Henry Miller and Modernism

The Years in Paris, 1930–1939

Finn Jensen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030331641
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030331658
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: Literature

Henry Miller and Modernism: The Years in Paris, 1930–1939 represents a major reevaluation of Henry Miller, focusing on the Paris texts from 1930 to 1939. Finn Jensen analyzes Miller in the light of European modernism, in particular considering the many impulses Miller received in Paris. Jensen draws on theories of urban modernity to connect Miller's narratives of a male protagonist alone in a modern metropolis with his time in Paris where he experienced a self-discovery as a writer. The book highlights several sources of inspiration for Miller including Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Hamsun, Strindberg and the American Transcendentalists. Jensen considers the key movements of modernity and analyzes their importance for Miller, studying Eschatology, the Avant-Garde, Dada, Surrealism, Expressionism, and Anarchism. 

 

© The Author(s) 2019

F. JensenHenry Miller and Modernismhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33165-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Voice

Finn Jensen¹

(1)

University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

Finn Jensen

End Abstract

What was amazing for Miller in Paris in 1930 was that in a short space of time he managed to establish the “voice”, which later runs through the entire writings both the “fictional” and the essayistic as a characteristic stream, a voice that is unmistakable but difficult to define accurately. It’s a personal voice, a voice that addresses us directly, and it feels authentic, genuine, untapped. With this voice he could start over again, allowing him to realize all his plans on a scale he hardly imagined.

The voice is anarchistic and is borne by a deep inspiration. Apparently it does not follow any established rules, and in any case it is not under the influence of established norms or moral concepts. Miller describes in several places how he simply needed to get to the machine, and then the text flowed down and down on the paper for hours, exactly as it was possible for him with a speech stream and just as seemingly unstructured and association-controlled. At the same time the voice is most supple and flexible—it can one moment move around in a seemingly banal everyday life, and then take off and fly around like a circus artist high in the metaphysical altitudes carried by the most amazing metaphors, associations, and fantasies. It can move from the most delicate poetry and spirituality and down to the most grotesque perversions, and from light religious speculations to ugly conception of decay and doom. It is a violent and expressive voice, which in its original imagery largely shows us an author who is an active part of the avant-garde, and is influenced not least by Dada and Surrealism.

It is precisely the anarchistic and unstructured by Miller’s voice, which shows him as liberated from the whole logical and linear form of production and instead cultivating the form he himself called “spiral”:

In telling this story I am not following a strict chronological sequence but have chosen to adopt a circular or spiral form of time development which enables me to expand freely in any given moment. […] I am trying to get at the inner pattern of events, trying to follow the potential being who was deflected from his course here and there, who circled around himself, so to speak, who was becalmed for long stretches or who sank to the bottom of the sea or suddenly flew to the loftiest peaks.

(The World of Sex (1941), p. 53)

A particular aspect of the writing process is Miller’s special application of the concept of time, which is largely based on the structures he develops especially in the two “Tropic” novels, but which he theoretically developed, among other things, in the “Hamlet Letters” (see Chap. 11). He distinguishes here in principle between what he calls “traditional present” (Hamlet Letters, p. 74) and what he calls “full present”: “In the full present which is the living moment, we join forces with past and future” (p. 112). The difference between the two perceptions of time corresponds with the great difference in Miller’s universe between respectively the rational linear worldview, where history makes sense as one long line of development, and an alinear situational reality that unfolds on another level. As he describes it, this reality is “the very plasma of life” (p. 50), and he summons a number of idols as witnesses: Rimbaud, Dostoevsky, Proust, Lawrence, and van Gogh. He could have added Nietzsche and Spengler, for as demonstrated among other things by Indrek Männiste in “Henry Miller’s Inhuman Philosophy” (Nexus 9 [2012]), this sense of time was very much a central part of the general showdown with the culture of development and its value concepts. In Miller’s universe, this view is an essential part of the sense of life that he denotes as “China”, but in the specific narrative context, the “full present” concept is primarily expressed through the “spiral” narrative form where the text dissolves in rows of “nows”, a number of expressions of the present, while any idea of “development” lies far beyond the narrator. How this is practiced and how it, in my opinion, is directly related to the chaotic life of the modern metropolis will be evidenced by the individual textual analyzes.

