From Narrative Detours: Henry Miller and the Rise of New Critical Modernism
(1989)
Introduction: “I want to make a detour….”
I want to make a detour of those lofty arid mountain ranges where one
dies of
thirst and cold, that “extra-temporal” history, that absolute of time and space
where there exists neither man, beast, nor vegetation, where one goes crazy
with loneliness, with language that is mere words, where everything is
unhooked, ungeared, out of joint with the times. I want a world of men and
women, of trees that do not talk (because there is too much talk in the world
as it is!), of rivers that carry you to places, not rivers that are legends,
but rivers that put you in touch with other men and women, with architecture,
religion, plants, animals–rivers have boats on them and in which men drown,
drown not in myth and legend and books and dust of the past, but in time and
space and history.
Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
Few products of the self-styled “Revolution of the Word” of the 1920s and
1930s have proved more disturbing to our sense of what is or ought to be valued
art than Tropic of Cancer (1934), Black Spring (1936), and Tropic
of Capricorn
(1939).[1] Other modernist novels, more radical and more conventional, move in
and out of critical and public view, but for half a century Henry Miller‘s
expatriate narratives have visibly marked the contentious boundary between
“good” and “bad” art, “serious literature” and “popular fiction,” “aesthetic
creation” and “pornographic exploitation.” Since he first appeared in the
“twilight of the expatriates” as “the spokesman, par excellence, for the Left
Bank,” Miller has inspired the fervid efforts of advocates and adversaries
seeking to establish his centrality to modern American literature and life, or
to expunge him from literary and even popular imagination.[2] In neither
direction have these partisan efforts succeeded. Miller’s work continues to
sell, influence contemporary fiction, and provoke violent debate whenever
raised. Instead of settling the “Miller question,” the debate over Miller’s
place in American letters has complicated and raised the stakes of an “answer.”
Feminists, from Kate Millet to Catharine MacKinnon, have joined in improbable
alliance with Miller’s partisans in impugning the methods and motives of those
who would hold Miller at a tasteful distance from the literary tradition.[3]
Attempts to strike a more dispassionate critical balance between the claims of
Miller’s friends and foes have proved inadequate, mixing hot and cold to
produce the kind of lukewarm “assessment” that gives academic criticism the
reputation of irrelevance: no one can read very far into Tropic of Cancer,
Black Spring or Tropic of Capricorn without realizing that an
“open mind” is
the most inappropriate of responses. Miller emerged with a generation of
writers who cultivated controversy as a sign of success in challenging
established literary canons; almost alone he has remained controversial, in
good conscience neither acceptable nor dismissible. Through five decades of
criticism the refrain runs, “This fellow can write: but[….]”[4]
The debate over Miller’s proper place inside or outside our mainstream
literary tradition has obscured the more intriguing historical questions posed
by the ambiguous position he already occupies and has occupied since the 1930s.
Miller has been that most paradoxical of literary creatures, a “minor writer”
with “major relevance” (Kingsley Widmer), a writer whose works are critically
devalued and politically denounced, but whose influence upon urban American
writing from the Beats of the fifties to the New Journalism of the seventies
and eighties is as pronounced as Faulkner’s upon southern and rural fiction.[5]
I propose to explore the phenomenon of Miller’s ambiguous status. How has the
modern literary tradition been constructed that a manifestly serious and
influential novelist can be both “minor” and “major,” without and within, at
the same time? What is it about Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring,
and Tropic of
Capricorn that has made them the object of a fifty-year open debate over
literary and cultural values–continuing even as literary criticism parted
company with that magisterial arbiter of taste, the gentleman scholar, in order
to immerse itself in technical, linguistic and philosophic questions of textual
hermeneutics?
