Music and dance are other recurrent themes in the book. ![]() : 22 The characters are caricatures, and the male characters "stumbl through the mazes of their conceptions of woman". a stronger visceral appeal than high comedy". In 1978, literary scholar Donald Gutierrez argued that the sexual comedy in the book was "undeniably low. There are many passages explicitly describing the narrator's sexual encounters. The treadmill stretches away to infinitude, the hatches are closed down tight, logic runs rampant, with bloody cleaver flashing. Here all boundaries fade away and the world reveals itself for the mad slaughterhouse that it is. One walks the streets knowing that he is mad, possessed, because it is only too obvious that these cold, indifferent faces are the visages of one's keepers. I understood why it is that here, at the very hub of the wheel, one can embrace the most fantastic, the most impossible theories, without finding them in the least strange it is here that one reads again the books of his youth and the enigmas take on new meanings, one for every white hair. I understood then why it is that Paris attracts the tortured, the hallucinated, the great maniacs of love. At any rate, I had not yet come to the end of my rope. A bitter nourishment-perhaps the best there is for certain people. One can live in Paris-I discovered that!-on just grief and anguish. Describing his perception of Paris during this time, Miller wrote: As a struggling writer, Miller describes his experience living among a community of bohemians in Paris, where he intermittently suffers from hunger, homelessness, squalor, loneliness, and despair over his recent separation from his wife. The book largely functions as an immersive meditation on the human condition. The novel is written in the first person, as are many of Miller's other novels, and does not have a linear organization, but rather fluctuates frequently between the past and present. : 243Ĭombining autobiography and fiction, some chapters follow a narrative of some kind and refer to Miller's actual friends, colleagues, and workplaces others are written as stream-of-consciousness reflections that are occasionally epiphanic. My idea briefly has been to present a resurrection of the emotions, to depict the conduct of a human being in the stratosphere of ideas, that is, in the grip of delirium. Up to the present, my idea of collaborating with myself has been to get off the gold standard of literature. Late in the novel, Miller explains his artistic approach to writing the book itself, stating: Set in France (primarily Paris) during the late 1920s and early 1930s, Tropic of Cancer centers on Miller's life as a struggling writer. But there is also a wild extravagance, a mad gaiety, a verve, a gusto, at times almost a delirium. The predominant note will seem one of bitterness, and bitterness there is, to the full. Here is a book which, if such a thing were possible, might restore our appetite for the fundamental realities. : v–xxxįollowing the introduction is a preface written by Nin in 1934, which begins as follows: But everything he has written is a poem in the best as well as in the broadest sense of the word. I do not call him a poet because he has never written a poem he even dislikes poetry, I think. I call Henry Miller the greatest living author because I think he is. The 1961 edition includes an introduction by Karl Shapiro written in 1960 and titled "The Greatest Living Author". ![]() These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies-captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences that which is really his experience, and how to record truth truly. In the 1961 edition, opposite the novel's title page is a quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson: : 108 : 116 Emerson quotation, preface, and introduction : 109 In 1934, Jack Kahane's Obelisk Press published the book with financial backing from Nin, who had borrowed the money from Otto Rank. Miller gave the following explanation of why the book's title was Tropic of Cancer: "It was because to me cancer symbolizes the disease of civilization, the endpoint of the wrong path, the necessity to change course radically, to start completely over from scratch." : 38Īnaïs Nin helped to edit the book. As Miller discloses in the text of the book, he first intended to title it "Crazy Cock". : 105–107 The fictional Villa Borghese was actually 18 Villa Seurat in Paris' 14th arrondissement. Miller wrote the book between 19 during his "nomadic life" in Paris.
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