The evolved voice was not one he had always been aware of, or rather: He had not known that it was the one he needed, for in reality, as he often emphasizes in, for example, Tropic of Capricorn, he had possessed it since childhood, it was part of the street language in the popular Brooklyn, where he grew up, and it was largely characterized by creativity and imagination and attached to the oral presentation, which school later sought to destroy, but it was also the voice he cultivated on his many lonely walks in the youth, where he himself, as mentioned before, “wrote” one masterpiece after another but never could gather the strength to get them down on paper.¹ When he finally sought to realize his dreams of becoming an author, he committed the error of rejecting the voice in favor of an artificial “literary” voice, which he thought was more appropriate, but instead made him a stranger to himself and the writing oddly stiff and lifeless. It was only now when he was nearly 40 years old and lived as a kind of vagabond in Paris that he found out that the direct language was his voice, that was his style.

Frederick Turner points out in Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of Tropic of Cancer (2012) that Miller’s voice was also largely rooted in a peculiar American tradition of a direct and very personal expression of an oral character which may be experienced by “alternative” authors such as Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. And not least in the latter one can meet the features that would be crucial to the whole of Miller’s writing: The first person narrator with his own person in the center.

By Miller the situation is complicated by, that from Tropic of Cancer and on he breaks with the fictive narration and makes direct use of his own name, but gives all other persons new names. This means that on what we still have to call the “fictive plane” appears a person named “Henry Miller”, who in no way can be unambiguously identified with the empirical author of the same name. The name, on the other hand, relates to the narrator as the source from which the voice flows. The name and the voice are both aspects of the same design. By James Decker, it is formulated as follows:

Miller creates a type of suprarealism that rejects factual continuity for emotional essence. An individual occurrence may thus provide Miller’s narrator, or supraself—an amalgam of the numerous redactions of “Henry Miller” that stands collectively for the biographical Miller at various points in his life—with myriad associations or interpretations. Although the interpretations may contradict or undercut one another, they work together to form a hermeneutics of the self.

(Henry Miller and Narrative Form (2005), p. 1)

Throughout the dissertation Decker uses the term “supraself” about the narrator. The split in the narrative role lies on the fiction plane, that is, that it is a construction that is “disturbed” by the fact that the fiction limit is constantly pervaded by the use of the real name of the empirical writer. The result is that we in an unsafe but very deliberate way oscillate across the fiction limit throughout the text, or in a different way: We have no way of actually distinguishing between facts and fiction, and that is exactly the purpose, for that does not interest the author at all. He has completely different perspectives in mind, as will be demonstrated in the actual text analysis. Originally, Miller had plans to go even further and also use the real names of the other persons in all sorts of fictional and factual situations, but his counselors drew attention to the completely unimaginable legal consequences of such a technique and it was wisely abandoned.

There is no doubt that Miller plays with the forms and would laugh of our efforts to master the concepts. Nevertheless I will argue that it is more fruitful to consider a text like Tropic of Cancer as a work of fiction based on biographical details, but using the author’s real name attached to the narrator. Thus, the term “auto fiction” can be applied with some justification, as the only completely sure nonfictional element is the name “Henry Miller” acting on both levels and which in the text is the central collective element both as narrator and as “person”.

If, unlike me, one should feel the urge to establish a larger argument to see Tropic of Cancer as mainly fictional, one can begin by studying Miller’s letters to Emil Schnellock and Anaïs Nin from the same period. Of them, it will be evident that his focus in this period in Paris was of a completely different character than it appears from the novel. In the center was the dramatic break with his wife June and the new intense relationship with Anaïs Nin. It says something about Henry Miller as “autobiographical” author that the relationship in his life that meant most of all—the love of Anaïs Nin—is never mentioned with a word.