Answers to these questions might be sought at any point in the history of the
reception of Miller’s expatriate narratives, a history which includes his
subsequent novels and essays. Forty-eight years old when he returned to America
after nearly a decade in Paris, Miller outlived most of his fellow expatriates,
continuing to write for another four decades until his death in 1979. These
later additions to Miller’s oeuvre inevitably reshaped the meaning of his Paris
narratives, which, like Miller himself, led a varied public life after the
onset of the Second World War ended “The Revolution of the Word.” The American
publication of Miller’s “banned books” under the banner of “freedom of
expression” in the early 1960s, and Kate Millet’s feminist indictment in Sexual
Politics (1969) of the “sexual liberation” this “freedom” was supposed to
herald, initiated major shifts in the terms under which Miller’s “value” has
been debated. But Miller’s ambiguous position in American letters antedates and
survives these developments. Already in 1938, Edmund Wilson’s review of Tropic
of Cancer for The New Republic uncannily anticipates the polarized
outline, if
not the precise terms, of all subsequent debate over Miller’s work: “Today the
conventional critics are evidently too shocked by it to be able to bring
themselves to deal with it–though their neglect of it cannot wholly have been
determined by the reflex reactions of squeamishness. [….] As for the
Left-Wingers, they have ignored The Tropic of Cancer on the ground that
it is
merely a product of the decadent expatriate culture and can be of no interest
to the socially minded and forward-looking present.”[6]
If Wilson’s review anticipates the tenor of ensuing dispute over Miller, it
sounds a note that has escaped most subsequent critics. According to Wilson,
the “historical importance” of Tropic of Cancer lies in Miller’s attempt
to
write “the epitaph for the whole generation of American writers and artists
that migrated to Paris after the war.” “We are going to put it down–the
evolution of this world which has died but which has not been buried,” Miller
wrote, setting out upon a polemical “detour” to change the direction “The
Revolution of the Word” was taking.[7] Miller’s ambition was unduly optimistic;
Wilson’s assent too sanguine.[8] As readers, writers, and critics we still
live, affirmatively or antithetically, in the shadow of the consensus forged by
a “Lost Generation” they thought dead and awaiting burial. Frustrated in its
grand design, Miller’s challenge to the aesthetic values and interpretive
conventions successfully advanced by many of his fellow expatriates succeeded
only in installing his narrative modernism proximate to–ambiguously inside and
outside–our canon of “New Critical” modernism. In consequence, even after
fifty years Miller’s language has a strangely contemporary sound: his narrative
modernism gives voice to intimations of modernity omitted from the “mythic” and
“symbolist” consensus that formed high modernism. But equally, Miller’s
narrative dissent has placed his novels outside the interpretive conventions
that give us ready, empathetic access to the coherence, structure, and
intention of canonical texts, rendering his alternative modernism vulnerable to
social and political criticism for what, though manifest throughout the
received modern tradition, we tend to excuse or extenuate in the name of Art,
Irony, and Tragic error. The controversy Miller’s expatriate novels are still
capable of stirring is but another indication that we have yet to come to terms
with the legacy of his generation’s literary battles.
It is Miller’s historically close and antithetical relation to the writers and
critics whose work would form the basis of New Critical modernism that, more
than his Whitmanesque “barbaric yawp,” has made it difficult to “read” Tropic
of Cancer, Black Spring, and Tropic of Capricorn as
anything other than
second-rate Modernism or an “anti-literature” indifferent to aesthetic
considerations. Miller’s expatriate works are neither. They embody an ambitious
writer’s calculated response to the debate over the shape of the “New Novel” he
joined in 1930–the year the first “guidebook” to the “classical” Ulysses,
James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’: A Study by Stuart Gilbert, ratified and
elaborated
Eliot’s strident declaration in “‘Ulysses,’ Order, and Myth,” “Instead of
narrative method, we may now use the mythical method.”[9] Discerning the
formation of a literary and critical alliance, Miller intuited its
transformative power even as he sought to resist it:
Already, almost coincidentally with their appearance, we have, as a
result of
Ulysses and Work in Progress, nothing but dry analyses, archaeological
burrowings, geological surveys, laboratory tests of the Word. The commentators,
to be sure, have only begun to chew on Joyce. The Germans will finish him. They
will make Joyce palatable, understandable, clear as Shakespeare, better than
Joyce, better than Shakespeare. Wait! The mystagogues are coming![10]
It is paradoxically Miller’s attention in formulating his narrative strategy
to the politics of modern aesthetic debate–his prescient engagement with that
coalition of writers, critics, and theorists who would successfully reshape
twentieth-century aesthetics in their own image–that has left him an
inexplicable, harsh voice on the margins of “the modern tradition.” Miller’s
radically digressive, free-flowing prose style advances a
post-realist/post-naturalist “narrative method” that closely pursues and
disputes, almost point for point, the then emerging “mythic” consensus.
