Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #53538 in Books
• Published on: 1994-01-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 348 pages

Customer Reviews

A Classic of 20th Century American Literature
I first read Tropic of Capricorn nearly 30 years ago as a freshman in college. Tropic of Cancer was "interesting," but "Capricorn" blew my mind and turned me on to a realm of writing and chronicling of personal experience that influenced me more than any other work of literature I have ever read. This book is a comic (and cosmic) masterpiece on many levels. It is also a vicious social commentary of the times and culture (the 1920's in New York City). More than anything, it is a vibrant work of literature, a lusty and no-holds-barred celebration of the human spirit with all its faults and foibles.. Check out Norman Mailer's commentary on Henry Miller and "Capricorn" in the chapter "The Advocate" in his book The Prisoner of Sex. Likewise, check out Erica Jong's "The Devil at Large." Henry Miller is one of the greatest and most misunderstood writers this country has ever produced. Perhaps it's unfortunate he'll never be taught at anything but the college level (if he's taught at all); but then, again, I wouldn't offer Courvoisier to a highschool sophomore. Some tastes require maturity, but Miller's writing is one I'm glad I had a few years under my belt before diving into it.

Capricorn: Beyond Cancer
Tropic of Capricorn is the gretest book I have ever read. I read Tropic of Cancer first, and was interested and intrigued by it, but not until I read Capricorn would I truly call Miller one of the greatest American writers. Also banned from the U.S for 30 years, Capricorn goes beyong the sexuality and bitterness of one who has "given up" and lived for themselves as Cancer outlines autobiographically of Millers days in Paris. In Capricorn Miller looks to the roots of his childhood and life in New York and examines what made him the man he is and brought on his great change to "a new way of life". It has elements similar to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg Ohio, which may be its greatest moments, as it tells small "grotesque" character studies of the people that shaped his life. Miller combines ideas of Eastern mysticism with the chaos of an ever industrializing world. Capricorn goes beyond linear writing to pursue a dreamlike atmosphere: one of admitted Surrealist and Dadsist influence, whose influence in turn can be seen in the later beat writing of Kerouac and Burroughs among others.

The Inward Journey to the Self: The Importance of Miller's TROPIC OF CAPRICORN
"For there is only one great adventure and that is inward, toward the self, and for that, time nor space nor deeds even matter" (4).


Miller's two tropics - CANCER AND CAPRICORN- are essentially manuals for the creative life. They present Miller's transformation from lay-schmuck working in the belly of the beast that is the American economy - jobs such as his position with the Western Union Telegraph company, which he refers to as the "Cosmococcic / Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company" - to his evolution as en expatriate writer living in Paris. The books are really designed to be read together to magnify the metamorphosis, the rite of passage. While CANCER chronicles the latter portion of Miller's experience abroad, the prequel, CAPRICORN, written five years later in 1939, is the more developed and more seminal of the two and elucidates with much greater detail the affects of his epiphany.

Most artists will immediately recognize the struggle Miller endures. Married to the "wrong" woman and with a young child in tow - a relationship which he finds stifling to his creative development - Miller faces tenable employment situations to support this life. Those jobs he does find do little to allow him to prosper; rather he finds himself as a cog on a wheel of Hell. His transformation from the morass of what society deems sound and true is painful. Anyone who has ever made such sacrifices to pursue the unspoken dreams to create from what grows inside of them will sympathize with Miller's dilemma. To pursue a life of an artist is frightening enough: to do it behind the rancorous veil of the American dream is horrifying. Miller recognizes the banal existence of modern America with its machines, its backward corporate policies, its worship of the unthinking and mechanical and he also knows he must break from its fetters.

Part of Miller's disenchantment with America is organic to his being just as much as it is experiential. As a child, Miller feels a unique disassociation with his peers and even his family. This self-possessed knowledge of his unique intelligence leaves Miller with a feeling of disorientation. As an adolescent, he sees his drunken father convert to piety when wooed by the charisma of a local minister. Miller, Sr. then falls from grace when the minister is called to another location and as a result of this perceived abandonment, cycles back to his earlier state of crapulousness. The event seems to have intimated to Miller the importance of being self-reliant upon a constant wellspring of inspiration so that disappointment in other people does not interrupt the flow of creativity.

Miller describes the evolution of the artist as riding "on the ovarian trolley." In fact, those very words are what preface CAPRICORN. For Miller there are really two births the artist experiences before his final descent into a world riddled with isolation, hunger and anticipation. Of course, there is the physical birth but this is more a symbolic representation than Miller's actual recognition of his square-peg, round-hole emotional relationship with the world at large: this is the first stage of birth. The second stage comes years later out of the "Land of F@ck" as Miller coins it, the place where the "spermatozoon reigns supreme" (198). These phrases, as they would first seem (and were seen for many years that the book was banned from U.S. publication), are not some sordid and gratuitous account of Miller's perceptions of the world or his conquests. Rather, he uses the extended metaphors and kennings to give the reader an understanding to the visceral almost primordial conditions from whence the artist arises. For Miller, spiritual ascension is a process biologic as well as intellectual.

"Once this fact is grasped there can be no more despair. At the very bottom of the ladder, chez the spermatozoa, there is the same condition of bliss at the top, chez God. God is the summation of all the spermatozoa come to full consciousness. Between the bottom and the top there is no stop, no halfway station" (199).

There is an almost funereal quality about Miller's cognizance here: this idea of exploring one's complete "ANNIHILATON" before metaphysical resurrection. Miller understands the need for an eradication of the former self before the rebirth of the artist as he moves from the "terra firma" to the "terra vague." Along with this laying waste of the individual comes the erasure of connections to the self: friends, family, lovers - all abandoned to pursue the freedom to express unhindered utterance*. To this point, Miller's use of "Tropic of" in the titles of CANCER and CAPRICORN now begins to make more sense as he asserts himself to be on the boundary between this land of the physical and the spiritual; the place where men aspire to be God for a period of time just before the flash-point of creative impulse.

He brings the idea of the "ovarian trolley" full circle when he talks about the importance of discovering Dostoevsky - this being the first glimpse of a man's soul - and then later in a book called CREATIVE EVOLUTION by Henri Bergson. He carries the latter book with him everywhere and extols its virtue upon any man or woman who would hear the new standard version on the gospel of solitude.

TROPIC OF CAPRICORN should be standard reading for anyone in the arts, for any artist who has ever felt the pang of isolation, who truly believes in the necessity of sacrifice, a higher calling and commitment to one's creative endeavors. Miller's importance to world literature is vastly underrated and in many cases. Writers are simply too intimidated to face the truth in what he espouses. Miller operates as an Overman and as such, it is right that he should pose a certain condition of tremulousness in his readership: he has forged his own society, he has forged his own being into something closer to what history had intended for him since his first phone call into the horn of the fallopian. This is discomfiting for most and is intended to show how the application of introspection for an artist can lead to becoming an acolyte of unconventional philosophy: how a writer emerges as "e pluribus unum." Henry Miller's doctrine is reserved for the initiate, the mad few who choose separation from the masses as a means for creative growth. Miller's epitaph should simply be, "My name? Why just call me God - God the embryo."

© 2005-06 Edward J. Carvalho

NOTES:
* A phrase I have incorporated from listening to many extemporaneous speeches of creative rebellion from Squawk Coffeehouse co-founder, Lee Kidd.

WORKS CITED:

1.Miller, Henry. Tropic of Capricorn. New York: Grove Press, 1961.