Tag: Modernism

Henry Miller, ‘Tropic of Cancer’

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

Any article on the internet listing the most influential novels of the 20th century is sure to include Henry Miller’s 1934 work Tropic of Cancer. At the centre of a high-profile obscenity trial, the book challenged the literary status quo and revolutionised the canon, toppling regulations surrounding literature deemed ‘acceptable’ to print. In this way, Miller helped expand the breadth of authorial voice, allowing authors to write about, amongst other subjects, the sexual realm, with a newfound confidence and transparency. 

I found the opening few pages of the text to be engaging but quite overwhelming. The narrator (who we later found out is Miller himself) flitters from one thought to another: the essence of the book he is writing, his love interest, Tania, the Villa Borghese and animal genitalia are each considered within a few pages. In the first paragraph, the reader is introduced to the kind of ‘honest’ carnality that features throughout. Miller writes candidly about happenings with his roommate: ‘Last night Boris discovered that he was lousy. I had to shave his armpits … . We might never have known each so intimately.. had it not been for the lice’. Unfiltered and unashamed. But the opening section is integral in other ways. The essential philosophy of the text is expressed in another frank admission: ‘I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive’. Celebrated here is the now clichéd motto of ‘living in the moment’. ‘Hope’ is imagined as a destabilising instinct that rejects the present in favour of an unforeseen, incalculable future. Rather than being fettered by expectation, one should ‘seize the day’. The quote also captures the anti-materialist spirit that runs throughout the book. For Miller, the trappings of bourgeoise life are heavy and repressive; he experiences the most profound sense of freedom when he is destitute. 

“Do anything, but let it produce joy. Do anything, but let it yield ecstasy”.

As aforementioned, the style of writing is raw and the subject matter is often brazen. Miller roams through seedy Parisian side-streets, meeting drunkards, prostitutes and down-and-outs, but also spends time with wealthy and morally reprehensible expats. He records his encounters in a visceral and graphic manner that echoes Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. Nonetheless, there is also a clear poeticism to the prose – a graceful and imaginative quality that is almost incongruous with the carnal themes. Take these two sentences, for example:

‘In the blue of an electric dawn the peanut shells look wan and crumpled; along the beach at Montparnasse the water lilies bend and break. When the tide is on the ebb and only a few syphilitic mermaids are left stranded in the muck, the Dôme looks like a shooting gallery that’s been struck by a cyclone’. 

A notable structural feature is the abrupt – and often confusing – diatribes that crop up during the text. These enraged, philosophical passages on the human condition break out suddenly during episodes, emphasising the need to find freedom from overbearing power structures. 

Rather than focus on humankind’s goodness, Miller takes base desires and instincts as his loci. In a self-reflexive passage that foreshadows the novel’s publishing difficulties, he writes: ‘If any man ever dared to translate all that is in his heart, to put down what really is his experience, what truly is his truth, I think then the world would go to smash, that it would be blown to smithereens’. Throughout the narrative he depicts his friends and acquaintances in a stark light, exposing their faults and selfish inclinations; Fillmore, for example, leaves his pregnant (and physically abusive) wife Ginette in Paris and escapes to America; Van Norden demonstrates a rampant, destructive sexuality. Rather than impose narratorial judgment, Miller merely paints them for what they are and recedes. There is no moralising or sermonising, but instead an admission that human nature contains an inherently dark streak, an ignobility that George Orwell recognised when he wrote of Miller: ‘“He knows all about me” you feel’. 

The novel is also controversial in that it espouses a patriarchal world-view, one in which women are sexually objectified and frequently referred to as ‘cunts’. Even the female characters afforded greater character development fit a range of derogatory stereotypes: seductress (Tania), abusive wife (Ginette), femme fatale (Yvette). Anti-semitism is similarly rife in the text; Jews are repeatedly insulted and singled out for their unethical behaviour. The representation of the hostile Rabbi, who turns away Miller and his associate when they are destitute, encapsulates this xenophobic spirit. Consequently, a key tension when reading the novel is how to reconcile Miller’s brave attack on social – particularly sexual – mores with his more regressive and troubling views. 

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

Quarantine Reading

So I wanted to write a short post covering what I have been reading during quarantine. Being a furloughed worker during lockdown has given me ample time to tick off some of the novels on my book bucket list. That said, I have not been too formulaic, and often ordered a book on a whim, or been drawn to a particular/author genre after reading literary articles online. As a result, my list is quite eclectic, but this is true of my normal reading patterns. I’m always branching out and, perhaps like many others, daunted and impelled by the notion that there is still a lot out there I haven’t encountered. 

Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita is a novel that has been on my reading bucket list for a few years. During my first year at university, I delved into a lot of Russian Literature in my spare time (Gogol’s Dead Souls and Grossman’s Everything Flows are memorable), and this is perhaps where the desire to read The Master and Margarita sprang from. At the beginning of lockdown I was looking for a comic novel and Bulgakov’s work fitted the bill. In Will Self’s introduction to the translation I read, he alludes to the novel as a precursor to the magic realism popularised by Latin American authors like Jorge Luis Borges. This analysis really stuck with me throughout: Bulgakov’s Moscow is simultaneously ordinary and realistic, as well as fantastical and supernatural. Woland’s (Satan’s) party and Margarita’s flight across USSR stand out as particularly magical episodes. From a purely comic perspective the novel did not disappoint. The magic show at the Variety Theatre, where Bulgakov critiques the greed and materialism of the Moscow elite, was another highlight. 

I read Julian Barnes’ England England alongside The Master and Margarita. I don’t want to go into too much detail because I dedicated a whole post to the novel, but it was my first experience with Barnes and I enjoyed it so much that I recently ordered The Sense of Ending, his 2011 Man Booker Prize winning work. 

