Interpretive Essay on Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

Interpretive Essay on Tropic of Cancer

Introduction

Henry Miller's first novel, published when he was forty-four years old, Tropic of Cancer celebrates an expatriate American's quest for a fulfilling life. The novel is a fictionalized memoir of Miller's life in Paris, where he moved in 1930. Miller describes his vagabond life on the Left Bank and portrays himself as a prodigious sexual athlete, including sexual scenes so explicit that the book was considered pornographic. While it remained banned in the United States until its publication by Grove Press in 1961 was upheld, the novel was praised by many critics and authors (Perles, 1956).

Discussion

"It may well be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for any of us," wrote Henry Miller in Tropic of Cancer, "but if that is so then let us set up a last agonizing, bloodcurdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war whoop! Away with lamentations! Away with elegies and dirges! Away with biographies and histories, and libraries and museums! Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance. But a dance!" (Miller, 1969). Tropic of Cancer, Miller's first published book, is such a dance, a full-bodied, hot-blooded celebration of joy and pain, of lust and decay, of poverty and plenty. Its frankness so shocked censors upon its publication in 1934 that the book remained banned in the United States for another 27 years (Nelson, 1970).

To this day, Tropic of Cancer still incites arguments between those who laud Miller for his liberated worldview and those who see him (or, perhaps more accurately, the book's narrator) simply as a misogynistic, selfish boor. Ironically, this book, set in Paris, owes much of its spirit to writers such as Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman. Miller's disdain for western society and how it crushes those who do not march to its beat is reminiscent of Thoreau's Walden, while Miller's depiction of sex and the body is frank in much the same way as Whitman's verse. Yet, like Whitman and Thoreau, Miller is hardly a crank, and his seriousness is tempered with good humor and joy, wonder and awe (Mailer, 1976).

Miller makes no secret of his love for Whitman in Cancer, explicitly stating that he considered Whitman "the poet of the body and soul," and that "there is no equivalent in the languages of Europe for the spirit which he immortalized. Europe is saturated with art and her soil is full of dead bones and her museums are bursting with plundered treasures, but what Europe has never had is a free healthy spirit, what you might call a MAN. Goethe was the nearest approach, but Goethe was a stuffed shirt, by comparison . . . Goethe is an end of something, Whitman is a beginning" (Miller, 1969).

Many of Miller's champions picked up the connection. Writers from Lawrence Durrell, Anaïs Nin, and George Orwell through to Norman Mailer and Erica Jong saw Miller ...