The auto fiction concept, as it was originally defined by Serge Doubrovsky in Autobiographie/vérité/psychoanalysis (1980), is a text where the author, narrator, and protagonist bear the same name, while the text still has an active fictional level. It is interesting because it marks a “floating” state of the text, a kind of “tremble”, where the reader cannot accurately count on the integrity of the narrator or with the truthfulness of the situations reported. Doubrovsky emphasizes that the text fluctuates between different levels. This relationship is utilized, in my opinion, clearly by Miller, exploiting the ambivalent and ambiguous as part of the erosion of the traditional novel’s authoritarian narrative form. It is a relationship that is parallel to the complete fragmentation of chronology and causation, characteristic of many of the experiments of the avant-garde in the Paris era.

But precisely in this dissolution of the classic narrator model, there is an ambivalence by Miller. On the one hand, he dissolves the familiar forms and obscures the true identity of the narrator; on the other hand, it is imperative for him that this dissolution does not prevent the narrator from passing on the very central message that he never loses sight of: the eschatologically vitalistic vision. This vision of living in the end time of a culture and on the brink of a new beginning is the great constant in the period, and it is never lost sight of even though the voice can be varied. Therefore, the modern concept of “Performative Biography” is highly applicable to Miller, who, through the long range of texts, managed to stage himself in a variety of dramatic roles. In the Paris texts, you can distinguish a variety of roles played by Miller: From the Chinese wise man or mystical zen master to the free vagabond bohemian, the unfaithful lover, the social wreck, or the classical European intellectual, and so on. None of them completely covers him, but they all serve the purpose as cover-ups of the author himself; you cannot get a grip on him.

The subject “floats” in the linguistic stream, which often has the distinctive character of a speech stream. This dissolved “I” appears in several cases, but is probably most evident in the Surrealistic texts in Black Spring. Thus, in “Walking Up and Down in China” this notion occurs:

If it is possible to leave the body in dream, or in death, perhaps it is possible to leave the body forever, to wander endlessly unbodied, unhooked, a nameless identity, or an unidentified name, a soul unattached, indifferent to everything, a soul immortal, perhaps incorruptible, like God—who can say?

(p. 201)

But as it is underlined by James Gifford in “Dispossessed Sexual Politics: Henry Miller’s Anarchism Qua Kate Millett and Ursula K. Le Guin” in Henry Miller—New Perspectives (2015), there is no question that the ego dissolution is a constant phenomenon in the oeuvre; it seems more like a notion he plays with, a nonbinding notion that the dissolution he can observe everywhere can also include his own consciousness as attached to a firm established subject. The stream of words is primarily an aspect of the life stream that everywhere is a key idea in Miller, but as it also is formulated in the well-known image of the I seated in a lighthouse (Tropic of Capricorn, p. 69), also to be found in Hamsun, he is intact in the midst of a changing world. As it is formulated earlier in this work:

If the self were not imperishable, the “I” I write about would have been destroyed long ago.

(p. 12)

For Miller, the idea of the survival of the I was the strongest in the midst of the eschatological nightmare. Here, the legacy of the transcendentalists, and especially Whitman, and the eternal background figure Nietzsche, clearly breaks through.

On both sides of the three major Paris books—the two Tropic novels and the mixed collection Black Spring—stand two blocks of text, which in their own way illustrate the process that Miller lived through in the period as a person and a writer. The earliest, and as a prelude to and eventually an integral part of the creative process, are the letters Miller sent back to New York to his friend and confident Emil Schnellock, who during the period both served as a knowing witness and as a coworke...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. The Voice
• 2. Miller and the Modern City
• 3. The Two Great Outsiders: Nietzsche and Rimbaud
• 4. The Roots of Vitalism
• 5. The Spectrum of Values in Modernity
• 6. The Radicals: From Artaud to Deleuze and Guattari
• 7. The Man-of-the-City Novel
• 8. Lonely and Desperate Men-of-the-City
• 9. Miller and Literary Criticism
• 10. The Meeting with the Death Cult: Michael Fraenkel and Walter Lowenfels
• 11. The Hamlet Correspondence
• 12. The D.H. Lawrence Book
• 13. Cosmology and Metaphors
• 14. Tropic of Cancer
• 15. Black Spring
• 16. Tropic of Capricorn
• 17. The Greek Journey
• Back Matter