Next up was Chuck Palahniuk’s cult classic Fight Club, another on my list. I’d watched the film a few times and loved it, and a lot of people had suggested that the book was even better. I found the book actually triggered a more emotional response – Palahniuk writes in direct, graphic, savage and visceral prose. The narrator – Tyler Durden – is despairing and distant, and his thoughts capture the generational psychosis that Palahniuk was so perturbed by. I also enjoyed Tyler’s ruminations on IKEA furniture (“I want to be that type of person, so I buy products that cohere with that sense of image”) and the attack on consumer culture. The book is short, punchy and damning, and achieves a lot in only 200 odd pages. 

Since finishing my English Literature degree last year I have been reading a lot of non-fiction, a conscious break away, I think, from three years of studying fiction. I’ve tried to fill in gaps in my historical knowledge by reading texts on specific historical events/peoples (lately I’ve turned my attention to the Vikings, the Medici and the Egyptians). A limited understanding of the Normans and   the subsequent Norman colonisation of England impelled me to read Marc Morris’ The Norman Conquest. This is a great piece of historical fiction – Morris’ vast narrative is accessible and moves at an appropriate pace without compromising on essential details. It pays close attention to contemporary evidence, demystifying popular assumptions about the Normans and their involvement in England. Upon finishing, I had a much better understanding of the historical process and the staggering impact that William the Conqueror’s fated journey across the Channel had on English secular and religious society. 

I’ve now moved on to the daunting prospect of David Foster Wallace’s acclaimed work Infinite Jest. My former colleague, also a friend and science fiction fan, gave it to me as a secret santa gift at last year’s work Christmas party. I started it soon after receiving it but became disillusioned after 50 or so pages and moved on to different pursuits. Now, with time in abundance, I’m ready to give it a second go. 

Virginia Woolf, ‘To the Lighthouse’ Review

After years of neglecting creating a platform to share my views on literature I’ve finally decided to start. This is the first of (hopefully) a number of posts where I will review what I have recently been reading. Having read Orlando and Mrs Dalloway in the last year, I was interested in delving a bit further into Woolf’s oeuvre – To the Lighthouse, perhaps Woolf’s magnum opus, felt like a good start.

To the Lighthouse centres around two summer breaks to the Ramsay’s holiday home on the Isle of Skye. Each visit – one before, one after the Great War – explores the mutating relations, aspirations and emotions of the Ramsay family and their array of middle-class, often eccentric, guests. Sandwiched in between these two chapters is another section that details the gradual deterioration of the summer house in the intra-war period. A fusion of forms, the novel is at once autobiographical – relaying Woolf’s memories of her childhood in St Ives – but also elegiac. There is also an often latent concern with topical issues of the day, particularly the post-war legacy in Britain and Western imperialism.

The novel is not plot-driven: in reality, not much happens in the way of action. As elsewhere in Woolf’s fiction, weight is given to specific moments or memories that somewhat eclipse the wider happenings of the narrative. When reading the novel one of the most impressive feats is Woolf’s ability to capture the arbitrary nature of consciousness in words: thought patterns develop in way that tests the reader’s desire for coherence and rationale, but ultimately reflect the whimsical nature of the human mind. The syntax is often testing as a result: ‘He is petty, selfish, vain; egotistical; he is spoilt; he is a tyrant; he wears Mrs Ramsay to death; but he has what you (she addressed Mr Bankes) have not; a fiery unworldliness; he knows nothing about trifles; he loves dogs and his children’. Although the perspective remains always that of the third-person omniscient narrator, subtle changes in diction and tone give the illusion of an ever changing point of view; the scene at the dinner-table being the best example of this in practice.

Much like Mrs Dalloway, temporality plays an important role in To the Lighthouse. Mr Ramsay is gripped by the anxiety that he will be lost to posterity – that he has never been able to scale to the heights of intellectual acclaim. This sense of missed opportunity is mirrored in the planned trips to the lighthouse that are repeatedly curtailed because of poor weather. For much of the novel, then, the lighthouse symbolises what is unreachable and insurmountable. The distortion of time is also significant, multiple pages are sometimes used to describe what is effectively a number of seconds, whereas, the chapter ‘Time Passes’ takes ten pages to account for ten years: it is the intensity of a moment that has a determining influence on time.

Although visibly a novel about a holiday-break to an island Scotland, the Great War seeps into the narrative. The damp-infested, decaying house mirrors Europe’s spiritual decline in the aftermath of war. Andrew Ramsay, the eldest son, dies fighting in France. His death reflects a generation of loss. Allusions to ‘no-man’s land’ and ‘poppies’, coupled with descriptions of the sea that account for submarines sighted on the harbour, ensure that the language, paraphernalia and emblem associated with war are always present. Again, as in Mrs Dalloway, Woolf is interested in the legacy of conflict.

At the heart of everything is Lily Briscoe. Shunned by Charles Tansley and Mrs Ramsay for painting, she rejects their prejudice and searches to find a unique form of expression. She mimics Woolf in her desire to disturb gender roles, revolutionise artistic styles and resist patriarchal authority. Allied with the elderly Mr Bankes, their relationship is perhaps the purest amongst the contingent of guests and family. Lily’s belief that her painting will likely end up in the attic is poignant – echoing in a sense Mr Ramsay’s agitation about the future. Yet, for Lily art is predominantly a private affair, and she takes refuge in the slow but therapeutic process of painting, often becoming sidetracked and philosophising on what is around her.

Favourite quote: ‘What is the meaning of life? That was all – a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come’.