Tropic of Cancer

Thoughts on Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

It is hard to imagine the impact of Henry Miller’s vulgar language in 1934, but I suppose in the pre-shock-jock era someone had to push the bounds of language and conventional thought. If Dostoevsky's underground man was the kind of person that must exist in the nineteenth century, created by the expanding rationalistic world of modernism, then Miller’s persona in the Tropic of Cancer is a logical but extreme extension of that thought. Given the possible nihilism that has come about after Nietzsche’s proclamation that “God is dead,” the possibility of value has been eroded in the early twentieth century. Miller’s reference to Turgenev shows an affinity with Russian nihilist thought. He states that:
For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been
dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been
crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it
off. The world is rotting away, dying piecemeal. But it needs the
coup de grâce, it needs to be blown to smithereens. (26)

Since nothing seems to rise above into a hierarchy of meaning and value, Miller seems to reject everything as the same, and in response concerns himself only with the base values of food and sex. He quite consciously claims that he is not of the human world but the inhuman, and it seems Paris suits his activity better than American and its “puritanical” values .

Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could
have, but I see now that it was meant to destroy me. Today I am
proud to say that I am inhuman, that I belong not to men and
governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds and principles.
I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity – I
belong to the earth!

This view indicates Miller wants to throw off all artificial limitations created by man, and live in a much more naturalistic way, answering only to the self. Despite his rejection of value, there does seem to be times where Miller regards the act of creation as having intrinsic value, and the (sometimes) eloquent and poetic quality of his writing suggests a pursuit of an aesthetic goal. Ultimately, Miller’s interest is only in what is immediately present, the concrete elements of life. He is interested in the awareness of the: discrepancy there is between ideas and living. A permanent dislocation, though we try to cover the two with a bright awning. And it won’t go. Ideas have to be wedded to action; if there is no sex, no vitality in them, there is no action. Ideas cannot exist alone in the vacuum of the mind. Ideas are related to living: (242)

Life requires action, it should not be “an abstract idea nailed to a cross” (243). Life is lived on the margins of society. Anything that takes the vitality out of life (such as social conventions, normative morality, etc) should be rejected. While this worldview may not be sustainable for societies at large, it does seem applicable to the artist striving to find the center of life, to create something new, and live life to its fullest intensity. I think Miller is proposing that the only way to find value in the modern world is to first destroy all of the systems that have been built up in the past and start over by finding value in life itself.