Resembling Leopold Bloom’s wandering excursions through the streets of Dublin,
Miller’s narrative method suggests, but in whole and in part refuses, the
symbolic, mythic, and perspectival integration that has become fundamental to
our sense of what “truly” Modern texts are “about.” As a consequence of
Miller’s own efforts, any attempt to pursue a “close reading” of his Paris
narratives as if they were New Critical texts is an experience in frustration:
Miller seems either a writer who knows what he ought to do but can’t do it, or
a writer who doesn’t know what he’s doing but occasionally does it–“it” being
some recognizable, interpretable, and hence valuable variation of what Ulysses,
the paradigmatic novel of New Critical modernism, does so thoroughly when “read
closely.”
If Miller’s more explicit diatribes against Joyce receive some notice, the
extent to which his narratives embody a thoroughgoing critique remains largely
unexplored–the very idea that a writer as “undisciplined” as Miller might
mount anything approaching a “serious” challenge to Ulysses seems preposterous.
But we view Ulysses through a long history of adulatory exegesis, forgetting
that Eliot’s influential unveiling of the “Order, and Myth” of Ulysses served
an occasional, polemical purpose: to fend off Richard Aldington’s charge that
Joyce’s was a “great undisciplined talent” and his work “an invitation to
chaos, and an expression of feelings which are perverse, partial, and a
distortion of reality.”[11] When Miller wrote, “Confusion is a word we have
invented for an order which is not understood,” it was still a resonant call to
battle and not yet hollow vanity.[12] The hegemony of New Critical
modernism–the naturalization of interpretive techniques that give us ready
access to the coherence, structure, and intention of canonical texts–has
replaced Joyce’s modernist “experiment,” first among equals, with the one and
only, insurmountable Modernist “monument.” To recover the structure, coherence,
and intention of Miller’s narrative “experiment” it is necessary to effect an
imaginative return to Paris of the 1920s and 1930s, to the vociferous debate
over the shape of the “New Novel,” and to the polemical “detour” that first
took Miller to the margins of twentieth-century literature.
Read as one of many expatriate efforts to wrest control of the modern novel’s
future, Miller’s Paris narratives, and especially Tropic of Cancer,
reveal a
dense weave of “tactical” allusions, engaging not “myth and legend and books
and dust of the past” according to Eliotic prescription, but the contemporary
positions, literary and critical, of Miller’s Modernist rivals. Through such
allusions Tropic of Cancer‘s declaration of intention–“I want to make a
detour[….]” (epigraph to this introduction)–specifies the aesthetics around
which its narrative seeks a path. As the phrasing of this manifesto suggests,
Miller’s response to the emerging Modernist consensus involves no broadside
denigration of Joyce’s achievement in Ulysses and “Work in Progress,”
but
rather a canny challenge to these works as interpreted by Louis Gillet in
transition (“‘extra-temporal history'”), by Edmund Wilson in Axel’s
Castle
(where the talking tree and stone, and river puns of Anna Livia Plurabelle were
cited to evaluate “Work in Progress”), and by T. S. Eliot in “‘Ulysses,’ Order,
and Myth.” The argument uniting these allusions draws upon the “meta-fiction”
novelists and their critical partisans have always invoked to legitimate their
formal innovations over and against all others: the novel is “the historical
genre,” distinguished by its protean ability to embody and represent the
historical forces that constitute a changing world. Miller turns the rhetoric
of the novel’s historicity to his own ends, insinuating that the “mystagogues”
who read and value in Joyce’s novels an “‘extra-temporal history,’ that
absolute of time and space […] and mere words,” are but revealing and
canonizing Ulysses and “Work in Progress” as dead ends in the genealogy
of the
novel: the “true” modern novel must follow Tropic of Cancer‘s narrative
“detour” to return to the proper path of “the historical genre” through “time
and space and history.” The generic discourse of Miller’s dissent points to the
vitality of an aesthetic debate broader than any linear, genealogical approach
to the novel’s history, however “revisionary,” can discern–a debate within
which New Critical modernism, Miller’s narrative modernism, and many other
contending “modernisms” were first forged and only subsequently obscured.
