Henry Miller and the Book of Life

I am sitting here reading a poet. There are many people in the room, but they are all inconspicuous; they are inside the books.

—Rainer Maria Rilke¹

In Nexus (1960), the third installment of The Rosy Crucifixion Trilogy, Henry Miller declares that he intends to write "the book of life," as he has decided that he is capable of writing only "the truth and nothing but the truth" (217). This subsequently rules out, as far as Miller is concerned, writing "literature," because "a wee small voice objected saying, 'Literature is something else again.'" Miller then responds to himself, stating his intention: "Then to hell with literature! The book of life, that's what I would write" (217). This claim sets the scene for Miller's obsession with writing and writers, and in general with his concept of literature. Throughout the unofficial "Obelisk trilogy" (Tropic of Cancer [1934], Black Spring [1936], and Tropic of Capricorn [1939]) and The Rosy Crucifixion Trilogy (Sexus [1949], Plexus [1953], and Nexus), Miller develops a literary form that disrupts conventional modes of writing by blurring the lines between his own writing, the writing of others, and the "real" world in which he, both as the narrator and as the writer, finds himself. To this end, Miller cites numerous writers and texts in relation to episodes of his own texts. Such literary evocations illuminate, in a deliberately peculiar fashion, events in the narrator's life. Although not imaginary per se, these references incorporate such things as Miller discussing another writer's methodology for writing or comparing himself with them as creators, as "those who were most in life" (Sexus 189). Miller aligns himself with writers both in order to become oriented for embarking on the process himself and also, more importantly, to reflect on how writing operates as a disruptive process, one that inhibits the flow of life while simultaneously appearing to establish that flow.

A controversial writer at the outset, Miller's negative literary reputation has often kept his work excluded from much serious academic discourse. This exclusion is partly due to, as Mary Kellie Munsil notes, "the seemingly misogynist and sexually violent inclinations of the protagonist/author" ("The Body in the Prison-house of Language: Henry Miller, Pornography and Feminism"[1992] 285). This negative issue of pornography, among others that deride Miller's literary merit, ultimately comes as a result of an array of misreadings of Miller's work, in the sense that he is often read literally rather than within a context that his work requires. Munsil, for example, argues, "Miller's work represents a new form of autobiography" and suggests that the reader ought to "accept this fact in the light of its potential for positive cultural subversion" (289). Munsil and other critics such as Ihab Hassan, James Decker, Gilles Deleuze, and even Miller's contemporaries including Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille, point to his style as highly innovative in its interest in the failures of language and in the questioning of the nature of writing, preemptive to an acute degree of poststructuralist thought. Indeed, relative to this indictment of Miller as pornographic, a poor writer, and unworthy of academic attention is the very quality in Miller's writing that precisely blurs these lines between acceptable writing, not just in terms of cultural norms (on topics of sexuality, among others) but in terms of a sense of the quality of writing that the reader observes in both the form and content in Miller. That is to say, if Miller is creating a "new" form of autobiography, for example, it is precisely in this new form that Miller's ingenuity can truly shine and should be permitted to do so by the critics. Promoting this reading of Miller as a "new" autobiographer, then, James Goodwin suggests in his article "Henry Miller, American Autobiographer" (1992) the following: "In turning to the American tradition of autobiography from a context of European nihilism and avant-gardism, Henry Miller voices a new need for dissent and independence" (300). Miller's writing style needs to be considered not within the confines of traditional literary evaluation but...