Henry Miller: The Inhuman Artist

A Philosophical Inquiry

Indrek Männiste

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781623569006
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Against skeptics, Männiste argues that Miller does indeed have a philosophy of his own, which underpins most of his texts. It is demonstrated that this philosophy, as a metaphysical sense of life, forms a system the understanding of which is necessary to adequately explain even some of the most basic of Miller's ideas. Building upon his notion of the inhuman artist, Miller's philosophical foundation is revealed through his literary attacks against the metaphysical design of the modern age. It is argued that, by repudiating some of the most potent elements of late modernity such as history, modern technology and an aesthetisized view of art, Miller paves the way for overcoming Western metaphysics. Finally it is showed that, philosophically, this aim is governed by Miller's idiosyncratic concept of art, in which one is led towards self-liberation through transcending the modern society and its dehumanizing pursuits.

1

Prelude to a Future Philosophy: Modernist Melancholy, Dadaist Dances, and Surrealist Songs

I was against life, on principle

—Henry Miller

The aim of this chapter is to lay bare the connection between Miller and some of the early sources of his thought. Revealing this bond will help to define and categorize Miller’s ideas in the historically relevant context in which they found their inspiration, maturation and point of departure. To an extent, Miller is being scrutinized here in a manner similar to the way he himself insisted on in his study of D. H. Lawrence. That is, as in this study, we can only understand Miller himself, if we investigate him, in his own words, “against the background of his age, by situating him, as it were, in his particular soil and climate” (WOL, 57).¹ This preliminary historico-intellectual contextualization will then open up a path to Miller’s thinking, which we will unpack, layer by layer, throughout the book. Miller’s early encounters with the works of different thinkers and artistic movements, scrutinized in this chapter, have been presented as preliminary intellectual exercises that Miller subsequently used to inaugurate his conceptual and spiritual basis for finding a refuge from the modern age and establishing himself as a writer. These “exercises” lasted more than 10 years. However, it is precisely these early sources and influences that attuned Miller to think the way he did and resulted in something that we can call his inhuman philosophy.

In what follows, we mainly focus on three artistic-intellectual movements as their impact, in my opinion, appears to be the strongest in influencing the pertinent ideas that need to be highlighted in Miller’s works. First, Miller’s relation to modernist ideas is to me a crucial but still sadly often overlooked topic. To remedy this, we start this chapter by uncovering Miller’s early interactions with pre-modernist and early modernist sources and, indeed, his decidedly modernist stance will be continually emphasized throughout the book. I regard modernism here as an umbrella term under which both Dadaism and Surrealism are to be situated. Miller’s relationship with modernism is still regarded as very much open to debate. Unlike Dadaism and Surrealism, several important pre-modernist as well as early modernist writings were accessible to Miller even before the 1920s, although he wasn’t able to incorporate these ideas into his first literary attempts. While “established literary quarters” have often refused to identify Miller as a modernist on the grounds that his works fall outside of the “golden era” of modernism in Europe, several commentators, on the contrary, regard him as rightfully belonging to the modernist scene. I seek to substantiate and defend the latter view. Rather than insisting that modernism be defined predominantly as a certain historical period, I suggest we instead focus on themes or concepts that modernist literature has evoked. If we take this conceptually modernist approach, as I have, we will see that Henry Miller’s works offer a rich treatment of some of the most prominent themes common to all modernist literature, namely the critique of modern technology, the treatments of crisis and history, and the ongoing question of the role of the modern artist, all of which we will take up in the later chapters of this book.

Dadaism and Surrealism, the other two prominent sources of Miller’s thought examined in this chapter, were both important stimuli for his thinking in their own right. Although having experienced Dadaist art already before the 1920s, Miller studied both Dadaism and Surrealism “academically” only in the 1930s. Through their influence he acquired the conceptual apparatus for capturing the spirit of his own life of the 1920s in New York. The influences of Dadaism and Surrealism were realized perhaps most effectively in his Black Spring (1936) in which he made ample use of impressionistic images, dream symbols, and stream of consciousness techniques. While Miller very much enjoyed Surrealistic cinema and its other art forms, he soon became disillusioned with the ultraintellectual goals and socio-political agendas of the Surrealists. This resulted in his “An Open Letter to Surrealists Everywhere” (1938), in which he directly objected to Surrealism as a movement and defended his own thoroughly individualistic view of art and artists.

Just as his personal engagement with the ideas of these early sources and movements served for Miller as “prolegomena” to his mature writing, the following introductory section will serve as “prolegomena” for readers entering the hallway of Milleriana, who can thereby familiarize themselves with the type of thinker Miller is being cast as in this book.

A modernist who got left out in the cold

Though contemporaneous with James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and several other celebrated modernist writers, Miller, in literary discussions, is typically not considered to be a modernist writer. In his recent study, James Decker concedes that “most critics of late modernist period completely ignore Miller” and that “Miller’s representation in broad surveys of modernist era, literary histories, anthologies, reference works, conference panels, and other indicators of academic interest proves rather scant.”² He also points out that some of the major anthologies of American literature fail to include any of Miller’s work.³ At first blush, this seems to have occurred for a few superficial but compelling reasons. First of all, there is something we may call the historical reason.