This essay proceeds as a “local study” in the history of the modern novel,
using the instance of Henry Miller‘s Paris narratives and their ambiguous place
in our received tradition to test the grounds of a literary history attentive
to the formation of literary values, tracing their genesis and legacy in
dissent as well as assent. How can we, as literary historians, recover from the
“texts” we examine a sense of the past that is something more than a linear
genealogy of “great, influential works” around which lies a disordered library
of “lesser works,” “curiosities,” and “failures” into which we periodically
venture to “invent” new “usable pasts,” new genealogies of “great works”? My
local study of a most controversial novelist, who for so long and for so many
highly charged reasons has been held at arm’s length from the Modernist canon,
is intended to suggest the outlines of an answer. If attention to the aesthetic
discourse within which coalitions of writers and critics vie for the authority
to promulgate “the tradition” discloses a heretofore unsuspected density and
coherence to Miller’s narrative and aesthetic polemics, such an approach is
likely to do the same for other apparent “detours,” past and present, from the
literary genealogy New Critical modernism traces back to Homer. At stake is not
simply Miller’s “place” within a divisive twentieth-century literature, but our
understanding of other alternatives to New Critical modernism, less
controversial, whose polemical engagement in “serious” novelistic discourse yet
remains concealed beneath the literary and critical consensus first forged in
the 1920s and 1930s.
Two relatively recent developments in literary scholarship signal a renewed
need for literary history as an integrative mode of analysis, even as they
undermine the premises that once made literary history a matter of checking
biographies, tracing influences, and constructing of these the literary
genealogies of Great Writers and Great Works. The first is the “deconstructive”
critique of hermeneutics, which has dispossessed the text of that isolate,
self-contained structural integrity of meaning which the New Critics viewed as
the key to interpretation and cultural value. Perhaps more important, the
second development is the renewed interest in the values and techniques of
those works from which high modernism and New Criticism maintained a studied
distance: realism, naturalism, ethnic/local color, and proletarian literature.
Feminist scholarship, with its search for difference in writing and its desire
to recover women’s experience, has participated in and energized both these
developments. The result on all scores has been an “information explosion” in
literary studies which, I believe, awaits a renewed sense of literary history
to weigh, distribute, relate, and assimilate; for only a sense of history, and
not the theoretical imagination, however “decentered,” can juggle the
simultaneous and sequential proliferation of competing views and values which
the current “explosion” discovers to be constituent of our literary past and
present.
Yet in the face of this task, literary history remains in quest of its own
grounds. How does one locate the meaning of a text and its relations to other
texts when meaning seems no longer a property of the text and every text
appears an “intertext” equally related and unrelated to every other text? Where
does one place the “canon” and how does one recognize its imaginative power
when a vast body of once “marginal” works and literatures are subject to an
increasing scrutiny which has had the effect of making the “canon” suddenly
appear “marginal” itself, a preoccupation of a few individuals and institutions
dwarfed by the onward rush of popular culture and history? This essay explores
the possibility of a literary history in the current critical landscape: one
capable of asking not what or how texts mean, but what they have meant; one
capable of describing the literary and interpretive acts whereby the aesthetic
hegemony of New Critical modernism was first forged and then sustained in the
face of many alternatives. To find such a capability is to make it possible to
ask a new, distinctively historical set of questions concerning the “meaning”
and “place” of Miller’s expatriate narratives. How must we read Tropic of
Cancer, Black Spring, and Tropic of Capricorn in order to
understand them in
dialogic relation with other modernist “experiments” such as Joyce’s
Ulysses–more simply, how did Miller’s narratives speak to the
contemporary
struggle to define the nature of modern literature? And, in turn, how must we
narrate literary and critical history in order to explain how among many
competing modernist “experiments” some, but not Miller’s, became Modernist
“monuments”? It is through these two questions and their interrelation that I
hope to retain for this essay in the history of the modern novel some of the
rigor of “close reading” lost to more sweeping accounts, and as well to lend
broader and, I intend, unsettling implication to such a local study of a
“minor” modernist.
NOTES
[1] Epigraph: Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (Paris: The Obelisk Press,
1934;
New York: Grove Press, 1961; New York: Ballantine Books, 1973), 231.
[2] Edmund Wilson, “The Twilight of the Expatriates,” in A Literary
Chronicle:
1920-1950 (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company-Doubleday Anchor
Books,
n.d.), 212. This is a collection derived from Classics and Commercials (New
York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1950) and Shores of Light (New York:
Farrar,
Straus & Cudahy, 1952). “The Twilight of the Expatriates” first appeared in The
New Republic (March 9, 1938).
