In the opening pages of Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller announces the extravagant anti-art that will be his theme. Beyond the lice and the cancer of time, beyond hope and convention, Beauty and Art, the auto-hero offers his book as libel and insult, the studied rejection of accepted literary values: "I am going to sing for you," he promises, "a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse." With fractured echoes of Whitman's celebration of the self, the passage insists on its own bellowing song…. If singing here is a last modern echo of Homeric invocation, music more generally becomes an insistant metaphor both for Miller's own discordant lyricism and for the collapsing world that Tropic of Cancer exposes.
Miller has his own inverted muse, the character named Tania, expatriate herself and wife of an American playwright. Fecund but conventional, Tania becomes at once both inspiration and the focal point of the chaos that Miller, singing only tunes of dying splendor, invokes as the hallucinated topic of the book…. Registering the death of time and the dissolution of the world itself, Miller announces the ultimate metamorphosis Tania inspires: "I am thinking that when the great silence descends upon all and everywhere music will at last triumph. When into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored and chaos is the score upon which reality is written. You, Tania, are my chaos. It is why I sing."… Miller's song, then, will be a carefully adopted cacophony, the literary equivalent, off-key and triumphant, of the very chaos a conventional world generates.
This is a free excerpt of 275 words. There are 1,271 words (approx.
4 pages at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Miller, Henry 1891–: Critical Essay by Paul R. Jackson Access Pass.
