2010/16

Henry Miller: Tropic of Cancer (321p.)

After its publication in France in 1934, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer was initially banned in the US, until the US publication in 1961 led to an obscenity trial, which was won on account of the book, and over the then-existing pornography laws. Tropic of Cancer is the chronicle of Miller’s years in Paris in the 30s. Miller is of course famous (among others) for his tryst with Anaïs Nin during those years.

It’s a personalized novel in the I-form, ridden with moral and social criticism, surrealist associations, mystic musings, and overt sexuality. Both in style and content, Tropic of Cancer reminds one of Céline’s classics Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan, which were written in the beginning of the 30s too, although Miller is even more candid in writing about the lower end of life.

A 20th Century classic, and an invitation to read more by this great writer.

“On the meridian of time there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama. If at any moment anywhere one comes face to face with the absolute, that great sympathy which makes men like Gautama and Jesus seem divine freezes away; the monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured – disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui – in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable. And all the while a meter is running inside and there is no hand that can reach in there and shut it off. All the while someone is eating the bread of life and drinking the wine, some dirty fat cockroach of a priest who hides away in the cellar guzzling it, while up in the light of the street a phantom host touches the lips and the blood is pale as water. And out of the endless torment and misery no miracle comes forth, no microscopic vestige even of relief. Only ideas, pale, attenuated ideas which have to be fattened by slaughter; ideas which come forth like bile, like the guts of a pig when the carcass is ripped open.”