[3] Kate Millet opens Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday and Company,
1970;
New York: Avon Books, 1971) with an explicit attack upon literary history,
narrowly conceived, and “New Criticism”:
It has been my conviction that the adventure of literary criticism is not
restricted to a dutiful round of adulation, but is capable of seizing upon the
larger insights which literature affords into the life it describes, or
interprets, or even distorts. [….] I have also found it reasonable to take an
author’s ideas seriously when, like the novelists covered in this study, they
wish to be taken seriously or not at all. Where I have substantive quarrels
with some of these ideas, I prefer to argue on those very grounds, rather than
to take cover under tricks of the trade and mask disagreement with “sympathetic
readings” or the still more dishonest pretense that the artist is “without
skill” or a “poor technician.” (Sexual Politics, 12)
Protesting the critical marginalization of Miller’s work, Millet writes: “The
anxiety and contempt which Miller registers toward the female sex is at least
as important and generally felt as the more diplomatic or ‘respectful’ version
presented to us in conventional writing,” in which Millet includes “not only
traditional courtly, romantic and Victorian sentiment, but even that of other
moderns [such as] Conrad, Joyce, even Faulkner” (Sexual Politics, 389).
Extending Millet’s suspicion that Miller is excluded because his inclusion
would reveal the misogyny of the “tradition,” Catharine MacKinnon writes:
“sometimes I think that the real issue is how male sexuality is presented, so
that anything can be done to a woman, but obscenity is sex that makes male
sexuality look bad.” She gives new sense to the ideology of “protecting
innocence”: “is it just chance that the first film to be found obscene by a
state supreme court depicts male masturbation? [….] Did works like Lady
Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer get in trouble because male
sexuality
is depicted in a way that men think is dangerous for women and children to
see?” (Catharine MacKinnon, “Not a Moral Issue” in Feminism Unmodified
[Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987], 154, 270n.).
[4] Jay Martin, Always Merry and Bright: The Life of Henry Miller (Santa
Barbara, Calif.: Capra Press, 1978; New York: Penguin Books, 1980), 317. Martin
quotes George Bernard Shaw, apparently the first to strike this note about
Miller: “This fellow can write: but he has failed to give any artistic value to
his verbatim reports of bad language.” Evidently, iconoclasm is not made of the
same stuff from generation to generation. Frank Kermode took up the refrain:
“Everybody agrees that Miller can write[….]” (Frank Kermode, “Henry Miller
and John Betjeman,” Puzzles and Epiphanies, reprinted in part in Edward
B.
Mitchell, ed., Henry Miller: Three Decades of Criticism [New York: New
York
University Press, 1971], 94).
[5] Kingsley Widmer, Henry Miller (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1963),
157.
[6] Edmund Wilson, “The Twilight of the Expatriates,” A Literary Chronicle:
1920-1950, 212.
[7] Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 24.
[8] As editor, advocate, publicist, central author and creator of Obelisk
Press’s “Villa Seurat Series,” Miller tried to gather the adherents necessary
to remake a literature during his final years in Paris, but his effort was
overtaken by the coming war. He returned to America alone, prepared to pursue
new interests.
[9] T. S. Eliot, “‘Ulysses,’ Order, and Myth,” in Selected Prose of T. S.
Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and Farrar,
Straus and Giroux–A Harvest/Noonday Book, 1975), 178. Eliot’s essay was first
published in Dial, November 1923.
[10] Henry Miller, “The Universe of Death from The World of Lawrence,” in
Henry Miller, The Cosmological Eye (1939; New York: New Directions
Paperbook,
1961), 114. The World of Lawrence was written contemporaneously with the
revisions of Tropic of Cancer. Abandoned, it was not published in its
entirety
until the year of Miller’s death. (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra Press, 1980).
The Cosmological Eye, the first collection of Miller’s Paris work
published in
America, contains a number of essays originally published in Max and the White
Phagocytes (Paris: The Obelisk Press-Seurat Editions, 1938).
[11] T. S. Eliot, “‘Ulysses,’ Order, and Myth,” in Selected Prose of T. S.
Eliot, 176.
[12] Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn (Paris: The Obelisk Press-Seurat
Editions, 1939; New York: Grove Press, 1961), 170. Miller’s direct allusion is
to Henri Bergson’s discussion of “The Idea of Disorder” in Creative Evolution
(New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911; New York: Random House-The Modern
Library, 1944), 240-258.
Copyright 1989 Raoul R. Ibarguen All Rights Reserved.