Miller’s first “official” book, Tropic of Cancer, was published in 1934. To those who believe the heyday of literary modernism ended in 1925,⁴ this alone would automatically provide a good reason for his exclusion from the modernist canon. Still, as so much is still unclear about what the best way to define modernism is, it may well be that our understanding of modernism as a temporally restricted phenomenon is simply inadequate, or at least not the only possibility. Do ideas cease to interest and influence people with the turn of a particular year or even a decade? Indeed, even during the period that is thought to include “modernism proper,” most of the literature produced was not modernist.⁵ Thus, denying Miller access to modernism on historical grounds only seems to be nitpickingly narrow-minded to say the very least.

Few as they are, some recent positive tendencies toward including Miller among the modernists can be found. Sarah Garland, for example, in her recent essay, finds Miller to be an interesting voice in articulating “a late apocalyptic modernism.”⁶ Nicola Allen, too, in The Modernism Handbook (2009) lists the publishing of Miller’s Tropic of Cancer as an important event in the timeline of modernism, which she defines as lasting from 1890 to 1941.⁷ We can see, however, that when it comes to the historical definition of modernism, different views abound and it seems to be much like the question of the end of the world where “any date can be justified on some calculation or other.”⁸ Owing to these apparent difficulties with historical categorization, my treatment of Miller focuses on what we may call a thematic or conceptual identification of modernism. To be sure, the conceptual reading of modernism is nothing but a difference in perspective on the overall phenomenon of esthetic modernism which took up the fight against the bourgeois modernity in the late nineteenth century.⁹ However, instead of engaging in an analysis comparing the particular literary and artistic similarities or differences between Miller and other esthetic modernists, my approach concentrates rather on the affinity and discord of their more universal philosophical ideas. It seems to me that Miller’s relationship to modernism is best demonstrated and explained precisely in such terms.¹⁰

The other reasons for Miller’s traditional exclusion from the modernist canon, or any literary canon for that matter, seem to be due to the use of “frank Anglo-Saxon vocabulary”¹¹ and explicit sexual depictions in his Tropic books. Ample descriptions of sex and the choice of a publisher of questionable reputation certainly ostracized Miller from wider literary discussions for decades. Miller’s Tropic of Cancer was published in Paris by Obelisk Press: a publishing house that was, alas, mainly focused on publishing books which “. . . were condemned under obscenity laws in England or America.”¹² It was more or less guaranteed, then, based on Obelisk’s reputation alone, that Miller’s book would be banned in English-speaking countries immediately when published. The banning of both Miller’s Tropics for nearly 30 years in both the United States and Britain, certainly tempered, although not exclusively, the tone of the reception of Miller’s works throughout these decades, during which most of the scholarly commentators were not willing to jeopardize their careers and reputation by dealing with a “banned author” who took liberties with sexual matters. To many, the sexual content in Miller’s books seemed so extremely over the top that for years it placed Miller “entirely off the map as an ideologue.”¹³ The mentality that sees Miller predominantly as a pornographer is sadly still felt today in the English departments of universities throughout the world. It has made it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to “pigeonhole him [Miller] into traditional literary classifications,” a noted commentator rightly observes.¹⁴ In addition, as Miller’s most important books were banned, the few critics who were bold enough to discuss his works between the 1930s and the early 1960s were necessarily limited to those Miller texts—mainly short stories and essays—which had been officially published by that time. As Frank Kermode, a distinguished scholar of English letters, admitted in his early Miller review, any critic at the time would struggle to make up his mind about Miller’s literary merit, not being able to read “the Tropics in their entirety.”¹⁵ Furthermore, drawing on the example of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which similarly was banned, Kermode thought that Lawrence’s legal proceedings “would look like tea at the vicarage compared with a Miller case.”¹⁶ Referring to Miller’s anti-intellectual stance and his well-known contempt for academics, Kermode put forward a warranted question: would the dons really queue up for Miller’s defense? It was not until the 1960s that academic criticism really began to take Miller seriously. Miller himself loathed the analyzes by serious university critics who “sought to put him in what they regarded as his proper place – as if he needed to fill a pigeon hole in literary history.”¹⁷ Miller did not want to be reduced to a theoretical framework he had never believed in. Indeed, his distrust of “classical models and conventional literature” is central to his works.¹⁸ In addition to being constantly viewed as a dirty writer, things turned even worse for Miller in the mid 1970s when Kate Millet’s infamous Sexual Politics (1970) brought along vigorous feminist attacks on his works and Miller fell out of favor even more.¹⁹

Now let’s proceed to examine Miller’s path to modernism in the way in which it is understood and emphasized here. Literary modernism, with its prime in the 1920s, was mainly a European phenomenon, although many prominent modernists were American expatriates (e.g. Eliot, Pound, Stein, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, etc). The members of the Bloomsbury Group in England and the so-called Lost Generatio...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Prelude to a Future Philosophy: Modernist Melancholy, Dadaist Dances, and Surrealist Songs
• 2 Apocalypse Now: The End of History and the Twofold Present
• 3 The Anxiety of Enframing: Miller, Modern Technology, and Work
• 4 Behold, I Teach You the Inhuman!: Inhuman Artist, Übermensch, and China
• 5 From Theoria To Praxis: The Poetry of Life
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright