Henry Miller and Narrative Form Constructing the Self, Rejecting Modernity (Contexts and Genre in English Literature)

Henry Miller and Narrative Form

In this bold study, James M. Decker responds to the common charge that Henry Miller’s narratives suffer from “formlessness.” He instead positions Miller as a stylistic pioneer whose place must be assured in the American literary canon. From Moloch to Nexus via such widely-read texts as Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, Decker examines what Miller calls his “spiral form,” a radically digressive style that shifts wildly between realism and the fantastic. Decker draws on a variety of narratological and critical sources, as well as Miller’s own aesthetic theories, in order to argue that this fragmented narrative style formed part of a sustained critique of modern spiritual decay. A deliberate move rather than a compositional weakness, then, Miller’s style finds a wide variety of antecedents in the work of such figures as Nietzsche, Rabelais, Joyce, Bergson, and Whitman, and is seen by Decker as an attempt to chart the journey of the self through the modern city. Henry Miller and Narrative Form provides readers with new insight into some of the most challenging writings of the twentieth century and a template for understanding the significance of an extraordinary, inventive, narrative form. James M. Decker is Associate Professor of English at Illinois Central College, where he teaches a range of literature and writing courses. He is the author of Ideology (2003) and Editor of Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal.

Context and Genre in English Literature Series Editors Peter J. Kitson Department of English, University of Dundee, Dundee, UK

William Baker Department of English, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, USA The aim of the Context and Genre in English Literature series is to place bodies of prose, poetry, and drama in their historical, literary, intellectual, or generic contexts. It seeks to present new work and scholarship in a way that is informed by contemporary debates in literary criticism and current methodological practices. The various contextual approaches reflect the great diversity of the books in the series. Three leading categories of approach may be discerned. The first category, consisting of historical and philological approaches, covers subjects that range from marginal glosses in medieval manuscripts to the interaction between folklore and literature. The second category, of cultural and theoretical approaches, covers subjects as diverse as changing perceptions of childhood as a background to children’s literature on the one hand and queer theory and translation studies on the other. Finally, the third category consists of single-author studies informed by contextual approaches from either one of the first two categories. Context and Genre in English Literature covers a diverse body of writing, ranging over a substantial historical span and featuring widely divergent approaches from current and innovative scholars; it features criticism of writing in English from different cultures; and it covers both canonical literature and emerging and new literatures. Thus, the series aims to make a distinctive and substantial impact on the field of literary studies. Other titles in this series include: Ted Hughes Alternative horizons Edited by Joanny Moulin George Eliot’s English Travels Composite characters and coded communications Kathleen McCormack

Henry Miller and Narrative Form Constructing the self, rejecting modernity

James M. Decker

First published 2005 by Taylor & Francis Inc. 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2005 James Decker

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006.

“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Decker, James M., 1967– Henry Miller and narrative form : constructing the self, rejecting modernity/James M. Decker. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Miller, Henry, 1891– Literary style. 2. Narration (Rhetoric)– History–20th century. 3. Literary form–History–20th century. 4. Miller, Henry, 1891– Technique. 5. Fantastic, The, in literature. 6. Realism in literature. 7. Self in literature. I. Title. PS3525.I5454Z6597 2005 818'.5209–dc22 2005017533 ISBN 0-415-36026-9 (Print Edition)

Contents

Acknowledgments

vi

1

Introduction: spiral form

1

2

Brooklyn dawn

26

3

Parisian tempest

59

4

Californian tranquility

102

5

Conclusion: Henry Miller and the American literary tradition

148

Notes Bibliography Index

156 169 177

Acknowledgments

I would like to extend my appreciation to Polly Dodson and Liz Thompson of Routledge for their kind assistance with this manuscript. I also wish to express my gratitude to John Button of Bookcraft Ltd, and to Sara Peacock for her exemplary copy editing. Sincere thanks go to the many people who have offered their criticism of various stages of this project, including William Baker, David Barrow, William Bennett, Amy M. Flaxman, Carol Gayle, Ben Goluboff, Yasunori Honda, The International Lawrence Durrell Society, Roger Jackson, Finn Jensen, John V. Knapp, James M. Mellard, Karl Orend, and Kenneth Womack. I would also like to express my enduring love and appreciation to Suzanne, Siobhan, Anastazia, and Evan Decker.

1

Introduction Spiral form

Henry once said to me, “When you write about me, make it all up!” Erica Jong (1993: 6)1

Henry Miller’s somewhat disingenuous remark to Erica Jong illustrates the older writer’s propensity to combine self-analysis with fabulation, historical fact with anecdotal hyperbole. Devoting literally millions of words to his spiritual autobiography, Miller sought to explore his identity on a scope few other authors ever attempted. Despite his almost maniacal efforts to reveal his innermost self in a “truthful” manner, Miller regularly, even typically, followed his advice to Jong and willfully distorted both the internal and external facts of his life. Although he occasionally protested, most famously to Edmund Wilson, that he never “use[d] ‘heroes’” and that everything he wrote paralleled his “real” life, Miller manipulated language, style, and form in such a way as to alter the significance of those parallels and create a persona quite unlike the historical Henry V. Miller (1938a: 49).2 Simultaneously lyrical and naturalistic, surreal and quotidian, Miller’s “autobiographical romances,” prose essays, letters, stories, watercolors, and criticism embody a life-long attempt to invent a mythopoeic vision and revision of the self. By filtering memories, dreams, and fantasies through an anecdotal matrix, Miller allows his narratives to blur categories of past, present, and future, enabling him to depict a persona that stands both in and apart from the historical continuum. Such a framework lets Miller fuse real events and fabrications without sacrificing the “truthfulness” of his representations. Because his narratives deny strict chronology, Miller may rearrange the incidents of his life in a pattern that seeks not photographic realism, but psychological realism. Viewing the same basic experiences, the memories that J. Hillis Miller describes as “a precarious support for narrative continuity,” from a variety of temporal and psychological positions, Miller creates a type of suprarealism that rejects factual continuity for emotional essence (1998: 149). An individual occurrence may thus provide Miller’s narrator, or supraself— an amalgam of the numerous redactions of “Henry Miller” that stands collectively for the biographical Miller at various points in his life—with myriad associations or interpretations. Although these interpretations may contradict or undercut one another, they work together to form a hermeneutics of the self.

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Introduction

Miller’s narratives, however, exhibit more than a concern for self-examination. While the notoriety he gained first as an “obscene” writer and later as an exemplar of sexist values continues to color the reception of his work, Miller imbues his texts with a critique of modernity that reveals his personal struggle with cultural anxiety. As used by Priscilla Wald, cultural anxiety refers to the “disruptions” that occur when “the experiences of individuals conspicuously fail to conform to the definition of personhood offered in the narrative” (1995: 10). For Wald, the representation of (radical) personal identity betokens a dialogue with national identity: “in order to be psychologically unsettling, [writers] had to be formally unsettled” (13). Miller’s own narratives, which frequently lash out at the economic base and institutional superstructures of modernity, often find themselves accused of being “formally unsettled.” Kingsley Widmer, for example, declares that Miller’s narratives possess an “irregular shape” that “does not quite come together in what can be called a style” (1990: 4). While works such as Tropic of Cancer (1934) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939) ostensibly structure themselves respectively around the four seasons or a love affair, they range wildly through time and space, all the while questioning economic and cultural expectations. Miller consistently juxtaposes what he terms a “new level of being,” associated with spiritual and artistic fulfillment, with the “empty existence” he links with habit-driven duty to family, employer, country (1962e: 185, 187). Both early and late in his career, Miller finds his influences in those individuals who reject “the harness” and pursue their own path, figures such as Lao Tzu, Christ, St. Francis of Assisi, R.W. Emerson, Walt Whitman, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ramakrishna, Blaise Cendrars, E. Graham Howe, Michael Fraenkel, and many others. Miller reacted strongly to sentiments reflected in Emerson’s assertion that “An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man” (1981: 138) or Nietzsche’s observation that “ … there is nothing more thoroughly harmful to freedom than liberal institutions” (2003: 103). As Wald notes, however, “official narratives,” while “neither static nor monolithic” exert pressure on those who would pursue idiosyncratic stories, resulting in an uneasy “oscillation between conformity and incomprehensibility” (1995: 2–3). The latter manifests itself both thematically and formally. In Miller’s case, as Paul Jahshan remarks, such “incomprehensibility” manifests itself via the “marked” and “unmarked” passages that Miller “juggl[es] with equal ease and effortlessness” (2001: 17). Miller, thus, fuses residual—and ideologically recognizable—narrative form with “formless” material that chafes against the expectations of his readers. This fusion, which Miller later theorizes, results from Miller’s anxious attempts to critique the environmental forces that branded him a failure as a husband, employee, and citizen. In his seminal reconsideration of the Jazz Age, Roderick Nash describes the post-war milieu in which Miller struggled with his first attempts at writing as a “nervous” one that consciously and unconsciously sought comfort in nostalgia, that “needed most [images of] tradition and value” (1990: 42). While select intellectuals, such as Randolph Bourne and Emma Goldman (both of whom Miller admired), excoriated Wilsonian panegyrics to progress, Nash continues, many representatives of the cultural elite salved their anxieties over modern instability and wholesale slaughter with nostalgic optimism. As Nash observes, however, the tension

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between the volatility of contemporary life and the perceived solidity of the past predated the Great War. Stephen Kern enumerates some of the “sweeping changes in technology and culture” in the latter quarter of the nineteenth century: Technological innovations including the telephone, wireless telegraph, x-ray, cinema, bicycle, automobile, and airplane established the material foundation for this [social] reorientation; independent cultural developments such as the stream-of-consciousness novel, psychoanalysis, Cubism, and the theory of relativity shaped consciousness directly. (1983: 1) As the United States and the world embraced many of these phenomena, and thereby extended the “frontier spirit” embedded in the national narrative, living conditions for millions paradoxically worsened. The Haymarket riots, the Pullman strike, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, the Tulsa race riot, the Ludlow massacre—such tragedies simply heralded countless unrecorded miseries and mocked the vital optimism of men such as Theodore Roosevelt and Horatio Alger. By 1920, the average male in the USA lived a mere 53.6 years, faced brutal working conditions, and saw little prospect of attaining prosperity (Blanke 2002: 283). Nevertheless, the lure of the American Dream continued to attract millions, despite the humiliations of Ellis and Angel Islands and the disappointments of the ghetto. Like so many writers of his generation, Miller held conflicting attitudes toward modernity, the “bundle of processes” that Jürgen Habermas describes as “cumulative and mutually reinforcing”: capital, Taylorized production, national identity, political rights, urban relocation, formalized education, secularization, and so on (1993: 2). Raised in a middle-class neighborhood, the young Miller resented the encroaching—largely Jewish—immigrants whose presence prompted his mother to relocate the family. As he grew older, Miller also learned to despise his nation’s most sacred institutions—its schools, churches, and businesses—as hypocritical and spiritually enervating. Resenting his remembered feelings of dislocation, Miller observed, “in the very heart of the Modern spirit there is a schism” (1941c: 170). Nevertheless, Miller infused his work with nostalgia, particularly with respect to childhood, and images of material longing and luxury commingle with anarchic desire and subversion. In her study of Miller’s use of emotion, Amy M. Flaxman suggests that frequently within Miller’s autobiographical romances “corrupted fast-paced backgrounds are contrasted with sweet moments” (2000: 69). The resultant tensions between Miller’s overt rejection of paradigmatic capitalism and his more subtle sentimentalism manifest themselves formally as the “disruptions” noted above by Wald. While recent studies by Paul Jahshan, Gay Louise Balliet, and Caroline Blinder suggest that the formal properties of Miller’s texts owe much to surrealist and Dadaist practice, they perhaps minimize sizable sections of prose that paradoxically reflect naturalist, romantic, and metaphysical sensibilities, among others. Even many of Miller’s most vocal supporters, among them Lawrence Durrell, Norman Mailer, and George Wickes, frequently lament Miller’s occasional “lapses” in formal judgment—his prolix excursions, his

4

Introduction

uncritical enthusiasms, his repetitions. As Wald points out, however, such “awkward” moments “force readers to confront their own longing for the narrative conventions that make a work comprehensible” (1995: 239). Beyond this, the formal untidiness observed in Miller’s work, particularly within The Rosy Crucifixion, mirrors the writer’s own struggle to identify and overcome his own spiritual “murderer,” the embodiment of unexamined, ideologically driven desire (1962b: 87). Miller himself admits the difficulty of this process, and observes that when he first started writing he “[was] almost paralyzed by fear and apprehensiveness” (1941e: 29). The “anxious” Miller tenders his most radical formal criticism of the dominant narrative ideology precisely within his texts’ “clumsy” junctures. Miller’s cultural anxiety reveals itself in the list of the 100 books he includes in The Books in My Life, with its stunning juxtaposition of esoteric European philosophy and boyish genre fiction. By combining avant-garde stylistics with conventions rooted in his earliest reading, Miller develops a style that defies easy categorization and reveals the profound ambivalence that prompted him late in life to alternate between denouncements of material culture and worries over tax shelters. Miller’s alinear aesthetic—which he labels “spiral form”—thus conjoins jeremiad-like pronouncements against capitalism and its attendant superstructures with unabashed enthusiasms, sexual disclosures, aesthetic philosophies, and metaphysical speculations. Nervous, yet confident, Miller formally expresses his cultural anxiety through a pattern of constant interruption, through a myriad of beginnings. In this way, he simultaneously strives for spiritual “Truth” and acknowledges the difficulty of such a venture. Both thematically and formally, Miller stresses alinear revelation and rejects Enlightenment binaries and dialectics. Throughout his canon, Miller celebrates his discovery of people, texts, and places that trigger within him an ineffable metaphysical feeling that advances him on the path of pure being. Institutions, systems, conventions—these stultify individuals, calcify their desires into mere habit. As with D.H. Lawrence and his principle of “blood consciousness,” Miller recognizes that modern individuals suffer because of their over-reliance on logic. In his unpublished parody “The New Instinctivism,” written with Alfred Perlès and intended for The New Review (Orend 2004e), Miller claims with Nietzsche that humanity’s “original instincts have been murdered” by morality and systematic thought and observes that “Man’s docility, is placid, bovine acquiescence, his abject surrender to creeds and codes and isms is precisely what pains us most” (1931: 109). Miller consistently avoided aligning himself with parties, philosophies, religions, and the like, a phenomenon that ultimately strained his relationship with George Orwell, although from the start Miller told Orwell that “I don’t for one minute believe that we will ever get rid of the slave class, or rid of injustice” (1936k: 1). Instead, Miller drew from widely diverse sources—such as Piotr Kropotkin, Marie Corelli, and Georges Duhamel—that produced within him epiphanic moments, the “pretext[s] for that which he really [sought]” (1962e: 159). Words, therefore, simply triggered within the Dionysian Miller a glimpse of the “mystical consciousness” (1931: 116). People, such as George Katsimbalis or Beauford DeLaney, and places, such as Montparnasse or Big Sur, could serve the same role in exciting what he calls, with

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5

Nietzsche, the “Yes-function” (116). What some critics, such as Tom Wood and Gore Vidal, deride as incompatible or ludicrous enthusiasms, Miller relishes for their ability to transport him momentarily to “China,” his metaphor for higher consciousness, a place beyond the material, beyond art. Like Miller, Pierre Macherey recognizes that certain types of literature attempt to transport their readers to “the depths,” and that such literature offers only the “distorted and deformed expression” of the “authentic meaning” (1995: 132). Both Miller and Macherey intimate that certain works of art function as catalysts for a type of hyperconsciousness that constitutes the “true” goal of the artist. Indeed, in his post-Parisian works, Miller frequently speaks of abandoning reading and writing, of replacing these meager substitutes with the energy of self-actualized bliss and acceptance. In denying the supremacy of modernity’s dual themes of reason and material security, Miller implicitly rejects what Jean-François Lyotard calls the “narratives of legitimation … the emancipation of humanity, the realization of the Idea” (1988: 65). Dionysian, Miller abhors the logic of the many and seeks to communicate with the few. For Miller, no one “plot” may suffice to liberate the consciousness, as each person’s singular needs constantly evolve. Miller, therefore, may never fully articulate his “message,” as it emanates from a metaphysical source, and must seek an alternative, “disruptive” method whereby to stimulate a revelation within his ideal reader. This method, spiral form, consciously thwarts narrative closure—which Miller feels may only occur once readers transcend the narrative itself—by radically switching various modes in kaleidoscopic fashion. As with Claude Lévi Strauss’ bricoleur, Miller “derives his poetry from the fact that he does not confine himself to accomplishment and execution” and revels in the process itself (1966: 21). Ever the bricoleur, Miller extracts whatever anecdotes he can from the substance of his own life in fashioning the narratives. Miller’s works, however, resist categorization as pure autobiography, for while they apparently examine Miller’s life in minute detail, they decenter that life and transform it into a metaphor of the process of metaphysical discovery. Because Miller concentrates to an extraordinary degree on situations that parallel his own life, naïve readers—regardless of Karl Orend’s well-supported claim that Miller’s books “were not, despite appearances, autobiography”— might easily assume that the writer’s canon falls under the generic rubric of autobiography (2004a: 25). Such a classification poses some problems, however, since recent autobiographical theory suggests that autobiography cuts across generic boundaries and ultimately proves too diffuse for rigorous definition. Many current theories, for instance, abandon earlier attempts to establish a set of formal conventions, and instead opt for a broader interpretation of autobiography that centers on the mode’s myth-making possibilities. James Olney, a seminal figure in modern autobiographical theory, observes that autobiographers—no matter what their “intentions”—must necessarily create a fictional situation that, in discussing earlier “selves,” reveals more about the writers’ current psyche than about the past: These order-produced and order-producing, emotion-satisfying theories and equations—all the world views and world pictures, models and hypotheses,

6

Introduction myths and cosmologies mentioned earlier—it may be that another, for our purposes better and more comprehensive, name for these would be “metaphors”: they are something known and of our making, or at least of our choosing, that we put to stand for, and so to help us understand, something unknown and not of our making. (1972: 30)

Olney’s contention contains important implications for a study of Miller’s writing. Rather than approach the “autobiographical romances” with expectations of discovering key facts about Miller’s life, readers should heed Olney’s arguments and view the texts not as transparent renderings of raw biographical data, but as metaphoric transformations of experiential material. By stressing autobiography’s metaphoric aspects, Olney concomitantly foregrounds the highly spiritual nature of the writer’s selection process. If, as Olney implies, autobiography may only divulge partial truths about its subject, then each incident that writers decide to include in their texts becomes magnified in importance. Raised to metaphoric status, individual events take on a multifarious character, reflecting not only their historical analogues, but “standing for” absence as well, a phenomenon that Ihab Hassan characterizes as “the mask of an absent face” (1990: 30). All that autobiographers omit, all that they think trivial, forget, or cannot face, paradoxically remains embedded within that which they commit to paper. In telling stories about earlier selves, autobiographers tacitly tell stories about their current selves because their decisions—conscious or otherwise—betray the way(s) in which they perceive themselves and, by extension, the world. The decision-making process constitutes more than simply which stories to tell, of course. How an autobiographer relates an anecdote informs readers about the writer’s personal “cosmology” as well. Consequently, Herbert Leibowitz asserts that “the self reveals itself through style,” for “style, memory’s ally, strives to make whole the split between the sentient self and the observing ego” (1989: 4, 28). Even the most ostensibly fragmented texts impose a type of order on their contents, and the subsequent parameters stemming from this order in turn partially shape how readers will engage the material. The autobiographer—especially one, like Miller, who uses a variety of traditionally “fictional” techniques—transforms the chaos of raw experiential data into a manageable, and stylistically self-contained, unit of thought. The various stylistic choices inherent in such a transformation make autobiographers negotiate yet another level of introspection because the narrative method they ultimately select will color their audience’s perceptions to a great degree. No matter how writers perceive themselves, certain modes of style will necessarily carry with them certain cues that may or may not run at cross-purposes with the authors’ original self-vision. A plain style, for example, might subtly prepare readers for a narrative in which contradictions and doubts play less of a role than their ultimate resolution. Conversely, an intricate style might suggest that the process by which such confusion or hesitation appears supersedes any attempt to unravel such phenomena. Although choice and placement of language do not necessarily affect content, style does affect how readers will absorb that content.

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Style aids writers in discovering how they view themselves by forcing them to question how others will comprehend the selves that they create. Miller’s oeuvre offers a running commentary on this process of self-discovery. Although elements of his artistic aesthetic shift with almost every text, an examination of Miller’s narratives reveals that a concern for non-chronological time pervades both the writer’s early and late work. A fragmented self that cuts across linear temporal boundaries proves central to Miller’s autobiographical myth or metaphor. Writing in Aller Retour New York, Miller reveals his “plan for writing concentrically, which will allow [him] the utmost freedom while still preserving the illusion of motion and progress” (1936a: 25). Such a sense of narrative time allows Miller to reroute his prose at any juncture; he may defer closure indefinitely even as he appears to move toward it. As Miller observes in Tropic of Capricorn, “each second is a universe of time” (1939e: 190). No amount of description could ever exhaust the deep reservoir of material held within the recesses of any particular moment. While such a phenomenon might prove daunting to some, to Miller it simply offers an artistic and personal challenge to seek the truth, no matter how limited the ultimate result. Miller overtly combines temporal speculation and experimentation with his literary aesthetic in his essay “Reflections on Writing.” After admitting that he could never accurately depict “Reality” in his narratives, Miller asserts that “one can only go forward by going backward and then sideways and then up and then down. There is no progress: there is perpetual movement, which is circular, spiral, endless” (1941e: 22). Pointedly describing time in purely spatial terms, Miller explodes the linear and replaces it with a flexible temporality capable of doubling or tripling back on itself. Expatiating further, Miller asserts that this flexible time scheme allows him to write more intuitively and dispense with convention: “I have no beginning and no ending,” he claims (27). The autobiographical romances thus unfold not according to clock time, but instead according to psychological time, that universe within each second. As Miller wrote to William Gordon years later in a letter of 3 September 1966, “all the backward and forward jumps have pertinence, from the standpoint [sic] of ‘true’ autobiographical narrative” (1968: 65). The relationship between events transcends mere chronology, and indeed constitutes an extreme form of the discordance between the ordering of the story and narrative that Gérard Genette labels anachrony (1980: 35–6).3 Plasticity, to say the least, marks Miller’s use of time, a concept reflected in the autobiographical romances’ relatively “loose” sequencing of anecdotes. Perhaps the most provocative statements Miller makes with regard to time occur in The World of Sex, where he develops his concept of spiral form.4 Arguing for a disjointed, associative time scheme, Miller reflects that In telling this story [of my life] I am not following a strict chronological sequence but have chosen to adopt a circular or spiral form of time development which enables me to expand freely in any direction at any given moment. The ordinary chronological development seems to me wooden and artificial, a synthetic reconstitution of the facts of life. The facts and events of

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Introduction life are for me only the starting points on the way towards the discovery of truth. I am trying to get at the inner pattern of events, trying to follow the potential being who was deflected from his course here and there, who circled around himself, so to speak, who was becalmed for long stretches or who sank to the bottom of the sea or suddenly flew to the loftiest peaks … . Thus, for no apparent reason, I may often lapse back into a period anterior to the one I am talking about … . A sudden switch, a long parenthetical detour, a monologue, a remembrance which suddenly crops up, all these, without conscious effort on my part, serve to bind the loose threads together and augment the whole emotional trend. (1941g: 53–4)5

Spiral form attempts to merge the diachronic and the synchronic, as it both “develops” through time and analyzes particular “points” from multiple angles. Departing from the purely synchronic because he acknowledges the importance of historical antecedents and speaks in terms of evolution, Miller’s use of time also deviates from the truly diachronic, for spiral form approaches evolution not in terms of nodes on a continuum, but in terms of an intricate associative pattern that returns again and again to the same individual event from a variety of perspectives. In a later text, Olney describes such memorial reconstruction with the metaphor of weaving, wherein “the weaver’s shuttle and loom constantly produce new and different patterns, designs, and forms” that “bring forth ever different memorial configurations and an ever newly shaped self” (1998: 20). Miller’s spiral form clearly belongs to such a tradition, although Miller often used the archaeological metaphor that Olney rejects. Indeed, Leon Lewis, while not directly discussing spiral form, points out that—influenced by surrealist cinema—Miller sets his autobiographical romances “against a shifting polychronic background” that allows his characters to “live simultaneously in different moments in their lives” (1986: 29). The autobiographical romances thus act as a type of tableau vivant that presents the same material in different phases or contexts. Past, present, and future become one as Miller blurs their boundaries and insists on a personal time—or “semiotic time” in Roland Barthes’ language (1977: 99)—that recognizes no formal divisions. As Raoul Ibargüen observes of Tropic of Cancer, Miller’s time is the time of writing: neither a time that shadows the year’s worth of events recorded in its anecdotes, nor a time of its present telling, nor the timelessness of ecstatic vision; but a time created by writing which opens the possibility of mimesis, retrospection, and dream coexisting without cohesion within the same narrative. (1989: 242) This metafictional quality allows Miller to expose the insufficiency of the linear plot while at the same time he reveals his own formal choices as equally artificial and incomplete. Miller vehemently argues against the traditional plot, stating flatly, if somewhat disingenuously, “I detest all books which run chronologically,

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which commence at the cradle and end at the grave” (1936a: 33). In his attempts to circumvent such predictable temporality and plot the inner pattern, Miller problematizes the relationship among art, time, and experience, thereby accounting for the ostensibly arbitrary sequencing of events the autobiographical romances employ. Drawing on stream-of-consciousness, surrealist, and Dadaist analogues, Miller’s spiral form, with its apparent lack of “cohesion,” drifts from anecdote to fantasy and back, tentatively anchoring itself only with repeated tropes and familiar memories. Anaïs Nin grasped Miller’s nonlinear aesthetic before the latter writer even published Tropic of Cancer, noting in a letter to Miller of 8 November 1933, “There is a spiral, in you, in your books” (Nin and Miller 1987: 125). Miller’s narratives “interrupt” themselves by breaking off one story to pursue another, launching into Dadaist reveries, discoursing with jeremiad-like fury on society’s foibles, employing Whitmanesque catalogues, recording countless sexual escapades, or philosophizing on any number of issues. Miller slyly states in the quotation on pp. 7–8 that such narrative shifts manifest themselves for no “apparent” reason. Clearly, however, his use of italics in later revisions of The World of Sex intimates that the writer manipulated his texts’ narratological schema to achieve an arbitrary appearance more indicative of life’s flux and reflux without actually composing in a random fashion. The simulacra of chaos rather than chaos itself, Miller’s narratives do not fall under the rubric of “automatic” writing like those of Jack Kerouac, nor can one assert that Miller’s work offers an analogue to the “cut and paste” novels of such authors as William Burroughs and B.S. Johnson. Unlike Kerouac (but like W.B. Yeats and his “automatic” writing in A Vision), Miller methodically revised his writing and, contrary to Burroughs and Johnson, retained control of his readers’ textual purview.6 Spiral form seems spontaneous, but it actually makes up part of Miller’s carefully crafted personal historiography. Critics unfamiliar with Miller’s theory will undoubtedly point out its similarities to Joseph Frank’s notion of spatial form (1945). Indeed, Donald Pizer attributes Miller’s “conscious rejection of the customary structuring device of chronology” to an “employment of spatial form” (1996: 125). Although Pizer correctly emphasizes the anti-chronological nature of Miller’s work, he commits an error in ascribing that quality to spatial form, for in addition to predating Frank’s concept by some four years, Miller’s spiral form diverges from spatial form in a few important ways, even though the two approaches belong under the same critical rubric. Both spiral and spatial forms stress what Frank labels “lyric organization” (1945: 84).7 Rather than present a story—or plot—in a linear fashion, practitioners of spiral and spatial form separate individual plot points from those that precede or succeed them chronologically, logically, or emotionally. Frank observes that such a phenomenon results in a series of images with “no comprehensible relationship in time” (15). As a result, the plot’s micromeaning takes precedence over its macromeaning until a reader can survey the entire text and begin to unravel the rationale(s) behind the various “arbitrary” juxtapositions and associations. Independent sections, sentences, or even words function, therefore, on two basic planes of understanding: the isolated and the holistic. In isolation, an image group may possess one set of

10 Introduction meanings, but the same image group—viewed in relation to either the whole or those groups that precede it—may hold an entirely different set of meanings. Narrative closure thus becomes problematic since the competing planes at once deny and affirm one another. As Frank suggests, lyric organization requires “simultaneous perception,” a physical impossibility on a first reading (14).8 Before—and even after—Frank’s article on spatial form, commentators often accused narratives that employed lyric organization of having no form or structure at all. Such imputations—and Miller certainly earned his share of such charges—deny or fail to recognize that writers must select and sequence their image groups and that comprehension does not necessarily have a linear paradigm, that intuition and emotion play a large role in how people perceive themselves and the world. Miller’s lyric organization, for example, allows him to traverse a wide range of styles and experience without concentrating on a specific narrative conclusion; his various anecdotes do not always “mesh” with one another—indeed, they may contradict each other—but a careful reader may piece together a larger portrait of the supraself from the numerous fragmentary ones. Miller and Frank also recognize that lyric organization leads to a type of factual transparency. Even though lyrically organized texts tend to bombard their audiences with hypertrophied detail or “facts,” the reliance on association rather than logic undercuts any attempt to “develop” a character or incident in a traditionally mimetic way. Frank comments that such an aesthetic leads to “snapshots of characters” rather than fully rounded figures (26), while Miller candidly admits to Nin that he purposely distorts his biographical models into caricatures (Nin and Miller 1987: 21), and he theorizes decades later—in an interview with Kenneth Turan— that “distortion is inevitable” (1994b: 230). The verisimilitude that William Dean Howells, or even Frank Norris, tried to practice does not apply to lyric organization because its practitioners attempt to transcend, or at least demystify, the attempt to capture “life” on paper. Lyric organization, while certainly a type of mimesis, lends itself to exploding or defamiliarizing the outward facade of an event, person, or concept. By distorting the familiar, lyric organization compels its audience to examine the commonplace anew, to discover latent connections and meanings. Miller and Frank do, however, diverge in their theories of time. Frank’s vision of spatial form directly deviates from Miller’s spiral form in terms of what constitutes the temporal unit in a lyrically organized text. While Frank refers to spatial form’s “halted time flow” (1945: 17), Miller asserts that spiral form necessitates “progression” (1941f: 126–7). For Frank, a reader must apprehend a lyrically organized narrative “as a moment of time rather than as a sequence” (1945: 10). Spiral form, according to Miller, requires a sequence, albeit an alogical one. Spatial form’s halted time flow implies an equal relationship—perhaps even a unity—between a text’s various word groups. In spatial form, a narrative’s constituent parts exist in the same temporal frame. Spiral form makes no such claims, and even contradicts them directly. Rather than dissecting one moment of time (because as Frank observes, the synchronic “takes precedence” over the diachronic in spatial form), spiral form transfigures both the synchronic and diachronic (75). Narratively, Miller will exploit one moment of time through several perceptual angles, but he

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also distorts the diachronic sequence by relating his anecdotes nonchronologically, by fluctuating between a dense fabric of detail and inexplicable lacunae, and, most important, by expressing the supraself’s progression toward self-knowledge even as the “character” Henry Miller wallows in ignorance and despair. Miller’s focus on self-discovery necessitates a hyperawareness of both the past and the present. Each event in Miller’s life affects the way he perceives the universe and his position within it. Memories, therefore, play a pivotal role in spiral form. If individuals will ever truly understand themselves, then they must constantly replay their past in order to seek its significance. Placed in myriad contexts, Miller’s memories do not function as naïve nostalgia, nor, as one commentator recently argued, as a “sociology report,” but instead they provide the underpinning to a complex historiographical and mythopoeic undertaking (Lewis 1986: 215). Although Miller will repeat many key anecdotes throughout his oeuvre, the cumulative effect of these repetitions does not, as one might expect, stabilize Miller’s supraself, but instead decenters it and calls into question fixed interpretations of psychic experience. As Gordon recognizes, “each time a familiar fragment appears it acquires a slightly new meaning by reason of the new context” (1967: 211). Fluid in both detail and context, Miller’s memories burst through the narrative’s interstices and create ostensibly bizarre juxtapositions of subject matter. Certain happenings operate as experiential refrains—although they lack any recognizable regularity within Miller’s canon—and thus establish both intertextual links between Miller’s various narratives and intratextual bonds within a particular text. Bertrand Mathieu, in noting Miller’s propensity to repeat anecdotes, reminds readers of the importance of repetition to myth (1976: 14). Only through countless tellings, as happens in Miller, can a narrative rise from the level of story to myth. The various retellings create textual masks for Miller’s supraself, masks that necessarily distort the biographical “facts” of Miller’s life because of their reliance on an intuitive, rather than objective, use of time. Miller-as-sexual-dynamo, Milleras-crank, Miller-as-artist, Miller-as-mystic, Miller-as-dreamer—none of these or his other personae delineates Miller’s bio-historical identity with any degree of verisimilitude, but all of them contribute to a textual, mythical supraself. Gordon remarks implicitly on the notion of the supraself when he comments that Miller’s work presents “fragments of the self which he [Miller] continually reconciles into a greater whole” (1967: xxiv). As this textual self evolves, it displaces, but ultimately does not discard, previous versions of Miller’s experience, and thus leaves what Miller referred to as the “geological” I, a psychic record that allows readers to compare Miller’s different levels of self-awareness (1980: 89).9 Miller’s fossilized selves often refer to the same incidents, but their knowledge of those events differs widely. For Miller to progress toward self-knowledge, he must continually retraverse his psychic terrain. Despite J.D. Brown’s assertion that “progression of time and development of character are not emphasized” in Tropic of Cancer, it seems clear that both elements in Brown’s equation do take precedence over all else if one considers the canon as an organic whole (1986: 17).10 The supraself who narrates the autobiographical romances quite obviously develops through time, even if the “character” of Henry Miller does not do so. The supraself, temporally distanced

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from the events the character experiences, functions as a synthesizing agent. In viewing and reviewing memorial data through a variety of contextual lenses, the supraself highlights its changing attitudes toward both its former selves and its art. By recovering the past through analyzing memories, Miller emphasizes the radical transformations his supraself has undergone. These transformations fit a psychological model. Roy Schafer, a psychologist with an interest in narratology, provides a gloss for Miller’s geologic textual strategy with his assertion that one may view all psychoanalysis as a fragmented narrative based on a substratum of memory. Like Miller, the analysand repeats and reshapes key images—Olney’s metaphors of the self—in an ongoing process of self-clarification. As Schafer argues, “In the retelling, certain features are accentuated while others are placed in parentheses; certain features are related to others in new ways or for the first time; some features are developed further, perhaps at great length” (1980: 31). Spiral form shares definite traits with Schafer’s concept of “retelling” in psychoanalysis. As with the analysand, Miller will allude to an incident or character only to expatiate another time. Similarly, spiral form, with its web of juxtapositions, will alter the context in which a particular image group interacts with its counterparts. Schafer’s theory also parallels Miller’s refusal to demarcate clearly between past, present, and future. For Schafer, “more and more, the alleged past must be experienced consciously as a mutual interpenetration of past and present” (32). The supraself, that composite of all Miller’s selves, offers precisely this temporal blend, presenting it in an arena that consciously attempts to reconcile—but never finally capture—the artist-analysand’s competing versions of the textual I. This reconciliation—or “clarification” in Schafer’s language—comes about through “the circular and coordinated study of past and present” (33). Miller’s project of spiral form resembles that of psychoanalysis both in its emphasis on memory and in its lack of closure. Well-versed in Freud, Jung, Rank, and a host of important psychoanalytic writers, Miller appropriated many of their techniques and integrated them into his quest for personal enlightenment. Identity functions as a manifestation of memory, and only through a long and painstaking dissection of one’s historical traces and their relationship to the present may one attain any substantial degree of self-comprehension. As memories always distort—however slightly—their objects of remembrance, Miller did not feel yoked to any sense of objective history. Spiral form allowed Miller to dispense with historical accuracy and write from a more intuitive locus. Miller thus gives his idiosyncrasies free rein in describing verifiable data. The objects of Miller’s recollections do not matter nearly as much as their effect on his writing process or the supraself. Individuals other than Miller function less as characters than as symbolic representations of the spiritual struggle within Miller’s supraself. Writing to Emil Schnellock, a friend well acquainted with his biography, Miller declared when you detect discrepancies in the narrative, lies, distortions, etc., don’t think it is bad memory—no, it is quite deliberate, for where I go on to falsify I am in reality only extending the sphere of the real, carrying out the implicit truth in some situation that life sometimes, and art most of the time, conceals. (1989: 106)

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That which captured Miller’s attention within a person, place, object, or event becomes disproportionate and caricatured, but nevertheless “true” for Miller. Veracity for Miller consists not in accurate transcription but in remaining faithful to the mood—or inner pattern—surrounding an incident. Miller will thus permute historical sequence, “augment” anecdotes, and fabulate tales all under the guise of “Truth.” Lawrence J. Shifreen refers to this amalgam of fact and fiction as “faction,” a genre that “results in the interrelationship of reality and myth” (1981: 1, 4). The desire to come to grips with his psychic history, rather than a need to record external, “sociological” facts, prompts Miller to adopt a radically anecdotal style. From the raw data of his experience, Miller extracts and re-extracts what he perceives as most important to his ultimate development as a writer and a man. With every new telling, Miller embellishes his anecdotes. Such reshapings grant the writer a great plasticity, and paradoxically allow him to spiral closer and closer to self-knowledge even as the stories Miller tells deviate further and further from his actual experience, both in time and substance. Paul Ricoeur provides an annotation for Miller’s aesthetics of repetition with his observation that memory “is no longer the narrative of external adventures stretching along episodic time. It is itself the spiral movement that, through anecdotes and episodes, brings us back to the almost motionless constellation of potentialities that the narrative retrieves” (1980: 182). Ricoeur’s comments resonate with Miller’s remarks in The World of Sex about following the “potential being,” as well as echo the central tenets of spiral form. Selective repetition, though anchored in historicity, allows an artist to distend the bounds of linear temporality and reclaim or recover what might have occurred or grasp the significance(s) of what “actually” transpired. Despite numerous assertions by Miller that everything he wrote really took place, contradictory accounts from other sources—and from Miller himself—suggest that the truth for which Miller aimed dealt less with factual precision and more with emotional accuracy.11 Through the act of writing, Miller strives for the ineffable, hoping to recapture and crystallize his prior mental states, as well as glean their importance to his current state of mind. Since such essentializing necessarily constitutes a spiritual abridgment, Miller at times retraces the same anecdotes, not seeking verbatim repetition, but emotional resonance. Miller tells anecdotes about himself and his experience time and again not unconsciously, like a dull relative with a shallow reservoir of material, but consciously, obsessively, like a scientist analyzing familiar data that still holds innumerable enigmas. As a post-Freudian, Miller realized that dreams and fantasies play a substantial role in a person’s life, both on an unconscious and conscious level. Indeed, Jay Martin observes that Miller kept a “dreambook” in which he made a “direct attempt to record the sequence of images which catch and record the self in its process of becoming, the self in the shuttle of primordial impulses” (1996: 13). Spiral form seems well suited to incorporate dream life with physical life in an endeavor to delineate the supraself. Since Miller rarely locks himself into a

14 Introduction linear narrative, his texts freely jump from anecdotes to reveries, nightmares, sexual fantasies, and daydreams. Often triggered by a single word or image, Miller’s dream sequences will interrupt even the most passionate or intriguing tales. Such reveries account for some of Miller’s most inspired writing, although they frequently sacrifice what one might even loosely label narrative sequence in favor of sensuous imagery, catalog rhetoric, surrealistic or Dadaist juxtapositions, and bizarre happenings. Miller’s dream sequences explode any residual pretense to linear narrative by unfolding in no recognizable pattern. They end just as abruptly as they begin. Fantasy gives Miller free rein to delve into the uncharted regions of his experience, regions that provide alternative explanations for his actions and emotions. Allen Tilley refers to just such a phenomenon when he claims that dreams “engage us in the imaginative reconstruction of our own identities” (1992: 142). Miller uses reveries both to give his impressions of intangible feelings that a more traditional narrative might fail to represent adequately and to suggest the incredible richness and complexity of human experience. Another, closely related, technique that Miller employs involves his use of intertextual references. Because self-awareness serves as Miller’s primary artistic goal, the writer exposes his literary influences to an unparalleled degree. Miller’s texts pay tribute to those writers who provided him with an artistic foundation. Other writers, other voices, appear constantly within Miller’s work. These allusions frequently consist of no more than a list of names, but may extend to matters of style and content as well. In a linear narrative, such name-dropping would intrude excessively on the story’s plot, but with spiral form, a catalog of authors contributes to the aggregate quest for identity. For Miller’s supraself, books and characters function just as symbolically as people, places, or incidents. While the actual content or words of a particular text may no longer linger within the writer’s memory, the mythic content remains. What Dostoevski or Spengler wrote does not matter so much as how their words affected Miller. In creating his mythic supraself, Miller also builds myths around those writers who inspired him. A Marie Corelli or a Rider Haggard might thus achieve preeminence over an Edgar Allan Poe or a Herman Melville because the former authors struck a deeper chord with Miller when he read them. Miller will interrupt an anecdote to discourse on a favorite novel or harp on an overinflated reputation not to add a pseudolearned quality to his texts, but to annotate his development from an overderivative scribe to a fully realized artist. Because of this strategy, Miller’s appreciations often appear self-indulgent, concerned less with the writer at hand and more with Henry V. Miller.12 Such an interpretation, however, fails to grasp Miller’s overall plan in charting his supraself. Miller not only exaggerates certain writers’ kinship with him, but he also employs hyperbole for practically every facet of his experience. In mythologizing his identity, Miller makes little attempt at formal literary scholarship, and instead treats various writers as spiritual building blocks. Similarly, the personages that orbit Miller’s fictional world function not as independent, fully developed characters, but as caricatures. Miller willfully depicts

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minor figures—that is, everyone but himself—in a highly distorted fashion, choosing to highlight the idiosyncratic personality traits that affected him and to ignore all else. Despite the literally dozens of characters that interact with Miller’s supraself, the narrator stands apart, essentially alone in the recesses of its art, a phenomenon that prompts Jane Nelson to argue that Miller’s use of caricatures serves to “heighten the ‘I’” (1970: 144). Miller’s caricatures span a wide range of personalities, from the grotesque to the saint. The importance of these exaggerated characters lies not in their actions or words, however, but in how Miller’s supraself reacts to them. Characters flit in and out of the narrator’s physical and psychic borders with great rapidity. Miller’s supraself accepts this overturn of acquaintances indifferently, rarely even commenting when an individual drops out of sight and picking up the threads of a long-severed relationship with little thought to the intervening months or years of silence. Each character, no matter how apparently marginal and insignificant, serves as a contrast to the narrator as well as functioning as a catalyst for Miller’s various anecdotes. Failed or frustrated artists, sex fiends, prosaic drones, eccentric savants—all these and more allow Miller’s supraself to dissect his own personality by compelling him to see traces of his own future or past selves reflected within the various individuals of his acquaintance. Miller makes little attempt to portray a character with a biographical counterpart in any photographically mimetic way—that is, to make the literary representation identical with the historical personage—and instead builds a mythology out of biographical material. Miller’s caricatures extend to the sexual realm as well. With significant exceptions such as Plexus and Black Spring, Miller’s autobiographical romances liberally employ scenes of sexual import. Sexuality does not, however, dominate Miller’s fiction to the extent claimed by many critics—including Kate Millett and Norman Mailer. Miller typically uses sexual incidents either to gloss the relative freedom of the participants or as an anecdotal segue. For Miller’s supraself, one’s attitude toward sexual intercourse often functions as a barometer of one’s intellectual selfliberation. Extreme sexual habits—obsession or frigidity, for example—usually indicate an individual who lacks a sense of self-awareness. Conversely, characters who enjoy sex with a singular verve typically approach all of their activities with an equal insouciance, and possess the creative spirit Miller’s narrator so highly values. As for the supraself, Miller’s anecdotal style often compresses sexual incidents into the span of a few pages, making it appear as though the narrator engages in intercourse at an incredible rate.13 Upon closer examination, however, one finds that a description of one sexual act will lead to a memory of another, which in turn reminds the supraself of yet another encounter. Because Miller explodes the linear plot, he can draw from a sexual past covering literally decades in any given sequence. Fantasies also add to the narrator’s apparent sexual excesses, but, like his nonsexual dreams, the sex fantasies owe less to verisimilitude or even self-aggrandizement than to the unconscious. Sexual incidents often serve as bridges from one anecdotal sequence to another. Paradoxically, these encounters often function anti-climactically by interrupting passages in which the “plot” builds toward some type of closure and so entering an ostensibly achronological realm. Such segues

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undercut narrative expectation by exposing flaws in the straight temporal rendering of experience. Miller realizes that his anecdotes often adopt the characteristics of a “realist” mode, and thus he breaks the narrative frame with “gratuitous” sexual outbursts, metaphysical musings, dreams, or other strategies that do not rely on clock time in order to suggest the infinite number of perspectives within any given synchronic segment of time.14 After such a framebreak, Miller launches into another anecdote, which in turn will give way to another. Miller’s sexual anecdotes and fantasies play no larger a role than his nonsexual ones in his overall pattern of recovery and creation. Millett’s characterization of Miller’s use of sexuality as a “primitive find, fuck and forget” thus conveniently de-emphasizes the symbolic nature of most of his encounters, and certainly the third variable in Millett’s equation ignores Miller’s obsessive attempt to remember everything about his life (1970: 296).15 Miller’s employment of catalog rhetoric often makes it seem as though his books try to capture everything that happened to Miller’s supraself. Bombarding his readers with lists that range from the esoteric to the trivial, from the popular to the personal, Miller creates a Whitmanesque illusion of inclusivity in his prose. Within any anecdote, Miller will abruptly “stop” the narrative’s linear progression and compose a mammoth sentence consisting of an inventory of nouns. Miller’s catalogs often have a freewheeling, frenetic quality to them, for Miller frequently uses outlandish juxtapositions that seemingly lack even an associational resemblance. For all his legions of subjective and historical references, one gleans a sense of irony in Miller’s catalogs, for behind every word the narrator lists lies a virtual abyss of information that no one could possibly even start to tally, much less analyze with any degree of perspicuity. Miller merely offers an intimation of the vast store of memories and details that individuals accumulate over a lifetime. Although they at first appear overwhelming, Miller’s lists ultimately serve to expose his “thoroughness” as a textual sham, a hollow gesture. The catalogs, moreover, foreground Miller’s mythopoeic strategy by laying bare the fictive underpinnings of his enterprise and mocking empirical “accuracy.” Miller tacitly acknowledges that he has relinquished any claim to the biographical Henry Valentine Miller, and instead must create a supraself that, while bearing some obvious resemblances to the actual Miller, never existed outside of the fictive arena. Each catalog—each anecdote, each dream, each diatribe—in Miller’s oeuvre subverts its antecedent by suggesting the endless spiraling of memory, the infinitely receding conclusion of the project of recovery and creation. Nevertheless, John Parkin points out that the nonsense, the lists, the jumbled impressions are not entirely free of authorial control, belonging to specific contexts where character, situation, tone conspire to affect and condition the reading even while granting the reader an unusual degree of freedom in his decisions about any specific passage. (1990: 78–9) Parkin’s comments should eliminate any belief that Miller relinquishes control of his texts because, even though he presents the appearance of unrestrained

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choice, Miller does the choosing. Hassan, writing without the aid of Parkin’s argument, observes that Miller’s notorious verbosity, a phenomenon that Hassan thinks compels Miller to refuse to evaluate anything, constitutes “a type of semantic silence” and that “he writes no-thing” (1967: 202). While Hassan’s comments certainly have some validity, especially regarding the catalogs, they mistakenly assume that Miller can avoid evaluations—as though his artistic production requires no selection, and, therefore, evaluation—and that Miller’s copious verbiage lacks a semantic basis.16 Miller’s verbal excess stems not from a lack of meaning but from an overabundance of meaning that builds tension toward an “orgiastic release of emotion” (Flaxman 2000: 41). In many noncatalog sequences, Miller attempts overt analysis of his actions and ideas, and even the catalogs indirectly comment on the narrator’s state of mind. Two techniques that Miller often employs, the diatribe and the metaphysical reverie, directly contradict Hassan’s contention that Miller fails to assess his experience. In his autobiographical romances, Miller will often interrupt the anecdotal thread of his narrative by discoursing on subjects ranging from the “meaning of life” to a particularly intriguing word. Such microessays—like Miller’s fantasies, sexual incidents, and catalogs—rupture the linear, diachronic narrative, and highlight the lateral, synchronic elements of the supraself’s experience. For all of their ribald, Rabelaisian humor, for all of their tremendous detailing of the narrator’s struggles and victories, Miller’s anecdotes—even en masse—cannot capture a fraction of the mental activity the narrator underwent at any specific moment. To subvert any direct equation of the narrator in a particular anecdote to the supraself, Miller uses the aforementioned techniques to suggest the breadth and depth of the narrator’s mental flow. Both strategies, despite their foundation in the concrete, provide a metaphoric reflection of the types of abstract problems that haunted the narrator. Individual debates with MacGregor, Stanley, Boris, and others may possess biographical analogs, but Miller means to portray only their aura, not their substance, in the autobiographical romances. Miller’s discourses on America, Europe, capitalism, art, and myriad other subjects roughly break down into two categories, the diatribe and the reverie. In the former, Miller adopts a jeremiad-like tone, and concerns himself with events external to his inner being.17 Such diatribes usually display a bitter disgust for perceived social injustice and the benign complacency that allows such phenomena to proliferate. Miller most frequently attacks forces—such as the “work ethic” or machine-oriented “progress”—that hinder intellectual and spiritual freedom. As George Wickes observes, much of Miller’s discourse proves derivative, and his logic often takes on a convoluted appearance, but such foibles betray not so much Miller’s failure to develop a coherent, original argument as they do his inextricable fusion of emotion and abstraction (1966: 32).18 Despite, or perhaps consciously flying in the face of, complaints by critics such as Nicholas Moore that Miller’s ideas “are not all clearly consistent,” in his search for the “inner pattern” Miller attempts to transcend the linear logic of the academic or philosopher (1943: 26). The spirit, rather than the substance, of the diatribe becomes paramount. During his literary apprenticeship, Miller

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indeed overindulged his “influences” to the point that they silenced his own voice. The diatribes in the autobiographical romances offer the vestiges of this phenomenon, as well as illustrate the trace elements of Miller’s influences that remain despite his efforts to purge them. Miller does critique society during such vitriolic moments, but he also interprets his earlier self. Metaphysical reveries in the autobiographical romances generally focus on Miller’s enthusiasms and intellectual quirks. A much more frenzied tone marks the reveries, and they lack the diatribe’s cynicism. Autodidactic, Miller read haphazardly but feverishly, absorbing new ideas with an almost naïve alacrity. Rather than state simply that he read and thought with an unusual zeal, Miller dispenses with his anecdotes’ plot structure and, via a type of poetic prose, creates an atmosphere at once urgent and meandering that reflects his sheer love for words, ideas, and the impact they had on his psyche. The reveries move from point to point in an alogical manner, spiraling around recurrent images but never actually analyzing them. Inspired more often than not by a single impression—for example, a word, image, or sound—the reveries develop a rhythm that increases in intensity, an intensity not concomitant with any sense of logical climax, but with an ineffable delirium within the narrator. The narrator loses himself, without quite knowing how, within the labyrinth of his own thoughts. Intuitively moving from thought to thought, the narrator inches closer to his goal of becoming an artist by experiencing a series of near-epiphanies on the origins of the creative impulse. Casual observers—as well as numerous critics—could easily fail to grasp, or could cavalierly dismiss, spiral form’s “progression” by analyzing its parts in isolation. Certainly, many of Miller’s autobiographical romances appear at first glance to constitute a chaotic hodge-podge of inchoate observations and stray images. Spiral form’s progression, as illustrated above, does not take the guise of a typical plot. Miller’s reliance on recurrent personal tropes, digression, and conversation, combined with his intimate, confessional tone, suggests that the autobiographical romances owe less to realism, naturalism, or even the picaresque than they do to the oral tradition. Throughout his oeuvre, Miller’s minor characters frequently tell the supraself that he should write like he talks. The supraself also desires to write in a natural, colloquial manner. Such patently self-reflexive moments underscore the oral underpinnings of spiral form by emphasizing the supraself’s sprawling, but powerful, range of conversation: he discourses on every conceivable topic, often “losing” himself in manic reveries with rather tenuous connections between the various subjects. The supraself captivates his audience, although his listeners cannot quite understand how he manages to do so, nor does the audience comprehend how the supraself juggles so many disparate themes without becoming incomprehensible. If one treats Miller’s canon as a single life-long project rather than as a series of separate texts, then it becomes plain that the writer carries on a monologue of indeterminate length with his readers. The building block of this monologue, the anecdote, allows Miller partially to fulfill his cronies’ exhortations to transcribe his speech into his narratives. As Gordon, among others, asserts, “Miller is above all a splendid storyteller” (1967: 11). Through his manipulation of the first-person

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narrator, Miller infuses his texts with two central aspects of what Walter Ong labels the “psychodynamics of orality” (1982: 31). Miller’s catalog rhetoric and reveries, for example, reflect what Ong views as an additive rather than subordinate style (37). Piling image upon image, Miller’s prose often mirrors an oral performer’s propensity to dispense with strict syntax and grammar in favor of a more relaxed narrative style. One may also characterize Miller’s writing—especially if one considers the entire canon—as what Ong describes as redundant or copious (39). Certain key anecdotes, phrases, and words recur with such frequency that they clearly function as mnemonic devices for both the writer and the audience. As the text(s) spiral and respiral past a familiar sign, the interpreter of that sign remembers previous hermeneutic contexts and can compare the current contextual situation with earlier ones. The repeated image thus paradoxically acts both to bind a multifarious text and to underscore differences within the narrative. Other factors contributing to the autobiographical romances’ oral qualities include the burlesque and nostalgic reconstructions of boyhood. The former pervades Miller’s texts on both a literal and figurative level, and William Solomon argues that Miller’s fascination with the amusement “enabled him to generate a carnivalized aesthetic capable of functioning as an anarchic mode of social protest” (2002: 100). The narrator frequently refers to his attending burlesque performances—especially those of Cleo—throughout the autobiographical romances. The burlesque house’s carnivalesque atmosphere provides a dramatic contrast to the supraself’s angst-ridden struggle to transform himself into a writer. Once he enters inside the burlesque hall, all intellectual pretense vanishes. The world of oral and visual performance replaces the world of the written word. Suggestive dancing, bawdy comedy, and raucous singing bond the audience together in a realm free from abstraction. The audience participates in the exhibition, exchanging banter and insults with the stage comedians, singing with inebriated zeal, and lasciviously leering at the dancers. Although any given show may use old material, the new audience configuration allows that material to remain fresh, a phenomenon that provides the supraself with a multifarious model for his art. The burlesque’s atmosphere exudes a sexually charged camaraderie that rarely fails to raise the supraself’s spirits. The narrator’s anecdotes often take on a burlesque quality as well, and many of Miller’s caricatures find analogs in the broad humor of the burlesque hall. Miller seizes upon one or two character flaws and often distorts them for comedic purposes. His use of scatology and insult parallels the repartee of the burlesque comedian, and his frequently stylized sexual scenes mirror the tableau vivant of the stage dancers.19 Miller’s anecdotes, moreover, invariably draw upon the burlesque’s slapstick and situation comedy. The burlesque, in short, grounds the supraself’s literary aspirations in an earthy, oral tradition. Miller’s nostalgic reconstruction of his childhood in Brooklyn approaches the oral tradition from a different perspective. Questions of authority lie at the heart of Miller’s use of boyhood as both an oral technique and metaphor. The supraself’s childhood world at once subverts and affirms traditional power structures via a rudimentary oral code of honor. Within the framework of this code, most, if not all, adults prove suspect. The supraself and his boyhood friends quickly intuit the

20 Introduction underlying hypocrisy in the words and value systems of their parents, and choose to inhabit a world that places little emphasis on abstraction and arbitrary rules. Boasts have no value unless backed up by concomitant actions. Each boy must prove his worth either through superior physical strength or exceptional wit. New boys must pass a type of intiation to gain wholesale approval and find their place in the hierarchy. While the boys take no stock the words of their elders, they trust each other’s tales—no matter how outlandish—unreservedly. The stories become a type of collective body of knowledge, touching on topics as diverse as sexuality, geography, and ethnography. The “knowledge,” of course, consists of myth as much as fact, for the boys not only draw from traditional sources such as nonfictional narratives for their stories, but from fiction and fabulation as well. The power of these tales, however, lies not so much in their accuracy as in their ability to unite the boyish community. This union later provides Miller with a contrast for the fragmentation and anguish that marked his search for an artistic voice as a budding writer. Miller poignantly aches for the harmony of his boyhood days, a harmony almost prelapsarian in quality.20 As he conjures up the spirit of his childhood milieu, Miller underscores the supraself’s inability as writer to capture “Truth” in any recognizable manner. Writing convolutes, separates. It forces one to search for origins, to analyze contradictions. Miller, of course, does not orally perform his narrative. He writes it. Despite his efforts to infuse his prose with techniques akin to those of a primary oral culture, Miller cannot escape the confines of print culture. He creates permanent records of change, tangible artifacts of process. Although he strives to develop the illusion of orality in his autobiographical romances, Miller’s chosen mode of discourse functions to negate the spoken quality of the narrative by constantly reminding the reader of the autobiographical romances’ status as physical objects. While Miller does not succeed in doing the impossible—rendering oral narratives within a written context without losing their original effects—he does manage to model his prose after a form of writing that holds a transitional position between conversation and literary production: the letter. Although Miller does not discuss his reliance on epistolary technique in The World of Sex, spiral form’s basis in the anecdote, coupled with the writer’s massive body of correspondence, clearly suggests that Miller’s aesthetic owes many of its idiosyncrasies to those of the personal letter. A rather flexible type of discourse, the letter seems inherently metonymic. Intended to take the place of face-to-face conversation, correspondence attempts to preserve an intimate atmosphere despite a spatial separation between participants. Correspondents often employ an anecdotal style in their endeavor to maintain a confidential tone, relating stories in a casual, chatty manner. Writers can also use the letter as a forum for discussing matters of profound intellectual import—almost in the manner of an essay. Miller’s copious correspondence exploits both possibilities. A master letter-writer, Miller treated his longer letters with extreme care, fashioning each epistle as a literary exercise.21 Miller’s Letters to Emil, for example, takes advantage of many of the same techniques and themes evident in Tropic of Cancer and Black Spring, and as a whole, form a type of impressionistic canvas on which Miller’s thoughts and half-formed

Introduction

21

ideas appear in an apparently random fashion. Referring to these letters years later, Miller told Digby Diehl that “letter writing … gave me my natural style” (1994g: 178). Miller embedded the raw material of these and other letters within his autobiographical romances, and the affinity between Miller’s “fictional” texts and his correspondence seems so unmistakable that it prompted Gunther Stuhlmann to suggest that the published oeuvre “resemble[s] a gargantuan letter tossed at the world” (1987: xvii), while Jong explains that “Henry was made for the epistolary book and digression was his art form” (1993: 135).22 Stuhlmann and Jong’s observations tacitly affirm the notion that Miller’s appropriation of oral techniques partly stems from his forays in the epistolary genre. The letter form allows Miller to digress, pontificate, rhapsodize, spin yarns. Spiral form allows him to adopt this plastic technique on a grand scale. Miller’s adoption of spiral form suits his thematic concerns as well. A critical commonplace that continues to proliferate in Miller studies concerns the notion that all of the writer’s narratives examine the phenomenon of self-liberation in the context of artistic awakening.23 While certainly valid, such a hermeneutic strategy tends to foreground the supraself’s attempts to overcome physical and mental hardships and disregard the importance of how the narrator interprets his surroundings. The narrator’s actions and interactions possess not only a literal level, but a metaphoric one as well. Such biological needs as eating or sex, such spiritual needs as love or conviction, and such intellectual needs as reading and writing, function as more than material for mere anecdotes in Miller’s autobiographical romances. Each narrative component constitutes a “sign” that points toward the narrator’s emancipation from the communal tyranny that paralyzes him as an artist. The supraself will, eventually, divorce himself from the restrictive codes that prevent him from growing as an artist and as an individual, but first, however, he must pass through—in a type of purgatory—what Gilles Deleuze refers to as an “apprenticeship to signs” (1972: 4). The supraself must learn how to read texts—not only literary narratives, but people and situations as well—in a radically different way. Rather than approach a text from a societally sanctioned mode of interpretation, the supraself begins to develop an increasingly subjective interpretive mode. Such a mode strips an object of its traditional meaning and focuses only on meanings that contribute directly to the development of the supraself’s art. A sign’s significance does not remain stable, however, nor does the narrator always immediately grasp a text’s import. The narrator, therefore, must periodically review key events in his life so that he may chart interpretive shifts and come to a new understanding of how his readings of various signs have shaped his development toward “liberation.” The outward manifestations of this liberation—the supraself’s own literary productions—self-reflexively remind the reader that Miller never reached his ultimate goal of true personal freedom and that each narrative merely offers a glimpse of his progress. Despite the growing body of criticism on Miller, only two commentators—Hassan and Jong—allude even remotely to spiral form, and neither exhausts the possibilities of Miller’s theory. Hassan, in his perceptive The Literature of Silence (1967), dismisses spiral form as “hardly a shattering insight” (66), while Jong, although she acknowledges spiral form’s importance to Miller’s aesthetic, fails to elaborate her interpretation of the technique (243).24 In rejecting spiral form without analyzing it thoroughly, Hassan casually

22 Introduction posits Joyce and Proust as the progenitors of temporal schemata more worthy of notice (66). Such an offhand comment, while certainly correct in implying that Joyce and Proust influenced Miller, places a premium on literary tradition and origins and underplays the importance of interpretations of, or variations on, the hegemonic discourse. Proust’s endless revisions of his fictionalized autobiography and Joyce’s radical experiments with spatio-temporal relationships certainly provided Miller with a creative point of departure, but the autobiographical romances very obviously do not confine themselves to simplistic repetitions of either influence. Miller, moreover, gleaned his sense of time and memory from a far wider variety of sources than those Hassan mentions. Asian philosophy, Henri Bergson, Otto Rank, burlesque shows, Oswald Spengler, Michael Fraenkel, and myriad other influences contributed to Miller’s spiral sense of time. To imply, as Hassan does, that one should ignore spiral form because it derives from earlier techniques seems somewhat naïve. James M. Mellard, drawing on Thomas Kuhn and Alastair Fowler, among others, identifies three stages through which a “new” literary form must pass: naïve, critical, and sophisticated (1980: 6).25 Mellard’s paradigm accounts for shifting relationships between author (and audience) and technique. As the implications of a naïve mode—a mode in which practitioners lack awareness of the long-term effects of their experiments—become known, a “revolution” occurs in the critical phase, and writers begin to offer critiques and bring hitherto latent assumptions to light (88). A further shift from the critical to the sophisticated manifests itself in terms of a crisis wherein conscious experimentation seeks to replace the current, now discredited, mode (127). The ramifications of Mellard’s theory on Hassan’s dismissal of spiral form seem fairly obvious. Hassan, in extolling Proust and Joyce as “originals,” privileges the naïve phase while ignoring the possibility that Miller—whom one might reasonably state belongs to the critical phase—could interpret earlier temporal paradigms in a fruitful manner. Miller’s nonchronological time scheme may not lack precedents, but it certainly extends the boundaries of those precedents, and explores their implications thoroughly. Hassan’s bias toward literary forebears trivializes the complex network—or web, as Foucault might say—of literary, economic, political, and social forces that contribute to any writer’s aesthetic and thematic choices. Among Miller’s numerous “influences,” three prove particularly salient with regard to the writer’s notions of time. Henri Bergson, Oswald Spengler, and Élie Faure, while certainly not the exclusive shapers of Miller’s spiral form, each contributed heavily to that writer’s burgeoning sense of nonlinear time. Each of these three authors provided Miller with the ideas that helped him to develop spiral form, although each focused on a different facet of temporality. Bergson, the philosopher, treats time in highly abstract terms, while Spengler, the historian, writes of time’s effects on human existence. Faure, an art historian, offers a third, perhaps synthesizing—at least for Miller—view of time, for he discusses how artists may reshape or reorder time to fit their intuitive needs. By combining, and thus altering, the philosophies of Bergson, Spengler, and Faure, Miller forged spiral form’s essential framework. Read by Miller earlier than Spengler or Faure, Bergson’s Creative Evolution offered the young writer a concept of time that departed from traditional linear temporality. Although Bergson employs traditional terminology—such as “past,”

Introduction

23

“present,” and “future”—he empties these signifiers of their common usage. For Bergson, the past does not end at the boundaries of either the present or the future: Our duration is not merely one instant replacing another; if it were, there would never be anything but the present—no prolonging of the past into the actual, no evolution, no concrete duration. Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances. (1911: 4) The preceding passage’s affinities with Miller’s spiral form seem unmistakable. Bergson, like Miller, implies that linear chronology cannot sufficiently account for perceived temporal divisions, and further intimates that the “past” functions not only as an agent on the present, but that it actually and actively shapes the future. Bergson’s refiguring of the past as a progression parallels Miller’s somewhat paradoxical idea that even though he interrupts the chronological movement of his anecdotes with details from earlier incidents, he nevertheless progresses at all times. Bergson later elaborates, saying that “evolution is not only a movement forward; in many cases we observe a making-time, and still more often a deviation or turning back” (104). Miller’s attempt to plot the inner pattern certainly corresponds to Bergsonian evolution. The supraself constantly evolves, even when Miller writes of periods when “Henry Miller” could not evolve, spiritually or artistically. Through the supraself, Miller returns to the past, finds it vital, and alters his view of his current situation. The past that haunts Miller, that informs his every line, finds an analog in Bergson: In its [the past’s] entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside. (5) The past, far from dead or stagnant, remains alive, not only in memory, but as a palpable force. If Bergson gave Miller a new nonlinear outlook on time, then Oswald Spengler caused him to question time’s very autonomy. In The Decline of the West, Spengler develops a morphological historiography that gives precedence to space rather than time. For Spengler, time stems not from the physical world, but from within human consciousness: All of us are conscious, as being aware, of space only, and not of time. Space “is,” (i.e., exists in and with our sense-impulse, intuition and conduct and as space in the strict sense in the moments of strained attention). “Time,” on the contrary, is a discovery, which is only made by thinking. We create it as an idea or notion and do not begin till much later to suspect that we ourselves are Time, inasmuch as we live. (1934: 122)

24

Introduction

Time, then, constitutes a self-perpetuated fiction that contradicts sensory data and ultimately serves to bolster myths of self-importance. Symbolizing human efforts to order their spatial environment, time and its concomitant parameters reflect not the natural environment, but an illusory separation from that environment. Time divides, partitions, limits. As an antidote, Spengler calls for a concentration on “spatial form,” a phenomenon he feels will “enable time and space to be brought into functional interdependence” (124). Besides the obvious verbal echoes with spiral form, Spengler’s spatial form shares with Miller’s concept the idea that the temporal cannot adequately measure human history. The ineffable, the inexplicable escape the boundaries of time and flow unchecked into the realm of space. The effects of any given moment of history explode exponentially and link past, present, and future in an enigmatic cloud of influence and reciprocity. Miller, like Spengler, bemoaned time’s artificial nature. Miller’s concept of China, a metaphor for artistic timelessness, highlights time’s destructiveness and seeks to reintegrate the artist with space, both physical and mental.26 For both men, all facts take on a symbolic import. Causal origins become less important than the “intuitive vision” that “vivifies and incorporates the details in a living inwardly-felt unity” (102). Within each solitary occurrence exists a metaphoric quality that allows even the most disparate incidents to mesh together in a coherent fabric. No aspect of life can exist independently, as one facet will provide symbolic commentary on all other facets. While traditional chronology insists on linear progression, Spengler argues for a “fugal style” that thwarts history’s reduction into a simple chain of causes and effects and instead relies on a “ceaseless process of differentiation and integration” (283). Such a historiography no doubt appealed to Miller, whose entire oeuvre concerns itself with the differentiation and integration of the self. Polyphony, even to the verge of chaos, suits Miller better than a single point of origin. Miller received further tutelage in fugal style—among other ideas—from Élie Faure, the French art historian. As with Spengler, Faure, in the fifth volume of his History of Art, employs the fugue as a metaphor for unifying chaos: the elements of the fugue call, reply, advance, pursue, pass each other, retrace their steps in a vast, captivating ensemble that reconciles its contradictions and its antagonisms in order to force the unity of man to achieve its poem in spite of the difficulties and the snares of the road. (1930: 80) Impulses and actions that seem mutually exclusive, that threaten to destroy any concept of self, ultimately find themselves accepted and embraced by the fugal style. Time becomes less important than the space that lets the interplay of temporal periods and their concomitant events take place. Miller, striking his best Whitmanesque pose, allows his contradictions free rein in telling the story of his life.27 Although the warring versions of his psyche appear to negate one another at times, spiral form, with its fugue-like repetitions, allows Miller to create his supraself, the “captivating ensemble” that imposes a unity on past, present, and future. Miller’s attempt to circumscribe his ostensible incongruities through artistic form finds, according to Faure, countless precedents:

Introduction

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the effort that man makes to reconcile in his work the contradictions that the chaos of appearances reveals to him defines the effort which he makes to conciliate in his heart the contradictions which are aroused there by the chaos of his feelings” (205). Alluding much the way Olney does decades later to the “vital impulse to order,” Faure’s paradigm suggests that the fear fostered by a partial cosmic perspective—and, thus, the unknown—compels artists to create an aesthetic framework or form that attempts to hypothesize a universal order via the microcosm (3). The artist builds a reality from the raw material of appearance. Miller’s obsessive endeavors to retrace his artistic and personal genesis reveal an acute awareness of the inability to move truly beyond the “chaos of appearances.” Each time Miller recasts his story, he admits the ultimate futility of ever capturing any but the most fleeting glimpse of his own contradictions, much less those of the universe. Art for Miller, then, provides, in Faure’s words, “the symbol of a fugitive image that we shall never reach but the desire for which maintains our heart at a summit of a universal life that rises unceasingly” (469–70). This process of fusing form, thought, and order creates a “spacial [sic] illusion” that breaks down temporal distance: “the thought and word are transmitted instantaneously from any point whatever of space to all its other points” (260–1). Like spiral form, Faure’s “spacial” illusion functions on a fulcrum of lyrical organization. Each artistic “part” comments synechdochically on the “whole.” Past, present, and future cease to function autonomously because of the web-like—or fugue-like—relationship between all temporal points. Miller’s synthesis of Faure’s “spacial” illusion, along with his interpretations of Bergson, Spengler, and a multitude of others, provided the rich loam from which grew spiral form, Miller’s own contribution to spatio-temporal theory. An application of spiral form to the autobiographical romances must necessarily remain partial. Since, if a critic takes Miller at his word, every node or text intimately connects with all others, logistical problems would rapidly occur without some set of artificial parameters. The current study breaks Miller’s career into three central periods, each based on a geographic locale important to the writer’s development as an artist and man: Brooklyn Dawn (1919–29), Parisian Tempest (1930–9), and Californian Tranquility (1940–80).28 While Miller’s prodigious output precludes any attempts at inclusivity, the succeeding three sections will make an effort to reexamine typical narratives from the context of spiral form and the growth of the supraself. As spiral form problematizes any notion of major and minor texts, length will serve as the primary—and admittedly arbitrary—criterion for inclusion. Smaller narratives will by no means remain on the periphery, however, for one of spiral form’s central tenets regards the interrelationship of Miller’s entire canon. Essays, stories, letters, marginalia—all of these texts will inform my readings of the longer autobiographical romances with their invaluable and indispensable annotations on Miller’s supraself. A concluding chapter will discuss Miller’s current critical status in relation to the American literary tradition and assess both the inadequacies of that reputation and the importance of spiral form as a literary influence.

2

Brooklyn dawn

What I must do, before blowing out my brains, is to write a few simple confessions in plain Milleresque language. Henry Miller (1989: 65)

Before Henry Miller exploded on to the Parisian literary scene with his exuberant, sprawling narratives of spiral form, he periodically marked his textual and historical lives with suicidal proclivities, mock or otherwise. In the above offhand comments in a letter to his friend Emil Schnellock—written before Miller commenced Tropic of Cancer—Miller, while probably jesting, betrays the deep anguish that he felt regarding both his deteriorating relationship with his second wife, June, and his hitherto failure as an artist. Indeed, Miller later told George Wickes that “in America I was in danger of going mad, or committing suicide. I felt completely isolated” (1994d: 54). Miller desperately wanted both to come to terms with June and to publish a novel, but he lacked the methods by which to achieve either end. Eventually, through months of separation—and an affair with Anaïs Nin—Miller girded himself against what he perceived as June’s outlandish and cruel behavior, and, after he abandoned third-person narration because of two herculean efforts at writing a book, consequently discovered spiral form and the textual I. In these two obviously flawed efforts, Moloch; or, This Gentile World and Crazy Cock, not published until over a decade after Miller’s death, Miller reveals—regardless of his objections that he could “find nothing of myself in them”—his “apprenticeship to signs” and provides a glimpse into how the aesthetic of spiral form came into existence (1972: 12). While neither Moloch nor Crazy Cock strictly belongs to the genre that Miller referred to as the autobiographical romance, Miller firmly grounds them in the soil of his experience. In fact, Miller wrote to Nin in a letter of March 1935 that he “was erecting a monument to past sorrows” in his earliest narratives (Nin and Miller 1987: 297). In these texts, Miller draws heavily from material that would eventually infiltrate his more mature work. In Moloch, for example, Miller recounts his career at Western Union, while in Crazy Cock he describes his life with June and her lesbian confidante, Jean Kronski (née Martha “Mara” Andrews).1 Although Miller later asserted that “they were no good,” citing the novels’ conventionality—“the ‘Writer’ with a capital ‘W’”—he locates neither Moloch nor Crazy Cock in any

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definite tradition or subgenre (1994i: 176). Miller no doubt referred less to matters of plot—both novels, and especially Moloch, manifest traces of the anecdotal style— than to the lack of a confident narrative voice, for he ended the above deprecatory comments with the observation that “later I became the person writing.” In his distinction between “Literature” and self, Miller prefigures Jacques Derrida’s notion of natural writing. While Miller claims that writing for its own sake “is the carrier of death,” a parasitic practice, natural writing “is immediately united to the voice and breath” (1976: 17). As Derrida would later, Miller claims that the former category, embodied by the book as object, denotes stasis, while the latter emphasizes process, becoming. In the early novels, Miller eschews the first-person narration that he equates with the self, with natural writing, in the later autobiographical romances and instead relies on a third-person narration that often makes use of stilted verbiage rather than the brisk, colloquial language of his subsequent works. Through this third-person method, Miller subverts the thematic and formal experimentation of the early novels by containing them within a quasi-objective framework and highlights the physical book rather than the ongoing text that Miller and Derrida valorize. Ultimately, Miller rejects such an impediment when he discovers spiral form and bursts forth in a subjective song of his self. Although Miller shuns his most characteristic narrative devices in Moloch and Crazy Cock, he fills his first two efforts with definite affinities to the mature autobiographical romances. Foreshadowing the epistolary technique of Tropic of Cancer, Miller employs in Moloch a narrator who adopts the role of the raconteur by embellishing tales with rich description and humorous asides. In Crazy Cock, Miller develops a narrator who explores the interpersonal interstices and narrative lacunae that Miller would exploit in Tropic of Capricorn and the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy. While not experimenting in terms of temporal structure nearly as much as he does, for example, in Tropic of Capricorn, in the early novels Miller certainly explores the viability of an alinear plot. Sudden shifts of scene and time, coupled with a rudimentary version of the hyper-digressive or anachronistic sequencing that characterizes spiral form, let Miller abandon a rigid story-line and pursue the inner pattern about which he would write in The World of Sex. With this aesthetic, Miller calls to mind Paul Ricoeur’s assertion that all narrative reconstruction “accentuates the break separating the objectivity claimed by the work of understanding from lived nonrepeatable experience” (1984: 97). Miller—even early on—realized that his recreation of the past diverged sharply from his lived experience and sought to develop a method by which he could “accentuate” this break. In the earliest two books, however, Miller fails to adopt lyric organization for, despite their anecdotal style, Moloch and Crazy Cock never completely abandon their central story-lines.3 Nevertheless, as in the later books, he denies closure in his first efforts. He does not seek resolution in Moloch and Crazy Cock, and he sacrifices a tidy “summing-up” for a portrait of a soul in flux. Because of his interest in the process of “constant becoming,” as he labels the phenomenon in The World of Lawrence, Miller overwhelms any concern for a definite ending with his fluid narratological concerns (247). In Dion Moloch and Tony Bring, Miller creates the prototypes of the persona or supraself that he would later call “Henry Miller.” By concentrating principally on

28 Brooklyn dawn his male protagonists, Miller starts a trend that continues throughout his narratives. He locates his mythopoeic vision of himself—no matter what the name—at the center of all of his creations. Although Miller works from a finite but “heterogeneous set of facts” that Roland Barthes would call the “corpus,” he reconstructs them through the matrix of the supraself (1967: 96). Miller argues that the supraself, initially a beleaguered, misunderstood, and frustrated artist figure, must cast off the chains of convention—both literary and personal—and liberate himself through self-knowledge. Accordingly, Miller compels all characters other than Moloch and Bring—including Hildred, Crazy Cock’s version of Mara/Mona—to function as symbolic “others” that reinforce the protagonist’s subjectivity by serving as objects of either desire or loathing. As with those autobiographical romances written in spiral form, in Moloch and Crazy Cock Miller willfully distorts his subject matter in order to capture the meaning it contains for his central character. Through such a tactic, Miller clearly asserts that once again “Truth” lies not only in the realm of the factual but also in the field of perception or intuition. In the characters of Moloch and Bring, Miller deviates from his “Henry Miller” primarily because he fails to project their inner life in any but the most inchoate manner. By seizing upon spiral form’s extensive use of fantasy, reverie, and diatribe, Miller penetrates beyond the facade of physical actions and events and suggests the forces that compel the supraself to behave as he does. Because he adopts a third-person format, Miller cannot adequately reflect his characters’ mental activity in more than a general fashion, although in the early novels he provides some crude analogues to the techniques he develops in later books. Miller also undercuts his presentation of Moloch and Bring because he omits the frank sexuality that he includes in the autobiographical romances. Undoubtedly daunted by the fear that no American publisher would handle a book liberally sprinkled with depictions of sexual intercourse, Miller consistently dodges the issue of sex by, as Mary V. Dearborn asserts, “dissolving into fuzzy lyricism or being interrupted or postponed” (1992: xiv). Because Miller came to despise such tactics, his later protagonists achieve an added personal dimension because of their ability to participate in sexual activity or talk.4 A discussion of Miller’s spiral form should include an examination of Moloch and Crazy Cock, despite all of their failings, precisely because Miller traverses through them the same psychological landscape found in the autobiographical romances. He would insist that the supraself by definition constitutes a “geological” record of all Miller’s selves, even—perhaps especially—those without the benefit of his Parisian breakthrough. The succeeding analysis will therefore emphasize Miller’s emerging aesthetic and place Moloch and Crazy Cock—novels that represent experiments in two different aspects of spiral form—in the context of Miller’s mature work. In Moloch, Miller establishes the fragmentation of the self that serves as the basis for the spiral form of his subsequent narratives, while inCrazy Cock he struggles to find the balance between the lyricism and biting realism that mark the form of his later fiction. In these earliest novels, he depicts himself in a dramatically different way from his method in the autobiographical romances, but Miller tells the truth about himself, nevertheless, for, as he

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expresses it in an aphorism alluding to spiral form’s emphasis on the aggregate nature of the supraself, “though one may shed his skin again and again one never loses his identity” (1962d: vii).

Moloch Miller marks his first extended self-portrait as a rebellious artist-in-the-making— and thus the first rough delineation of spiral form’s supraself—with his character Dion Moloch, a figure bearing the name of the Canaanite god of fire mentioned pejoratively in Leviticus.5 Writing to order for one of June’s many “admirers,” Miller forced himself to stop merely claiming the title of writer and actually produce a substantial text with Moloch; or, This Gentile World.6 Although he had earlier composed a few pieces—most notably the now-lost “Clipped Wings” and the self-published Mezzotints—he remained quite uncertain of his ability and avoided facing the possibility of his lack of talent simply by not writing. By deciding to recycle material from “Clipped Wings” for the new novel, Miller benefited from a fortuitous stroke of luck in terms of his later aesthetic of spiral form (Martin 1978: 143). Adding a layer of distance between himself and his experience, in Moloch Miller embarks on the first step in his process of self-mythologization, the phenomenon that Dearborn aptly labels “Millerian amplification” (1992: xiii). Instead of simply and straightforwardly recounting his experience as an employment manager for Western Union, Miller constructs his narrative in the anecdotal or picaresque fashion characteristic of spiral form. Indeed, Martin discloses that Miller composed the text “backwards and forwards from the center,” a fact that clearly echoes spiral form’s disregard for traditional structure (1978: 144). While certainly not experimenting as radically as in Tropic of Cancer, Miller—with Moloch’s use of temporal lacunae, memory, digression, and parallel stories—problematizes the notion of linear narrative, despite Robert Ferguson’s assertion that he “tells [his] story in a straightforward, chronological fashion” (1991: 156). True to the tenets of spiral form, Miller—regardless of his lack of an action-based plot— progresses in terms of time while still extensively using many of the elements that subvert strict chronology. Ferguson apparently seizes upon the novel’s ultimate conclusion in making his judgment about the narrative’s time scheme, for Miller interrupts the “chronological” tale with, for example, reveries on the burlesque, anecdotes about California, sexual fantasies, and catalogs. Miller does, however, amply employ verbal cues indicating where the narrative ruptures occur, unlike the later autobiographical romances where the shifts often happen without warning, a strategy that might help explain Ferguson’s observation. With his application of spiral elements, moreover, Miller rarely deviates far from the narrative content (the signified) that Gérard Genette labels the “story” (27) and Barthes the “corpus” (1967: 96). Nevertheless, Miller reveals, with his first geological stratum of supraself, not only the biographical leitmotifs and intellectual preoccupations of his mature work, but also his first tentative movements toward his “natural” form. Early manifestations of spiral form in Moloch exhibit both narratological and thematic perspectives. As spiral form places a premium on motion—because of its

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metaphoric significance to the supraself’s quest for identity—Moloch functions in the context of what Ihab Hassan calls the spiritual quest. The novel’s preponderant concern with movement represents a formal manifestation of the abiding thirst for self-knowledge that consumes not only Moloch, but all of Miller’s selves. Miller’s concentration on the kinetic elements of Moloch’s quest leads him toward the extreme fragmentation of character he would later exploit more fully in the autobiographical romances. In using the telegraph company as a backdrop, Miller makes natural use of an anecdotal style to convey his hero’s journey toward an ever-receding wholeness of identity, but he nonetheless cripples this effect of spiral form with his use of third-person narration. Though Miller’s later success with spiral form stems from an apparent lack of narrative mediation, in Moloch Miller dilutes the text’s power both by allowing a narrator to comment on the actions of his hero and by including an anecdote about Hari Das that Moloch could not have known about in much detail. Nevertheless, because Miller does make Moloch the subject of most of the book’s anecdotes through the techniques of spiral form, Miller dramatizes how Moloch’s spiritual quest leads him toward a theory of artistic self-actualization. In his use of anecdotes, Miller dispenses with naturalistic characterization in favor of the narratologically innovative methods of spiral form. Collectively, these anecdotes evince Miller’s extreme distaste for static notions of the self and provide a record of Moloch’s path toward self-liberation. Beginning and ending Moloch with his title character in literal and figurative flux, Miller plainly discloses his interests in spiral form and its ability to chart the progress of the supraself’s artistic quest and development. At the novel’s outset, Miller describes Moloch—who will soon undergo a series of personal crises—walking through the Bowery, listening to its “weird cacophony” of sounds (7). Similarly, Miller brings his narrative to a close with Moloch’s perambulations through the “fugitive backyard of Brooklyn” and its squalor as Dion ponders the elusive “Tomorrow” that he must face (266). As with most of his fiction, because Miller attempts in Moloch to dramatize the process of artistic and personal awakening motivating its protagonist, he here prefigures spiral form’s narratological strategy of constant movement with a textual structure that echoes the thematic concern with spiritual quests. Coursing through the city’s expansive nexus of hope and decay, the streetwise but artistically inclined Moloch contemplates his place in the cosmos and attempts to lift the yoke of potential from his neck. Like a Leopold Bloom with the morals of a grifter, Moloch takes a symbolic excursion through the city that defines him. Unlike Bloom’s journey, however, Moloch’s trek covers not a single day, but an unspecified number of days. During this period, Miller, employing the numerous anecdotal and stylistic shifts that mark spiral form, represents Moloch—with the help of his cronies—sifting through the grotesques that come to him in search of work, battling his wife, expatiating on a variety of topics, ranting against Jews, and attempting to write. In Moloch, Miller presents a man on the verge of a profound personal breakthrough, a man who will soon metamorphose from an artist-pretender to a writer, but he fails to achieve this presentation through conventional narrative means. Miller intimates with his abrupt changes of action and tone, both of which anticipate spiral form, that as Moloch advances

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through the city, he remains partially ignorant or unconscious of the goal of his quest, a search Miller claimed typifies youth (1972: 2). Although Miller divulges through a type of proto-spiral form that a kinetic impulse—matched by an equally compelling mental fervor—spurs Moloch onward, he also suggests that the character lacks the ability to decipher his desire and achieve the type of personal resurrection Ihab Hassan describes as marking the “ontic affirmation” of the most “resonant” quests (1990: 22). Moloch shares an affinity with Hassan’s questing hero because he feels an urge to transgress social mores, but Dion does not yet possess the metaphorical capacity to kill the self that torments him and create a new order. By the novel’s end, Miller illustrates that Moloch, for all his movement, remains safely ensconced in his passionless marriage and demoralizing job and that, moreover, Moloch—despite writing a book— comes no closer to realizing his literary aspirations, for he will not commit himself to his art in any but the most haphazard of fashions: he will not risk entering an unknown realm. Miller, therefore—tacitly agreeing with Hassan’s repeated assertions that quests entail both “spirit and risk,” epiphany and action—would not suggest that readers view Moloch’s struggle as a “true” quest (1990: 28). Instead—spinning like a dervish from the tension caused by his ongoing conflict between society and self—Moloch wobbles on the precipice of self-actualization, unconsciously afraid to take the decisive, risk-entailing step. Writing to Michael Fraenkel about this period of his life, Miller makes a confession that applies well to the blustering Moloch: “action was what [I] was incapable of” (Fraenkel and Miller 1962: 20). Miller, in a halting but spiral fashion, paints a fragmented, anecdotal picture of Moloch’s peripatetic title character. Covering roughly the same period as he does in Tropic of Capricorn, The World of Sex, and Sexus, Miller attempts in Moloch to analyze Moloch’s struggle with society’s rigid expectations and his ardent desire to write. As in the later works, Miller employs the Great American Telegraph Company both as a microcosm of the bourgeois concern for progress at the expense of personal freedom and as a vehicle for employing the techniques of spiral form.7 Manipulating the text with the constant anecdotal segues that appear in the mature spiral form, Miller reveals that the telegraph company, with its “staggering influx” of messenger boys and its concern for profits above all else, looms like a hellish apparition over Moloch (37). Decades later, Miller described the company as “surrealistic” in an interview with Georges Belmont, and, indeed, Moloch’s experiences frequently seem nightmarish (1972: 14). Rushing from scene to scene, Miller presents the contradictory memoranda, incompetent executives, thieving or addlepated messengers, meddling efficiency experts, and a host of other problems that all threaten to thwart Moloch’s efforts to fight through another day, but that also provide him with the anecdotes that will lead him toward truth. In an almost unconsciously self-referential manner, Miller discloses that though Moloch’s work proves both exhausting and demoralizing—even though he hires hundreds of messengers a day, the process starts anew each morning because the “boys,” more often men fallen on hard times, quit with astonishing regularity—he, by listening to his applicants’ stories and creating those of his own, begins to compile the data that

32 Brooklyn dawn he will later transform into art. Miller, with his theory of spiral form, places a high value on such stories because he believes that one’s knowledge consists of nothing but a patchwork quilt of subjectivity. Suggesting, therefore, that through their tales of woe, Moloch’s applicants reveal their limited perspective and enrich that of their potential employer, Miller points toward his own subjective spiral form and its emphasis on competing narratives. Miller further discloses that, much to the chagrin of his wife, the company extends its claws into Moloch’s domestic life as well—for Dion drags his companions and promisingly eccentric messengers home for prolonged bouts of drunken discussion—a phenomenon that permits Miller to broaden his textual scope even further by providing the impetus for yet another set of memories, anecdotes, and other “digressions” that will lead to the type of “noisy,” alinear narrative typical of the later spiral form. Narratologically, Miller takes advantage of the telegraph company, for the service-oriented organization proves an excellent setting for his embryonic spiral techniques because of both its hectic pace and its diverse subject matter, two of the principal methods Miller eventually adopts in the mature version of spiral form. Because Moloch comes into contact there with such a multifarious crowd, Miller— and, by extension, Moloch—sharpens his powers as both storyteller and observer and rejects a monocentric approach to narrative “action.” Miller thus transforms Moloch’s life into a series of anecdotes. Like the telegrams that Moloch’s messengers deliver or throw down the gutter, Miller tells only part of the “inexhaustible story” of his life with his anecdotes about Moloch and his friends, and thus represents only one spiral twist of the supraself’s story (1941e: 20). In Moloch, Miller often employs anecdotes as a technique by which to present the events of Moloch’s past that inform his current actions, but unlike what Miller achieves in the autobiographical romances, where the supraself darts from one anecdote to the next with a minimum of transitional cues, he relies on a thirdperson narrator to contextualize the anecdotes about Moloch and his acquaintances. As a vehicle for spiral form, third-person narration seems most unlikely. With spiral form, Miller tries to mythologize complex psychological situations by reenacting them. By dramatizing their fictional counterparts and evoking the atmosphere of the original, Miller allows intangible thought processes lost even to memory to become more palpable. In using the third person, Miller impedes this effect, for the narrator acts as a mediator or interpreter. Through the use of such mediation, Miller cripples spiral form because he introduces a presence quite distinct from the supraself. While Miller later permits the supraself to cast judgment on or elucidate the actions of “Henry Miller,” he does so not from a position of omniscience like that of Moloch’s narrator, but from one of partial, though everexpanding, knowledge. Miller clearly identifies the supraself with the protagonist because, unlike a third-person narrator, the supraself once lived the character’s life. In Moloch, Miller awkwardly creates an omniscient narrator who functions as an entity separate from Dion Moloch, and thus must tell of Moloch’s inner life— remarking, for example, on Dion’s anger with the “coprophilous tendencies” of new immigrants—rather than simply show it as would the supraself (113).8 Instead of establishing the seamless fusion of self and character that he achieves with the

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various Henry Millers of the autobiographical romances, therefore, Miller positions Dion Moloch—in relation to the narrator—to operate not in conjunction with the supraself as the textual I through which all else must filter, but simply as another character, albeit the central one. Emphasizing the narrator’s role in mediating Moloch’s past—a strategy that readers will immediately notice as a phenomenon distinct from true spiral form— Miller scuttles his attempt to recover the meaning of his (and Moloch’s) experience and resorts to employing a set of transitional cues that undermine the seamless interrelationship between past and present that occurs in the mature works. Anticipating Hassan’s speculation that “we all continually live in a dimension that is not wholly past, present, or future, but a blend of them all,” Miller remembers the events of his—that is, Moloch’s, Tony Bring’s, Henry Miller’s—life in order to make sense of his present self (1990: 30). In “My Life as an Echo,” Miller describes this effort as a way to “put together the broken parts” of his self (1962c: 84). From the outset of Moloch, as most readers will realize, for all his misguided attempts at “objectivity,” Miller fails to deviate from this method. Via the narrator, Miller selfconsciously depicts Dion as a spatio-temporally fragmented individual. Nevertheless, Miller does not match the success of his later autobiographical romances— whose supraself assumes and consumes the identity of “Henry Miller”—in formally reflecting this psychological turmoil because his narrator must distance himself from Moloch, relying on phrases such as “one morning” or “looking back” to introduce various anecdotes (5). With such narrative distancing, in addition to causing the tension between Miller’s “first-person” subject matter and his thirdperson narrator to bubble to the novel’s surface, Miller produces in the narrator a predisposition to judge Moloch that leads to a coarse, half-digested form of irony— for example, the twice-repeated assertion that Moloch “was a modest, sensitive individual” (8). In the autobiographical romances, by contrast, Miller depicts a supraself that empathizes with “Henry Miller” even when the latter acts ignobly or cowardly.9 Nevertheless, even with the clumsy third-person narration, Miller clearly starts to use a recognizable version of spiral form in Moloch. Owing to his seemingly congenital predisposition to derail conventional narrative action, Miller represents Moloch—characterized as an “enigma”—not along a chronological line, plodding from event to event, but instead, as in those texts written in mature spiral form, in an associational, stylistically diverse manner that constantly digresses but nevertheless strives toward psychological accuracy (4). As if to underscore his intention to eschew traditional plot, Miller, in his initial description of Moloch, parodies linear conceptions of time with a tepid recounting of Dion’s past. Rushing over Moloch’s courtship with Blanche, for instance, Miller writes that Moloch, in order to avoid the draft, “took it into his head to get married” (4). With this sweeping statement—emblematic of the type of artificial, scene-setting summary that elides temporal complexity in traditional novels and that Miller hopes to avoid—Miller humorously effaces or buries whole layers of psychological complexity that he will explore in Tropic of Capricorn, The World of Sex, and Sexus. Miller underscores his character’s alienation from linearity with the observation that Moloch could not get up whenever the alarm went off. Miller thus tacitly reveals that Moloch

34 Brooklyn dawn coexists on a myriad of temporal planes, none more important than the others—a fact that Miller will exploit throughout the remainder of the text by spiraling around the past, present, and future events of Moloch’s life. In the relatively short first chapter, Miller also introduces other key elements of spiral form that divulge his interest in nonlinear characterization and progression. An informal discussion of naturalism, allusions to Dostoevski, Marx, and Gogol, and a catalog all illustrate that Miller rejects linear progression even in his pre-Parisian texts. Despite the existence of the omniscient narrator, Miller feels free to digress in a carnivalesque manner. Within the multiplicity of voices evident in the chapter’s closing catalog, for example, Miller suggests the epistemic lacunae inherent in written discourse. Following the narrator’s assertion that Moloch could have picked from at least twenty-five courses of action, Miller conveys in the catalog, with its “orgasm of inorganic lust,” a wild sense of both possibility and futility (7). Ranging from lice to labor-capital relations to comets, in the short catalog’s topics Miller intimates the hectic but stifling atmosphere of the workplace and its effects on Moloch. Through the catalog Miller cannot, however, capture more than a minute fraction of all that happens as Moloch walks through the street, just as in his novel he must select only a tiny portion of Dion’s life to relate. In setting out to tell Moloch’s story, therefore, Miller must employ an archeological style akin to spiral form. With each anecdote, Miller—and his vehicle, the narrator— burrows into Moloch’s past and uncovers the emotional wounds, passionate dreams, and mundane facts that contextualize the present and inform the future. Despite his novel’s anecdotal nature, Miller fails to develop his spiral form in the second chapter because of the presence of the third-person narrator, and thus the truncated anecdotes of the first chapter yield to what amounts to an extended anecdote about Hari Das, a messenger with messianic and artistic pretensions. Although Miller employs in Moloch his habitual technique of recasting his previous material into his current narrative, in his story about Hari—whom Miller modeled on Charles Candles, one of the messengers in “Clipped Wings”—he does not adhere to spiral form’s insistence that all material must filter through the consciousness of the supraself (Martin 1978: 146). While in Moloch Miller distinctly separates the tale about Hari from the discourse surrounding Moloch, in later books, structuring his texts from the unique perspective of spiral form, he interjects stories about eccentric personalities such as Hari directly into his self-discourse. Because of spiral form and its dissolution of spatio-temporal boundaries, Miller encourages such digressions, as they tend to comment as much on “Henry Miller” as they do on their ostensible subjects, for the supraself always remains in the center, controlling the narrative even if he takes no part in the action described. Initially, however, Miller failed to implement such a technique—analogous to Emerson’s eye—and instead relegates Hari’s story to a separate chapter.10 Retaining this vestigial trace of linear narrative forces Miller to undercut the book’s spiral effect, for he focuses attention away from Moloch, the erstwhile and future textual I. While Hari’s story itself bears directly on Moloch, Miller permits the reader to become privy to information about which Moloch knows nothing until subsequent chapters, a phenomenon that would not occur in a work written in true spiral form.

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In spiral form, Miller develops a process whereby his anecdotes dovetail—even those with radically disparate subject matter or those that abruptly cut off their predecessors—and create a poetically rendered verbal collage, but in the anecdote concerning Hari, Miller fails to achieve this effect, for the story seems out of place, not so much for its topic, but because it displaces Moloch as the textual center. In Tropic of Capricorn, Miller delineates portraits of several messengers. He does so to censure the type of faceless capitalism inherent in America as well as to demonstrate the type of individual who attracted and repelled the supraself. Nonetheless, he never allows the anecdotes to shift completely the narrative focus from the supraself. In Moloch, Miller, while striving for Hari Das to function in a similar way, subverts this aim by devoting an entire narrative unit to the messenger as he delivers his “mellifluous exordium” and maintaining silence as to Moloch’s thoughts and actions (13). Although Miller creates an amusing scenario around how Hari’s religious speech earns him nothing but an ignorant reprimand (“you’re in the United States now, remember! Don’t go shootin’ off yer mouth too much”), he divorces it too fully from the remainder of the narrative. By offering such a selfcontained anecdote, Miller redirects the psychological impact of the book away from Moloch and to Hari and his Christ complex, but the maneuver negatively impinges on the autobiographical aesthetic of spiral form. Still, Miller manages, despite the anecdote’s anomalous positioning, to reveal information about Moloch, a phenomenon suggestive of Miller’s interest in developing character in a spiral, rather than linear, manner. While Miller could not in Moloch integrate competing anecdotes, such as that about Hari, into a compelling picture of the supraself, in later chapters he eventually attempts to establish a psychological profile of Moloch by making him interact with Hari, who embodies capitalism’s most egregious flaws. As in the later books, Miller depicts his central character’s distaste for conventional mores by illustrating his reactions to those, like Hari, marginalized by capitalism’s brutal, profit-oriented efficiency, but, unlike in autobiographical romances such as Capricorn and Sexus, Miller creates a narrative buffer between the anecdotal subjects and Moloch. Instead of employing one of spiral form’s many internal devices to describe the eloquent and hard-working Hari, who prostitutes his talents to tote messages for The Great American Telegraph Company, while uninspired dolts such as Twilliger maintain positions of power, Miller must create a plausible narrative context in which Moloch’s relations with Hari contribute to the overall action. In the mature work, Miller simply inserts anecdotes when they annotate his larger theme of artistic and personal growth, but in Moloch he includes only material that, while it lends insight as to Moloch’s character, bears on the novel’s primary action. Miller, therefore, develops a subplot in which the company ultimately perceives Hari—who runs afoul of the law by exercising his right to free speech—as no more than a trouble-making “nigger” and finally forces a reluctant Moloch to fire all of his Indian messengers. By creating such a narratological hierarchy, Miller departs from spiral form, for in the later texts he fails to demarcate “subplots” from “primary” action, but he nevertheless reveals key facets of Moloch’s character and establishes a prototype of the artistic grotesque who functions as a counterpoint to the supraself. For instance,

36 Brooklyn dawn while Miller implies that Moloch develops a kinship with Hari both because of his exotic, idealistic outlook and because the messenger pursues his artistic endeavors regardless of societal or economic consequence, the writer also hesitates to sanction the Hindu fully. Miller thus first relates that, despite attestations about Moloch’s racism—the narrator claims, for example, that Moloch hates Jewish people because they “smell bad” (102)—the character invites the freshly fired Hari into his home and treats him as an individual rather than as a type, musing on weighty topics such as the properties of “great soul-spluttering beauty” (57), but Miller then undercuts Moloch’s benevolence with snide comments about the “master-artist” lacking “clean linen” (66). Clearly, Miller to some degree underscores Hari’s “difference” as something to which to aspire: while Moloch wastes away in the office, Hari sacrifices physical comforts for his writing, something that Dion desires but cannot yet achieve. Miller suggests that although Hari earns low wages and receives no respect, he nevertheless remains happy and true to himself, his art, and his “fluid, gaseous,” and divine philosophical system (65). Later professing such traits as admirable, Miller, by including them in Moloch, foreshadows the rebirth that the supraself would soon undergo. Nevertheless, Miller also realized that such idealism can lead to devastating results, and Hari later dies a pauper’s death. Hari’s demise, along with some of his more peculiar mannerisms—such as his laugh and his “Messianic complex”—aligns him with Miller’s artistic grotesques, a group that includes Tropic of Cancer’s Boris and Nexus’s Stasia (66). Inevitably, Miller characterizes such figures—while undoubtedly talented—as unable to overcome some fatal flaw and enter the Nirvana-like realm that Miller would label China and to which the supraself would aspire. Frequently, Miller represents such artistic grotesques as lacking perspective and portrays them as taking themselves too seriously or not seriously enough. Ultimately, Miller suggests that such characters either live in torment, unable to reconcile their ideals with a squalid reality, or find themselves objects of ridicule, so engrossed in art as to forget to take care of themselves in matters of personal hygiene or other basic necessities of life. In spiral form, Miller employs such caricatures as doppelgängers, individuals who resemble the supraself before his personal resurrection. Miller silently compares the grotesque behavior of Hari with that of the supraself and highlights those traits deemed either admirable or abhorrent. Fortunately, Miller makes his only aberration from the novel’s thematic focus in chapter two, for a portrait of Moloch controls the remainder of the narrative, in which Miller experiments with spiral form by establishing a picaresque story-line that places Moloch in three principal settings: domestic, public (work and play), and in transit. By manipulating three different environments, Miller may draw from three different anecdotal reservoirs and thus anticipate the sense of fractured action present in his later work. Nevertheless, instead of creating the interplay common to spiral form whereby the mental and physical action within each sphere merges to form a more accurate picture of Moloch, Miller places narrative boundaries between the three environments. In the former two locales, Miller depicts a self-centered—often belligerent—Moloch who dominates his wife, friends, and employees, the young man Miller describes as “arrogant” to Belmont (1972: 19).

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Miller suggests that both the public and domestic spheres stifle Moloch’s creative urge, as he laments to Prigozi: “What do you want—a row of spare time novels? I tell you, when it comes five o’clock, I’m licked. The company’s got me, body and guts. And when I get home, there’s Blanche” (119). Consequently, Miller reveals that this artistic impotence causes Moloch to overcompensate by abusing his perceived authority as husband and employer. In the latter milieu, however, Miller represents Moloch as much happier and much closer to achieving his ideal of becoming a writer: “The soliloquies he conducted in the street, or in the subway, or in bed nights, when his mind raced like a millstream—he could capture none of these when he sat down before a blank sheet of paper” (100). Miller intimates that when Moloch walks alone through the city, he achieves a type of spiritual ecstasy that points him closer to casting off his former self and attaining rebirth. Miller implies that in movement, in the quest, Moloch unconsciously recognizes that his dissatisfaction with others ultimately reflects dissatisfaction with himself. Despite employing a rather rigid structure, by viewing Moloch in three distinct settings, Miller enables himself to look beyond simple cause—effect relationships and prefigure the psychological mimesis of spiral form. Writing contrary to his technique in the autobiographical romances, Miller carefully demarcates Moloch’s various environments, although he still manages to experiment with many of the devices that he would use in spiral form. Whereas in the autobiographical romances Miller may blur or distend the boundaries of a particular place by interposing anecdotes of other locales or by invoking a nonanecdotal device, he and Moloch’s narrator undercut such effects of spiral form by erecting a transitional superstructure. Rather than fluidly launching into a memory of Blanche, for instance, Miller awkwardly permits the narrator—paradoxically constrained by his omniscience—to announce that Moloch “saw again the woman called Blanche” (50). Another example of how Miller allows the narrator to intrude on spiral form’s autobiographical aesthetic occurs before a dream sequence: “his dream was of such a quality as we experience only in the trammeled depths of a profound stupor” (170). With such excess verbiage Miller runs counter to spiral form’s subtle shifts and abrupt departures. Employing the supraself in the mature works, Miller usually does not call attention to his narrative maneuvers, preferring instead to effect them without comment. Nevertheless, Miller embryonically manifests other components of spiral form—such as the diatribe, reverie, and dream—in all three settings. Since Miller employs three principal settings in Moloch, he necessarily creates a tension with regard to the “primary action,” a struggle that prefigures the convoluted progression of spiral form. From the outset, Miller subverts his novel’s dramatic effects by cutting from one environment to the next, although he negates his narratological experiments by ultimately emphasizing the domestic sphere, where Moloch appears at his worst. Nevertheless, even though he concentrates on Moloch’s marriage, Miller fails to progress in a traditionally linear way, and consistently “digresses” from the action. In terms of drama, Miller relies on a fairly typical depiction of two people trapped in a marriage based on mutual indifference rather than affection or respect. Consequently, Miller portrays Moloch baiting

38 Brooklyn dawn Blanche shamelessly, hoping to rekindle some spark of emotion in his erstwhile lover. Miller then divulges via the narrator that Dion does not “want to go on hurting” Blanche, but that his need for passion compels him to continue his reprehensible behavior (55). Miller develops still more drama by illustrating how Moloch, torn apart by his desire to write and Blanche and the company’s need for him to produce, escapes either by acting the buffoon—“capering around [Blanche] with the frying pan,” for example—or reenacting past events (54). Through this second method, Miller rises above his formulaic material and begins to reshape it according to some of the tenets of spiral form. Miller deflates the situation’s melodramatic potential by pausing the action in order to present the many memories—in the form of anecdotes—that spiral forth throughout Moloch’s interaction with his wife. Anticipating the way he dissolves plot in spiral form, Miller— through the narrator—frequently punctures the primary story-line to gloss Moloch’s behavior with an episode from the past. In spiral form, Miller constantly resurrects the past as a way to explain the present. By relating the story of Cora, for example, Miller strikes at the heart of Moloch’s failing marriage to Blanche. Miller writes of Cora—the figure whom Miller would later rechristen Una and whom Bertrand Mathieu labels the “lost Eurydice”—in many of his narratives (120). As Miller aged, he portrayed Una— based on his first love, Cora Seward—in a progressively more ethereal and romanticized way. As Miller later recognized, he constructed in Una a symbol of unparalleled bliss and purity so divorced from reality that he “didn’t even think she had a cunt” (1981: 126). Miller places his mythological first love, and his reactions to her, in quite a different light in Moloch. Rupturing the narrative thread in which Hari stays with the Molochs, Miller uses the pattern of nostalgic digression that weaves its way through most of the autobiographical romances. Miller de-emphasizes his novel’s action—but nevertheless reveals a great deal about Moloch—by shifting from Moloch’s contemplation of his marriage with Blanche to a vision of Cora, the “buxom, two-breasted Amazon” whom Moloch feels he should have married (68). While Miller depicts Cora with a certain amount of reverence, in his earliest extant portrait of the girl, he emphasizes her sexuality—she “returns pressure for pressure” during a session of heavy petting—and mocks Moloch’s treatment of her as “Vestal Virgin” (72, 69). Miller illustrates how Cora remains vital to Moloch (more as an image than as a person) and Dion, like the Henry Miller of Tropic of Capricorn and Plexus, worships her. Through the use of “digression,” Miller clearly implies that, to Moloch, Cora unquestionably symbolizes a door unopened, a life unlived. By focusing on Moloch’s escape to the realm of memory, Miller achieves a type of psychological mimesis akin to that of spiral form and demonstrates that Moloch’s desire for Cora stems not, as he believes, from true love, or even lust, but from his dissatisfaction with the sordid reality of his daily existence. Immediately preceding the narrative dislocation he causes with the introduction of Cora, Miller portrays Moloch parodying “home-sweet-home” rhetoric in front of Blanche, suggesting that Dion somehow truly longs for “the sanctuary of repose. A cozy hearth … the good wife who eagerly awaits her husband’s homecoming” (52). Turning away from plot development, Miller illustrates how Moloch’s memory of Cora, perfect

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and unattainable, represents the endless deferral of that homely idyll and its concomitant “perfect” writing conditions. Essentially, Miller reveals that Moloch, bruised and battered from the constraints of marriage and capitalism despite his tough demeanor, seeks refuge in the paragon he creates from his memories of his adolescent longing. Fusing the past with the present, Miller shows that Moloch wistfully blames his current problems on his inability to court Cora properly, and that he escapes by musing on the different course his life could have taken: “there was a time when to have possessed Cora would have meant his soul’s salvation” (233). Unlike in later versions, Miller grants Cora a voice in Moloch, and thus undercuts the autobiographical aesthetic of spiral form. Miller discloses through the narrator that Cora loved Moloch and questioned why Dion would not admit this to her. By offering this perspective, Miller deviates from spiral form, for in the mature work, the textual I—limited by his consciousness—never reconstructs the thoughts of other characters. Perhaps because he uses third-person narration, Miller occasionally drifts from the psychological center of his narrative, Moloch, and seems to retreat into the safety of narrative convention. Nevertheless, in rendering Cora, Miller illustrates his early propensity, even willingness, to suspend narrative “action” in favor of an anecdote that will help to explain his character’s quest for self-knowledge. Although with his story about Cora he contributes nothing to the plot in terms of action, Miller creates in the figure—as with all of his characters—a device for measuring the protagonist’s vision of himself, the potential being referred to in The World of Sex. Miller reveals through his treatment of Blanche—Moloch’s shrewish wife, who contrasts dramatically with Cora—how he utilizes several aspects of spiral form, including how he unfolds his anecdotes, how he employs sexuality as a metaphor, and how he draws a fuller portrait of his protagonist’s artistic hunger via comparison. Characteristically, as he does with Cora, Miller first introduces Blanche—a character who appears as Maude in Tropic of Capricorn and The Rosy Crucifixion, and simply as a pronoun in The World of Sex—in a memory.11 In spiral form, Miller often dispenses with more traditional ways to exhibit a new character, preferring to digress on an incident that crystallizes the figure’s importance to his supraself. In Moloch, Miller chooses an anecdote that foregrounds Blanche’s dual need for social sanction and for sexual intercourse to remain a furtive, “dirty” activity. While drinking with Hari and Prigozi—the Kronski of the autobiographical romances— Moloch lapses into a memory of a prenuptial sexual encounter with Blanche. Whereas Miller typically juxtaposes Mara/Mona and her unrestrained sexual passion to Maude’s paranoid loss of self-control, because of his first novel’s lack of a June figure he compels his readers to compare Moloch’s early enraptured kissing of Cora’s “parched and bruised” lips to Blanche’s guilty post-coital admission that she “feel[s] so ashamed” (72, 50). Miller generally employs sexuality as one means of determining a person’s degree of relative freedom. He intimates that Blanche never initiates sexual activity with Moloch, but once he approaches her stealthily, she releases her pent-up desire frenetically, only to regret her actions immediately afterward. By inserting a sexual anecdote—no matter how truncated—Miller

40 Brooklyn dawn displays an affinity with his later spiral form and demonstrates that Blanche’s sexual idiosyncrasies pale next to Cora’s unlimited potential—according to Moloch’s fantasies. Via this comparative method, Miller also demonstrates that Cora lacks the blemishes of Blanche’s cool treatment of the “queer idiots” Moloch calls his friends and her callous disregard for Dion’s artistic pretensions (53). Through his strategy of anecdotal juxtaposition, Miller both anticipates spiral form and reveals that the Cora of Moloch’s desire would never, like Blanche, caustically remark, “remember that you have a job. Don’t go starting a book again” (98). Indicting the domestic sphere for stifling Moloch’s artistic yearnings, Miller “explains”—in the oblique manner he uses in spiral form—that the thought of Cora fills Moloch with inspiration and causes him to believe that he could achieve anything. Conversely, Miller represents Blanche—much like Washington Irving depicts Dame Van Winkle—so that she serves as an emblem of a system that grinds down artists like Hari Das.12 Consequently, Miller unfolds his anecdotes so that they depict how Blanche, detesting their “looking-glass theories” and “enormous appetites,” bristles at the intellectual conversation Moloch shares with men such as Prigozi and Stanley (59). Miller establishes a frankly subjective aura by manipulating anecdotes to create a picture of the supraself rather than contribute to a rising action, and so Blanche’s belief that art resides in safe, tepid renditions of Liszt and the occasional melodrama—when the larder contains ample quantities of food and Moloch has earned enough to pay the bills—locates its narrative importance not as a plot point but as a psychological contrast. Through his various anecdotes about Blanche, Miller winds through Moloch’s life and proffers glimpses into his psychological state. Because spiral form necessarily entails subjective truth, Miller will often employ exemplary anecdotes to comment indirectly on the supraself’s quest. With these anecdotes, Miller both presents the supraself’s version of reality and critiques that perspective through techniques such as humor and irony. In one such anecdote— Moloch’s ultimate reconciliation with Blanche after she leaves him—Miller ironically indicates that Dion’s incapacity to commit himself to art ultimately rests with himself. Through this anecdote, Miller observes that Moloch—forever restless, forever searching—cannot finally take the risk that Hassan believes crucial to the quest. Deflating the anecdote’s importance to narrative action (it functions as a climax of sorts), Miller looks beyond temporal sequence and forces his readers to recognize that, just as he hungers for Cora, Moloch yearns for the Blanche of his memory, an “imaginary being” he clings to despite his abhorrent treatment of the corporeal Blanche (251). By creating a pattern from the supraself’s nostalgic memories, Miller redirects the narrative focus from action qua action to Moloch’s subjective—and ultimately crippling—reinterpretation of external events. Thus, Miller gives secondary importance to the scene in which Moloch, who desires Blanch nevere more than after she departs, attempts to win her anew, and emphasizes how—spellbound by a three-day meeting with Blanche after which she gives him a copy of Knut Hamsun’s Victoria—Moloch develops a fantasy in which he begs Blanche to “save [him] from the daily degradation” of the company and love him once more (261). Thus—in the indirect, fragmented fashion typical of the later

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spiral form—Miller demonstrates how, in reshaping the past, Moloch forgets the times that he and Blanche “stormed and raged like two maniacs” as well as forge’s her treatment of his friends (120). By concentrating on an anecdotal narrative structure akin to spiral form, Miller may avoid potential dramatic disproportion and indirectly suggest that Moloch creates in Blanche a potential savior, a panacea for his problems. Through the constant interplay of anecdotes, Miller reveals that Moloch continually seeks the source for his self-liberation from—as Miller calls it in The Books in My Life—“the prison which he has created for himself and which he ascribes to the machinations of others” from without (1952: 155). In the anecdote about Blanche and Knut Hamsun, Miller underscores Moloch’s ineffective nature and insinuates that Blanche, like Cora and Dion’s other female acquaintances, appears to Moloch as a potential muse. Through the technique of anecdotal juxtaposition, Miller elucidates how Moloch derives his strength from others because he cannot yet rely on himself, and, in short, finds everyone but himself culpable for his situation. In Moloch’s second major setting, the public sphere, Miller evinces quite another side of Moloch, and thus highlights his ability in spiral form to develop contradictory facets of the supraself’s personality—without descending into incoherence—by introducing a multiplicity of characters. While Moloch concerns himself with Cora, Blanche, and other women—including his secretary Valeska, with whom he enjoys a tryst—his life seems predominantly homosocial, and Miller seeks to develop both Moloch’s power over other men and his ability to transform that strength into art. Miller observes that, with two important exceptions—Twilliger, his superior, and the “tailor-in-chief,” a company spy resembling the Spivak of Sexus—Moloch stands firmly at the center of his relations with other men: “in the end, Moloch always had his way” (20). In anecdote after anecdote, Miller fails to advance the plot but nevertheless submits that—whether tricking Dave out of the more attractive of two women, out-talking Stanley and Prigozi, or handing his last money to an unemployable applicant—Moloch controls the tempo of the masculine realm in which he maneuvers. Pointing directly to the supraself, in this portrait of Moloch-as-ringleader, Miller establishes the first redaction of his myth of selfhood. Adopting a key trait of spiral form, Miller reduces characters such as Prigozi—the philosophizing medical student—and Reardon—his assistant—to their relative utility for deepening the truth about Moloch. Anticipating the ranks of characters flitting in and out of later works such as the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, Miller introduces and dispenses with a host of individuals who come into contact with Moloch. Because his anecdotal style precludes focusing extensively on any figure other than the supraself—with the possible exception of Mara/Mona—Miller conjures up characters such as Lawson and Leslie only when he requires their actions to highlight one of Moloch’s peculiarities. Miller permits Lawson, for example, to serve little purpose in the narrative, except to lend money to Moloch to give to one of the “choice”—in other words, interestingly eccentric—applicants whom Lawson hand-picks for Dion’s amusement (33). Although Lawson, who bears a strong resemblance to the O’Rourke of succeeding books, works in Moloch’s

42 Brooklyn dawn office, Miller never refers to him again. With this brief, anecdotal inclusion of Lawson, however, Miller nevertheless permits his readers to learn much about Moloch’s temperament, just as in spiral form Miller develops the supraself through a series of fragments. In the Lawson scene, for example, Miller clearly illustrates how—ensconced in a position of power in which he can either further devastate or uplift members of the underclass—Moloch maintains an ambivalent attitude toward the applicants with whom he interacts. While Moloch offers his—and Lawson’s—money to the slow-witted but sincere Luther, Miller subtly renders how Dion and his cronies delight in the man’s confusion and take an almost clinical approach in observing his reactions to their taunts and ridiculous queries, such as whether he belongs to the “Christian Endeavor Society” (30). Miller creates an atmosphere of ambivalence in which Moloch displays some sympathy for Luther, a figure on the margins of capitalism who cannot qualify even as a messenger, but asks the applicant’s dignity as a price for his charity. Miller, moreover, underscores Moloch’s habit of experimenting on hapless would-be messengers before shuttling them out of the door with a few dollars (“don’t let him in again, savvy?” [33]) by making Lawson refer to “choice” individuals. Characters such as Lawson, and even those like Prigozi to whom Miller devotes more attention, thus orbit or spiral past Moloch’s consciousness and function as catalysts for his memories and thoughts. Using Moloch’s dealings with Prigozi as a vehicle, Miller experiments with several aspects of spiral form, including diatribe and self-reflection—a technique akin to internal monolog. Not yet universally employing the internal monologs that function as a cohesive device in spiral form, Miller compensates for his novel’s lack of first-person narration by allowing Prigozi, a Jewish medical student drawn to the sensitive spirit beneath Moloch’s external callousness, to play an important role in the nascent spiral form of Moloch by acting as a forum in which Moloch’s innermost thoughts may manifest themselves.13 Miller requires at least a nominal audience for the epistolary methods that he employs in spiral form. In the autobiographical romances, with their first-person narration, Miller causes the reader to function as this audience. Consequently, Miller occasions the supraself—acting as an analysand—to unburden himself to the reader by free association in an anecdotal style. With Moloch, Miller eschews such an intimate, confessional relationship, primarily due to the buffer-like presence of the narrator. Miller, therefore, lets Prigozi—as Moloch’s closest, most intelligent friend—assume the dual role of confessor and intellectual sparring partner. In the physically grotesque, verbose, and arrogant Prigozi, Miller provides the impetus for Moloch’s diatribes, as well as creates a figure who stimulates Dion to look inward for the source of his problems.14 Although he avoids “digressing” to the lengths he achieves in the mature works, Miller presents in a diatribe Moloch delivers to Prigozi and Stanley an analog to both the unconscious oral performances and the idiosyncratic internal monologs of books such as Capricorn and Sexus. With this “cataract of words,” Miller describes Moloch deluging his friends on a multiplicity of topics, ranging from phallic worship to Brown-Sequard to a Russian anecdote, with his “funambulesque exhibition sans parasol” (137). Spirally, Miller conveys in this diatribe, and others like

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it, a sense of Moloch’s diverse interests, and he also attempts to recreate the intensity of feeling within the character. With verbal flights such as Moloch’s table discussion with Prigozi and Stanley—profuse in his work—Miller illustrates the supraself’s proficiency as a storyteller, a trait that contrasts with Moloch’s (“Henry Miller’s,” Tony Bring’s) lack of literary output. As Prigozi sits enraptured by Moloch’s discourse, Miller lets the reader—and Prigozi—understand that Dion possesses talent and could write if he would make a concerted effort. Because he lacks a dominant internal component such as he possesses in spiral form, Miller must rely, paradoxically, on Prigozi to draw Moloch into moments of self-revelation. Signaling his interests in autobiographical analysis, for example, Miller employs Prigozi as a surrogate for the type of internal soul-searching that appears in the later narratives. In a scene where, upon noticing Moloch writing in his journal, Prigozi’s brusque manner bursts through to the source of Moloch’s artistic paralysis, Miller places in the doctor’s mouth the type of indictment that the supraself would later charge upon itself in books such as Nexus: “When are you going to write that book? You have sufficient notes there to write The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” (45). While he fails to use an internal monolog, Miller nevertheless moves toward the thematic implications of the mature works by allowing Prigozi, versed in psychology, to realize that Moloch fears failure and that the idea that he might not produce writing acceptable to himself results in an endless deferral of the beginning. Just as Miller later demonstrates that the supraself cannot fool himself about his avoidance of artistic responsibility, he discloses through the narrator that Moloch could not deceive Prigozi, and, indeed, the latter incurs Dion’s wrath by stating that Blanche “isn’t as bad as [Moloch] paints her” (121). Miller then points out that Moloch, in reaction to Prigozi’s statement, wonders why Prigozi always “insists on holding him responsible,” a question that contains the most important lesson Moloch learns in the novel because, while Prigozi fails to succeed in forcing Moloch to answer this query, the assumption of personal responsibility constitutes the greatest lesson of spiral form (121). Unless one accepts life in a Whitmanesque manner—embracing both good and evil, fortune and failure—Miller argues that one will remain ignorant, a prisoner of appetite. By using Prigozi as a type of prompt whereby Moloch looks within, Miller anticipates the internal monologs that demonstrate how the supraself signifies a transcendence of desire and the growth of self-knowledge. Miller thus implicitly argues that, while Moloch disdains Prigozi for insisting that he look within himself for the solution to his problems, he owes his friend a great debt. Nevertheless, Miller permits the narrator to subvert the technique by describing rather than dramatizing most of Moloch’s reflective monologs. Using first-person narration, Miller may eradicate any barriers between the supraself and the audience, but in Moloch he cannot do so. Ultimately, Miller demonstrates that Prigozi’s perceptive analysis of Moloch’s personality finds its validation in Dion’s solitary perambulations, narrative moments that serve as analogs to the artistic reveries that mark the spiral form of the true autobiographical romances. As he achieves in the reveries, Miller reveals during each of Moloch’s walks that the character discovers more about himself and

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begins to learn the artistic tenets that soon will inform spiral form. Although he rarely attains the staccato lyricism of the reveries, Miller characterizes Moloch’s personal journeys with constant movement through time and space. In these anecdotes—which Miller detaches from narrative action—he states that, while Moloch’s body ultimately progresses—like spiral form—toward a destination, his mind winds through the past, present, and future, and experiences concentrated moments of self-awareness and artistic creation. Via the narrator, Miller explains that, only “partially aware of his environment,” Moloch “wonders all the time, in the back of his head, just what he would sit down to write about” (100). Miller portrays Moloch, free from the constraints of his job, wife, and friends, turning inward, searching his soul for appropriately literary topics with “the soliloquies he conducted in the street, or in the subway, or in bed nights, when his mind raced like a millstream” (100). Nevertheless, Miller reveals that such brainstorming inevitably leads Moloch nowhere because only when he lets go of such preimposed limits can he truly create the book he needs to write: himself. In the fluid, associative manner he more fully adopts in spiral form, Miller depicts Moloch recovering his past from the “maze of crooked, woebegone streets” as he muses on his stolen bicycle, a concert with Blanche, and boyhood friends (101). While he rarely advances the plot in such scenes, Miller demonstrates how Moloch—and, by extension, the supraself—will reconfigure formerly pedestrian or trivial events with clarity and meaning. Through his narrator Miller observes, for example, that by looking at a windowpane, Moloch “gazed fondly at the walls and puzzled over the familiar texts” (109). In such a seemingly innocuous moment, Miller symbolizes the mythopoeic design of spiral form, for all “familiar texts” yield great and portentous mysteries if one peers behind the facade. Avoiding moments of high drama, Miller implies through his aesthetic that the stuff and substance of personality, of life, resides in each moment of one’s existence. By invoking such emotionally charged impressions, Miller alerts his readers that, fragmented and alone, Moloch must face his personal demons and restore himself to wholeness. Using a luxuriant, layered approach to his descriptions, Miller causes well-known sights and sounds to spur in Moloch memories of an almost prelapsarian childhood, before the fall of marriage and career. At the same time, Miller anticipates the competing narrative strategies of spiral form by relating that the alien presence of Jewish immigrants leads Moloch to launch a diatribe against foreign interlopers. Miller juxtaposes lush descriptions of “silken mustaches dripping with cool foam” and “flags flutter[ing] riantly” favorably with the urine-besmirched coatsleeves of the immigrants—emblematic of the drive for money that Dion loathes—who now people Moloch’s boyhood haunts (114, 111). On the walk that closes the novel, Miller causes Moloch, significantly thinking of Gauguin, to delve deep into himself and course the “tremulous causeway linking dream to dream” that constitutes his life (265). Attaching little significance to the scene’s dramatic function, Miller discloses, in a passage that closely resembles the disjunctive lyricism of spiral form, that the night sparks in Moloch a reverie on the city, with its “tumbledown shanties” and “dreary mansions of the rich” (266). In this reverie, Miller represents Moloch’s artistic epiphany and designs his urgent thoughts to crescendo like a prose poem as

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he discovers the spiral path to light and truth amongst chaos and darkness. Miller illustrates how Moloch realizes with Whitmanesque insight that beauty rises from “a dump heap littered with rusty can openers, broken down baby carriages … and—animal crackers that had been partially nibbled” (266). Abandoning form for its own sake, Miller suggests that Moloch verges on the brink of finding the spiral pattern within the anomalous and disparate, the universe within each second. Emphasizing the staccato impressions that course through Moloch’s brain, Miller creates an aura of fervent mental activity and the alinear time of memory and creation. By choosing to end his novel internally rather than externally, Miller once again deflates the importance of action and gives precedence to a psychological mimesis that intimates that from the wreckage of his life—cluttered with false starts, ignoble acts, and dashed hopes—Moloch may emerge like a phoenix and soar to infinite demiurgic heights. Miller proves both tentative and innovative in the initial geologic layer in his archeological quest for self-knowledge. In Moloch, his first novel, Miller displays remarkable courage in scuttling the plot-driven aesthetic of the popular books of the 1920s. Regardless of critically successful modernists such as Joyce and Woolf, most publishers demanded more of a “story” than Miller offers in Moloch, as Roderick Nash points out (1990: 137). Miller bolsters the narrative with little in the way of sustained crisis—Blanche’s desertion of Moloch provides perhaps the only attempt at suspense—and, with his cinematically abrupt scene shifts, he undercuts plot in favor of psychology. Furthermore, Miller explores an alternative to commercially profitable narrative strategies by using caricatures and grotesques in a way that anticipates spiral form’s device of the textual I—the controlling consciousness that reduces all secondary characters into their utility to the supraself. In incipient form, Miller also experiments with reverie and diatribe (both attacking capitalism and institutions in general). In most of these techniques, Miller appears halting and awkward, however, because of his intrusive third-person narrator. With his later books, he clearly demonstrates that spiral form derives its power from its spontaneity and jeu d’esprit. Within these narratives, Miller rushes from episode to diatribe, fantasy to reverie, with little attention to transition. In Moloch, Miller, encumbered by his narrator, fails to convey a similar sense of insouciance, and often falters while the narrator makes a wooden passage from one anecdote to the next. Miller also lacks in the novel the firm sense of purpose evident in the later books. As Martin indicates above, Miller struggled with the novel and changed direction several times, a fact suggestive of Miller’s unreadiness for the demands of spiral form. While he seems to lack formal properties in spiral form, he most certainly permits his narrative to flow according to a controlling pattern, the presentation and analysis of the supraself. In Moloch, Miller cedes control to the narrator and characters other than Moloch too often to adhere to a similar plan. Nevertheless, in his initial effort—an attempt uninformed by the surrealist and Dadaist theories Miller assimilated in France— he shows remarkable affinities with full-fledged spiral form, illustrates his early concern with alinear narrative, and prefigures Crazy Cock, a book J.D. Brown calls “a more promising narrative” (1986: 7).

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Crazy Cock Drawing on many narrative techniques that would eventually constitute spiral form, Miller unveils his first complete attempt to grapple with his turbulent relationship with June in Crazy Cock, a novel that serves as a bridge between the problematic third-person narration of Moloch and the ebullient first-person pyrotechnics characteristic of Tropic of Cancer.15 Miller, writing in both Brooklyn and Paris, finished several drafts of the novel, each, according to Dearborn, “an almost total rewrite” (1991b: 118). Although Miller later claimed in a notebook entry that the novel constituted “the vilest crap that ever was,” he markedly improved his prose style over that of Moloch, and he made tremendous strides toward spiral form (Martin, 1978: 248). As his friend and influence, Michael Fraenkel, would later remark, although Miller “was trying to write to order,” a “bright light of integrity shone through” in Crazy Cock (1945: 44). Ultimately, Miller caused the light of which Fraenkel writes to emanate from his tentative attempts to move beyond an outmoded naturalism inherited from early heroes such as Theodore Dreiser and Jack London and develop the more subjective form of literary analysis endemic to spiral form. Decades later, Miller asserted that an overwhelming concern for facts, such as that which hindered his early efforts, “is just an imitation of true reality,” “just the surface of things,” and that his mature narratives offer a creative interpretation of external evidence that depicts a subjective reality rather than boasts a false claim to objectivity (1972: 39). With each draft of Crazy Cock—especially those produced in Paris—Miller discovered the limitations of using a photographic technique and sought to inject his prose with a more intuitive, fluid mode of expression. In the result—published posthumously in 1991—Miller dramatizes not only the nebulous association between June and Jean and its effects on him, but also the tension inherent in discovering one’s own literary voice. Miller found the genesis of Crazy Cock in his desire to chart the “truth” about his relationship with June and her close friend, Jean, the Anastasia of the trilogy.16 Left alone in America while June and Jean toured France, Miller, tormented by June’s clandestine excursions and the perceived ignominy of sharing her affection with Jean, pounded out in an all-night session approximately thirty pages of notes outlining his life with June.17 Miller, hitherto struggling to find a worthwhile literary topic, suddenly realized that the “one book” he wanted to write concerned his love for June, and, ultimately, the effect of that love on his writing (1941g: 55). Miller initially hoped to delineate the entire relationship and capture its essence and June’s “eight or nine cities” of personality on the page (1944a: 293). Aspiring to such an impossible goal, Miller first experienced incapacitation and then unearthed the breakthroughs of spiral form. Retracing the zealousness that marked his early propensity for accuracy, Miller writes in My Life and Times that “I struggled in the beginning. I said I was going to write the truth, so help me God. And I thought I was. I found that I couldn’t. Nobody can write the absolute Truth” (1971: 98). Just as Joyce and Proust could not write everything about their subjects, Miller quickly realized that he would either need to discover a technique to distill the truth he felt or else compose nothing at all. Miller finally compromised with his ideal by imbuing each fragment of his life with “the feeling of the whole” (1941e: 20). Miller ultimately devised the aesthetic of spiral form whereby

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writers must liberate themselves by making reality their own and “exploding the myth which binds us to past and future” (1952: 155). By embellishing on certain moments of his life with June, Miller escapes from the prison of absolute Truth and learns to revel in subjectivity and Derrida’s “natural” writing. Although Crazy Cock seems more temporally traditional than Moloch, Miller nevertheless uses some of the same techniques characteristic of spiral form. Writing to Emil in a letter of 16 February 1931, Miller states that form and style “have been occupying [him] frightfully” and that such concerns dominate his conversations with other writers such as Fraenkel, Alfred Perlès, and Walter Lowenfels (1989: 70). Drawing on such theoretical discussions—along with his letters to Emil and his exuberant Parisian notes—Miller eventually caused his narratological strategies to gel into the spiral form that individuates Tropic of Cancer. It would seem naïve, however, to suggest that Miller failed to bring the lessons he learned from these fecundating debates to Crazy Cock. Ferguson, while unequivocally labeling Crazy Cock a “bad book,” astutely suggests that though [Miller] still laboured at the formally traditional Crazy Cock, he had become increasingly aware that disciplined writing was writing against the grain, and the violence and anarchy inherent in surrealism … at once opened up a way out of the baffling strictures of literary orthodoxy. (1991: 184, 176) Far from separating his new insights from the composition of Crazy Cock, Miller allows his “increased awareness” to surface in the technical aspects of the novel. While Miller felt sure of his theme—he even thought of Tropic of Cancer as an interruption of that subject—with the numerous revisions of his second novel he betrays his tremendous struggle over how to accomplish his task. Although Miller concentrates on a rather limited period of time in Crazy Cock, he structures his book in such a way as to underscore its incapacity to tell the story of Tony Bring, Hildred, and Vanya in a comprehensive manner and thus anticipates spiral form. Miller partitions his novel of scarcely two hundred pages into six parts, each of which contains from two to seven short chapters. With such marked fragmentation of the narrative, Miller indicates that in later drafts of Crazy Cock, he abandoned his intention to disclose the entire truth and, instead, would content himself with mythologizing key incidents in the affair. Miller expresses this desire in an October 1930 letter to Emil in which he states that he wants “to prune [the novel] down, to mutilate it, to reduce it to skeletal strength” (1989: 64). In so doing, Miller intimates the subterranean river of emotion that courses beneath the text. In the scene in which Vanya and Hildred care for Tony’s hemorrhoids, for instance, Miller conveys less about Bring’s physical condition than he does about the character’s painful emotional state. Simply put, Miller illustrates how Tony uses the ailment as a means to shift attention to himself. As Hildred and Vanya nurse Tony back to health, Miller—via the narrator—causes Bring to ruminate that hemorrhoids “can become so cursedly unbearable that the thought of hanging by the wrists becomes an unmitigated pleasure” (196). Nevertheless, Miller demonstrates that, despite his complaints, Bring’s physical discomfort provides him with a

48 Brooklyn dawn temporary escape from the plaguing thoughts of Hildred and Vanya, while at the same time functioning as an external manifestation of Bring’s mental distress. Miller suggests that one may treat physical pain, but mental anguish requires more than a soothing ointment. Through the use of loosely connected scenes, Miller explores his anecdotal life. As with the foregoing incident—or others, as when a drunken Tony hits Hildred or when Tony desires that Vanya kill herself—Miller occasions the anecdotes to function as annotations on the supraself’s existence. In lieu of unfolding a definitive “life story,” with spiral form, Miller defers closure indefinitely by spinning yarn after yarn that crystallizes—and thus mythologizes— experience. The myths take the place of the endlessly retreating “whole” truth, and within each anecdote in Crazy Cock, whether about Tony’s ass, Hildred’s deceptions, or Vanya’s poetry, Miller establishes a synechdochic relationship to his subjective truth. Within each story—no matter how trivial—reside the tools by which to decipher the whole. Nevertheless, still unsure of his incipient spiral form, Miller laments to Emil that “only a meagre portion of what I feel and think gets expressed” (1989: 72) and complains to Nin that “so much was left out of the novel” (Nin and Miller 1987: 3). In these confessions, Miller reveals that he still clings—however tentatively—to a purely mimetic notion of art in which novels function as mirrors to some Platonic version of Truth. Despite—or perhaps because of—Crazy Cock’s conspicuous lacunae, in these letters Miller continues to grasp the impossible notion of exhausting his topic. Conversely, in his novel’s hyperfragmented style, Miller suggests a move toward the narrative techniques he observed in surrealist cinema, Joyce, and modern painting, methods that scuttle artificial notions of closure. Subverting both “suspense” and a strict sense of time, Miller shifts rapidly from scene to scene in Crazy Cock. As with spiral form, with these quick cuts, Miller infuses the narrative with a pastiche-like quality—although to a lesser degree than in the mature works. Miller merges an anecdote about Dredge, for example, with an anecdote about visiting Tony’s parents for Christmas, while he dissolves a scene between Tony and Hildred into a description of Vanya at the Caravan, the cafe where Hildred works. Moving toward spiral form, Miller employs chapters not as self-contained units—that is, with one anecdote each—but instead will subvert a given chapter’s viability by veering away from the principal story with a catalog, dream, or reverie. In the first chapter of part four, for example, Miller digresses from a surrealistic description of the genesis of one of Vanya’s paintings—with its alogical admixture of flowers “with stupendous human organs,” monsters “dripping with slime,” cathedrals with “huge teats, bursting with milk,” and other fantastic spectacles—to an anecdote about Hildred and a shadowy Spaniard (79). In commenting on Vanya’s painting, Miller, via the narrator, approaches the empyrean verbal machinations that mark the later autobiographical romances. Instead of providing a literal rendering of Vanya’s art, Miller, in his discussion of the painting, seeks to recreate the feelings her bizarre imagery evoked in Tony. By depicting such an outlandish menagerie of associations, Miller attempts to recover the aura of the original scene. In cutting away to Hildred, Miller represents the equally unpredictable behavior of Tony’s spouse. Thus, Miller demonstrates that,

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just as Vanya might insert anything into her artwork, so, too, would Hildred say or do anything: “she would commence in the middle of a sentence or ask him to set the alarm … she wanted them to argue with her, to gush, rhapsodize. She wanted to sparkle” (79). Following his description of Vanya’s painting, Miller permits his representation of Hildred’s behavior to assume a surrealistic, alogical character. Via the text’s staccato rhythm, Miller envelops the narrative with a sense of urgency and gives the impression that he could relate anecdote after anecdote attesting to Hildred’s enigmatic conduct. Far from adding structure to the novel, Miller heightens the book’s textual hyperkinesis with the parts and chapters by drawing attention to the disparate elements within each section. Even though Miller propels his story consistently forward from chapter to chapter, the narrative lacunae coupled with the atemporal dream passages suggest that he no longer set any store in such traditional divisions and simply left them as trace remnants of a former aesthetic. In his liberal employment of such textual scaffolding, therefore, Miller develops a type of metafictional parody whereby the reader becomes increasingly aware that the headings come at random intervals and fail to signify any definitive break in the narrative.18 Miller continues this pattern of structural fragmentation in the subsequent autobiographical romances, although he heightens their atmosphere of incompleteness by inundating the reader with detail rather than by “pruning” superfluous description. While Miller ostensibly adheres to a more linear narratological plan in Crazy Cock than in Moloch, he employs in the former novel a narrative voice that seems more akin to that of Tropic of Cancer than to that of his earlier novel. Miller permits the third-person narrator in Crazy Cock to function far less obtrusively than in Moloch, and, therefore, the narrator, through free indirect discourse, acts more as a conduit for the thoughts of the novel’s characters than as an “omniscient” contrivance. Primarily, Miller differentiates his handling of the narrator in the two books by adopting a more transparent use of the device in Crazy Cock. Whereas in Moloch, Miller allows his narrator to pronounce his prejudices readily—causing some confusion as to whether the text faithfully renders the thoughts of its characters—in Crazy Cock he devises a narrator that furnishes the characters, especially Tony, with more rein to express their opinions. At the novel’s outset, for instance, Miller sets up a scene wherein Tony, while waiting for Hildred to arrive, slips into a Spenglerinspired contemplation of the city. Through the narrator, Miller provides a verbal cue to the reader that the narrative will shift to Tony’s thoughts, but he achieves this transition with little fanfare. Consequently, Miller creates in the resultant reverie a reflective quality that bears a strong resemblance to similar musings in later works: “A city, he said to himself, is like a universe, each block a whirling constellation, each home a blazing star, or a burned out planet … a universe of bricks, a madhouse of egotists, an atmosphere of turmoil, strife, terror, violence” (8–9). Miller breaks with the anecdotal thread by thrusting Tony into a lustrous pool of language and making him drown in thought and the “books” he writes in his head. As with the surrealist films that influenced his use of alogical sequencing, with Crazy Cock, Miller “recreates for us the time-destroying element of thought itself” (1939d: 64). Miller unfolds Tony’s Spenglerian monolog in spiral time, for

50 Brooklyn dawn one cannot measure thoughts, although they occupy a specific number of minutes, with the ordinary “passage of time as indicated by the slow-moving hands of a clock” (8). Miller, therefore, represents the depth of Tony’s agony and the expansiveness of his musings as transcending mere chronology. Anticipating the narratological splicing inherent to spiral form, Miller immediately follows this inner monolog with Hildred’s appearance, and the narrative shifts abruptly from Tony’s pensiveness to a dialog between husband and wife in which Bring berates his spouse for looking “worse than a whore” (9). By adopting this technique of spiral form, Miller adroitly portrays Tony as a man capable of both sublime insight and jealous blindness. Miller concludes the chapter with a snippet of conversation that offers only the slightest glimpse into the relationship between Tony and Hildred, but when juxtaposed with the prior scene, the dialog shows to Bring fear that his relationship will “burn out,” and that his hostile remarks toward Hildred stem from his inability to love unconditionally. In turn, Miller allows the reader to discover Hildred’s facility to twist language for her own purposes when she transfers attention from her tardiness to Tony’s own failings. Although Tony’s reverie and subsequent dialog exist textually as fragments, Miller recovers his past from the cumulative effect of such partial anecdotes by sacrificing narrative unity for a subjective, polysemous truth. With utter ease, Miller and his narrator effect transitions from one mode to another and anticipate Tropic of Cancer and the later autobiographical romances. In a maneuver that calls to mind his technique in spiral form, Miller lets Tony Bring, like Dion Moloch in Moloch and the supraself of the autobiographical romances, function as the sustaining force of Crazy Cock, but Miller ultimately undercuts this effect by straying from Tony’s thoughts and actions too frequently. While his portrait of Tony as a jealous, sensitive man appears at odds with his representation of the brash, headstrong Moloch, Miller reconciles the disparate autobiographical images by establishing them as two “geologic” levels of the supraself. Nevertheless—despite Tony’s central importance—Miller, repeating one of Moloch’s primary flaws, at times allows the narrator to draw attention away from Bring and focus exclusively on either Vanya or Hildred. In the autobiographical romances, Miller will certainly deign to tell the story of other characters, but he always filters these stories through the consciousness of the supraself: the supraself looms in the background even in the midst of an extended anecdote on a secondary figure, for “Henry Miller’s” story-telling ability and techniques rival the importance of the subject of the tale. In Crazy Cock, Miller begins to sense the significance of letting the supraself continually dictate the narrative content and pace, but occasionally—no doubt still holding to misguided notions of “objectivity”—he will undercut his spiral form by including scenes beyond Tony’s purview. Through such scenes, Miller grants the reader insight where Tony can only speculate. While spiral form’s flexibility gives Miller leeway to alter or even create “facts,” he always does so with an eye toward memorial reconstruction. In recreating the past, Miller moves beyond superficial notions of fact and fiction and attempts to deepen the supraself’s self-knowledge through an analysis of subjective truth. Miller fails to contribute to this spiral project of recovery in scenes that fall outside of Tony’s ken

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because he still seeks an objective, all-encompassing Truth apart from that of the supraself. Miller offers an example of how such a scene operates in the first pages of the novel in which Vanya—at this point unknown to either Tony or Hildred—journeys to New York from the West. Echoing Dreiser’s depiction of Carrie as she boards a train to Chicago carrying “a cheap imitation alligator skin satchel” (1900: 3), Miller allows the narrator—quite apart from Vanya, Hildred, or Tony—to describe Vanya as she waits for a train: “Standing on the platform in her heavy cowhide boots, a thick, brass-studded belt about her waist, she puffs nervously at a cigarette” (3). Unwilling or unable to develop beyond the realistic and naturalistic fiction he absorbed as an adolescent, Miller attempts in such episodes to maintain a detached, omniscient perspective that will ground the text in objectivity. Departing from spiral form—which demands that one turn inward to discover truth—Miller describes events that he (or Tony) did not experience and attempts to penetrate Vanya’s psychology, although she ultimately proves alien to him: “Was there something beyond the screen of language which imparts to us … ? It was impossible for her to formulate, even to herself, the meaning of that flood which illumined for her, at that moment, the hidden places of her being” (4). By portraying Vanya, a talented but tormented lesbian artist, as a unique consciousness given to half-formed epiphanies, Miller hopes to understand both Hildred’s attraction for her and Tony’s abhorrence. In the former instance, Miller discloses that Vanya, who can produce, requires only guidance and encouragement, properties that Hildred possesses in abundance. In the latter case, Miller divulges that Tony, a writer in name only, cannot yet grant Hildred the status as muse that she hungers for. Nonetheless, in this rather contrived initial portrait of Vanya, Miller remains unconvincing because he reduces her to a series of partially formed observations, disassociated facts, and artistic credos. Later, Miller would pivot spiral form on the consciousness of the supraself and cause all other characters to function as satellites that orbit around the central figure. Since the opening scene lacks Tony, Miller and the narrator cannot contrast Vanya via the protagonist, and so Miller develops a flat, nonspiral realism based on what Alan Palmer calls “negative knowledge,” the facts that “the character does not know but the narrator does” (2004: 82). Perhaps because his grip on realism loosened owing to his talks with Fraenkel and Lowenfels and his exposure to Luis Buñuel, André Breton and other surrealists, Miller later in the novel treats Vanya, an artistic grotesque, more as a caricature than as a character. He veils her internal struggle and motivation from the reader just as Tony cannot fully comprehend her actions. Paradoxically, Miller represents Vanya’s eccentricities and bizarre genius more authentically when he filters them through Tony’s subjectivity. In the character of Vanya, Miller creates an artistic grotesque that rivals those of the later spiral form. Miller demonstrates that gawky, eccentric, and inspired, Vanya moves to a personal rhythm, oblivious to the effect she makes on others. In a rudimentary internal monolog similar to the more extended use of the device in spiral form, Miller reveals that Vanya immediately entrances Hildred, and occasions Tony to lament that “from now on it was Vanya this and Vanya that” (23). Similarly,

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Miller experiments with a type of internal monolog when, at his first meeting with Vanya, Tony remarks to himself that she “had a da Vinci head stuck on the torso of a dragoon” (23). As he achieves with Moloch’s Prigozi, in this monolog-like device Miller employs physical caricature to penetrate the psychology of an artistic grotesque and contrast with the supraself’s relatively healthy outlook. The creator of bizarre puppets, Rimbaud-inspired poems, and startlingly incongruous art, Vanya shatters what little tranquility exists in the Bring household. Hildred, showering attention on Vanya, arrives at ridiculously late hours, misses appointments, and even sleeps with her friend when she stays the night. After Hildred rescues Vanya from an asylum, the artist moves in permanently. Vanya “chews on the cuds of her poetry” and “masturbates with paint,” but Tony nevertheless marvels at “the fecundity of this genius with the dirty fingernails” (100, 200, 79). In spiral form, Miller depicts most artists as grotesques. Consequently, Miller indicates that Vanya, despite teaching Tony— both directly and indirectly—about art and what it means to labor under the spell of an overwhelming creative urge, cannot reconcile her life and work. Through his caricature, Miller suggests that Vanya personifies what he and Fraenkel would later label the “Hamlet” type. Miller argues in the Hamlet correspondence that modern artists such as Vanya possess a high degree of “unnaturalness” and live through the intellect—art—rather than the visceral (12, 51). Vanya’s mental problems— expressed not only in her trip to the asylum but also in the novel’s final pages when she declares “I’ll go mad … go mad”—illustrate her inability to become truly one with her work. In Hamlet, Miller refers to such a split as schizophrenia. Miller argues that real artists (such as Tony), as opposed to grotesques, achieve an inner harmony as they unite the warring factions of mind and flesh. In Vanya’s outlandish painting, Miller represents her attempt to reorder the world to match her intellectual conception. Although her struggle fails—as all such efforts must, for they fail to accept life in toto—Miller employs it as an important counterpoint to the goals Tony must set for himself. Despite her flaws, Miller demonstrates that Vanya presents an attractive figure to Hildred—a woman drawn to the mysteries of the artist—and thus provides Miller with the opportunity to explore Tony’s relationship with his muse—antagonist. In Miller’s first extant portrait of June—the woman whom Kingsley Widmer refers to as a “Dark Lady of passion”—he differentiates Hildred from Mara/Mona only in degree (1990: 43).19 Miller grants June, in her various guises, a vital place in his spiral form because she represents the slippery, ever-receding truth toward which he quests.20 Miller further complicated June’s protean image, for, as Dearborn observes, he “began to alter the facts, caught up in the climate of June’s deceptions” (1991a: 117). Because his aesthetic issues forth from the desire to solve the riddles of selfhood, Miller locates in June’s enigmatic being, the key to the past for which the supraself searches. In traversing the labyrinthine geography of his relationship with June, Miller recreates the death of his potential being and the birth of an artist: “We are preparing now,” he writes in The Time of the Assassins, “for the death of the little self in order that the real self may emerge” (1956: 37). Miller positions Hildred—Mara, Mona—as both the object of and the impediment to that longing for artistic resurrection. Emanating from a house of revolving,

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distorted mirrors, the image of June thwarts Miller’s efforts to reach an unequivocal answer to his probing questions. Within each portrait of the supraself, Miller looks at June from a different, and unsatisfactory, angle. Miller echoes spiral form’s insistence on subjective truth by creating in Hildred a trickster figure who destabilizes meaning with practically her every word and action and thus leads Tony to discover the principles of spiral form. As he achieves in spiral form, Miller employs Hildred to subvert any notion of linear, monovalent Truth, for to her no story seems improbable, no suggestion too ludicrous. Perhaps mirroring Tony’s thoughts in an analog to the internal monologs he uses in spiral form, Miller causes the narrator to remark that Hildred uses “words … words … words … . She gobbled them up, spewed them out again, added them up, juggled them” (80). Whereas Vanya and Tony paint and write, Hildred’s polyphonic carnival of words constitutes a veritable oral symphony, and with this semantic noise Miller self-reflexively underscores the impossibility of signifiers to capture the signified. Just as he accomplishes in the mature work, Miller deflates his narrative’s drama with a complex series of digressions that both add to and detract from any sense of plot. Miller privileges language play and de-emphasizes facts by aiming Hildred’s discourse at confusion, even chaos, as when for example, in mentioning her new acquaintance, Hildred blithely speaks “as if [Tony] knew all about the Spaniard, whereas he had never heard of him before” (81). Revealing his new obsession with subjective truth, Miller represents Hildred as lying at every opportunity, as though she cannot separate fabrication from reality. In so doing, Miller problematizes the notion of Truth itself, just as he questions it in the autobiographical romances by replacing dramatic action with anecdotal—and, therefore, partial—observation. Miller highlights how Hildred forces Tony (the supraself) to recognize how language shapes meaning in many anecdotes, including one in which Hildred, after Tony discovers the falsity of her excuse that she stayed with her “sick” mother, accuses her mother of lying: “So my mother really said that? … and you swallowed it!” (30). In an effective moment that underscores the inability of fully explaining the past through language, Miller causes Hildred simply to laugh when—still practicing an archaeology of the Truth—Tony questions her as to why her mother would lie. With this anecdote Miller cuts to the center of Hildred’s character, for he demonstrates that her confidence in the power of her tales to decenter Tony’s objective notion of truth proves so great that even when apparently unmasked, she wears another costume beneath the first. Through the character of Hildred, Miller exposes the ultimate futility of spiral form because, as a verbal contortionist she dissimulates to such an extent that her lies merge with truth and defy separation from any angle. Miller undercuts Hildred’s effectiveness as a device of spiral form, however, because he portrays her in scenes apart from Tony—for example, the reader witnesses Hildred at the Caravan and with the psychiatrist. Miller establishes part of Mara/Mona’s effectiveness as a “Dark Lady” from her absence. Creating an aura of mystery, Miller represents—via the internal monolog—the supraself waiting by himself, speculating on Mara/Mona’s whereabouts, suffering, and

54 Brooklyn dawn trying to create, and Miller often launches into spectacular reveries and microessays as a result of the lack of actual “drama” or action. In lifting the veil in Crazy Cock, Miller dilutes Hildred’s enigmatic power because he depicts Tony less as a tragic figure and more, Ferguson observes, as a “pathetic character” verging on a cuckold (1991: 184). As in all his books, Miller allows the supraself to take precedence in Crazy Cock. Dearborn reminds readers that Miller originally planned to title the text “Lovely Lesbians,” but decided to shift the focus to Tony (1991b: xxi). Although Miller develops Tony’s reactions to Hildred’s love for Vanya as his principal subject in terms of narrative action, he ultimately makes Bring’s troubled attempts to write act as the unspoken theme that drives the novel. In all the book’s anecdotes—from Tony and Vanya’s meeting to Christmas at Bring’s parents’ home—Miller seeks to record the supraself’s quest to write. Miller recognizes this quest and causes Vanya to discern and say to Tony, “it’s good for you, this suffering … it’ll improve your writing” (156). Foreshadowing his concerns in The Rosy Crucifixion, Miller focuses on the need for Tony to kill his old self and experience rebirth. Miller demonstrates that Tony, given the freedom to write, finds that he cannot compose, although he pretends to. Bringing to a fevered pitch the wretchedness that Tony feels when Hildred showers love on Vanya, Miller relates an anecdote wherein—incensed that the women left him alone with his parents at Christmas—Tony throws the apartment’s furniture and his manuscripts in the fire when his wife complains of a chill: “he sat on the gut table and watched the flames licking up ten years of scribbling” (147). In the gesture, as Vanya would label it, Miller reveals a twofold purpose. On the most basic level of action, Miller indicates through the fire the true misery of a man distressed about his wife’s inviting a lesbian to live with them. As he suggests in other anecdotes—such as when Hildred crawls into bed with Vanya or when Tony reads Vanya’s love letter to Hildred—in the fire scene Miller represents Tony as feeling both betrayed and inadequate. Ironically, Miller reduces Tony’s whole existence not to his concept of art, but to the crucial question he finally poses to Vanya—but not, significantly, to Hildred—at the gut table: “Are you or are you not a pervert?” (106). As he underscores with the novel’s title, Miller demonstrates that Tony’s sense of manhood—already threatened by Hildred’s then unorthodox role as provider—seems endangered. Ultimately, Miller allows Tony’s perceived emasculation—stemming from the conflict between the Bohemian existence he leads as an “artist” in Greenwich Village and the puritan conservatism of his upbringing—to drive him to attempt suicide at least once.21 On the deeper, more symbolic level characteristic of spiral form, however, Miller employs the fire to operate as an emblem of Tony’s burgeoning autobiographical aesthetic. As the remnants of Tony’s artistic impotence smolder, Miller permits him to witness the passing of his former, voiceless manner of writing and the phoenix-like rise of his future, auto-centric literary concerns. Soon after this event, Miller relates that Tony starts to transcribe his life—and the effects of Hildred and Vanya on that life—into an outline for his true artistic project: “all he did was scribble notes” (157). Miller implies that, in collecting the anecdotes for books to come even while living through the humiliating incidents he jots down,

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Tony undergoes a process of artistic education that teaches him to look inward for the source of his pain and transform—and thus transcend—that agony into the substance of art. Although Miller creates impressive portraits of Hildred and Vanya, readers will quickly realize, because of the many techniques of spiral form that surround the narrator’s description of Bring, that Miller locates Tony, and not the women, at the novel’s core. While each character dominates certain anecdotes (Hildred, for example, oversees Vanya’s release from a mental asylum, while in another anecdote Vanya tells the story of her rape) as the novel progresses, Miller inserts the more experimental passages when Tony commands the narrative. Miller places two techniques in particular, the reverie and the dream, almost exclusively near Tony. Many critics, including David Littlejohn, note that “some of the most agreeable fantasies” in Miller “take off from the rankest obscenities” (1970: 43). While in Crazy Cock, Miller fails to reach the sexual extremes he exhibits in autobiographical romances such as Tropic of Capricorn or Sexus, in Tony’s reverie—experienced as he aimlessly walks in the wake of a sexual encounter—Miller begins to approach one of his favorite devices of spiral form. Miller reveals that, disgusted by finding Hildred and Vanya sleeping in each other’s arms, Tony explores the New York nightlife and eventually yields to the solicitations of an intoxicated woman. Although Tony desires to remain faithful to Hildred, he succumbs, perhaps to spite his wife for her attachment to Vanya. Rather than resolving the anecdote, however, Miller simply dissolves it with a kaleidoscopic vision of the New York streets: A sheet of ice, no thicker than the band of a ring, covered the asphalt. It was a mirror broken into an ocean of light waves, a mirror in which all the colors of the rainbow flashed and danced. A theater loomed up; the lobby had vertigo. It was not a lobby but a huge illuminated funnel revolving at high speed; into this dizzy, crystal maze long queues advanced with an undulating motion, like gigantic waves flinging their plumed crests against the shores of an inlet. (1991: 48) In this passage, Miller forces Tony, his thoughts intensified by both Hildred and his tryst, to explode into an impromptu poem, the manifestation of his constipated creative urge. While Miller introduces the above passage via the narrator, he soon dissipates the third-person device and only Tony’s inner voice remains, detached from any narrative action. Shunning externally dramatic moments and plot, Miller digresses from a linear temporal frame and observes that, escaping from the confines of his mental prison, Tony occasionally casts off the thoughts of Hildred that consume him and writes in his head. In Tony’s reverie—impressionistic to the verge of surrealism—Miller offers a frenzied antidote to what Erica Jong terms the “dour, dismal, [and] gray” tone of many of the anecdotes (1991: xiii). Revealing that Tony feels bitter and jealous most of the time due to incidents such as Hildred’s trip to the theater with the Spaniard or her accusation that Tony might harbor homosexual tendencies, Miller permits Tony to release pent-up anxiety

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through his mental prose poem, while at the same time he avoids the photographic mimesis that inadequately captures Truth. Providing a drastic counterpoint to Tony’s typical sedentary existence, Miller designs the reverie’s hyperkinetic imagery to burst forth in a frenetic roar. Miller further punctures the reverie’s relation to action by causing the mirror and theater to function self-reflexively. In the broken mirror of art—represented by a “sheet” of ice—Miller creates a symbol whereby Tony views himself on stage, a comic figure gesturing histrionically as life rushes by. With this symbol, Miller reveals that vertigous, dizzy, Tony seeks to exit the maze in which he finds himself imprisoned, although he, of course, sublimates this desire and its only manifestation comes in these periodic flurries of creative activity. Miller uses this technique often in Crazy Cock, denying closure to his “inexhaustible” life story. Miller studied psychoanalysis in the works of Freud, Jung, Rank, and others, and he considered the oneiric aspect of life of equal importance to consciousness. In Moloch, Miller uses dreams in a somewhat awkward manner, but in Crazy Cock he employs a surrealistic technique that foreshadows his usage in books such as Black Spring. After a truncated anecdote concerning a “shameful scene” with Hildred and Vanya, Miller depicts Tony’s decision—after wandering “dismally from one sordid memory to another”—to kill himself (67). After Miller describes Tony’s suicide attempt, Miller lets Bring fall into a—one assumes drug-induced—slumber during which he dreams a nightmare: Suddenly a hand seized him by the nape of the neck and flung him backward into the mire. His arms were pinioned. Above him, digging her bony knees into his chest, was a naked hag. She kissed him with her soiled lips … . He felt her bony arms tightening about him … suddenly, in her clawlike grip, there glittered a bright blade; the blade descended and the blood spurted over his neck and into his eyes. (1991: 69) Once again, Miller introduces a technique of spiral form through his narrator— “he was rapt away into another time”—but apart from the pronoun “he” instead of “I,” the device does not interfere with the rendering of Tony’s dream (68). Clearly, Miller develops the nightmare as an unconscious metaphor of Tony’s suicide attempt. By using a dream—an ostensible digression from the principal narrative action—Miller may delve deeper into the subjective truth than he could by conventional narrative means. Miller shows that, unsettled by Hildred’s abiding interest in the frankly lesbian Vanya, Tony feels trapped and betrayed, and the sudden violence of the hag’s hand mirrors Hildred’s abrupt desire to please Vanya. Paralyzed by the thought of assuming a secondary role in Hildred’s life, Tony cannot write, a fact Miller significantly represents by Bring’s “pinioned” arms. Tony finds himself in a subordinate role both consciously, his dependence on Hildred’s schemes, and unconsciously, under the hag’s body. Obsessed with discovering whether his wife and Vanya engage in sexual activity, Tony views Hildred’s lips as potentially as soiled as those of the hag. The culpability for the

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suicide attempt, which he symbolizes in the hag’s murderous knife blows, Tony lays at the feet of Hildred. In portraying this and other of Tony’s dreams, Miller not only accounts for Tony’s motivations, but also explodes traditional notions of time. Miller reflects the achronological nature of spiral form through the narrator’s comment that Tony enters “another time.” In the above dream and reverie, Miller distances Tony from the realm of minutes and days and lets him enter an expansive, potentially infinite arena where he can search through the geologic layers of his being. In charting the supraself, Miller uses dreams, reveries, and other devices to move beyond the external boundaries that limit most realist and naturalist narratives. In what readers might deem to be the novel’s climax, Miller unfolds a two-part epiphany in which Tony extends Dion’s artistic discoveries in Moloch. In the first part of the epiphany, Miller portrays Tony lying in bed next to Hildred, fantasizing on “ice-cold time, without divisions and without arrest. A circular, prenatal time, without springs, or pulse, or flux” (174). In Tony’s vision, Miller reflects both his and his character’s growing cognizance of spiral form. Undoubtedly adding the scene in a Parisian revision, Miller offers in Tony’s fantasy a rudimentary definition of the artistic philosophy that will soon drive his work. Tony dreams of the interconnectedness of past, present, and future, and in the dissolution of boundaries that mark dreamtime, Miller mirrors the fragmented depictions of self he evinces in spiraltime. Unconcerned with how fantasies contribute to the overall narrative action, Miller interests himself with creating a sense of psychological accuracy, whether or not that aura finds its locus in linear temporality. In the second part of the epiphany, Miller reveals that Tony’s dream soon affects his consciousness and that spiral form will soon become a reality. After developing anecdotes concerning the trio’s anemia and Tony’s hemorrhoids, Miller represents Bring’s ultimate epiphany, which comes after he decides to “rehearse the drama of his life” (198). In a metafictional moment, Miller suggests that Tony suddenly realizes that one cannot recapture an entire life and comes to the conclusion that his experience consists of “seismographic orgasms” that portend far more than a simple list of events (199). As he achieves in similar scenes in spiral form, Miller demonstrates that the process of artistic catharsis supersedes the goal of comprehensiveness, for Tony stops feeling sorry for himself and begins to compose literature in as frenetic a manner as he did his reveries: “he had his words copulate with one another to bring forth empires, scarabs, holy water, the lice of dreams and the dream of wounds” (199). In short, Miller demonstrates that Tony starts to create the polystylistic, multivocal story of the supraself. Just as in spiral form Miller avoids completely ignoring dramatic action, in writing, Tony does not cease to care about his travails with Hildred and Vanya, but he releases them from blame and acquires the control necessary for extended self-analysis. Orgasm follows orgasm as Tony launches into the endless story of himself. Miller halts his narrative after a troubling, surrealistic image of Vanya as viewed through Tony’s eyes. As with The Rosy Crucifixion, Miller fails to reach the end of his Capricorn notes, as though to finish the story would force him to cease his project of self-mythologization. In Crazy Cock, Miller lacks the sustained force of the spiral form of the autobiographical romances, but he makes several important advances

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on Moloch. Most important, in Crazy Cock, Miller reduces the third-person narrator’s role significantly. Only the thinnest veneer of intrusion coats the text, and Miller causes many passages to function like unspecified first-person narrative. Miller filters Tony’s thoughts through the narrator somewhat, but he does not impede those thoughts as in Moloch. Miller also positions his male protagonist in a more exclusive fashion. Whereas in Moloch, Miller repeatedly expresses other characters’ thoughts, in the second novel he diminishes such information and, indeed, readers will find most of it in the beginning of the text. Miller also eliminates much of the bombastic, awkward rhetoric that mars his first effort. His lyrical language seems much more controlled and works with the narrative—even when rupturing an anecdote—rather than against it. Still developing his notion of subjective truth, Miller makes excellent strides in Crazy Cock. Miller tells Emil in a letter of 10 May 1930 that he thinks he “will be through … with realistic literature” when he finishes Crazy Cock, a fact indicative of the new aesthetic he propounds in the novel’s final pages (1989: 52). In this letter, Miller looks toward the autobiographical romances, texts that will combine elements of his first two novels—anecdotes, caricature, reverie, dream, and memory—with several additional components—including first-person narration, unbridled sexuality, and a looser structure—and forge a new, explosive aesthetic of spiral form.

3

Parisian tempest

There are times when I myself no longer know whether I said and did the things I report or whether I dreamed them up. Anyway, I always dream true. If I lie a bit now and then it is mainly in the interest of truth. Henry Miller (1962c: 83)

In Paris, Henry Miller learned to dispense with facts and dredge the silt at the bottom of his heart for the truth that would drive his spiral form.1 Physically and emotionally drained by his travails with June and the equally difficult task of recording that struggle, Miller arrived in Paris with ten dollars, a draft of Crazy Cock, and little hope. Miller quickly sensed the futility of finishing Crazy Cock according to his previous plan: “The literary had to be killed off” (1994d: 51). Everywhere Miller turned, he saw an inversion of the realist/naturalist mode from which he worked. For Miller, this new artistic perspective meant a flight from “dead fact” toward spiral form and its reliance on “signs and symbols” (1956: 55). At theaters such as Studio 28, the surrealist films of Buñuel, Machaty, and others tacitly scoffed at the notion of plot, while experimental writers such as Blaise Cendrars, Georges Duhamel, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline reconfigured “facts” in an effort to cut through the facade of appearance and discover a deeper, firstperson reality.2 From painters such as Matisse and Chagall, Miller gleaned a sense of color and perspective.3 J.D. Brown correctly asserts that another movement— Dadaism—“encouraged humor, disorder, and destruction, … elements Miller had already discovered in himself” (1986: 36). During long talks with Michael Fraenkel, Miller grasped the static, death-like nature of surfaces and sought the chaotic, “dark, hidden, concealed sources of the putrefaction,” while he redoubled his interest in dreams and psychoanalysis owing to the inspiration he derived from his contact with Anaïs Nin and her collage technique (Fraenkel 1945: 48). Still searching for the resounding first-person voice he would employ in the autobiographical romances, Miller absorbed and synthesized these various concepts readily. Using his friend Emil Schnellock as a sounding board, Miller declared, “the hell with form, style, expression and all those pseudo-paramount things which beguile the critics. I want to get myself across this time—and direct as a knife thrust” (1989:

60 Parisian tempest 72). By using spiral form, Miller certainly achieves this goal in the product of his desire, Tropic of Cancer. Miller gleaned much from the great ferment of artistic experimentation that he witnessed, and his studies affected his own output—and its concomitant reliance on spiral form—in a number of positive ways. First, they gave Miller a sheer excitement that stands foremost among his new breakthroughs. His enthusiasm for the sights and sounds of the Parisian art scene left him bursting with the need to express himself on the page, whereas hitherto he simply wanted to write. Second, they created an urge—a phenomenon he calls a “white heat”—that prompted Miller to strip away the techniques of realistic fiction that stood, bufferlike, between him and his auto-creative instincts. On the blasted-out ruins of his two previous third-person failures, Miller then erected the principal accomplishment of spiral form, the supraself. No longer enslaved by a wish to remain objective, in the Tropics, Miller recreates the drama of his life according to the caprices of his own subjective truth. Like Cendrars, Miller “can tell the most monstrous lies and remain absolutely truthful” (1941f: 151). By jettisoning the unnecessary ballast of literary convention, Miller rises to the rarified air of personal mythology and spiral form. In Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, and Tropic of Capricorn, Miller establishes the fluid spiral form that will aid him on his journey of self-discovery. He always thought of his narratives as a means of comprehending his place in the cosmos and destroying the barriers between self and text. As he claims in The World of Sex, “when my writing becomes absolutely truthful there will be no discrepancy between the man and the writer” (1941g: 6). Like Jacques Derrida in his conception of natural writing, Miller strives in his Parisian narratives to express the “full and truthful presence of the divine voice to our inner sense” (Derrida 1976: 17). For Miller, the act of writing objectively impedes this process, for it glorifies the signifier rather than the signified, the word rather than life. In the Tropics and Black Spring, Miller attempts to demystify the signifier by destroying the bridge between self and text. Although both autobiographical romances “progress” temporally, Miller adopts the spiral flux, with its metaphoric twists and turns, to illustrate that he regards the journey itself as more important than the ultimate destination. With his avalanche of words, Miller buries the notion of a finite self for, despite the proliferation of signifiers, he cannot locate the signified, the origin. Miller and the Parisian books thus unite at the moment of composition: the autobiographical romances represent a palpable emblem of Miller’s spiritual struggle, a “mental topography,” in Caroline Blinder’s terms (2000: 2). The narratives equal Miller and Miller equals the narratives, but neither variable exists in a static realm. In Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, and Tropic of Capricorn, Miller explores the growth of the supraself and celebrates his artistic resurrection and acceptance of life by recovering the past in an “entirely personal, subjective, biased, and prejudiced”— and thus spiral—manner (1994f: 31). Through the use of rhetorical hyperbole, Miller endlessly defers the “capture” of his self, even though—paradoxically—he deepens his understanding of that self. Recognizing this propensity in Miller’s work, William Gordon declares that “for Miller, art could be embraced as a way simultaneously to enhance life and to create it” (1967: 47). In his texts, Miller

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accomplishes more than simply to recite the facts of his life. He remolds incidents in a grand (re)vision of the self. If, as John Sturrock observes, “autobiography raises into consciousness whatever unconscious process the autobiographer accepts has brought him to his present condition,” then Miller recasts this ineffable process into a palpable, spiral form (1993: 6). He uses the first-person narrator as a conductor who injects old notes and facts with a new, cataclysmic verve in an effort to explain his artistic renaissance. Miller employs this energy—present at the moment of writing, as Gordon suggests—to amplify both his life and text with an urgent, spiritual tone. “My aim, in writing,” Miller claims in his “Autobiographical Note” to The Cosmological Eye, “is to establish a greater REALITY. I am not a realist or naturalist; I am for life” (1939a: 371). Consequently, Miller creates the greater reality to which he refers from a fusion of external data with a fecundating consciousness. He thus anticipates James Olney, who—in discussing the creation of autobiographical metaphors—glosses Miller’s personal cosmography by asserting that “even as the autobiographer fixes limits in the past, a new experiment in living, a new experience in consciousness … and a new projection or metaphor of a new self is under way” (1972: 331). Olney, like Miller, comprehends that the order and meaning a text extracts from experience lie not in the events themselves but in the writer’s mind. In the spiral form of the Tropics and Black Spring, therefore, Miller posits no claim to replay history, but instead seeks to analyze and comment on it. Working in a mode that Ihab Hassan labels the “cosmic picaresque,” Miller fragments and distorts his experience in an effort to reflect the supraself’s conception of the world as living death and his reactions to that spiritual malaise (1967: 59). In the cosmically picaresque Parisian texts, Miller rejects a “plotted” model of the universe in favor of a spiral, anecdotal one. Miller turns both autobiographical romances on an axis of what Steven G. Kellman calls a “structure of permanent digression” (1980: 124). Throughout these narratives, Miller permits anecdote to dissolve into anecdote and fantasy to yield to fantasy. By emphasizing such antisequencing, Miller creates in the books an aura of randomness. Because of this ostensibly desultory construction, Miller may adopt a nonlinear temporal scheme and approach the supraself spirally. Since he makes digression normative rather than exceptional, he causes the autobiographical romances to appear conversational or epistolary in tone. Several critics have noted this tone, including Fraenkel, who remarks that Cancer evokes “the living throbbing quality” of speech (1945: 48). Similarly, Leon Lewis argues that “the thread of Miller’s narration often approximates the style of conversation—surges, rapid changes of emphasis and tone, repetition, and, most significantly, digressions” (1986: 42). Miller hinges spiral form on precisely this colloquial pattern, but he reconfigures the oral mode into an epistolary one.4 Although Miller provides no salutatory or valedictory structure to the various anecdotes in the Tropics and Black Spring, the tone of intimacy created by the first-person narrator suggests that Miller modeled his autobiographical romances on the personal letter. Nin referred to Miller’s epistolary technique as a “loose mad kind of letter writing” that “is full of surprises, no tapestry weaving, no arduous mountain climbing, just diving” (Nin and Miller 1987: 89). Indeed, Miller allows the various anecdotes of the autobiographical romances to assume the appearance

62 Parisian tempest of letters on a variety of subjects. By choosing such a format, Miller may range from a chatty description about the adventures of a friend to a jeremiad on American capitalism to burlesque fantasy to the pensive musing of his more serious moments. In all of the various “letters,” however, Miller occasions the supraself to function as the textual center by editing what his “correspondent” will read. Since each section may function as a separate textual unit, Miller makes frequent abrupt shifts, such as those Lewis outlines above. Because Miller always concerns himself with the supraself, however, he sees to it that the sections may also operate in concert—like a sequence of letters written to the same correspondent—and delineates various facets of his personality. Because he writes in spiral form, Miller may approach the supraself from a multiplicity of angles not only within a particular autobiographical romance but also across his oeuvre. Despite titling two of the books similarly, Miller views the supraself from radically different perspectives in the Tropics and Black Spring. In Tropic of Cancer, he follows the course of the post-rebirth supraself, a Whitmanesque individual who has ceased to struggle in the ordinary sense, who accepts the ebb and flow of life unconditionally. In Tropic of Capricorn, he presents the supraself at the nadir of a personal hell, a man who flees from his life by wallowing in a sea of mindless sex and self-pity. Brown succinctly explains the difference between the two: “Cancer celebrates personal liberation; Capricorn condemned the imprisonment of the self” (1986: 44). In Cancer, with his explosive amalgam of caricature and poetry, Miller depicts a supraself confident of its art and at peace with itself, whereas in Capricorn he portrays the supraself’s false starts and dissatisfaction. Black Spring, in many ways, functions as a liminal text, with Miller straddling the boundary between chaos and contentment. Writing in spiral form, Miller can infuse all of his portraits with his current wisdom, a philosophy based on personal responsibility and acceptance, and achieve the “self-narrativisation [that] is imperative to transcending thrownness,” the Heideggerian feeling of spiritual displacement (Sheehan 2002: 100). He uses reveries and interior monologs, diatribes, burlesque fantasies, dreams, catalogs, and anecdotes to take the place of a linear plot, for Miller’s Parisian revelation taught him that text and self should unite seamlessly. With the chaos and flow of the narrative, he mirrors the progress of his life. Employing lyric organization, Miller dissects in the autobiographical romances the innumerable layers of the supraself and searches for the secrets of the soul.

Tropic of Cancer Setting aside Crazy Cock for his “fuck everything” book, Miller reached into his guts and found Tropic of Cancer, a carnivalesque jumble of self, semen, and solace written in true spiral form. “It contained everything,” Lawrence Durrell avows, “speculations, soliloquies, short-stories, strings of images, flights of fancy” (1945: 1). Durrell’s reverence for Cancer thus stems in part from the autobiographical romance’s spiral form. In a conscious effort to hack up a “gob of spit in the face of art,” Miller ignores both thematic and formal convention in his 1934 tour de force (2). With Tropic of Cancer, he causes the experimental techniques and stray flashes of

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brilliance of his first two novels to coalesce into a riveting self-vision written in the ebullient free-associative language that George Orwell calls “a flowing, swelling prose, a prose with rhythms in it” (1968: 497). No longer muted by the encumbrance of an artificial, superfluous, third-person narrator, Miller allows the supraself’s voice free rein to probe the peaks and valleys of experience. In Tropic of Cancer, Miller sacrifices devices such as plot and characterization for a lyrically organized record of the supraself’s transcendence of the worlds of both art and experience. Separating Cancer into fifteen unlabeled sections—which he further partitions by placing gaps between certain paragraphs—Miller traces the mental and artistic growth of the supraself during approximately one-and-a-half years of a sojourn in Paris.5 By eliminating chapter and section headings as he employs them in Moloch and Crazy Cock, Miller suggests his growing dissatisfaction with the traditional novel form. Newly released from the constraints of Brooklyn, Miller underwent a process of formal experimentation of the sort explained in the following passage from Otto Rank’s Art and Artist: “[The] artist, liberated from God, himself become god, soon overleaps the collective forms of style and their abstract formulation in aesthetic and constructs new forms of an individual nature, which cannot be subsumed under laws” (1932: 24). Intent on scuttling convention and self-apotheosis, Miller—no doubt influenced by Joyce’s Ulysses—underscores his autobiographical romance’s fragmentary nature by refusing to erect a structural edifice around his story. Since Miller uses spiral form in Cancer, he sequences most of the text’s various anecdotes not in a logical progression, but in a subjective order. He technically progresses—each section ultimately (apparently?) advances temporally on its antecedent—but within each part Miller ranges wildly and muddies linear notions of time. The autobiographical romance begins in medias res and, rather than concluding, simply stops—phenomena that Nin attributes to Miller’s “instinct … for non-realization” (Nin and Miller 1987: 275). Between these intervals, Miller uses the supraself to expose the death-in-life experienced by most and to offer the alternative of true acceptance. He discourses on both the sublime and the pedestrian. He produces both fantasy and art. He lives. While examining every section’s myriad anecdotes, fantasies, dreams, diatribes, catalogs, reveries, and interior monologs would necessitate a study at least as long as the autobiographical romance itself, an analysis of representative examples, as well as an examination of Miller’s treatment of time and sexuality, should convey a sense of the text’s methodology of spiral form. Readers may easily interpret the first section of Cancer—the twenty-one pages that Norman Mailer hails as a “literary wonder”—as a manifesto of the self and spiral form (1976: 8). At the narrative’s outset, Miller discloses that he no longer requires the wooden voice of a thirdperson narrator to tell his tale: “I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive” (1934: 1). With Cancer’s first-person narrator—the primary element missing from his previous efforts—Miller signals a revolution in American prose by relating his story with unprecedented candor. Willing to delve into previously uncharted regions of experience, Miller, via the supraself, breaks one literary and social taboo after another. Finn Jensen remarks that “the chaotic order of the

64 Parisian tempest novel is very much like a rhizome, a set of relations without a center … in constant movement,” yet the supraself’s presence allows one to focus on the “inner pattern” (2004: 69). Employing the supraself as the focal point of these frantic relations, Miller transcends the superficial elements of personality and seeks self-knowledge in dream, thought, metaphor, analogy, and other arenas beyond simple action. By eliminating the third-person narrator, Miller also permits the polystylism that marks spiral form and avoids the need for awkward transitional devices. When Miller wishes to switch modes in Cancer, he may simply do so without justifying himself. In derailing any particular anecdote, Miller may pursue another equally vital line of thought: No single part of [my book] is finished off: I could resume the narrative at any point, carry on, lay tunnels, bridges, houses, factories, stud it with other inhabitants, other fauna and flora … I have no beginning and no ending. (1941e: 27) Just as the supraself continues to grow with each new experience, Miller may enlarge his spiral text indefinitely. Since the pool of anecdotes, fantasies, dreams, reveries, diatribes, and other devices from which Miller may choose never ceases to expand, he must select—and ultimately truncate—those which best represent the angle of the supraself he wishes to examine. Using the first-person narrator, Miller thus frees himself from any sense that he must discover and disclose the whole truth in his writing, for the quest for meaning never ends. Anticipating Derrida’s claim that “the idea of the book, which always refers to a natural totality, is profoundly alien to the sense of writing” (1976: 18), Miller, alluding to spiral form, declares early in the text that Cancer “is not a book” (1934: 2). Consequently, Miller occasions the supraself—newly liberated from his self-imposed mental prison—to declare that he will sing—“a little off key perhaps”—and dance over the reader’s “dirty corpse,” for from his fresh perspective he realizes the speciousness of distinctions between art and artist, text and individual (2). In denying Cancer’s status as object—and thus making it a “gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty”—Miller refuses to reify the supraself as well (2). Thus, Miller employs spiral form, declaimed as from an aesthetic manifesto in the autobiographical romance’s early pages, to counter the reductive, essentializing position of “Literature.” Process, self-actualization, constant becoming— Miller stresses these elements above all others in his aesthetic clarion call. Miller makes the supraself reject the concept of the book not because he ignorantly assumes that all writing will cease, but because it supports his notion that “Literature” represents a false, outmoded order wherein writers and their narratives exist as separate entities. For Miller, art and artist function harmoniously. As Brown asserts, “the inseparability of the artist and his art is clearly at the heart of Miller’s aesthetic vision” (1986: 38). In the supraself’s manifesto, Miller announces his intention to dissolve the artistic boundaries between subjectivity and truth. Within the artistic proclamation that opens the autobiographical romance— and that sets the tone for the subsequent sections—Miller introduces two other

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important elements: spiraltime and raw sexuality. Fresh from the quasi-realism of Crazy Cock, Miller quickly condemns time-bound notions of self: “the cancer of time is eating us away … . The hero then is not time but timelessness” (1934: 1). Miller develops spiral form in part to develop the illusion of such timelessness. By denying the boundaries between past, present, and future, Miller may submerge the consciousness of time and concern himself with living each moment fully. The supraself defiantly declares that It is the twenty-somethingth of October. I no longer keep track of the date. Would you say—my dream of the 14th November last? There are intervals, but they are between dreams, and there is no consciousness left of them. The world around me is dissolving leaving here and there spots of time. (1934: 2) In positing the dissolution of time, Miller provides an annotation for the anecdotal method he employs in Tropic of Cancer. He suggests that the lacunae between—and within—each of the autobiographical romance’s fifteen sections parallels the notion that between each “dream” lies an irretrievable gap. Miller permits certain events, thoughts, impressions, objects, and people to impress themselves on the supraself’s mind like a fantastic dream. In these “fantasies,” Miller indicates that the supraself experiences life in such a frenetic manner that he loses his sense of linear time, and, as Miller notes in The World of Lawrence, the “concrete reality of the herd” (1980: 173). Recalling David Hayman’s theory of nodality, in the book’s various anecdotes Miller represents the spots of time that the supraself can remember. For Hayman, such spots, or “nodes,” represent a “complex foregrounded moment capable of subdivision and subject to expansion” (1987: 73). Miller anticipates Hayman with his concept of temporal “spots.” Since each spot fails to “contribute to a coherent and generalized narrative development,” they instead “break the narrative surface, standing out or being readily isolable before blending into verbal context” (73). In spiral form, Miller consistently ruptures the “generalized narrative development” in favor of nodality, a phenomenon that allows him to shift focus at will. Miller cannot depict each spot or anecdote fully, for a spiral universe exists in each. A sketch of Bakhtin’s theory of biographical time will help to elucidate Miller’s notions of narrative temporality in spiral form. For Bakhtin, certain “crucial events” contain “biographical significance” (1981: 89). Between two adjacent moments may lie an “extratemporal hiatus” that forms a digression from life (91, 90). Readers might interpret the anecdotes that Miller chooses to relate as holding biographical significance. Since the supraself now revels in both the squalid and the sublime, Miller’s concept of a “crucial event” differs sharply from that of Bakhtin, who refers to examples such as falling in love or marriage. Such biographically significant incidents—what Miller labels “quintessential moments”—form the basis of the “dreams” that make up Tropic of Cancer (1941g: 54). The gaps between these moments signify such extratemporal hiatuses. By developing spiral form, Miller, as Lewis reminds his readers, may “try to arrest or step out of the temporal

66 Parisian tempest progression that calibrates history” (1986: 25). Because he tells the story of the supraself, Miller may dictate what constitutes “crucial” and thus present the illusion of one’s existing in a personal timeframe where one may “throw away the calendar” that constrains most individuals (1939c: 3). Miller deviates from Bakhtin’s concept, however, for in spiral form the author may retrace his steps and discover significance in a heretofore neglected moment. Such a recovery process allows Miller the flexibility to repeat an incident or interpose new material in a familiar setting. Raoul Ibargüen locates the source of this plasticity in “the time of writing … a time … which opens the possibility of mimesis, retrospection, and dream coexisting in the same narrative” (1989: 241). Ibargüen essentially describes what Miller refers to as spiral form but misattributes it to writing. Miller argues that his polytemporal and polystylistic method enables him to “augment the whole emotional trend” of a particular autobiographical romance or section (1941g: 54). Spiral form results in what Miller’s character Borowski refers to as the supraself’s “anecdotal life” (1934: 3). Most readers quickly discern the text’s heteroglossia and realize that Miller fragments the supraself’s subjectivity via the anecdote rather than plot, a fact that contributed to accusations of the narrative’s pornographic intent.6 Spiral form, then, encompasses the time of writing, but does not function synchronously with it. The methods of spiral form draw their parallels more from memory than from writing, for they transcend such isolated acts and holistically embrace the inexhaustible body of the supraself’s experience. Since Miller strives to relate the entire (subjective) truth about the supraself in spiral form, he includes unbridled accounts of sexuality within this body of experience. In the autobiographical romance’s collage-like manifesto, Miller wastes little time in employing obscenity as a means to shock readers out of their complacency: O Tania where now is that warm cunt of yours, those fat, heavy garters, those soft, bulging thighs? There is a bone in my prick six inches long. I will ream out every wrinkle in your cunt, Tania, big with seed … . I know how to inflame a cunt. (1934: 5) Miller will not couch the textual record of the supraself’s desire in the euphemisms of the hypocritical living dead. Via the supraself, Miller issues a blunt challenge to those who would closet their passion in niceties. He does not, as Maurice Charney correctly observes, simply cause the supraself to “tote up his triumphs and enter them into a record book” (1981: 99). Instead, Miller occasions the supraself to revel without shame in sexual abandon. Far from enacting what Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar pejoratively label a “theology of the cunt,” Miller seeks to celebrate his liberation in all realms of existence (1988: 116). Miller never posits sex as the goal of the supraself’s quest, as even a cursory examination of Cancer’s Van Norden suggests, and he openly questions the validity of such an objective: “anything that reduces a human being to a commodity, well, what could be worse?” (1994k: 113). Although the supraself accepts, rather than represses, biological urges—a phenomenon embodied in his paean to Tania’s cunt—Miller does

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not reduce him to a compendium of those desires. Clearly, Miller illustrates how lust comprises but one facet in the supraself’s existence. Indeed, Miller demonstrates that in giving free rein to those passions, the supraself injects the other areas of his existence—including his art—with a renewed vigor. Miller, as Charles Glicksberg recognizes (1971: 138), often alternates his most violent scenes of passion with his most joyous reveries, and this certainly holds true for the above passage, for he directly follows the supraself’s fantasy of Tania with a reverie-like description of a walk: “Indigo sky swept clear of fleecy clouds, gaunt trees infinitely extended, their black boughs gesticulating like a sleepwalker” (1934: 6). In short, Miller proves that the supraself approaches all aspects of life—not only the sexual—with a powerful ardor. Although one may read the first part of Tropic of Cancer as a manifesto, Miller certainly infuses the section with the wide variety of genres and techniques typical of spiral form and creates what John Parkin identifies as a “battleground of styles and modes” (1990: 243). Because Miller—in Ibargüen’s language—“broke naturalist observation into anecdotal observation,” most of the narrative’s various divisions spiral wildly around the supraself in a medley of textual strategies (1989: 224). Besides the manifesto, sexual fantasy, and reverie mentioned above, Miller—who, in a moment of metafictional self-consciousness, moves “the typewriter into the next room where I can see myself as I write”—attempts to probe the supraself’s subjectivity with eschatological diatribes, interior monologs, catalogs, fantasies, and a number of anecdotes, including one about Mona (1934: 5).7 In his drive to write down “all that which is omitted in books,” Miller fills his narrative with a carnival of voices and tactics as he describes the supraself (11). Self-reflexively, he lets the supraself remark that—in the face of the manic tsunami of life that threatens to wash him away from art—“there is scarcely time to record even these fragmentary notes,” a sentiment underscored by Miller’s pervasive use of sentence fragments to reflect urgency (12). Through the staccato pace with which he imbues the narrative, Miller establishes an atmosphere in which the supraself carries himself away in his thirst for life and self-knowledge, a phenomenon that often effaces not only time, but the room, street, city, country, and planet where its body—as opposed to his emotionally charged spirit—resides. By frequently switching between modes, Miller permits the supraself’s subjectivity to blot out all else, not because of his solipsistic delusion, but because he becomes overwhelmed with the sheer joy of existing another moment. As Hassan observes, through the supraself, Miller thus “dissolves the city into his emotions, into remembrances more vivid than the city ever was” (1981: 98). With the multiplicity of textual strategies inherent to spiral form, therefore, Miller recreates the pure exhilaration the supraself felt during his rebirth. In Tropic of Cancer, Miller employs anecdotes far more than the other modes, a strategy that reflects his tendency in spiral form to characterize the supraself from his relations with unliberated individuals and artistic poseurs. Miller slices up the supraself’s reality—one recalls that he envies the title “A Man Cut in Slices”—with a sequence of miniature portraits (1934: 41). He spirals through a great number of anecdotes in an attempt to juxtapose the supraself’s mental wellbeing with a variety

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of grotesques. Through depictions of, for example, Boris’s hermetic systems and petty greed, Carl’s clowning, Fillmore’s Russian harlot, Nananatee’s strange abode, and Sylvester and Moldorf’s self-deluded talk, Miller both establishes the healthy enthusiasm of the supraself and paints a picture of the world in which he attempts to scramble for a meal and a place to sleep so that he may create art. Miller suggests that as the supraself observes these grotesques, he moves among them but avoids their existential emptiness, for his actions indicate not the decadent, ossified spirit of his compatriots, but a purity of intention. Indeed, Miller demonstrates that, even when he cons a whore or commandeers Fillmore’s money before shipping him off, the supraself acts with an insouciant joy rather than bitterness or a warped sense of righteousness. In short, Miller peoples his anecdotes with caricatures who still seek the inner solitude that the supraself has glimpsed within himself. Many figures in the anecdotes function as neurotic counterpoints to the supraself in Cancer, and Miller’s use of spiral form reflects this fact. Based on columnist, Wambly Bald—who expressed chagrin at Miller’s “total disregard for accuracy”— the sexually obsessed Van Norden represents by far the most extreme case (Wood 1980: 8).8 With the character of Van Norden, Miller epitomizes the concept of living death that the supraself wishes to avoid (1934: 9). In his comment that his portrait in Tropic of Cancer “[is] a weird sex fabrication,” Bald correctly notes Miller’s use of caricature, but he fails to interpret its import (Wood 1980: 9). Although he may have concentrated on a particular aspect of Bald, Miller undoubtedly recognized that facet as both central to the reporter’s character and in utter contrast to that of the supraself. “Distortion is inevitable,” Miller told Kenneth Turan, “but in the main it [his writing] was truthful” (1994c: 230). In observing Van Norden throughout section eight, Miller’s supraself subtly compares his own outlook with that of a diseased spirit. True to spiral form, Miller strips away what he considers extraneous in Van Norden and presents the manifestations of a deeper subjective reality. A columnist for the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune, Van Norden can think of nothing but “cunt” and how to “make” them: “all I ask of life is a bunch of books, a bunch of dreams, and a bunch of cunt” (1934: 108). Unlike the supraself’s take-it-or-leave-it attitude toward sex, Van Norden allows his desires to consume and paralyze him. Although Van Norden aspires to write, his quest for the perfect subject and mode of expression parallels his futile search for the perfect cunt: “it is impossible for him to get started on it [his novel]” (136). Contrary to the supraself’s statement that “I am not interested in perfecting my thoughts,” Van Norden cannot accept himself and the world in which he lives (11). Plowing through books in the same “disdainful” manner in which he discards women, Van Norden fails to experience life in any but the most muted of manners (137). He makes noise and appears furiously active, but his perspective never rises above distortion, as when he trains a flashlight on the shaved pudendum of his “Georgia cunt”: “the more I looked at it the less interesting it became” (143).9 Unlike the supraself who, with his Emersonian eye, finds endless mystery in all things—for example, the “truly herculean efforts” of a hungry sparrow—Van Norden seems drained of all vital impulse and unable to cease the death-like

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struggle that comes from failure to embrace all facets of life (32). Illustrating spiral form’s utter disregard for continuous narrative, Miller punctures his anecdote about Van Norden in several places. Most prominently, Miller inserts an extended burlesque-filled anecdote about Carl’s “seduction” of Irene, but he also interrupts the narrative thread with the supraself’s dream about Van Norden’s penis— ”about the size of a sawed-off broomstick”—lying on the sidewalk (131). With this dream, in which Van Norden ludicrously and pathetically attempts to copulate with a reluctant woman, Miller crystallizes the supraself’s disdainful view of his acquaintance’s sexual desperation. By employing a dream, Miller both reveals the unreality of Van Norden’s situation and allows the reader to witness the supraself’s deeply ingrained revulsion. Miller further distends the time surrounding his anecdote of Van Norden with internal monologs, an anti-capitalist diatribe, an anecdote about the supraself’s proofreader’s job, a memory of Mona, an anecdote about a pimp, a diatribe on sex, a reverie on Matisse, and a catalog. By employing these multifarious strategies, Miller provides himself with a method by which to both condemn Van Norden from a variety of perspectives and show that the hyper-sexed character does not obsess the supraself to the exclusion of all else. Relating an incident in which the supraself watches Van Norden have sex with a whore, for example, Miller compares the passionless, commodified performance between the supraself’s friend and a fifteen-franc prostitute to “one of those crazy machines which throw the newspaper out, millions and billions and trillions of them with their meaningless headlines” (148). With this statement and the diatribe that follows it, Miller moves from Van Norden and his machine-like actions to a statement of the supraself’s philosophy. The anecdotal action and its literal and figurative climax recede to the background while the supraself and his analysis of the situation spiral to the fore: “You can get over a cunt and work away like a billy goat until eternity … [but] nothing will create that spark of passion if there isn’t the intervention of the human hand” (149). Essentially, through spiral form Miller may offer metacommentary on the anecdote’s grotesque action and distance the supraself from the implications of that action. Clearly, Miller indicates that the supraself does not equate sex with passion. Passion comes from shedding one’s prefabricated emotions and learning to trust one’s instincts. The reverie with which Miller ends the anecdote provides a tangible example of such passion within the supraself: Even as the world falls apart the Paris that belongs to Matisse shudders with bright, gasping orgasms, the air itself is steady with a stagnant sperm, the trees tangled like hair. On its wobbly axle the wheel rolls steadily down hill; there are no brakes, no ball bearings, no balloon tires. The wheel is falling apart, but the revolution is intact … . (1934: 170; Miller’s ellipses) In this passage, Miller evokes the sense that the supraself, like Matisse, basks warmly in the blinding jubilance inscribed in the commonplace. Miller succinctly demonstrates that, finding beauty in wretchedness, the supraself cheers deliriously

70 Parisian tempest while others struggle around him. Such exuberant outbursts contrast markedly with Van Norden’s despairing cry that women “want your soul,” for the journalist has no soul to give (134). Like Nero (or Nietzsche), the supraself transcends worldly agony by celebrating. While Miller interrupts Van Norden’s struggle repeatedly, the “digressions” actually serve to explicate his behavior, and thus intensify reality. Fantasy constitutes another method by which Miller investigates subjective truth in spiral form. Miller will often launch into a fantasy when the supraself must face an insufferable bore or a surrealistic situation. In terms of spiral form, the former situation functions as a defense mechanism, while the latter contributes to what Nicholas Moore labels the narrative’s “jazz improvisation” (1943: 13). In an early example of fantasy, Miller illustrates the supraself’s ability to detach himself from a situation and enter a timeless arena where he may express the “bubble and splash of a thousand crazy things” (14).10 Providing a backdrop for the supraself’s fantasy, Miller suggests that, although Moldorf knows enough “to fill the British museum,” he, like so many of Miller’s artistic grotesques, lacks a vital spark (10). Miller divulges that while the supraself admires Moldorf’s technical virtuosity, he disdains the pathetic schism between art and man revealed when, in a conversation, Moldorf rambles tepidly about his family. By employing spiral form to illustrate how—in an effort to resist the deadening effects of Moldorf’s sterile banter—the supraself detaches itself from a situation and enters a type of nontemporal world, Miller shifts directly from the inane talk to a fantasy. In short, Miller permits Moldorf’s superficial discussion of bicycles and schools to mutate into a Dadaist parody: Fanny carries him to bed and drops a little hot wax over his eyes. She puts rings around his navel and a thermometer up his ass. She places him and he quivers again. Suddenly he’s dwindled, shrunk completely out of sight. She searches all over for him, in her intestines, everywhere. (1934: 37) In this burlesque fantasy, part of what Kingsley Widmer labels the “savage incongruity” of Cancer, Miller focuses on Moldorf’s true impotence and insignificance as a man (1987: 222–3). Miller implies that, contrary to the supraself—who unites the visceral and intellect seamlessly—Moldorf lives solely in the mind and withers in the realm of the body. By interrupting Moldorf’s monolog, Miller both conveys a sense of the artist’s separation from the world and allows the reader to glimpse the way that the supraself affirms his connection to life. In the supraself’s fantasies—other examples of which include a circus-like parody of Sylvester and one inspired by rancid butter—Miller adds another dimension to his personality. While one might interpret Miller’s fantasies as daydreams that reflect the supraself’s overwhelming impulse to extract the most out of each moment, his dreams reflect the machinations of his unconscious. Because Miller establishes in spiral form what Warner Berthoff calls a “plurality of agency,” he permits dreams to function not as a secondary element to the supraself’s story, but as a component equal in importance to the descriptive anecdotes and interior monologs (1979: 117).

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Capitalizing on spiral form’s heteroglossia, Miller allows room for the voice of the unconscious to provide its contribution to the supraself’s experience. Nin particularly influenced Miller’s interest in dreams, and even inspired him to keep “dream records,” as he notes in a letter of 30 May 1933 (Nin and Miller 1987: 166). Nin records in her June 1933 diary that Miller “is beginning to wonder what the quality of dreams is and how to render it” and later notes that she told him “there was a need of giving scenes without logical, conscious explanations” (1966: 224, 306). Deviating from the early novels’ pattern of labored transitions, in Tropic of Cancer, Miller initiates the spiral flow of dreams that he will perfect in Black Spring. Through dreams, Miller appears at irregular intervals to tunnel beneath the surface of reality. He occasions the supraself to dream a variety of fantastic scenarios, from the Eiffel Tower “fizzing champagne” to Van Norden chewing his rage to Jupiter piercing the ears of a lesbian (1934: 66, 132, 81). In the latter dream Miller provides an analysis of pretension as well as sheds light on the supraself’s notions of art. In the midst of an anecdote in which the supraself attends a concert, he carries his readers away from the music’s temporal sphere and transports them to a province where time cannot limit human experience. Upset that Ravel slows his tempo, the supraself remarks that “art consists in going the full length” (80). Bored, the supraself looks about him and, to his disgust, finds that “people everywhere are composed to order,” pompously experiencing the music through their minds rather than their emotions (80). In a typical maneuver of spiral form, Miller then causes the supraself to fade into a dream where “a woman with white gloves holds a swan in her lap” (81). The music cannot hold the supraself’s attention because he insists on containing the exuberant flow of life within set boundaries. Miller then demonstrates how the supraself descends into a string of isolated images: “little phrases from California, whales with big fins, Zanzibar, the Alcazar … deep in the icebergs and the days all lilac” (81). With the supraself’s surreal flight, replete with its bizarre imagery and jubilant chaos, Miller offers an antidote to the inertia of the music and the audience. Unfiltered and unexpurgated, the sequence “goes the full length” because it does not compromise artistic integrity—here identified as the unrestrained zest for experience—and captures the subterranean corruption beneath the facade of self-satisfaction evoked by the “stuffed shirts” (81). Miller juxtaposes this manic vision with the living dead to underscore the supraself’s rebirth and acceptance. While the supraself embraces life’s contradictions and finds peace in chaos, Miller never allows this acceptance to prevent him from depicting the supraself as he rails against injustice or stupidity. Thus, Miller shows that, preferring an active role to a passive one, the supraself accepts existence on a higher plane than mere unmediated receptivity. Rather than struggle against societal constraint, the supraself realizes that these forces cannot extend to his self-conception unless he allows them to. “I belong not to men and governments … I have nothing to do with creeds and principles,” he declares triumphantly (257). Instead, the supraself liberates himself by ceasing to act according to the traditional law—a law that inspires the dull conformity of the teachers in the Lycée or Sylvester’s languid drama—and conducts himself according to the dictates of his heart, a concept Miller refers to as

72 Parisian tempest anarchy: “in real anarchy, each man is an individual, is himself. He’s eccentric, and there are no rules to grapple with, and deal with him” (1994i: 180).11 Because he wishes everyone to break free from bondage, Miller occasionally inserts diatribes into Tropic of Cancer. Miller employs such vitriolic explosions not to indicate a struggle, but to operate instead as warnings or wake-up calls to those who march like automatons to a rhythm alien to their true desire. In spiral form, Miller uses such jeremiads to accentuate Cancer’s alinearity by serving as temporal asides. He often interrupts anecdotes with his vituperative sermons and allows the supraself the ability to deliver a metacommentary on the action. Examples of such diatribes include the supraself’s disquisition on German “indigestion” (which suspends an anecdote about Elsa), a discourse on passion (which interrupts a dinner with Sylvester and Tania), and a rant about New York, a “city erected over a hollow pit of nothingness” (which occurs during a walk) (26, 71). In each, Miller seeks to lay bare the deadening influence of modern civilization. Miller epitomizes his use of the convention in Tropic of Cancer’s spiral form in a diatribe near the end of the text. Dispossessed of a place to stay, the supraself travels to Dijon to teach English to French students in exchange for food and shelter. Deftly demonstrating the supraself’s leeriness of the world he expects to find there, Miller leaps out of anecdotal time and causes the supraself to offer an extended critique of capitalism’s obsession with money: All over the States I wandered, and into Canada and Mexico. The same story everywhere. If you want bread you’ve got to get in harness, get in lock step. Over all the earth a gray desert, a carpet of steel and cement. Production! More nuts and bolts, more barbed wire, more dog biscuits … . (1934: 270) In the diatribe, Miller depicts the supraself’s abiding need for independence. An economy based on capital rather than on meeting basic needs seems preposterous to him. According to the supraself, individuals should not have to prostrate themselves in exchange for sustenance. The bleak picture that he paints of capitalism contrasts markedly with the “keyboard of color” he finds in Matisse (167). Matisse, like all truly liberated people, represents an order in which the everyday world means not drudgery and homogeneity, but a sublime enchantment. Assembly line emotions yield ciphers, and the supraself reacts vehemently against such a lemming-like concern with submitting to the will of others. As a technique of spiral form, the diatribe allows Miller to both demonstrate how the supraself vents his anger at a society that entraps its denizens and present another angle of the supraself’s mental process. The supraself, who finds his foreboding justified, leaves Dijon—and its collection of “ciphers who form the nucleus of a respectable and lamentable citizenry”—as soon as possible, enacting the individualistic code it outlines in its diatribe (276). Miller dissolves the end of this diatribe into another device of spiral form, the catalog. Through the use of catalogs, Miller represents a chaotic flood of images that give the illusion of capturing every detail of his subject. Parkin refers to such

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catalogs as “timeless thresholds” (1990: 91). Parkin’s phrase seems apt because the catalogs simultaneously freeze the narrative action and flow on and on in a deluge of information. With his catalogs, Miller may distort time by employing image groups to convey a sense of movement and encyclopedic comprehensiveness, even though his narrative cannot bear the weight of such an onslaught of information. Although Miller perfects the catalog in Tropic of Capricorn, he also employs it to great effect in Tropic of Cancer because with it he implicitly parodies his prior need to encompass everything in his texts. Using catalogs, Miller subtly reminds the supraself (and the reader) that the story never ends, that “there never [is] a final draft” (1989: 131). Word tumbles after word in a breathless outpouring of textual noise. Apart from the catalog mentioned above (which continues further), Miller interjects the convention in many strategic locations, interrupting, for example, a description of the pseudo-pious Nananatee with a catalog regarding his “fumbling fingers, fox-trotting fleas, [and] lie-a-bed lice” (1934: 94). Other instances include an impressionistic catalog of Matisse’s art, an ode to Tania’s “aural amplifiers, anecdotal seances, burnt sienna breasts, [and] heavy garters” (5) and a wordcanvas depicting the banks of the Seine and its “musty porches of the cathedrals and beggars and lice and old hags full of St. Vitus’ dance” (16). Essentially, Miller occasions the catalogs to function as psychological landmarks to which the narrative may spiral back in the future—because life happens too fast to record more than a fleeting impression of even the most significant of moments. Through these landmarks, Miller conveys a sense of place or character in a type of frenzied shorthand. In his portrait of Carl’s room, for example, Miller achieves more than simple description because the urgency created by his catalog provides a fluid, threedimensional quality to his prose: “Always a dictionary lying open on a gilt-edged volume of Faust, always an open tobacco pouch, a beret, a bottle of vin rouge, letters, manuscripts, old newspapers, water colors, teapot, dirty socks, toothpicks, Kruschen salts, condoms” (291). Rather than expend his energies on an extended description of Carl’s apartment, Miller compresses and intensifies the supraself’s impressions of the environment with a metonymic list. In pell-mell fashion, Miller attempts to evoke a sense of the room, but at the same time he implies that the jumbled textual bric-a-brac cannot do justice to the scene. In the catalog, Miller conveys the barest notion of Carl’s carefree attitudes, the merest hint of his passions and habits. Because behind each individual component of the catalog lie myriad stories that still paint only part of the picture, with the catalog Miller halts the anecdote temporarily in the chronological sense, but then actually expands it by offering in the possible stories another temporal dimension that cuts—or spirals— across the external one. The reverie constitutes another element of spiral form in which Miller thwarts the notion of linear time. Although Tom Wood caustically refers to Miller’s reveries as “idiotic flights,” they form an important part of the supraself’s psychological picture (1976: 24). Far from writing idiotically, in the reveries Miller metaphorically reconstructs the overwhelming creative impulses that entrance the supraself and compel him to create. Unfolding a brilliant effusion of sensory

74 Parisian tempest impressions, Miller reflects in the reverie the supraself’s wonder at all he surveys and illustrates his need to transform his feelings into art. Miller achieves this effect of spiral form by imbuing his prose with the cadence of poetry. In these prose poems—emblematic of the “books” the supraself writes in his head—Miller often reaches a fevered pitch, building each image on its predecessor. With the reverie, Miller does not represent writing itself, but instead metaphorically depicts the mentally fertile moments that animate creation. Examples of such flights include the supraself’s walk along the Seine, his thoughts on Matisse, and his impressions of Paris, the “eternal city” (1934: 185). During each of these sequences, Miller interrupts the narrative’s forward progression and spirals through the vibrant chaos of the supraself’s divine visions. Almost mystical in proportion, reveries such as the one that perforates an anecdote about Fillmore attempt to capture the ineffable, transcendent feelings of awe that sweep through the supraself. In this scene, Miller depicts the supraself launching into a frenzied collage of images after staring at a naked woman: A glance at that dark, unstitched wound and a deep fissure in my brain opens up: all the images and memories that had been laboriously or absent-mindedly assorted, labeled, documented, filed, sealed and stamped break forth pell-mell like ants pouring out of a crack in the sidewalk; the world ceases to revolve, time stops, the very nexus of my dreams is broken and dissolved and my guts spill out in a grand schizophrenic rush … Great whore and mother of man with gin in her veins … I hear bells chiming, two nuns at the Palace Stanislas and the smell of rancid butter under their dresses, manifesto never printed because it was raining, war fought to further the cause of plastic surgery (1934: 250) Unraveling in the reverie a flourish of illogical sights and sounds, Miller allows the reader to experience vicariously—albeit imperfectly—the onslaught of emotion concomitant to the supraself’s epiphany. Importantly, Miller indicates that during such instances the supraself stands outside of the chronological current and taps into a vast and timeless reservoir of inspiration. The pattern of movement that the passage evinces stems not from physical progression but psychological energy. With his incongruous imagery, Miller underscores this mental vitality because he suggests the frenzied, far-reaching nature of the supraself’s thoughts. Granted a momentary revelation of cosmic mysteries, the supraself reacts with passion. With his use of reverie, Miller attempts to impart the spirit of this vision and reveal another level of the supraself’s consciousness. The interior monolog constitutes another method by which Miller explores the supraself in spiral form. Obviously capitalizing on a byproduct of his shift from third- to first-person narration, in the interior monolog Miller expresses the range of the supraself’s conscious thoughts. Unlike what he accomplishes in the reverie— in which the supraself seems to maintain little control—Miller gives the interior monolog a relaxed pace and generally concentrates on less abstruse subject matter. Miller integrates this device into the entire autobiographical romance, temporarily

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interrupting anecdotes with interior asides, explanations, or expostulations. Generally, Miller causes the interior monolog to run parallel to his anecdotes, but he may also allow it to diverge in order to cut across narrative time and revert to a prior memory. Miller will also mutate this device into several other conventions of spiral form, including the diatribe, reverie, fantasy, and dream. Essentially, Miller accomplishes this metamorphosis by suddenly shifting the tone of the prose. As with the anecdotes, Tropic of Cancer resounds with examples of the interior monolog, but some representative instances include the supraself’s discourse on “the physiology of love” and various animal penises, his intertextual comments on Papini, his thoughts on proofreading “in a lunatic asylum, with permission to masturbate for the rest of your life,” his memories of Mona, and his observations on Van Norden’s soul (1934: 2–3, 150). In the accumulation of these monologs, Miller establishes what J. Gerald Kennedy calls an “experiential sense of place” (1990: 499). Miller presents the supraself’s perspective of Montparnasse, Dijon, and other areas by allowing all description to flow through his consciousness. Miller delineates this “interior Paris” according to a subjective reality, rather than employing a necessarily partial objective mimesis (1934: 496). Miller unfolds a representative interior monolog during an anecdote regarding a discussion the supraself holds with Fillmore. Rather than report a dialog between the two men, Miller allows the supraself to deliver a discourse inspired by—but not identical to—this friendly debate. Arresting the anecdotal flow, the supraself takes the opportunity to extemporize on his (anti)literary aesthetic: Up to the present, my idea in collaborating with myself has been to get off the gold standard of literature. My idea briefly has been to present a resurrection of emotions, to depict the conduct of a human being in the stratosphere of ideas that is in the grip of delirium … . In short, to erect a world on the basis of the omphalos, not on an abstract idea nailed to a cross.12 (1934: 247) In this monolog, which possesses the characteristics of an essay, Miller dramatizes the driving principle behind Tropic of Cancer. In this autobiographical romance, Miller strives to maintain a unity between art and artist and to recreate the aura of immediate experience. By employing the interior monolog, Miller may create the illusion of eradicating the wall that separates text and individual by making subjectivity the subject of the narrative. Miller thus reacts violently against the gold standard of literature that impedes such a “natural” symbiosis between writing and writer because of its preimposed conventions and rules. By employing interior monologs to create a more transparent relationship between author and narrator, Miller reveals that the supraself wants a text composed of blood rather than abstractions. With the most essential technique of spiral form, the interior monolog, Miller filters everything through the supraself’s consciousness and blurs the distinction between creation and creator. Because he finally discarded the genre of novel in favor of the autobiographical romance, with Tropic of Cancer Miller marks a tremendous personal and literary

76 Parisian tempest triumph. In this, his first autobiographical romance, he learns to sing unerringly in his own voice, a voice that heralds both an innovative prose form and an expansion of literary themes. Presenting his version of truth, Miller disregards virtually all previous fictive conventions and forges a bond between form and individual virtually unprecedented. Drilling to the very core of literary hypocrisy, Miller exposes the falsity of adhering to pre-existing forms and urges artists to look within themselves for their own unique method of expression. As he remarks in “An Open Letter to Surrealists Everywhere,” “I didn’t write a piece of fiction: I wrote an autobiographical document, a human book” (1938b: 161). In his spiral form, Miller reflects his multidimensional view of self and quite effectively merges disparate modes—what Durrell refers to as the book’s “short poems”—into a coherent, unexpurgated portrait of the supraself (Durrell and Miller 1988: 114). Via the reborn supraself, Miller shouts his discoveries to the cosmos and continues to live.

Black Spring Originally titled “Self Portrait,” Black Spring seems a dramatic departure from Tropic of Cancer and the other autobiographical romances (Dearborn 1991a: 163). Written concomitantly with Tropic of Capricorn, Black Spring ostensibly separates, rather than fuses, Miller’s various spiral techniques. While Miller presents the Tropics and The Rosy Crucifixion as isolated, albeit fragmented, texts within his autobiographical project, he clearly permits readers to view Black Spring as a collection of smaller pieces, each of which explores Miller’s identity from a different perspective. Consisting of ten separately titled narratives, Black Spring, Miller’s favorite Parisian book, ranges from relatively straightforward anecdotes, as in “The Tailor Shop,” to pure fantasy, as in “Into the Nightlife ….” Jeff Bursey notes that this diversity frequently compels critics to deal with Black Spring simply by “recapitulating its contents … instead of examining it analytically” (2004: 23). The fragmented narrative, it seems, shares more with collections such as Max and the White Phagocytes and The Wisdom of the Heart than it does with autobiographical romances such as Tropic of Cancer and Plexus. One may, however, interpret Black Spring as a totality. Martin, for instance, likens the text to a Cubist painting, wherein an object appears radically transformed by way of a variety of perspectives, while Solomon observes that Black Spring “owes formal and thematic debts to the variety format utilized by a range of commercial amusements thriving at the turn of the [twentieth] century” (1978: 293; 2002: 86). As Martin and Solomon recognize, Miller’s Black Spring, like Winesberg, Ohio or Cane, functions as a lyrical novel whose disparate parts represent deviations on a theme. In his fugue-like fashion, Miller keeps the binary of fragmentation and selfactualization before the reader. In constant movement, “round and round,” the supraself persists in “seeking the hub and nodality” lost with the onset of adolescence and self-consciousness (1936d: 14). Fluctuating between the mist of nostalgia, the thralldom of false desire, and the peace of acceptance, Black Spring represents a liminal state within the supraself, a threshold between artistic struggle and higher consciousness. On this threshold, which Miller frequently represents in

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his characterizations of the Brooklyn Bridge, the supraself recognizes both the “unbearable” (1936i: 128) nature of the unexamined life and its “ridiculous, monstrous formations” and his inability to cross the threshold completely despite his “heroic struggles” (1936l: 196). The “self portrait” thus depicts a supraself “in slices”—to appropriate the title so attractive to him in Tropic of Cancer—struggling not to struggle, trying to reconcile his failures with his epiphanies. Unlike in the other autobiographical romances, Miller does not employ the anecdote as the central mode in Black Spring. While certain sections, most obviously “The Tailor Shop” but also at times “The Fourteenth Ward” and “Third or Fourth Day of Spring,” use the anecdotal style essential to the other autobiographical romances, fantasy, reverie, and burlesque dominate the book. In foregrounding these techniques and subduing the anecdote, Miller intensifies the text’s liminal qualities and creates a dream-world reflective of the artist’s momentary transcendence. As Jashhan notes, however, a purely “marked” or “excessive” narrative tends to jade its readers and thus undercut the very feeling that it seeks to prompt (2001: 17, 22). Whereas the other autobiographical romances intersperse their flights between large “unmarked” sections—thereby drawing attention to their transcendent qualities—in Black Spring, Miller employs “The Tailor Shop” as a textual fulcrum that balances the book’s more numerous frenetic sections and prevents a slide into undifferentiated surrealism. By placing “The Tailor Shop” at the text’s core, Miller somewhat solves the problems of “saturation” that Jahshan notes, when “stabilization” fails to take place before moving on to the next marked passage (21, 22). “The Tailor Shop” functions to ground Black Spring to the quotidian and emphasize that the supraself cannot sustain its journeys to “China” until it can absolve itself of all forms of desire. While the artistic consciousness may—in the “white heat” of creation—prolong such moments of metaphysical clarity, it cannot ultimately escape reality. With his Parisian breakthrough, however, Miller channels his creative energies to experience more and more such moments in an attempt to draw out the latent spirituality within himself and unify his fragmented consciousness. In Black Spring, then, Miller “meditate[s] upon that which [he is]” and that which he hopes to become (1936g: 249). In “The Fourteenth Ward,” Miller quickly establishes that his image of the supraself in Black Spring will reflect as through a shattered mirror. Distorting the facts slightly, Miller marks the supraself’s tenth year as the one in which he became self-conscious, false.13 Prior to his removal to a “Lutheran cemetery,” the supraself wanders in the “free, wild, murderous” realm of the street, a dream-like place where a “harmony of irrelevant facts … [gave to his] wandering a metaphysical certitude” (1936d: 3). Walking amidst corruption yet uncorrupted, the young supraself intuitively, like a precocious Whitman, accepts both the beauty and grime of the street. Crazy Willie Maine, the angelic Johnny Paul, the open sewer mains, the begrimed hands of the workmen—all this and more constituted a wholeness, an “inward peace and contentment” that the supraself lost with his move to the street of early sorrows (4). In a far more compact way than in Tropic of Cancer, Miller uses anecdotes to convey a sense of a nostalgic time before, as he writes in “The New Instinctivism,” the instincts “were murdered” (1931: 109). In this dreamlike-

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paradise, the supraself notes that “it was a period without end, one thing melting into another” (1936d: 8). This timeless realm, which soon gives way to the pressures and suffering of adolescence and adulthood, Miller conveys via the quick cuts of spiral form, catalogs, and a generous use of ellipsis. He cannot “capture” the period; he may only recreate its simulacrum, its potential: “Their names ring out like gold coins—Tom Fowler, Jim Buckley, Matt Owen, Rob Ramsey, Harry Martin, Johnny Dunne, to say nothing of Eddie Carney or the great Lester Reardon” (4). Behind this catalog stand innumerable memories and the security of childhood, concepts that Miller will later explore with increasing frequency. “The great change” of adolescence, however, destroys the supraself’s peace and initiates the suffering with which he will struggle for decades before his rosy crucifixion (4). Miller elaborates: Henceforward everything moves on shifting levels—our dreams, our actions, our whole life … henceforward we walk split into a myriad fragments … we walk against a united world asserting our dividedness. All things, as we walk, splitting us into a myriad iridescent fragments. The great fragmentation of maturity. (1936d: 10) Here Miller subtly annotates his aesthetic, both in Black Spring and throughout his oeuvre. The reveries, the anecdotes, the fantasies, the dreams that constitute the balance of the narrative, function not as a means to celebrate the complexity of human experience but as a way of lamenting the paralyzing effects of intellectual self-analysis. Over and over in his later work, Miller reveals his goal as the end of writing, the end of the symbolic, for only then will true inner peace arrive. Miller suggests that his spiral form, with its own “myriad iridescent fragments” serves as a metaphor of the supraself’s divided consciousness. Significantly, through memory “we live in the life of the mind, in ideas, in fragments” and the totality of childhood splits into a series of binaries—for example, morality/immorality, pleasure/pain, work/leisure—and creates the emptiness of desire that only complete acceptance may transcend (10). As Miller told Brassaï, his “books do battle with the adults who massacred the child living inside them” (Brassaï 2002: 17). On the Brooklyn Bridge, the threshold or purgatory the supraself traverses as he writes books in his mind, Miller describes “a man standing in agony, waiting to jump or waiting to write a poem … because if he advances another foot the pain of his love will kill him” (12). Here, in this liminal state, “the very armature of the body float[s] off into nothingness. Passes through you crazy words from the ancient world, signs and portents” (13). The Brooklyn Bridge here stands for the creative flights that transport the supraself, if ever so transiently, to “China” and self-awareness. In these moments, generously represented throughout Black Spring, the supraself can revel joyously in acceptance not only of art, love, and self-fulfillment, but commerce, lust, and pain as well. Elsewhere in his autobiographical romances, such reveries appear at irregular intervals, sparked perhaps by a word, a face, a place. In “The Fourteenth Ward,” such a moment when “suddenly the whole world roars again” occurs when the supraself encounters Dostoevski for the first time:

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Everything new and old, or touched and forgotten, is a fire and a mesmerism. Now every door of the cage is open and whichever way you walk is a straight line toward infinity, a straight and mad line over which the breakers roar and great rocs of marble and indigo swoop to lower their fevered eggs. Out of the waves beating phosphorescent step proud and prancing the enameled horses that marched with Alexander, their tight-proud bellies dipped in laudanum. Now it is all snow and lice, with the great band of Orion slung around the ocean’s crotch. (1936d: 15) With such reveries, Miller abandons any pretension to photographic mimesis and enters the realm of the psyche, where the supraself—and the reader— may transcend the quotidian. For Miller, Dostoevski’s philosophy or aesthetics matter less than the ineffable feelings that they mysteriously trigger within the supraself. Unbolted, the “cage” of reason yields to an eternal expanse of color, dreams, flight. Within such passages, often interpreted as purely surreal and alogical, Miller attempts in a tangible way to represent the supraself’s inner transformations and, possibly, to excite such a state within his readers. Such metamorphosis continues in the text’s final catalog, which bursts with “bandannas and black cigars; butterscotch stretching from peg to Winnipeg, beer bottles bursting, spun glass molasses and hot tamales … ” (17). Miller’s bizarre juxtapositions, the stuff of much modern poetry as Lewis astutely notes, with their alliterative sounds and homely referents, splash over the readers and drench them with both the flotsam of the physical and the jetsam of the metaphysical (1986: 36). Cutting his catalog short with an ellipsis, Miller apostrophizes the lost world “now chewed to a frazzle” and asks “under what dead moon do you lie cold and gleaming” (17). This question, and its concomitant query regarding the supraself’s lost unity, drives Black Spring as a whole and underpins the fragmented self-portraits that make up the rest of the book’s sections. The second selection, “Third or Fourth Day of Spring,” spirals back to the supraself’s childhood and examines the significance of his early home, particularly with respect to “the lovely diseases of childhood which make time stretch out into everlasting bliss and agony” (1936j: 21). Miller interrupts this anecdotal sequence with a microessay on schizophrenia and the Black Death, in which he celebrates “how marvelous it is that the whole world is diseased” (22). In this Spenglerian passage, Miller connects the supraself’s attempt to live joyously despite his foreboding of the apocalypse (as seen in the first page of Tropic of Cancer) with “the dance and fever” of Europe during the Black Plague. Miller praises this phenomenon, best exemplified in the laughter of Rabelais as he treats his dying patients, and, in a jeremiad, contrasts it negatively with the “false spring-time” of the present era, where “dreamers dream from the neck up, their bodies strapped to the electric chair” (26). Rather than laugh, contemporary humans consume “quack medicines,” both literal and figurative, the latter in the form of ideas for which “fanatics” and “simple idiots” alike “were crucified” (27). In flowing from anecdote to microessay to jeremiad, Miller uses spiral form to trace the supraself’s

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progression from the “healthy” grip of childhood illness to the more insidious diseases of ideology and progress that he bristled against and futilely attempted to prevent. The former, natural and predictable, stem from God, whereas the latter find their roots in hubris, power, and duty. These “destructive, disintegrating elements” at first lead the supraself to live “multiple lives,” and his “story is lost, drowned, indissolubly fused with the lives, the drama, the stories of others” (28). Once he abandoned himself to these forces, however, and accepted his own part in the world’s chaos, the supraself “moves sideways and backwards and forwards at will” as he launches into another reverie: “I move in strange tropics and deal in high explosives, embalming fluid, jasper, myrrh, smaragd, fluted snot, and porcupines toes” (29). Miller interrupts this flight with a discourse on writing, an anecdote, and a question whether “to live beyond illusion or with it” (32). Miller’s spiral form here decenters both the supraself and the reader and destabilizes the spatiotemporal logic of both the world and the rhetorical act. Ideology leads one into an abyss of pain and self-pity, but during the creative act—if ever so fleetingly—one may apprehend the source of the “murdered” instincts, what Hegel terms the Geist and Emerson calls the Over-Soul. “A Saturday Afternoon,” the next selection in Black Spring, also concerns itself with “this eternal moment which destroys all values, degrees, differences” (1936h: 39). Starting with an internal monolog, Miller merges the supraself with Whitman in an intertextual moment where Paris and America fuse in an endless Saturday afternoon. Sprinkling catalogs throughout the piece, Miller reflects the supraself’s daydream-like state as he wanders near the Seine, his mind teeming with images sparked by urinals and bridges. The supraself, for instance, links a urinal with Robinson Crusoe, launching into a microessay on the “pre-Christian” notion of “relative happiness,” a phenomenon destroyed by the “plague of modern progress” (44–5, 46). As in the earlier narratives, Miller links “civilization” with a taming of humanity’s instinct for satisfaction and wholeness. Ideas designed to divorce individuals from themselves, to crave an endlessly deferred “perfection,” leads to a catalog of misery: colonization, trade, free Bibles, war, disease, artificial limbs, factories, slaves, insanity, neuroses, psychoses, cancer, syphilis, tuberculosis, anemia, strikes, lockouts, starvation, nullity, vacuity, restlessness, striving, despair, ennui, suicide … (1936h: 46) The list continues, yet it brings “no desert isles. No Paradise. Not even relative happiness,” but only dour “men running away from themselves so frantically that they look for salvation under the ice floes or in tropical swamps, or else they climb the Himalayas or asphyxiate themselves in the stratosphere … ” (46; Miller’s ellipsis). In its quest to seek happiness in ever more complex ideas, humanity fragments itself, squelches the god-like impulses that it unselfconsciously felt, and destroys the world it attempts to elevate. Prefiguring a theme that he touches on in The Books in My Life, Miller remarks of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, “how little it

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mattered what the book contained; it was the moment of reading it that counted,” a moment that “placed the book in the living ambiance of a room with its sunbeams, its atmosphere of convalescence, its homely chairs” (47). Reading here becomes an act of creation. As Jahshan remarks, for Miller indeterminacy “is settled separately by each reader” (2001: 149). Continuing, Miller leisurely writes a microessay on bathroom reading—complete with catalogs of his past books, among them Joyce’s Ulysses—and the toilets themselves, a subject that soon leads to inspired catalogs and impressionistic musings on “Real eunuchs. Real hermaphrodites. Real pricks. Real cunts. Real banquets!” and other subjects that eventually lead to a discussion of Avignon’s Popes (52). Ultimately, this spirals back to the leitmotif of fragmentation when, after fantasizing about a “fat wench” sitting on the Pope’s knee, Miller contrasts the past with Modern decadence: “No schisms, no hairsplitting, no schizophrenia” (54). Self-consciousness, rigid morality, obligation—these destroy the spirit of modern individuals as they mature and sap the enjoyment once found in earthly pleasures: food, sex, laughter, music. Preferring the “primary colors [and] primary passions” of the papal frescoes to histories of the Popes, Miller laments that “words are dead” (55). In this way, Miller critiques rhetoric that seeks comprehensiveness and privileges his own spiral form, which tries only to ignite an “eternal moment” within its readers. Ostensibly about painting, “The Angel is My Watermark!” also serves both to gloss Miller’s written aesthetic and continue Black Spring’s recurrent image of fragmentation. Before describing “the genesis of a masterpiece,” Miller discusses his notebook and its “cryptic lines” wherein “a simple phrase may record a year’s struggle” (1936b: 59). In spiral form, Miller’s catalogs, reveries, fantasies all “stand for” the charged and mundane experiences within the “eternal moment,” the “universe within each second.” Miller then relates an anecdote wherein his “whole life rushes up in one gush” and he records “pages and pages of notes,” which he “feverishly annotate[es]” (60). This anecdote provides the raison d’être of spiral form: the impossibility of revealing more than a shadow of the passionate color behind the “facts.” One may write prolifically, fanatically yet fail to divine the gnosis, the eternal secret, much less share it with others. Exhausted with his efforts to transcribe his internal “dictation,” the supraself picks up Art and Madness, examines illustrations drawn by the mentally ill, and decides to paint a watercolor. Attempting to draw a horse, the supraself finds it difficult to stick to the anatomical facts and proceeds to recast the drawing according to instinct, feeling, for “the drawing is simply the excuse for color.” In spiral form, Miller, too, begins with a basic narrative outline, yet, just as in his depiction of the painterly process, the plot “is simply an excuse for the color,” for the supraself’s mad flights of fancy, his burlesques, his sexual acrobatics, his intellectual prejudices, his abysmal sufferings. The “color” coalesces to stimulate a transient feeling, an emotional touchstone within the supraself and the reader, just as in the act of creating his “masterpiece” the supraself regenerates himself with the frenzy of transforming a fifth leg into a penis and then into an arm. The process, the color, supersedes the “realm of the idea,” the “sickishly ideational” outline. Spiral form, often derided as no form at all, privileges the color of life over the black and

82 Parisian tempest white ideologies that force individuals to capitulate to reason and murder their instincts. The horse transmogrifies wildly, unrecognizably, yet the supraself finds pleasure in the unruly result, with its volcano, mountains, bridgework, and angel, commenting that “I am a colorist, not a draught horse” (70). After pausing his description of the painting with an anecdote about the supraself in 1927–8, Miller finally notes that supraself “blot[s] the horse out,” while acknowledging that “he’s still there” (73). The supraself, echoing the tenets of spiral form, comments that “when you’re an instinctive water-colorist everything happens according to God’s will” (74). Instinct, rather than reason, rules Miller’s aesthetic, for reason leads one to dissatisfaction and fragmentation while instinct conducts one to wholeness and God. After adding the inspired colors and finishing the painting, the supraself muses that “I am putting my whole life into the balance so that it may produce nothing … to have disorder you must destroy every form of order” (77). The shedding of desire, transcendence, requires a Spenglerian destruction of civilization and its discontents, demands that the conditions that spawned modernity’s fragmentation themselves explode. In Black Spring, Miller celebrates the supraself’s disintegration, for it will help lead the way back to instinct. After four ecstatic jeremiads against modernity and its attendant spiritual crises, “The Tailor Shop” provides Black Spring with some anecdotal grounding. Initially eschewing metaphysical discussion for incidents from the supraself’s life, “The Tailor Shop” cools off Black Spring with—in Jahshan’s phraseology—some “unmarked” passages about the days before the supraself committed to writing in earnest. Most of the first dozen pages or so of the “portrait” focus on other individuals and place in the background the supraself’s own struggle to become a writer. Brief, comedic tales about such men as the Bendix brothers, George Sandusky, and Tom Moffet illustrate the supraself’s (and his father’s) homosocial nature and mock the social hierarchy in which “the silk-lined duffers,” America’s aristocracy, spewed “pus and filth” out of their “dirty traps” (1936i: 99). Employing caricature as he usually does when dealing with individuals other than the supraself, Miller highlights the foibles of the motley gang of tailors and customers, yet, reminiscent of Herman Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” he also nostalgically stresses the security and comfort of the locale, which seems devoid of women. In one particularly amusing anecdote, the supraself’s father deals with a delinquent customer by “invit[ing] his cronies to lunch with him” at the customer’s bar and “commandeer[ing] a juicy squab, or a lobster à la Newburg, and wash[ing] it down with a fine Moselle” (91). Avoiding diatribes, Miller nevertheless effectively highlights the injustice of a system wherein the affluent may rob workers with impunity and at the same time underscores the ingenuity of the tailor’s ploy to exact his revenge. Midway through “The Tailor Shop,” however, the attention shifts back to the supraself. The anecdotes rise in intensity from a sexual romp and a dinner with the supraself’s first wife to a discussion of the supraself’s desire to write and a violent diatribe that signals a return to Black Spring’s primary leitmotif. The movement back toward the fragmented supraself occurs, appropriately enough, after Paul Dexter dies and the supraself offers his “condolences” to the widow, “a woman

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whose breasts seemed to sob out loud”: “I finally bent her over and without saying a word I raised her dress and slipped it into her” (100). The episode, notable in the relatively celibate Black Spring, typifies Miller’s use of sex in spiral form, for it countermands the dictates of rigid moral code with a natural act and subtly reveals the supraself’s discontent with his life, a phenomenon made even more plain in the anecdote involving his first wife. The supraself enjoys the sex, yet clearly uses it to escape from both his wife and his feelings of artistic inadequacy. Helping others as he does in Tropic of Capricorn and elsewhere, the supraself brings home the Baron von Eschenbach, a man down on his luck, to eat dinner. The supraself’s wife at first seems flattered to hobnob with royalty, but when she balks at the knowledge of the Baron’s syphilis, she underscores her ties to conventional morality, a fact that depresses the supraself. At this point in the supraself’s development, he cannot recognize and accept his wife and her own struggle. Gently nostalgic for most of its pages, “The Tailor Shop” avoids much direct discussion of the supraself’s own misery until the end, where it crescendos, but the shame and anger in the preceding anecdote suggest, deep suffering, nonetheless. After an anecdote about Tante Melia, during which the supraself’s “whole life stretch[es] out in an unbroken morning,” Miller reverts to the theme of the first sections of Black Spring, the enervating, fragmenting properties of modernity (120). Here, amidst the detritus of the supraself’s memories, lies the “love and murder” of modern life, where “new babies com[e] out of the womb, soft, pink flesh to get tangled up in barbed wire and scream all night long and rot like dead bone a thousand miles from nowhere” (123). Barbed wire, a bitter symbol of the mechanized destruction of the first “modern” war, here betokens the shredded identities and living deaths that await children once they mature and become either “crazy virgins” or “men with dog collars around their necks” in service of “the czar of electricity” (123, 124). The gentle anecdotes have dissolved into a jeremiad that eagerly announces the death of modernity and a “new world … coming out of the egg” that will lay the ground for the supraself’s resurrection and his return to an instinctive, whole existence (124). The supraself reads Nietzsche’s “droll” The Birth of Tragedy as he contemplates the fact “that a whole world could be diseased” (125, 126). An anonymous “dry fuck” in the crowded subway underscores modernity’s lack of passion, symbolizes the furtive, taboo quality of modern sex and brings the supraself’s despair to a fevered pitch (128). Automatically, inevitably, the supraself ends up on the Brooklyn Bridge, where the pain manifests itself directly: “I hate seeing people so deadly serious when I myself am suffering worse than any of them” (130). This leads to thoughts of violence—perhaps reflecting the ferocity needed for the supraself to write Tropic of Cancer years later—and rage: So far I haven’t had a thing to say about my own life. Not a thing. Must be I haven’t got the guts. Ought to go back to the subway, grab a Jane and rape her in the street … . Ought to stand on Times Square with my pecker in my hand and piss in the gutter. Ought to grab a revolver and fire pointblank into the crowd. (1936i: 130–1)

84 Parisian tempest The supraself’s earliest work—derivative, literary—lacked the forceful firstperson perspective and resounding imagery of the later autobiographical romances. In this way, the supraself subordinated his instincts and passions to the desires and conventions of others, avoided his story in fear of charges of solipsism and selfindulgence. The literal and figurative violence of the preceding passage—crude, defiant, alarming—reveals both the extent of the supraself’s frustration with his lot and his alliance with Nietzsche, Spengler, Céline, Goldman, and other radical thinkers who saw the apocalypse as a means to a new order of self-actualization.14 Once modernity’s cycle ends through chaos and anarchy, peace and acceptance will arise. After a brief catalog of grief, Miller connects the tailor shop itself with the living death he contemplated with Fraenkel: “Swimming in the crowd, a digit with the rest. Tailored and re-tailored … . The tragedy of it is that no one sees the look of desperation on my face” (131). Miller refigures the tailor to epitomize not the sentimental drudge of the previous anecdotes but an agent of modernity who helps to mask the faces in the crowd as they lumber toward their dehumanizing jobs and pay homage to the machine: “Smash it! Smash it!” the supraself cries in a fury against mechanized progress (132). Lost, “yowling and screaming,” the supraself deliriously dances a “merry whirl” in an effort to stave off madness and suicide, to spiral toward transcendence (133). In “Jabberwhorl Cronstadt,” the next narrative, Miller concentrates fully on the “merry whirl.” Inspired by such diverse sources as Lewis Carroll and André Breton, “Jabberwhorl Cronstadt” provides both a caricature of Miller’s friend, Walter Lowenfels, and a whimsical burlesque. The seemingly random wordplay emphasizes sound and feeling rather than sense: “queasy Buxtehude diapered with elytras and feluccas” (1936f: 137). As Bursey points out, however, “there is more significance to the wordplay than is immediately appreciable (2004: 24). Bursey admirably demonstrates that, apart from their sounds, Miller’s words form a “sexual cryptogram” among other effects that “manifest command of language and a firm control of the material” (34, 39). The “frame anecdote,” if the text can indeed support its weight, involves the supraself visiting the poet Cronstadt, who “must be having his period again” (1936f: 137). Images of male menstruation and pregnancy recur in Miller’s work and often refer to the pain that precedes creation. Paul R. Jackson asserts that “menstruation is the perfect symbol for a period of dormancy during which the writer sheds the dead matter of his experience as he waits for his ‘pregnancy,’” while Julia Kristeva more accurately views Miller’s imagery as “oriental, if not tragical” and narcissistic (1969: 41; 1987: 235). Cronstadt’s residence sparks several fevered catalogs from the giddy supraself, and the tale itself threatens to explode with words. The nuisances of life—“if the bell gets out of order, if the toilet doesn’t flush, if the poem isn’t written, if the chandelier falls, if the rent isn’t paid”—matter not if one may accept that “everything can be played in the key of C” (1936f: 139). In the Cronstadt home, joy resounds amongst the squalid and the sordid. As with the supraself, Cronstadt “scarcely use[s] the word [time] any more, choosing to live a more intense, nonconformist life (140). Snippets of conversation, surreal juxtapositions, and catalogs exemplify the notion—important to spiral form—that “Anything is a poem if it has time in it”

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(151–2). Even the jellyfish “is … the finest kind of poem. You poke him here, you poke him there, he slithers and slathers, he’s dithy and clabberous, he has a colon and intestines, he’s vermiform and ubisquishous” (151). The supraself delights in, shares in, Cronstadt’s ridiculous aesthetic and contents itself to listen to the highoctane monolog that leads Jabberwhorl from “venereal faucets” and the “pludal bed of the Sargasso Sea” to “live worms” and “dead cathodes and squirming infusoria” (152, 153). Singing as “the world sinks,” Cronstadt virtually collapses from his reverie and the supraself must lay him on the bed “like a dead and stricken swan” (154). Miller here parodies the impulse that drives Cronstadt (and perhaps the supraself) to delve so deeply into his art that he loses contact with the world, with the anecdotal style that grounds the supraself and provides needed contrast for his ecstatic flights. Nevertheless, beyond the caricature clearly lies admiration, for the supraself, too, seeks to sing as modernity shatters. Drawing its title from Freud, “Into the Night Life … ” illustrates another important facet of spiral form: dream. Prompted by Nin and her immersion in psychoanalysis, Miller paid careful attention to recording his dreams and their impact on his psyche. Throughout his later works—particularly in The Rosy Crucifixion— Miller inserted dreams and fantasies as a counterpoint to his anecdotes. “Into the Night Life … ,” however, contains no anecdotes based on the supraself’s wakeful life.15 The dream commences with the supraself in chains and in view of “the shadow of the cross,” perhaps a reference to his rosy crucifixion (1936e: 157). A weeping, naked, medusa-like hag, a questioning stranger, a sadistic surgeon, and a tribe of Native Americans, among many others, all float through the supraself’s unconscious, as do numerous bizarre images such as “the diaphanous legs of the amoebas scrambling to the running boards,” “lecherous, fornicating ghouls,” and “the butter yowsels in the mortuary” (161, 182, 187). In the dream, more properly labeled a nightmare, the supraself seems full of doubt and faces a series of demeaning, even dangerous, confrontations. While subjecting the surrealistic flight to rhetorical analysis seems beside the point, two of the dream’s many motifs link “Into the Night Life … ” to Miller’s dominant concerns in Black Spring. Distorted images of time, such as the hag’s silver watch dangling near her pubis and turning black, a clock “running down with nervous sweat,” and the “mad thing called sleep that runs like an eight-day clock” (158, 164, 188) reflect both the “eternal” nature of dream and the supraself’s own fragmentation. Mention of the Montreal and Brooklyn bridges intensifies this liminal sense of time, which culminates in a series of curved Japanese bridges where the supraself “could stand forever, sure of [his] destination. It hardly seems necessary to go the rest of the way for now [he is] on the threshold, as it were, of [his] kingdom” (177). The safety of the bridge, where the supraself “could stand forever lost in a boundless security” contrasts with the dream’s images of torture and suffering (177). Off of the bridge—frequently employed by Miller as a symbol of the transcendental experience of creation—the supraself faces or witnesses a series of horrible events, including “a trip-hammer pounding the dome of [his] skull,” his wounded daughter in the hands of a sadist, a stream of amputated feet, splintered feet, “a flood of blood-flecked men,” and his own mangled bowels and scalped head (170, 172, 178, 179, 183, 184). Although

86 Parisian tempest Lynette Felber reads “Into the Night Life … ” as a parody of Nin’s “symbolically suggestive imagery,” one may see that Miller reveals that even in his dreams the supraself, ripped to bits, fragmented, pays for his art in blood, in the suffering of life (2002: 38). Turning from the unsettling pain of “Into the Night Life … ,” Miller steers the Black Spring toward calm in “Walking Up and Down in China.” Miller establishes China as a symbol for the spiritual awakening stimulated by the creative act. Silent, dream-like, eternal, China borders the absence of desire and the presence of God. Equating France with China, Miller emphasizes its spiritual importance to the supraself as the land where the supraself experienced resurrection and learned to sing in his own voice. In China, the supraself recognizes the spiritual power of acceptance: “I have no desire to recover the past, neither have I any longings or regrets” (1936l: 191). The supraself’s convoluted walks, which, Béatrice Commengé suggests allow him to “discover a street that he has encountered again and again in his dreams,” transport him to China, beyond art, toward acceptance (2005: 13). “Born and reborn over and over,” the supraself takes “grand obsessional walks” and observes with “the proper spiritual gusto” all facets of life, whether “shitpumps” or “the hill of Montmartre” (191, 192, 193, 202). In China, as Amy M. Flaxman observes, Miller “makes no differentiation of the relative importance of things,” metamorphoses into an Emersonian eyeball (2000: 33). As Miller makes clear, “there are no clocks or calendars” in China or in spiral form, (1936l: 197). This contrasts with “the horror of the present,” the modern world “screaming in pain and madness” on its way toward Spenglerian destruction (199). The physical walks that transport the supraself to China thus melt time and merge with metaphorical “walks” through the past, where the supraself meets the ghosts of his past: the “princely, golden-haired” Lester Reardon, the “sissy” Joe Goeller, the “hump for the monkeys,” Jenny Maine (212, 213). In this past, the supraself reunites his fragments and makes his peace. Miller reflects China, provides a textual glimpse of this ecstatic state of mind, within the dizzying rhetorical devices of spiral form, the reverie, the catalog, the fantasy. Miller’s impressionistic flights merely stand for the feeling, the Godly instinct, that China represents: “Everything staggeringly alive, a swarm of differentiated matter. The warm hive of the human body, the grape cluster, the honey stored away like warm diamonds … I gather up the whole of France in my one hand” (202–3). This and other such passages attempt to depict the textual equivalent of the supraself’s epiphanic delirium and stir within the reader an emotionbased (rather than logic-based) empathy. Huge catalogs of places (“Point Loma Durham, Juneau, Arles, Dieppe”) and names (“Booker T. Washington, Czolgosz, Arthur Brisbane, Henry Ward Beecher”) convey “a thousand intimate details of [the supraself’s] life” and demonstrate how spiral form merely functions as a metaphor, a vehicle, for the tenor of the supraself’s life (208, 210, 211). The rush of words both illuminates the feeling of China and demonstrates that, as Flaxman astutely observes, “when his emotions overwhelm him, Miller has trouble communicating his ideas” (2000: 51). The trips to China, however, cannot last, and the supraself must come to the realization that “the whole past is wiped out” (216).

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Switching modes, the narrative ends with a solemnly peaceful jeremiad that suggests that “the whole world has become a running sore” and prophesizes that “the world will go out like a Roman candle. Not even a blade of grass will grow again” (217). In “Walking Up and Down in China,” Miller employs spiral form both to create the simulacrum of the supraself’s spiritual peace and to fragment it once more. As its name suggests, “Burlesk” apostrophizes the burlesque and emphasizes the importance of pleasurable escape to the supraself. Solomon argues that by appropriating the burlesque, Miller “engage[s] in a kind of cultural transvestitism” that allows him to “relocate the strip show inside the psyche” (2002: 93). This “strip show” manifests itself via spiral form, wherein Miller may divest himself of memory after memory, fantasy after fantasy, teasing his readers with the endlessly deferred promise of the supraself’s naked self. As frequently happens in spiral form, Miller jumps from one anecdote, in this case one about an “English cunt with all her front teeth missing,” to another, here concerning a walk and taxi ride toward Billy Minsky’s National Winter Garden burlesque show (1936c: 221). Along the way, the supraself enters a store-front church, observes a group of testifying evangelists—every bit as intriguing as the characters he will meet at the burlesque—and joins a visitation: “We’re all going down in a body to look at Sister Blanchard’s dear dead son. All of us—Colossians, Pharisees, snotnoses, gaycats, cracked sopranos— all going down in a body to have a look” (224). The catalog emphasizes the religious spectacle and collective energy evident in the street. The supraself finds religious power not in the traditional Church, but within idiosyncratic personalities who feel God’s presence.16 The supraself lampoons the preacher, yet also recognizes that his histrionics crackle with laughter and spiritual energy. Solomon astutely notes that, while the preceding scene apparently digresses from the sketch’s main attraction, the burlesque, Miller “obviously attributes to the burlesque show an effect analogous to that of the religious performance, both ways of easing the mind of the troubled individual living in a fallen world” (2002: 96). Indeed, the church experience whips the supraself into a faux religious frenzy, where black snow, “lousy black wigs,” and liquidation sales amusingly provide evidence of God’s “savin’ and keepin’ power” (1936c: 225). The supraself’s exalted state finds further representation in a catalog of city sites: “Poverty walking about in fur coats. Turkish baths, Russian baths, Sitz baths … baths, baths, and no cleanliness. Clara Bow is giving ‘Parisian Love’” (225). The merger of religion and bawdy amusement completes itself as the supraself notes: “Come tonight! Jesus wants you … Cleo dances every night!” (226). If the reader misses the connection, the supraself states it plainly: “My soul is at peace” (226). Like a carnival barker, Miller entices his readers into “the cleanest, fastest show in New York” (227). Meanwhile, “under cover of darkness the ushers are spraying the dead and live lice … buried in the thick black curls of those who have no private baths, the poor homeless Jews of the East Side” (227). No sanitized amusement, no decorous church, the National Winter Gardens functions as a temporary escape for the pre-resurrection supraself, one of those “things that brought [him] relief in the beginning” (235). Here, the supraself mingles with the diverse ethnic groups

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that encroach on his geographic security and underscore the exploitative capitalist system he detests. Here, the supraself may forget his woes and marvel at Cleo and her “belly swollen with sewer gas [and] navel rising in systolic hexameters” (229). Transient, the supraself’s escape dissolves into “immense, heartbreaking loneliness,” and Miller tones down the frenzy with a series of quick anecdotes about sexual frustration, Tante Melia, and Stanley (230–1). Beyond this, Miller shifts to an internal monolog on the hope of creation, the desire to release the “true book which is locked up inside you [that] would make people laugh and weep as they never laughed, never wept before” (236). In a self-reflexive moment, Miller describes the genesis of Black Spring, where “by means of the dream technique he peels off the outer layers of his geologic mortality and comes to grips with his true mantic self” (237). “A symbol rather than a precise ideological concept,” spiral form proves the method by which Miller hints at this “mantic” self, transcends the facts, and prays for “no more logic” (238, 240). Black Spring’s last section, “Megalopolitan Maniac,” offers a final meditation on the fragmentation of the modern individual, particularly the alienated city dweller. Eschatological, the piece contemplates the rush hour as “the sweet death racket” and “each member of the great herd driven by loneliness” searches for “the universal can opener” that will validate his or her existence with meaning (1936g: 243). The diatribe notes that the inventions of modernity fail to connect with spiritual realm and plunge humanity into despair: Men are delirious in their new-found freedom. A perpetual séance with megaphones and ticker tape, men with no arms dictating to wax cylinders; factories going night and day, turning out more sausages, more pretzels, more buttons, more bayonets, more coke, more laudanum, more sharp-edged axes, more automatic pistols. (1936g: 246) À la Swift, the catalog mocks civilization’s pretensions to greatness. It links a grand symbol of capitalism, ticker tape, with the amputees of World War I, connects mass consumerism with both vicious weapons and narcotic escape. Far from creating freedom and contentment, modernity unwittingly churns out spiritual and physical cripples, fragmented souls, “peace programs which will end in a hail of bullets” (248). The supraself sings before the apocalypse, however, sure that a new order will rise after a “magnificent evacuation” (246). Like Black Spring itself and its spiral form, the supraself pursues his “tail drawing in closer and closer great labyrinthine spirals and now reaching dead center where [he] whirls on the pivot of self with an incandescence that sends a blinding flood of light through every gutter of the soul” (247). With his newfound theories of acceptance, the supraself rages no more in hopes that from fragmentation will come unity, instinct, peace. The supraself declares confidently, “Tonight I shall mediate upon that which I am” and, however temporarily, basks in a spiritual glow (249). Black Spring thus begins and ends with self-portraits of the supraself attempting to ward off the fragmentation and confusion unique to the modern soul. Miller’s

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spiral form, here brought into relief by the varying approaches of the ten sections, stylistically echoes his thematic concerns. Comingling the mundane with the fantastic, the tragic with the burlesque, Miller here abandons plot even more completely than in Tropic of Cancer. Submerging the anecdotal underpinning of the other autobiographical romances, Miller concentrates on the feeling of fragmentation and its impact on the supraself. While certain devices of spiral form—most notably the catalog, reverie, and diatribe—drift in and out of the various sections, in Black Spring, Miller chooses to rely on Élie Faure’s fugue method and infuse the diverse modes with leitmotifs such as the bridge-as-threshold, the Idea-as-decadence, the apocalypse-as-salvation, and acceptance-as-happiness. Instinct, madness, ecstasy—these help stave off the living death that comes with the modern soul’s spiritual nomadism, unspecified desires, and hollow obligations. With spiral form’s spatio-temporal flights, Miller textually recreates the supraself’s metaphysical journeys, his abortive attempts at transcendence, and invites his readers to join the quest for cosmological, and thus personal, harmony.

Tropic of Capricorn In his masterpiece of spiral form, Tropic of Capricorn, Miller spews forth a fusillade of styles and subjects in an urgent attempt to grasp the meaning behind the supraself’s early life. Erecting a kind of “preface or vestibule” to the “vast edifice” of what he first referred to as his Capricorn project, in Tropic of Capricorn, Miller stretches spiral form to its limits (1941g: 56).17 While in Tropic of Cancer, Miller still preserves vestiges of chronological time through his use of extended anecdotes, in Tropic of Capricorn he washes away even these “microplots” in a deluge of prolixity. In Capricorn, Miller cuts from anecdote to interior monolog with great dexterity and rapidity and fashions a startling verbal edifice of rococo proportions. With this autobiographical romance, he collapses even the semblance of external time by blurring the division between memory and creation, action and text. In Tropic of Capricorn, Miller peers both into the supraself’s personal inferno—a locale beset with meaningless tasks and gratuitous sexual encounters—and into his childhood, a realm where he could temporarily resist the dehumanizing machinations of a capitalism and civilization in, as Kenneth Womack remarks, “the throes of ethical decay” (2004: 169). By fluctuating between these two arenas, Miller creates a carnival-like effect. He paradoxically infuses his chaotic narrative with a sense of tranquility, for his dominant first-person voice (embodied by the supraself) looks back on the hopelessness of its confused earlier life with the knowledge of its spiritual rebirth. Although Miller produces in the text what may often seem—in the derogatory terms of Widmer— an “uncertain jumbling,” in Capricorn he employs spiral form to create a fantasy-like reality deeper than the sum of its parts (1990: 67). Miller continues the assault on chapter-like headings he began in Tropic of Cancer by reducing Tropic of Capricorn’s formal divisions to a minimum and thus emphasizing the narrative’s spiral form.18 Separating Capricorn into two unnamed sections plus an interlude—commonly known as “the Land of Fuck”—and coda, Miller implodes the structural scaffolding of realism and naturalism and establishes a

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textuality wherein “frames are continuously broken and built and broken again” (Jahshan 2001: 73). Miller further partitions the text with a series of irregular gaps between various paragraphs. These narrative segments seem almost arbitrary because Miller employs them as vast textual warehouses wherein he stocks the collection of innumerable, ostensibly incongruous, thoughts, stories, and impressions that typify spiral form. Instead of a continuous narrative, or even a consistently anecdotal one, such as in Cancer, Miller develops in Capricorn a host of motifs and refrains that—fugue-like—spiral closer and closer to his encounter with Mara, the ultimate source of his spiritual renewal. Hassan alludes to the book’s fugue-like form with his observation that “the structure is like the music of remembrance, leitmotif and sudden counterpoint” (1967: 75). In this form, Miller first compels anecdotes to break down in the face of a new, more urgent thought, and then causes them to resurface later in the narrative. Themes develop, disappear, and return. Via his garrulous narrator, Miller keeps the story in constant motion, not, as George Wickes argues, because of “logorrhea,” but because of the realization that he must pursue his own subjective truth (1966: 29). In developing such a style, Miller presents the illusion of a raw, unedited reality that may appear “like an invention,” but “is nevertheless the truth and … will have to be swallowed” (1939e: 5). Miller causes Tropic of Capricorn to recede further and further from the mimetic as he plumbs deeper and deeper into the resources of the supraself’s emotional past, a strategy endemic to spiral form. With this strategy, Miller reflects the profound changes that take place within the supraself due to his meeting with Mara. Caught between the Scylla of the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company and the Charybdis of his unsympathetic wife, the supraself senses the void in his life, but remains powerless to overcome his spiritual inertia. Miller analyzes this inertia in the first section of Capricorn by juxtaposing the supraself’s tragicomic existence as employment manager for Cosmodemonic with the solace of his current position. In the second section, Miller examines the supraself’s life outside of the Cosmodemonic— although the company influences that life—and expands the point of comparison to include his boyhood experience. In the “Land of Fuck,” Miller demonstrates how the supraself both descends to the lowest point of his psychological existence and begins the process of ascent sparked by Mara. Finally, in the coda Miller combines a eulogy for the supraself’s old self with a benediction to his new one. Throughout each section, Miller interlaces the various devices of spiral form that he establishes in Cancer. By employing such techniques, Miller constructs the “simultaneous interaction of conjunctive and disjunctive relations” that Luz Aurora Pimentel claims constitute metaphoric narration, a process by which a breach in chronology allows meaning to transcend the linguistic boundary of the sentence (1990: 46, 35). Although he hyperfragments his text, the cumulative effect of such disjunction allows Miller to go beyond normal semantic parameters and transform the structure of Capricorn into a metacommentary on his theme. The act of narration thus becomes a metaphor for self and, in the book’s apparent formal dissonance, Miller mirrors the supraself’s lack of unity in Brooklyn but also reflects his later view that one may glean a knowledge of truth from even the tiniest grain of experience. The following analysis, therefore, will examine the effects of spiral

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form on Capricorn’s various parts and demonstrate how they contribute to the development of the supraself. In the first section, Miller illustrates the supraself’s state of living death and his vain attempts to overcome forces beyond his control. Miller’s scathing denunciations of American capitalism and his tendency to enfeeble the individual pervade Capricorn’s first untitled division. There, rebaptizing Moloch’s Great American Telegraph Company the Cosmodemonic, Miller formulates a milieu that Lewis aptly dubs a “melting pot of despair” (1986: 176): “It was a slaughterhouse … . The thing was senseless from the bottom up … . A hideous farce against a backdrop of sweat and misery” (1939e: 12). Miller conveys the desperation and debilitation emanating from the Cosmodemonic with a variety of conventions of spiral form. He inundates the reader with a series of Dantesque anecdotes that depict the utter dehumanization inherent in the Cosmodemonic environment and also occasions the supraself—from his present vantage point—to provide a running commentary on the psychological effects of constantly breathing in this appalling effluvium. At several points, Miller permits such discourse to metamorphose into diatribe, fantasy, and reverie. Miller employs another device, metafiction, to step back from the supraself’s psychological drama and annotate the process of recording that angst. Miller opens Tropic of Capricorn with a five-page synthesis of the “cesspool of the spirit” he will subsequently describe (1939e: 4). In this brief passage, Miller quickly demonstrates the far-ranging network of memories and current observations that drive the text’s spiral form. Miller compels the supraself to travel back to the womb, philosophize on the futility of struggling, discuss his family of Nordic “idiots” (3), lament the “statistical wealth [and] statistical happiness” of most Americans (4), and offer a self-reflexive comment on the construction of the current text. Foreshadowing his intentions in crafting such an idiosyncratic narrative, Miller obliges the supraself to declare triumphantly that “there is only one great adventure and that is inward toward the self, and for that, time nor space, nor even deeds matter” (4). In heralding subjective truth, Miller (via the supraself) emphasizes that “whatever I imagine to have happened did actually happen, at least to me” (5; Miller’s emphasis). In both of these metafictional statements, Miller rejects the notion that one may separate the variable of subjectivity from any external reality. He contends that the common pool of historical data from which everyone shares ultimately contains no meaning apart from that which each individual grants it through interpretation. Through such comments and their implications, Miller echoes Rank’s assertion that the creative impulse “attempts to turn ephemeral life into personal immortality” (39). Following this impulse, the artist shapes the malleable clay of experiential data into a monument of the self. Likewise, Miller, by analyzing his life through spiral form, suggests that, for him, within each pregnant moment lies an infinite number of connections and possibilities: “something which is parallel to life, of it at the same time, and beyond it” (6). Because of this endless well of experience, Miller possesses the latitude to proceed at full tilt, for within his mercurial text he can—for all its “innumerable mistakes, withdrawals, erasures, [and] hesitations,” as he remarks in “The Angel is My Watermark!”—present the “result of certitude” (1936b: 76).19

92 Parisian tempest In Tropic of Capricorn’s first section, Miller offers a virtual compendium of the “false” starts and “pointless” digressions typical of spiral form. Indeed, he allows few of the section’s observations to run for more than two pages, a phenomenon that Durrell attributes to Miller’s ability to reduce complex material to “explosive crystallizations” (Durrell and Miller 1988: 54). Like the authors of most metaphoric narration, he “weaves a virtual temporal order that … troubles … the corresponding temporal relation between diegetic and discourse times” (Pimentel 1990: 85). Through the cumulative effect of such textual cacophony, however, Miller blasts through to the very core of the supraself’s early hell. After a pair of anecdotes describing the supraself’s childhood, Miller underscores the devitalizing powers of capitalism with a discussion of how he acquired his job: Finally the day came when I desperately did want a job. I needed it. Not having another minute to lose, I decided that I would take the last job on earth, that of messenger boy … . To my great amazement I was refused the job. (1939e: 9) Even though the supraself equivocated on his application, Hymie rejects him unhesitatingly, metonymically reflecting the capriciousness of capitalism in general. The supraself later storms the general manager’s office, and, ironically, receives the job not of messenger, but of employment manager in exchange for acting as a spy for a few months. In this brief anecdote, Miller conveys the brutal injustice of the economic system. In short, he suggests that one may ascribe neither the supraself’s rejection nor success to logic. Miller causes the Cosmodemonic— what Lewis labels a “Kafkaesque symbol”—to function as an unthinking monster who, in the search for profit, lumbers aimlessly and makes senseless decisions (1986: 174). Through the strategic use of competing anecdotes and diatribes common in spiral form, Miller establishes a textual noise that serves to echo the supraself’s hellish existence. Each day of the supraself’s life, his “tiny, microcosmic life, was a reflection of the outer chaos” (64). Whether listening to Hymie ramble about his wife’s ovaries, or hearing O’Rourke discourse on the evil of human nature, the supraself can do nothing but descend further into the nightmare of his daily existence. By employing spiral form, Miller concentrates this chaos and magnifies its effects. Disseminating literally dozens of such horrific anecdotes, Miller reproduces the oppressive veil of woe that enshrouded the supraself. Miller permits his anecdotes—such as when Valeska, a highly efficient secretary, must transfer to a Cuban branch because of her “nigger blood” (51) or when the supraself must turn down an ex-mayor of New York City for a job because age “forty-five in New York is the deadline” (65)—to tumble forth like a “heterogeneous assortment of odds and ends” (43), and he compresses several years’ worth of sorrow into seventy pages. In staccato fashion, Miller switches from anecdotes to diatribes on the “cannibalistic” nature of Americans or the “foul and degrading” fate of those who conform to the needs of the agents of power (35, 12). Miller oscillates between anecdote and diatribe, allowing the supraself both to dramatize a pathetic situation—as when

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Carnahan, a “model messenger” “shot his wife and children in cold blood”—and to reflect on the larger meaning of that situation after several similar anecdotes: “Outwardly it seems to be a beautiful honeycomb, with all the drones crawling over each other in a frenzy of work; inwardly it’s a slaughterhouse, each man killing off his neighbor and sucking the juice from his bones” (29, 35). By constantly interrupting his anecdotes with diatribes, Miller creates the illusion that his narrative may permanently break down, that communication in the face of such an unchecked verbal influx will prove impossible. Through this illusion, Miller furthers his thematic treatment of the supraself’s spiritual distress, for the sense of urgency created by the narrative’s breakneck pace formally reflects the supraself’s dire need to abandon his hectic, and ultimately pointless, mode of existence. As he does with Moloch, however, in Tropic of Capricorn, Miller, relying on the digressive properties of spiral form, counterbalances the supraself’s dejection with an examination of his artistic longings. The underlying theme that sustains spiral form, the birth of the artist plays an important role in Capricorn, and, at any point in the narrative, Miller will interrupt and pursue a parallel thought concerning the supraself’s previous attempts to write. Such “digressions” constitute the metaphoric heart of the book because they help explicate the supraself’s current aesthetic and illustrate why he had to die.20 Interrupting a diatribe on the supraself’s downtrodden messengers, for example, Miller points out the flaws of his first book, “Clipped Wings,” “the worst book any man has ever written” (27).21 In this digression, Miller perhaps reveals his own intentions in adopting spiral form, by suggesting that the primary failure of “Clipped Wings” stemmed from its inability to “get beneath the facts” (28). Consequently, Miller forces the supraself, who has “been carbonized and mineralized in order to work upwards from the least common denominator of the self,” to observe his own fundamental unreadiness for the task he had in mind (28). Miller causes the supraself to realize that he must digest and reorder facts before he may penetrate beyond the superficial. The supraself, overwhelmed by the sheer influx of data, cannot process the facts in order to grasp their significance. From the tales of men such as Guptal and Olinski, the early supraself fails to extract the emotional pulp and can only describe the outer rind. Conversely, the post-rebirth supraself needs only the briefest space to divulge the suffering of these men, for their stories compose only a fraction of the aggregate tragedy. Thus, in the preceding digression, Miller both suggests selfreflexively that he desires emotional essence rather than photographic mimesis and demonstrates that the supraself requires a radical shift in his spiritual and artistic sensibilities before he may succeed. Although Miller deviates from his focus on the supraself’s Cosmodemonic life, he nevertheless reinforces his more underlying thematic concern with the supraself’s artistic rebirth and how that resurrection causes him to sacrifice plot for mood. In striving to present an emotionally accurate picture of the supraself and his reactions to the cumulative tragedy of his messengers and friends, Miller also uses catalogs, reveries, and fantasies in this first section. With each technique, he explores the situation from a different angle. By using catalogs, for instance, Miller reveals the cataclysmic proportions of capitalism’s problems in a frenetic manner

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that even a rapid series of anecdotes cannot adequately express. In the following passage, Miller lets the supraself offer a partial catalog of the breadth of American poverty: I heard men beg for work who had been Egyptologists, botanists, surgeons, gold miners, professors of Oriental languages, musicians, engineers, physicians, astronomers, anthropologists, chemists, mathematicians, mayors of cities and governors of states, prison wardens, cowpunchers, lumberjacks, sailors, oyster pirates, stevedores, riveters, dentists, painters, sculptors, plumbers … (1939e: 25) The list continues. As always, Miller employs the catalog as a metafictional device whereby he both supports and subverts his aim in spiral from. Through such catalogs, Miller creates the dual effect of quantitative comprehensiveness and emotional inaccuracy. While the catalog certainly seems statistically impressive, Miller nevertheless cannot reveal the passion behind the sheer accumulation of descriptive titles. Miller thus draws upon Henri Bergson’s theory that individuals tend to “confuse the feeling itself, which is in a perpetual state of becoming, with its permanent external object, and especially with the word which expresses this object” (1910: 130). By choosing to capture the ineffable through words, Miller, as with any writer, ultimately resigns himself to futility, but through his lists he recognizes the inescapable need to try. Although Miller seeks through spiral form’s inclusivity to capture the supraself’s version of truth, literal and figurative gaps always remain. The wide and impressive inventory of would-be messengers does not necessarily correspond with the facts. Miller simply lists them to denote his text’s semantic insufficiency. In effect, Miller employs the tension between his desire to tell the truth in a comprehensive fashion and his recognition that he will never realize this goal as the catalyst for spiral form’s chaotic narrative style. As he does with catalogs, Miller uses reveries and fantasies to demonstrate the signifier’s incapacity to render the signified (and, thus, the supraself) accurately. Because he wants to present as many facets of the supraself as possible, Miller allows both techniques to recur periodically, in order to give an indication of the special artistic quality that distinguishes the supraself from those who will continue to grind themselves slowly to death. In these flights of prose, emblematic of the “book” the supraself “used to write everyday on [his] way from Delancy Street to Murray Hill,” Miller juxtaposes the coarse reality of the job that saps the supraself’s vitality to the energy locked within him that could only escape in solitary moments (43). Abandoning plot for emotional energy, Miller demonstrates in a reverie that in crossing the Brooklyn Bridge—Tropic of Capricorn’s symbol of modern futility—the supraself temporarily escapes the “worms [and] ants crawling their way out of a dead tree” and floats to a more ethereal milieu: Maybe, being up high between the two shores, suspended above traffic, above life and death, on each side the high tombs, tombs blazing with dying sunlight,

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the river flowing heedlessly, flowing on like time itself, maybe each time I passed up there, something was tugging away at me, urging me to take it in … [and] the book commenced to write itself, screaming the things which I never breathed, thoughts I never uttered. (1939e: 44) With such passages, Miller both acknowledges his inability to tell a comprehensive narrative and evinces the supraself’s fleeting ability to cease struggling and gaze through the portals of art. Because he must constantly step outside narrative time and gloss his anecdotes with the psychological annotations provided by devices such as the reverie, Miller implicitly recognizes that even his microplots fail to express the truth of a particular situation. Similarly, by writing in his head, the supraself arrests the time of menial obligations and petty hierarchies embodied in the skyscraper mausoleums and the rushing river. By punctuating his narrative with reveries and fantasies, Miller reenacts the flashes of lucidity that overcome the supraself without concern for traditional notions of plot. Both because spiral form demands constant motion and because the supraself has not yet experienced his metaphoric crucifixion, however, Miller permits neither reveries nor fantasies to dominate his text, and he instead continues to explore the source of the supraself’s spiritual hollowness through a variety of devices. If, in the first section of Tropic of Capricorn, Miller typifies how he interrupts important anecdotes with techniques such as the reverie and fantasy, then, in the second division, he demonstrates how spiral form allows him to defer his “primary” action indefinitely. He dramatically starts the second formal section with mention of Valeska’s suicide and the supraself’s first encounter with Mara. In a maneuver typical of spiral form, a phenomenon Genette labels “paralipsis,” the sidestepping of a crucial narrative element (1980: 52), Miller postpones discussion of these two momentous events and quickly fires off a succession of anecdotes, including the supraself’s “Egyptian fuck,” a reconfigured version of the events following Kronski’s wife’s death, and a chat with MacGregor (1939e: 76).22 Miller eventually returns to Mara, but never discloses the details of Valeska’s death. By offering such allusions, however, Miller dramatizes spiral form’s constant concern for movement and his realization that a narrative will not do justice to the reality of “myth and legend” he has built around Mara or the tragedy behind Valeska’s self-slaughter (1952a: 98). Miller thus allows the truth of these two women—the truth as the supraself views it—to recede further and further from linguistic comprehension, as signifiers seem inadequate to convey the internal electricity that these women generate in the supraself. Parkin suggests that Miller erects a verbal fantasy in order to escape from Mara (and, by extension, Valeska), but Capricorn’s status as vestibule for the trilogy indicates that the writer desires not to evade Mara, but instead spiral closer and closer to her (1990: 82). The supraself needs to establish the geologic record of his being before Mara appears because she will alter it profoundly. After another barrage of anecdotes, therefore, Miller turns toward childhood and shows how the supraself dreams of rediscovering a unity that even art cannot achieve, a unity that ultimately only Mara may provide. Through Capricorn’s various devices,

96 Parisian tempest Miller reveals the supraself’s implicit need for a muse-figure such as Mara to spirit him away from the onanistic drudgery of the telegraph company and his equally demoralizing social life. In spiral form, Miller attempts to tell the unvarnished subjective truth about the supraself. Even though in many anecdotes he paints a less than pleasant picture of the supraself, Miller nevertheless strives to capture the emotional aura of the supraself’s life and how that experience shaped him into an artist. Consequently, while he focuses the narrative’s first section on the supraself’s alienation in the workplace, in the second part he concentrates on the supraself’s callous detachment away from the company. For example, desensitized to the sufferings of others owing to the countless tales of woe he heard from his applicants, the supraself develops a cynical outlook toward mourning. In an internal monologue, for instance, he claims that “at bottom I couldn’t feel sorry for Kronski,” whose wife had died, while he tells Maxie that their dead friend “[was] a big pain in the ass” (1939e: 83, 103). Miller thus reveals that the supraself’s indifference toward individual agony threatens to make him indistinguishable from the faceless powers of the Cosmodemonic. Miller also suggests during this monologue that the supraself’s lack of empathy demonstrates his supreme unreadiness to write: “the thought of beginning a book terrifies me” (96). Essentially, Miller implies that the supraself’s cynicism will never yield the dual satisfactions of art and personal freedom and that he requires a complete rebirth. He further intimates that, while the supraself undergoes a tremendous process of humiliation at his job, only Mara can truly penetrate his facade and force him to suffer to his very marrow. Until he meets Mara, the supraself simply spins in a furious whirl of activity without moving toward self-liberation. Because spiral form allows him to show the supraself’s life through a series of anecdotes removed from the strictures of plot, therefore, Miller may reveal in a subjectively truthful fashion how even negative experience contributes to the growth of an artist. To reflect the lack of evolution of the “unhatched” supraself, Miller employs a variety of spiral form’s effects that undercut traditional notions of character development or plot (93). For example, he ruptures the anecdotal thread with a number of catalogs and comments on the supraself’s lack of self-awareness. Rather than conclude an anecdote concerning MacGregor, for instance, Miller slips into an observation on the supraself’s fundamental paralysis: Every one is so utterly, confoundedly not himself that you become automatically the personification of the whole race, shaking hands with a thousand human hands, cackling with a thousand human tongues, cursing, applauding, whistling, crooning, soliloquizing, orating, gesticulating, urinating, fecundating, wheedling, cajoling, whimpering, bartering, pimping, caterwauling. (1939e: 91) Even though by failing to bring the MacGregor anecdote to a climax, Miller subverts his narrative’s energy in terms of action and nonetheless augments it in terms of psychology. In this catalog, Miller suggests that, endemic to society, the inability to listen to one’s inner rhythm reduces one’s life to a pointless sequence of

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biological urges, mental ruts, and ludicrous gestures. He contends that unless one dies spiritually, one will not act but react. He argues, moreover, that, drawing from a common pool of tropes, the average person lives a gray, uninspired existence, for even restless individuals like the supraself or his friend Curley—Miller peppers this section with several anecdotes about this figure—lead fairly predictable and pointless lives. Although he fails to advance the “plot” of Capricorn—or even the microplots of his anecdotes—with such devices of spiral form as the catalog, Miller, in transcending “facts” and “action,” nevertheless may underscore salient aspects of the supraself’s psychology. In Tropic of Capricorn, Miller also explores the supraself’s interior motivation through another device of spiral form, the caricature. Miller will frequently examine character flaws that manifest themselves in the supraself by exaggerating them in another, minor, character. Miller may accomplish this because spiral form’s extreme plasticity allows him to introduce anecdotes in an associational or lyrical way rather than in a logical or sequential fashion. Because he uses an anecdotal method, Miller may disregard a particular character’s importance to the book’s overall action and concentrate on how that character reveals a flaw or strength in the supraself. Through Curley, for example, Miller dramatizes the supraself’s sexual excesses and demonstrates how this promiscuity reflects a type of emotional barrenness that will reach its nadir in the Land of Fuck. Curley, a seventeen-year-old employed by the supraself, cheats, steals, and connives to satisfy his biological needs: “he had absolutely no moral sense, no scruples, no shame” (105). In Curley, Miller forces the supraself to see a vision of himself stripped of his artistic pretensions. Drawing a blunt comparison between the two characters, Miller tacitly argues that, as with Curley, the supraself bounds from woman to woman, “throwing a fuck”—literally or imaginatively—“into each and every one” (99). Miller, moreover, reveals that both Curley and the supraself drift from moment to moment, hungrily awaiting the next female orifice, and he also indicates that the supraself possesses Curley’s ability to betray his friends, offering kindness at one interval and indifference at the next. As he achieves with the anecdotes about MacGregor, Kronski, Maxie, and the dancehall, Miller interlards Curley’s story with other textual fragments, such as a diatribe on the “cold, waste fire” of New York and a reverie in which he fancies himself a “starfish swimming on the frozen dew of the moon” (113, 115). In such devices, Miller ponders the forces that cause Curley and the supraself to act as they do and searches for a way to transcend that behavior and its concomitant spiritual malaise. Although Miller presents a portrait of the supraself as he teeters on the precipice of artistic rebirth, because he uses spiral form he may defer comment on this situation indefinitely and choose instead to foreground material from the past. Unlike what he would achieve with a simple flashback, however, Miller may expand on any number of nodes that reveal little or nothing about the book’s “plot.” He may, moreover, “reenter” the “primary” line of narrative action at any point—he does not need to recommence where he broke off. In the second section of Capricorn, for instance, the picture of the supraself’s fragmented, aimless former self leads Miller to employ one of spiral form’s devices that he perfected in Black Spring, a vision of boyhood unity. Interrupting an interior monolog in which the supraself “[is] leveled down each day

98 Parisian tempest to make the fleshless, bloodless city whose perfection is the sum of all logic and death to the dream,” Miller spirals back into the past (116). Through anecdotes ranging from a story about Claude, a kindred artistic spirit whom the supraself rejects, to an amusing scene about fried bananas and their effects on a party, Miller depicts a childhood world devoid of self-doubt and living death. By relocating the narrative to the supraself’s childhood, Miller indirectly contrasts this vibrant sphere to the dull and pointless profit motive that constitutes the Cosmodemonic world. Far from idealizing boyhood, however, Miller retains its brutalities and pain as well as its enthusiasm and vitality. A rock fight in which the supraself “kills” another boy, for example, will coexist with a portrait of his loving Aunt Caroline, while his exacting mother will appear alongside pleasant recollections of Humbolt Street. Miller demonstrates that, more than a simple need for nostalgia, these incidents attract the supraself because of their existence apart from the “fog of words and abstractions” that clouded his later years (122). Essentially, Miller contends that, before he entered school, the supraself’s every action—“good” or “bad”—contributed to his growth. He further asserts, however, that once the supraself’s teachers indoctrinated him, he became stunted and started to atrophy like those around him. Miller suggests that, from his current vantage point, the supraself realizes that this constant mental expansion finds its parallel in the artistic consciousness and laments its demise: “The wonder and mystery of life—which is throttled in us as we become responsible members of society!” (138). In this extended sequence of anecdotes, Miller takes advantage of spiral form’s lack of a temporal center and refuses to cater to the demands of plot. Although he develops what would ostensibly seem to be digressions, in escaping the requirements of linear progression Miller both deepens the reader’s knowledge of the supraself and emphasizes the tremendous struggle he must undertake before achieving his personal and artistic goals. In the “interlude” known as the Land of Fuck, Miller continues his rejection of action-based plot, for, in a supreme irony of spiral form, the interlude constitutes the greater part of Tropic of Capricorn. Combining what Ibargüen calls a “sexual department store” with a celestial description of his protean muse, Mara, Miller creates in the Land of Fuck a remarkable achievement in spiral form (1989: 293). While in the first two sections Miller examines the supraself at work and at play, in the interlude he dissects his sexuality. Capitalizing on the section’s fugue-inspired name, Miller abandons all pretense of plot and instead offers a lyrically organized potpourri—part fantasy, part realism—of anecdotes and interior scenes. Partially because the sexual snippets that constitute the bulk of the Land of Fuck lead the supraself nowhere, Miller—who later asserts that an obsession with sex “is immature”—depicts the supraself of this period as a spiritual blood-brother to Tropic of Cancer’s Van Norden (1994k: 106). While Blinder views the Land of Fuck as an “emblem of creativity,” Miller clearly proscribes such a view (2000: 67). Miller permits encounter to give way to gratuitous encounter as the supraself seeks salvation in the “super-cunt,” a mythical, alogical dimension that “defies speed, calculation or imagery … . There is only the sustained feel of fuck” (1939e: 191). Clearly, Miller believes that this sensation, while certainly tempting, lacks the spiritual sustenance that the supraself requires to terminate his living death, for fleeting physical joy does not equal life.

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Rather than explore the conscious and unconscious resources of the supraself’s mind, Miller depicts him playing sexual tag with a host of willing and unwilling recipients and highlights spiral form’s ability to examine all aspects of life. Again, Miller dispenses with a rigid narrative structure and develops his story in the looser, more picaresque fashion of spiral form. Although he presents a tenuously connected sequence of sexual anecdotes, Miller nonetheless contributes a great deal to the supraself’s early, pre-Mara character. In the interlude, for example, Miller reveals that, a lamb on the “cosmosexual altar,” the supraself quests for the “pure fuck” and forgets both his demoralizing life and his artistic longings (197). Miller shows that—whether the woman upstairs, Veronica, Evelyn, Rita, or simply anonymous—the supraself’s sexual conquests allow him to escape from the Cosmodemonic nightmare of American life. While manifestations of a deeper lack, through the supraself’s sexual incidents Miller evinces an unrestrained joy that, although ephemeral, suggests the supraself’s ability to flout the hypocrisy of a society that clothes sex in the furtive garments of taboo. In an anecdote relating “probably the best fuck [the supraself] ever had,” Miller employs a mini-catalog to describe the supraself’s neighbor’s vagina: “a dark, subterranean labyrinth fitted up with divans and cosy corners and rubber teeth and syringas and soft nestles and eiderdown and mulberry leaves” (177). Miller indicates that, whereas most individuals—hampered by a restrictive society that mutes passion with guilt—repress their desire, this woman possesses a sexual unconsciousness that allows her to perform amazing feats of carnal athleticism. He observes, therefore, that the supraself stresses the “impersonality” of her “cunt” because such detachment bespeaks a release from the world of abstraction and a return to the intuitive wonder of childhood (178). In short, Miller asserts that—as with Weesie, the girl who shows the young supraself her “little bud”—the woman upstairs displays a healthy sexuality free of modern neurosis and boundaries (119). Employing sex as a technique of spiral form, Miller delves into an illusory realm of timelessness where the supraself does “all [his] quiet thinking via the penis” (179). Seizing on spiral form’s capacity to step outside of chronological time, in this section Miller frequently depicts the supraself fleeing from the degradation of his daily life and, in the midst of sex, retreating into thoughts “that led absolutely nowhere and [were] hence enjoyable,” although “it was the fuck that counted and not the construction work” (180). With such atemporal moments, Miller distends the secular time of bureaucracy and punchclocks and permits the supraself to pursue a legion of amorphous images. Nevertheless, through the accumulation of such engagements—as well as those of friends such as Curley and Hymie—he underscores the ultimate futility of such a course. While he certainly considers it a positive step, Miller recognizes that the supraself’s sexual abandon cannot constitute a goal in and of itself. By including raw depictions of intercourse in Capricorn, Miller helps to break down communal parameters, but spiral form finally requires progression toward artistic consciousness. Miller, therefore, demonstrates that the later supraself realizes that sex alone can not remove him from the Cosmodemonic purgatory in which he exists. Because spiral form ultimately requires him to progress in his exploration of the supraself, Miller must eventually lead him to Mara. Instead of unfolding the

100 Parisian tempest momentous meeting between the supraself and Mara through a series of narrative events, however, Miller presents the emotional essence of that encounter by using a reverie, one of the most jubilant and energetic devices of spiral form. In Mara, whose image flits in and out of Tropic of Capricorn like a refrain, Miller represents the muse who will teach the supraself to fly, and thus he avoids the more demotic requirements of plot in his description of her. After a number of fantasies, diatribes, reveries, and intertextual moments—such as the supraself’s discovery of Henri Bergson and the “ways of not understanding” (215) or the day the “world stopped dead for a moment” (204) when it first encountered Dostoevski—Miller finally spirals to a grand description of Mara. In this extended portrait, the spiritual climax of Tropic of Capricorn, Miller condenses the material he will employ in the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy into a stunning vision. Via the supraself, who “baptized [himself] anew” (225) as a result of his meeting Mara, Miller conveys the sense that he cannot do her justice because he “remembers too much” (230). Reflecting both Mara’s hypermutability and his own awareness of the fallacy of objective Truth, Miller leaps from impression to impression in an effort to pin down momentarily her essence. Among a vast number of other objects, Miller compares Mara to a Mithraic Bull (229), a ventriloquist (230), a succubus (231), a jaguar (233), a volcano (235), and a moon (239). Peeling away layer after layer of Mara’s otherness, Miller establishes a network of contradictions and convolutions—typical of spiral form—from which emanates yet more mystery: “nobody could say what she was really like because with each one she was a different person. After a time she didn’t even know herself” (233). Miller suggests that, “stunningly beautiful” and “positively ugly,” Mara’s chameleonic presence forces the supraself to reconsider his own condition to the point where “the identity which was lost is recovered” (234, 226). Ultimately, Miller inundates the reader with so much information that the text threatens to break down under the semantic pressure.23 He allows the interlude’s portrait of Mara—declarative and interrogative, mystical and plain— to spiral violently between the poles of living death and rebirth. Indeed, Miller demonstrates that the supraself looks within the prism of Mara’s otherness and sees refracted there a fragment of his own true identity: “a blazing seed hidden in the heart of death” (243). None of Miller’s descriptors tell the truth about Mara, but none of them tell lies, for contained within her rests the sum of all identity and the “vacuum of the self” (234). She nourishes and devours the supraself. She makes him suffer. True to his paradigm of spiral form and its emphasis on movement and partial, subjective truth, Miller allows the representation of Mara to explode like a supernova. He leaves in its stead another series of sexual anecdotes, dreams of writing, memories, catalogs, intertextual references, and diatribes, for Miller concerns himself not with building up narrative action but with piecing together the infinite fragments of the supraself. Thus, Miller causes the narrative to spiral away from Mara in another attempt to underscore her importance to the supraself’s art. Ultimately, beneath the supraself’s living death seethes an identity that Miller can neither fathom nor record, despite his “titanic efforts” to “canalize the hot lava which was bubbling inside” him (279). Miller demonstrates that the supraself gives

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the outward appearance of life and emotion, but this facade simply operates as a distorted parody of his true self. Moreover, before he will find himself able to write in his real voice, Miller observes that the supraself must undergo a rosy crucifixion wherein he discovers a subjectivity apart from Mara and forges a new consciousness. In Tropic of Capricorn’s coda, Miller erects a bridge to the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy where the supraself makes this divine discovery. With this supremely metafictional coda, Miller reflects on the artificial construction of Capricorn: Time and again I have related to others the circumstances of our life, and I have always told the truth. But the truth can also be a lie. The truth is not enough. Truth is only the core of a totality which is inexhaustible. (1939e: 330) In this statement, Miller recognizes that the repeated and varied disclosures the supraself makes in Tropic of Capricorn and elsewhere grasp vainly at this totality, for the “facts” can muddle the overall emotional picture and vice versa. Refiguring his earlier characterization of the book as a personal skyscraper with “no elevators, no seventy-third-story windows to jump from” (50) Miller realizes that Tropic of Capricorn “[is] nothing more than a tomb in which to bury” (331) Mara and his former self. By offering his epistle to the world, Miller creates a grand narrative of the self that offers rhetoric as a metaphor for his subjective totality. As he heaps image upon image in his variegated text—the “disproportions between rhetoric and reality” that so distress Widmer—Miller mythologizes, and thus buries, his past (1990: 68). Although he may resuscitate anecdotes and recreate reveries, Miller may never, even in the expansive trilogy, locate the inexhaustible totality: “we must get going. Tomorrow, tomorrow … ” (1939e: 346; Miller’s ellipsis).

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I discovered that suffering was good for me, that it opened the way to a joyous life, through acceptance of the suffering. When a man is crucified, when he dies to himself, the heart opens up like a flower. Henry Miller (1994d: 64)

During his sojourn in Paris, Henry Miller perfected the spiral form that allowed him both to dispense with the factual and narrative transparency that marred his earliest works and to forge a new, dynamic mode of expression that would permit him to explore the convolutions of the self. Such essential textual spadework completed, Miller—now a resident of California—could return to the imaginative reexamination of the relationship he considered pivotal to his development as a man and artist.1 Whereas in Crazy Cock, Miller originally felt slavishly obliged to remain faithful to the facts, in his long-anticipated project, the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, Miller could capitalize on the narrative breakthroughs of Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn and view his life with June in a much more flexible manner that would let him search for a subjective rather than objective truth.2 As he wrote to Lawrence Durrell in a letter of 12 July 1947, “there is every sort of style and treatment in the 750 pages I have written, and a good bit is diffuse, opaque, rambling, hugger-mugger” (Durrell and Miller 1988: 213). Miller no doubt recognized that spiral form, with its insistence on heteroglossia and polystylism, would function much more effectively than his previous, Dreiserian mode of expression did in handling both June’s hypermutability and his own profound artistic transformations. Miller employs spiral form as a textual forum in which he may range freely from the raw (auto)biographical data of his life with June and offer highly idiosyncratic interpretations of those facts. Miller also places his relationship with June in a broader context, for spiral form does not confine him to a strict chronology. Through the employment of spiral form, Miller revivifies the past and creates a narrative of mythological proportion. By adopting the aesthetic of spiral form, Miller frees himself to encompass his entire life in the three volumes of The Rosy Crucifixion: Sexus, Plexus, and Nexus. In a letter of 17 May 1946 to Anaïs Nin, Miller expresses the plastic nature of spiral form: “I really believe I will write only that [The Rosy Crucifixion], just everything

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into one vessel, even if it requires six more volumes” (Nin and Miller 1987: 377). Miller reveals in his astute comments both the organic qualities of spiral form and the central reason for much of the critical hostility showered on the trilogy. By referring to the project as a “vessel” into which he will pour “everything,” Miller indicates his eagerness to abandon traditional notions of plot and climax in favor of nodality. Miller de-emphasizes his narrative goals and heightens the process by which he achieves those goals. Each individual anecdote, diatribe, monolog, fantasy, dream, microessay, and reverie stands for the whole, and thus contains a high degree of textual autonomy. Miller then employs the collocational pattern endemic to spiral form to create a multidimensional portrait of the supraself, particularly the supraself’s struggles with Mara/Mona. The Rosy Crucifixion’s diversity allows Miller to mirror the supraself’s geologic strata. Theoretically, no one node —for example, the supraself’s life with Mara/Mona —should attain preeminence over another, so Miller may divulge crucial elements with regard to the supraself’s expanding consciousness in any node, no matter how apparently trivial. Notions of rising suspense, therefore, seem antithetical to Miller’s design in the trilogy because he structures each narrative moment to operate with a selfcontained rising action, climax, and denouement. In spiral form, Miller sacrifices the chronological elements necessary for a sustained sequence of “action” and replaces them with a narrative strategy based on synechdoche. Miller’s critics almost universally prefer the Tropics to the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, despite each autobiographical romance’s use of spiral form.3 Ihab Hassan, for example, scathingly argues that the three autobiographical romances constitute “perhaps the most tedious achievement of our time” (1967: 85), while George Wickes observes that The Rosy Crucifixion “is simply an enormously expanded Tropic of Capricorn” and laments its “plodding” style (1966: 38, 40). Even a staunch proponent such as Erica Jong claims that Miller “is rehashing old experience” in the trilogy, and Eric Laursen calls the trilogy “mostly an embarrassment” (1993: 170; 2005: 101). Such critiques find their roots in two fundamental misunderstandings of spiral form. Both Wickes’s and Hassan’s objections regarding the lack of narrative movement attempt to impose hermeneutic prereading(s) on Miller’s texts. Since Miller undercuts their notions of plotted action by employing an anecdotal style that moves toward synthesis rather than resolution, both commentators resort to describing the narratives through images of boredom. By using spiral form, Miller forces his readers to draw connections between his texts’ various nodes. Conventional definitions of action, therefore, fail to account for the textual energy within the trilogy. Such vitality comes not from photographically mimetic scenes arranged in a chronological fashion, but from a psychological re-creation of the supraself. The trilogy’s extreme length magnifies the anecdotal method and compels the reader to focus less on any one anecdote—as one may do in the Tropics—and pay attention to how each node works in concert with the rest. Miller defers conclusions in order to foreground the mechanics of discovery. A corollary misinterpretation concerns Jong’s and Wickes’s comments that Miller cannibalizes earlier texts in The Rosy Crucifixion. In effect, these critics privilege—falsely, if one considers “Clipped Wings,” “Gliding through the Everglades,”

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Moloch, and Crazy Cock—the “originality” of subject matter in the Tropics and denigrate the reexamination of such narrative content. Based on a foundation of memory, all of Miller’s texts “cannibalize” an ur-text because they draw from a common biohistorical pool of data: the life of Henry Valentine Miller. Despite referring to the same events, however, the texts present the material from different perspectives. The trilogy’s revision of Mara/Mona, for example, reflects a deep change in the supraself’s attitude toward both art and existence.4 Whereas the pace of autobiographical romances such as Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn seems extremely urgent, that of The Rosy Crucifixion emits an aura of acceptance. Miller’s experiences in France and Greece, combined with an increasing consumption of books on Eastern thought, astrology, and mysticism, taught him how to transcend psychological suffering by making him recognize its value. In the trilogy, Miller replays the supraself’s anguish, not as a vehicle for self-pity, as in Crazy Cock, but as a method of understanding how he arrived at his present situation. Since his experience with June leaves its imprint on all of the supraself’s many geologic layers, Miller must repeatedly come to grips with it. While Mara/Mona inhabits most of the autobiographical romances, Miller does not treat her statically. As he grows, so Mara/Mona advances into myth. With each “cannibalization” of his memories of June—as well as his anecdotes about key people and events in his life—Miller imbues her figure with the personal truths of his current perspective. Spiral form thus allows Miller to “resignify” Mara/Mona and fill her otherness with his subjectivity. Several critics marginalize The Rosy Crucifixion for quite a different, but nevertheless equally flawed, reason. Although they fail to label it as such, critics such as Leon Lewis, Raoul Richard Ibargüen, and John Parkin celebrate Miller’s spiral form. These scholars recognize that Miller’s prose differed radically from that of most Modernists of his era and understandably laud the two Tropic books for their hyperdiscursivity. All three, however, view The Rosy Crucifixion as a retrogressive accomplishment. Lewis, for instance, asserts that the later narrator operates in a “predictable” way (1986: 39), while Ibargüen dismissively comments that the “chronological” trilogy uses a “matter of fact” prose style (1989: 322, 320), and Parkin sadly notes that the later autobiographical romances appear “traditional” (1990: 214). Although Miller’s narrator functions unpredictably and the trilogy employs spiral time, all three criticisms seem understandable. While each Tropic quite obviously advertises its “anti-novel” status by rejecting conventional structural divisions such as chapters and books, Miller resurrects such devices in the trilogy, which may help explain why even sympathetic critics often reject—or at least temper their enthusiasm for—The Rosy Crucifixion. After developing spiral form to its outer limits in Tropic of Capricorn, Miller modifies its use in the later autobiographical romances. The principal alteration concerns his concept of progression. In the Tropics—and especially Tropic of Capricorn—Miller occasionally submerges the supraself’s motion toward rebirth and concentrates more on the details of the supraself’s character. In The World of Sex, however, Miller clearly indicates that he wishes the supraself to evolve, a phenomenon that prompts Jonathan Cott to refer to Miller’s books as a “perpetual Bildungsroman” (1994j: 181). In The

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Rosy Crucifixion Miller foregrounds such evolution by progressing chronologically from chapter to chapter. Within each chapter, however, Miller continues to dispense with linear notions of time and apply his concepts of spiral temporality. Miller does so not with a “predictable” narrator, but with one who will constantly undercut narrative expectations. As Yasunori Honda observes, “Miller’s unsurpassed quality is, among others, to unite things which seem to be remote or unrelated” (2005: 152). Discoursing on widely diverse subjects, the supraself turns back toward childhood or forward toward Paris and beyond in an unforeseen manner. Miller, moreover, continues to employ such devices as diatribe, dream, reverie, fantasy, and anecdote to subvert the conventional treatment of plot. Miller’s newfound tranquility certainly reduces much of the Tropics’ textual “noise,” but to characterize the trilogy as traditional seems somewhat disingenuous. Sexus, Plexus, and Nexus represent Miller’s most ambitious attempt to unravel the twin mysteries of the supraself and his muse-antagonist, Mara/Mona. In The Rosy Crucifixion, a “monumental failure,” according to Norman Mailer, Miller tries to decode the crypto-romantic symbolism of the Land of Fuck’s ethereal description of Mara by using spiral form (1976: 186). By performing this endeavor, Miller not only raises Mara/Mona to mythological status, but he also, in the words of Nin, continues to “bury June over and over again” (1974: 33). Although Kingsley Widmer laments the absence of an “internal” Mona (1990: 46), Mailer remarks that she seems only half real (1976: 181), and Gilles Mayné posits that she appears “a little disappointing” (1993: 85), in his writing after Crazy Cock, Miller purposely rejects the mimesis they desire in favor of spiral form because of the grounding of mimesis in a false paradigm of objectivity. Thus, Jane Nelson’s characterization of Mara/Mona as an “allegorical representation” of the struggle between conscious and unconscious appears closer to Miller’s narrative strategy in the trilogy (1970: 103). While Nelson may overdetermine her interpretation of Mara/Mona, her fundamental point that Miller employs his femme fatale not as a “character” in the conventional sense, but as a symbol of otherness, rings true. Miller clearly indicates that as the supraself gazes into Mara/Mona’s being, he confirms his own subjectivity. Miller, moreover, reveals that while Mara/Mona’s lies and suspicious behavior force the supraself deeper and deeper into a psychological reevaluation of his life, and compel him to “recognize the legendary in the actual,” which Miller claims separates artists from the unimaginative, only through physical separation from Mona may the supraself finally start to write and achieve the status of artist for which he so longs (1980: 82). By employing spiral form, Miller depicts the supraself’s growth because it allows him to view the supraself from a variety of angles without sacrificing evolution. While each autobiographical romance within the trilogy distinguishes itself thematically, Miller imbues each with uniform formal qualities, for all three texts utilize spiral form to express their various points. Miller consistently employs spiral form in the three books to problematize the narrative by exposing its origin in subjectivity. Miller recognizes that a plot would superimpose order on an endlessly refracting enigma and thus prematurely truncate his quest for selfhood, and so he must search for an “eternally changing formless form” (1989: 28). Miller uses spiral

106 Californian tranquility form to avoid this potential hazard by concentrating not on the end of the narrative, but on the hermeneutic process itself. Despite employing an apparently encyclopedic coverage—the trilogy exceeds 1500 pages—Miller lets the supraself come no closer to understanding Mara/Mona at the close of the project than at the start of the enterprise, although he does possess a greater knowledge of himself. Miller crafts a spiral form that not only conveys the enormous void in the supraself’s life and illustrates how Mara/Mona fills this vacuum with her hypermutability, but also reveals how artistic subjectivity allows one to move —in the words of G.S. Fraser—“beyond language” and grasp at truth (1968: 75). The succeeding analysis will examine the trilogy’s respective volumes to demonstrate the way in which Miller employs spiral form to depict how the supraself suffers emotionally, but grows artistically.

Sexus Sexus remains Miller’s most misunderstood autobiographical romance. Much of the critical disappointment, outrage, and boredom surrounding the narrative, however, derives from an ignorance of the principles that guide Miller’s spiral form. Hassan, for example, comments that the autobiographical romance lacks in plot (1967: 92), a contention echoed by Wickes, who remarks that Sexus “[is] disorganized” (1966: 40). Kathryn Winslow, moreover, bemoans that Miller’s anecdotes “are suddenly dropped” without resolution (1986: 254). Even admirers of spiral form such as Durrell (Durrell and Miller 1988: 232) and Jong (1993: 170) feel cheated by the “lack” of organization in Sexus.5 That Sexus lacks a driving plot seems both beyond dispute and rather obvious. By using the anecdotal style endemic to spiral form, Miller replaces one overarching plot with a vast number of microplots or nodes. Through the accumulation of such nodes, Miller creates multiple impressions of the supraself rather than a rigidly defined, monovalent character progressing along a fixed line. Viewing the text in isolation from its companion volumes, therefore, seems fundamentally flawed. In Sexus, Miller represents only one layer in the supraself’s geologic record, and since he arranges the trilogy according to the methods of spiral form, in the first volume he cannot by definition tell the “whole” story about the supraself’s relationship with Mara/Mona. Miller, moreover, frequently refers to his autobiographical narratives as “autobiographical romances,” a term that indicates a loose, often picaresque, structure. Thematically, Miller takes advantage of the book’s apparent formal disarray to reflect the supraself’s early propensity to flounder in a sea of artistic and emotional uncertainty. In order better to understand how Miller capitalizes on his book’s outward chaos, one must analyze Sexus’s structure as it relates both to spiral form and the text’s use of time. Finally, one should explore representative examples of Miller’s various techniques of spiral form and learn how they illuminate the supraself and his life with Mara/Mona. Miller cautiously wrote to Durrell that in many ways Sexus “is a reversion to preTropic” writing (Durrell and Miller 1988: 230). While Miller undoubtedly overstates his case, he astutely recognizes that certain of the autobiographical romance’s elements share a commonality with Crazy Cock and even Moloch. Miller

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marks the most visible manifestation of his intention to modify spiral form with a return to chapter divisions. Separating Sexus into twenty-three chapters, Miller ostensibly aligns his text with a more rigid formal tradition than an earlier work such as Tropic of Capricorn. Actually, Miller readopts formal prose units both in order to disorient his readers and to provide subtle metafictional commentary on his project. Outwardly traditional, chapters function as directional cues for a book’s audience. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, formal chapters tended to denote a segment of prose that could not function independently from the demands of a plot. Even a chapter published separately as part of a serialization derived much of its textual energy from those that preceded and followed it. Miller, though, explodes such an externally dependent relationship between chapters by substituting anecdotal observation for the traditional plot curve. At the autobiographical romance’s outset, Miller starts to fulfill the narrative expectations promised by chapter headings, but it soon becomes apparent that he plans to spoof the rigid plots of his naturalistic influences and further explore the possibilities of spiral form. Although the opening sentence anticipates a lengthy rehearsal of a love affair—“It must have been a Thursday night when I met her for the first time”—Miller quickly abandons such sequential rhetoric and employs individual chapters, not as registers of narrative action, but as textual warehouses in which he stores anecdotes, diatribes, and reveries, among other devices of spiral form (1949: 5). Instead of arranging his “chapters” around a crucial narrative occurrence that will inform the entire plot, Miller parodies the notion of linear structure by infusing each rhetorical unit with numerous anecdotal microplots that often seem to compete with, rather than augment, the “main” action, a phenomenon that M.M. Bakhtin refers to as “heteroglossia” (1981: 263). While Miller purports in Sexus to relate the supraself’s early life with Mara/Mona, for instance, in many chapters he makes little or no reference at all to the cryptic muse, and opts instead either to engross his readers with tales about the supraself’s friends, lovers, and experiences or else discourse on a variety of extranarrative subjects. In chapter sixteen, for example, Miller relegates Mona to the background and foregrounds anecdotes on the Cosmodemonic, a letter from Knut Hamsun, an attempted tryst with Maude, and an orgy with Maude and Elsie. He also includes a diatribe on the sterility of modern life. Even within a chapter where Mara/Mona constitutes the ostensible subject, Miller will often make an excursus that not only uses more textual space, but that resonates as well with more emotional power than the “primary” action. Such a technique occurs in chapter two, where Miller breaks off an anecdote about Mara and discusses literary composition among a host of other topics, including anecdotes about Sylvia, Ulric, and childhood. Miller, thus, continues to employ spiral form even though, outwardly, it appears as if he abandons it for a more traditional structure. Miller uses this conflict between the “deep” structure of spiral form and the outward structure of chapter units—units which Gary Saul Morson would argue falsify by “subjecting contingencies to a pattern”—to parody the expectations of his audience (1994: 38). Although he establishes, through the device of the chapter, a narrative atmosphere in which an audience would expect him to expatiate on the

108 Californian tranquility relationship between Mara and the supraself, Miller consistently undercuts such anticipations through his application of spiral form. Miller, in effect, creates an ironic tension between the old, “outmoded” textual codes of naturalism and the new, “radical” textual codes of spiral form. Miller’s “bitextualism” results in parody, the phenomenon that Linda Hutcheon defines as “repetition with critical difference” (1985: 42, 36). While Miller, to some extent, partakes of the generic conventions of naturalism, he does so in order to foreground their deficiencies with regard to representing reality. Although he shares the naturalists’ propensity for encyclopedic detail, Miller fails to agree either that such narrative itemization will suffice to tell an adequate story or that rigidly structured novels yield any sense of objectivity.6 By appropriating, and then discarding, the precepts of the naturalist novel, Miller first readies his audience for a—by now—“safe” experience, and then substitutes this for an unpredictable, heteroglossic one. Miller thus employs “chapters” not to order objective reality, but instead to shock and vex his readers when they realize that Miller, using the subjective, anecdotal methods of spiral form, attaches little importance to linear narrative. Miller extends his parody of reader expectation into the temporal realm as well through the use of pseudo-chapters. Because Miller partitions Sexus into chapters, he makes the lack of plot that Hassan notes above seem much more visible. While Miller, with such rhetorical cues, orients his audience to expect a chronological narrative, he undercuts these expectations with the temporal and thematic range within each chapter. The chasm between what readers might reasonably expect and what Miller actually does, therefore, makes it appear as though Miller desires to write linearly, but fails in his attempt. Miller understands this phenomenon and seeks to parody it. By substituting anecdotal observation for narrative action, Miller produces a text that—in the language of Welch P. Everman—“is potentially infinite,” a concept at odds with traditional notions of plot (1992: 333).7 Seemingly at any point, Miller may add to, or subtract from, a chapter’s stock of material without regard to its effect on the chronological progression of the “story.” Despite the above objections from critics such as Parkin and Ibargüen, in Sexus, Miller advances not sequentially, but according to the tenets of spiral form. Although each chapter generally progresses chronologically beyond its predecessor, within each unit Miller organizes his material according to a lyric plan that functions to problematize the linear superstructure and offer in its place a more fluid concept of temporality. Whereas naturalists such as Theodore Dreiser or Frank Norris accumulate detail after detail in an essentially chronological manner, Miller brocades his text with minutiae that often fail to establish their narrative (temporal) relevance and result in what Widmer disparagingly—but nevertheless erroneously—refers to as “semi-artistic documentation” (1990: 52). Widmer, in slighting Miller’s technique of aggregation, misses its fundamental point with regard to the bond between time and language in Miller’s autobiographical romances. Because he seeks subjective rather than objective truth, Miller places a premium on all of the supraself’s experiences.8 Miller, however, cannot possibly articulate all of these phenomena, so, by employing spiral form, he creates an expansive temporal effect by deflating the

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importance of specific causal relationships—the diachronic—and emphasizing the sheer magnitude of the potential links between events. He grants precedence to fragments over totalities. Miller thus arranges language—specifically signifiers—to function as a textual surrogate for time. Through the verbal outpourings in Sexus, Miller calls into question the validity of ordering human experience according to metaphors similar to the “arrow of time.” In Sexus, Miller uses spiral form both to highlight the artificiality of such metaphors and to create, in the guise of the supraself, a purely textual metaphor of experience in time that eradicates the boundaries between memory, action, and anticipation. Miller epitomizes how he treats time in Sexus and The Rosy Crucifixion in chapter fourteen. Although the previous chapter closes with a diatribe on the Hudson River, Miller begins the fourteenth chapter with an abrupt decision “to clear out of Cockroach Hall” and ignores any loose narrative threads from chapter thirteen (311). Because discontinuity of material proves the rule rather than the exception in Sexus, Miller thus belies the common notion that the autobiographical romance proceeds chronologically. While the “principal” actions—if one considers Genette’s distinction between story and narrative—in chapter fourteen occur after those in chapter thirteen, Miller decenters such temporal relationships through the analeptic use of competing anecdotes. Just as his embedded memories drift from the recollection of a dream that opens chapter thirteen, Miller, through his use of anecdotes, strays further and further away from the chronological node that initiates chapter fourteen. During the course of the chapter, Miller traces the supraself’s departure from Dr. Ornirifick’s house, tells the story—complete with catalog rhetoric—of Arthur and Rebecca, embeds an anecdote about Roy Hamilton, expatiates on the mechanics of conversation, writes about Arthur from the perspective of twenty years later, discusses the supraself’s dealings with Kronski ten years later, expounds on the conversational aptitude of fat and thin people, and gives a theory of psychoanalysis. What would—or at least could—constitute a simple unfolding of facts through time—for instance, “Henry Miller and Mona leave Ornirifick’s house and move in with Arthur and Rebecca”—Miller reconfigures into an exercise in the temporal convolutions that mark spiral form. Miller allows the narrative to flow from one association to the next, shedding light not only on Arthur and Kronski, but on the supraself as well. During this flow, when Miller segues from the supraself’s past to the mythological moment of composition, he provides a nearly simultaneous glimpse at multiple geologic levels of his personality. Miller thus permits his readers to bear witness to the changing temporal and psychological contexts that shape the supraself’s attitudes toward his experience and characterize spiral form. Miller, moreover, ranges chronologically from the early 1920s—perhaps earlier if one takes into account his use of “undated” anecdotal material—to the late 1940s, but his microessays on conversation and psychoanalysis evince a timelessness that contributes to the feeling of psychological flux. They function as “frozen” images of the supraself that Miller might insert anywhere or nowhere in the narrative. Similarly, in telling the story of Arthur, Miller employs catalog rhetoric to distend his anecdotal time and suggest narrative possibilities beyond those he actually explores. With this frozen aspect of

110 Californian tranquility his prose, Miller paradoxically adds to his ability to create the illusion of a temporal surge. James Goodwin observes that this quality of Miller’s form “provides an undefined referentiality that allows his persona great mobility in relation to any chronological order of events. It affords full rein to the writer’s vagrant thoughts, exhortations, incidental observations, and diffusive ideas” (1992: 305–6). In spiral form, therefore, Miller may temporally compress or expand his anecdotes and other devices indefinitely. Sexus and The Rosy Crucifixion may appear chronological at first, but only a thoroughly uncritical reader could maintain such an interpretation for long. In Sexus, then, Miller employs spiral form to underscore how subjective patterns of language and thought unfold in time. Miller concerns himself, of course, not with an abstract subjectivity, but with that of the supraself. Through the use of spiral form, in Sexus, Miller explores the supraself’s cavernous subjectivity as he discovers the muse-antagonist who will help transform him from a struggling proto-writer into a practicing artist. By employing spiral form, Miller may juxtapose typical incidents from the supraself’s pre-Mara existence—the mindnumbing period before he truly committed itself to art—with his first, stumbling efforts at writing in an environment ostensibly free of bourgeois distraction, and demonstrate the fundamental change in attitude that the supraself underwent.9 Miller also finds himself free to provide his readers with occasional portraits of the supraself’s post-Parisian, post-Mara/Mona period. Because of the narrative and temporal flexibility inherent in spiral form, Miller may create a picture of the supraself’s subjectivity that depends not on any factual or chronological template, but instead upon an unpredictable, anecdotal flow that yields not what Giles Mayné disdainfully labels “verbal gonorrhea,” but a lucid, mythopoeic impression of how bio-historical events shaped the narrator’s current perspective (1993: 82). As the supraself’s anecdotes tumble after one another, critical readers will not witness events “as they happened,” but they will come to some understanding of what those experiences meant to the supraself and how they altered his subjectivity. Despite a “frame” story concerning the supraself’s love for Mara/Mona, Miller interlards Sexus with literally dozens of anecdotes. In most of these anecdotes— whether, for instance, a story regarding the supraself’s spiritual “twin,” George Marshall, a narrative about how the supraself received a letter from Knut Hamsun, or a tale concerning how Mona supposedly lost her virginity—Miller ultimately stops, rather than ends his story, because of an intrusive “digression” caused by the introduction of either a competing anecdote or a different device of spiral form, such as a microessay, fantasy, intertextual moment, catalog, internal monolog, reverie, diatribe, dream, or sexual encounter. Consequently, the following paragraphs will analyze several key anecdotes both to illustrate how Miller employs spiral form and explain how his aesthetic reveals the supraself’s subjectivity. As mentioned above, Miller begins Sexus in a fairly traditional fashion by proposing to tell the history of the supraself’s love for Mara/Mona. He quickly deflates his ostensible narrative purpose, however, and the opening anecdote— which Miller relates in a mockingly chronological style: “It must have been a

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Thursday night,” “It was a Saturday morning,” and “Sunday morning”—soon unravels (7, 9).10 By the time Miller finishes the chapter, he employs over a dozen stylistic shifts, and injects the narrative with a multitude of spiral form’s principal techniques, including the catalog, diatribe, internal monolog, and microessay. Critics often point to this last device, the microessay, as emblematic of Miller’s supposed verbal excesses. Tom Wood, for example, caustically remarks that “Miller often takes idiotic flights into philosophy, religion, or astrology” 1976: 24), while Gore Vidal sarcastically asserts that “when Miller climbs onto the old cracker barrel, he gets very fancy indeed” (1969: 115). Wood and Vidal miss the thrust of Miller’s microessays. Seizing on the apparent aberrations in theme and rhetoric between Miller’s anecdotes and his reflective passages, such commentators seem perplexed that the writer’s prose does not conform to the “wild plunge through fantasy, like the ‘letters to the editors’ of Playboy and Penthouse” that they anticipate (Wood 1976: 17). Wood and Vidal privilege (but nevertheless dislike) the sexual content—and its concomitant “demotic” prose style—and deride the microessay as pseudolearned puffery (Vidal 1969: 115). Miller, with his thoughts in Sexus on subjects such as writing, joy, pain, evangelism, conversation, and the burlesque— among other topics—appears to threaten such critics’ monologic expectations. Miller with his heteroglossic approach to narrative fails to allow any one aspect of his writing to supersede the others, and, consequently, his style shifts repeatedly. By virtue of his microessays, Miller will often puncture an anecdote and “digress” on a theme that either informs the supraself’s actions in a given scene or else provides commentary on how he has evolved. The microessay serves to suggest—rather than mirror—the supraself’s thoughts in any given “geologic” period. Accordingly, Miller employs such passages not as poorly conceived—and thoroughly misplaced— philosophical disquisitions but, instead, as glosses on the supraself’s version of reality. In the first chapter, Miller presents a microessay on writing that functions in a twofold manner. Although he ostensibly interrupts an anecdote about Mara, Miller, in his “digression” on writing, subtly underscores her pivotal, muse-like role in the supraself’s life. Through the device, Miller also illustrates the wide gulf between the artistic philosophy of the pre-Parisian supraself and that of the postParisian supraself. In its first capacity as a “narrative detour”—to co-opt Ibargüen’s term (1989: 143)—the microessay finds its genesis in a simple phrase spoken by Mara over the telephone to the supraself: “Why don’t you try to write?” (17; Miller’s emphasis). The supraself, unused to encouragement—especially from women—regarding his writing, repeats the phrase throughout the rest of the day and contemplates the efficacy of such a pursuit. Despite possessing the “itch to write,” the supraself never truly entertained the notion that he could write fulltime because people such as his mother and Maude mocked him (1949: 21). Mara, with her apparent acceptance of the supraself’s desire, however, inspires him to begin to cast off his prior constraints and start the process of death and rebirth necessary for a nascent artist. While temporally and narratively disjointed from its neighboring scene, the microessay that ensues from Mara’s comment highlights the fruits of her fecundating influence over the supraself: “A man writes,” asserts the supraself, “to

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throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life” (17). Since the supraself does not realize the profound effect Mara—in forcing him to first suffer and then write of that anguish—will have on his artistic philosophy and output, such a comment may initially seem anachronistic or superfluous. Miller, via spiral form, though, allows for two temporally discontiguous incidents to occupy adjacent textual moments. By juxtaposing Mara’s words with a microessay on writing, Miller concerns himself less with temporal sequence than with psychological resonance. Through statements such as “the first quivering word [the writer] puts to paper is the word of the wounded angel: pain,” Miller metafictionally reveals the supraself’s great debt to Mara/Mona, the woman who both caused him pain and prompted him to write (18). In the microessay, Miller, in effect, answers Mara’s question with an affirmative by providing tangible evidence of the supraself’s newfound ability to create. Miller, by seizing on spiral form’s flexibility, isolates two ostensibly disparate events—Mara’s query and the supraself’s discourse on the act of writing—and illustrates their actual interdependence. When critics such as Wood, Vidal, Wickes, and Widmer point to such passages as sophistry, they ignore the vital relationship the microessays have with Miller’s more “demotic” anecdotes. By way of the microessay’s second function—that of outlining the supraself’s approach to literature—Miller also reveals his typical approach to spiral form. Miller rejects offering a linear narrative in which the reader gleans the supraself’s thoughts, and instead substitutes an apparently timeless sequence of the sort that Mieke Bal labels “achrony” (1985: 66).11 Miller blurs the chronology of the microessay by referring—in apparently random order—to both the musings of the supraself circa 1924, and those of the supraself circa 1949. Miller relates both sets of thoughts to writing, but the latter seems more confident. Through his use of spiral form, Miller creates a textually layered effect that allows for a dialectic between two geologic levels of the supraself. Mara’s words initially unsettle the supraself, as the microessay illustrates: “The little phrase … involved me … in a hopeless bog of confusion. I wanted to enchant but not to enslave; I wanted a greater, richer life, but not at the expense of others” (1949: 18–19). Miller suggests that the early supraself simply does not comprehend the full implication of Mara’s question. At the moment of composition, however, the supraself at last realizes what writing truly involves: Words, sentences, ideas, no matter how subtle or ingenious, the maddest flights of poetry, the most profound dreams, the most hallucinating visions, are but crude hieroglyphs chiseled in pain and sorrow to commemorate an event that is untransmissible. (1949: 19–20) Although at first the supraself fails to understand what writing entails and seeks the impossible, Miller divulges to the reader in the second passage that he will eventually come to grips with the lacunae between art and experience. In the patently metafictional preceding citation, Miller provides an explicit commentary on the

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entire trilogy and illustrates his ongoing concern with spiral form. The “untransmissibility” of experience—that is, Truth—underlies Miller’s decision to adopt spiral form and causes him to cast and recast his bittersweet affair with June in narrative form throughout his career, and brings to mind Jacques Derrida’s notion that “the semantic horizon that habitually governs the notion of communication is exceeded or split by the intervention of writing” (1988: 20). By employing devices such as the microessay, Miller allows the supraself free rein in “commemorating” the events of his life, but, despite his verbal pyrotechnics, the supraself will never tell the truth about Mara/Mona in any but the crudest—in other words, subjective— manner, which explains in part why Miller wrote to Michael Fraenkel that “the book is not important but writing itself, and not even writing, but expression, which can be on any plane” (Fraenkel and Miller 1962: 397). In his microessay, Miller thus encapsulates the futility of writing—“the process of putting down words is equivalent to giving oneself a narcotic” (1949: 18)—and illustrates his approach— “a great work of art, if it accomplishes anything, serves to remind us … of all that is fluid and intangible” (20). Despite drifting from his initial topic, Miller uses spiral form to connect two subjects (Mara and writing) that fuse spiritually, if not temporally. Miller takes an excursus not to derail his anecdote, but to discuss its latent import. Although Miller will employ “metaphysical” techniques such as the microessay to gloss salient anecdotes, he also makes use of the less intellectual device of fantasy throughout Sexus. While his fantasies often seem spurious or awkwardly inserted, they actually contribute a great deal to the effects of spiral form —indeed, Judson Crews goes so far as to suggest that Sexus “is essentially fantasy” (1994: 338). Undoubtedly owing a debt to his surrealist and Dadaist forebears—although he certainly experimented with fantasy prior to his Paris days—Miller often attempts to transcend the boundaries of external experience by infusing his anecdotes with flights of pure imagination. Through such fantasies, Miller allows the supraself to escape temporarily from the constraints—financial, sexual, moral, spiritual, or artistic—that hinder him from fully realizing himself. Miller often organizes these fantasies to serve as surrogate climaxes and offer alternatives to the drab existence foisted upon the supraself by his capitalist society and its various agents, including the Cosmodemonic and Maude. In the timeless realm of fantasy, Miller counteracts the timeclock drudgery demanded of the supraself by characters such as Spivak and Maude, and lets the supraself explore the recesses of his imagination, an activity frowned upon by his antagonists. In Sexus, Miller employs several fantasies—arising from a variety of emotions and situations and leading to scenarios such as the supraself’s paranoia-induced fantasy about Mara begging for Kronski’s “fat prick” (1949: 82), a wistful scenario in which the supraself and Una exchange a kiss that “sealed the wound which until then had bled unceasingly” (292), and a “physiological comedy” in which the supraself “menstruated from every hole in [his] body” (498). All interrupt the “primary” anecdote. Miller interrupts a dreary anecdote concerned with the supraself’s wife, Maude, with yet another fantasy. Miller typifies his use of the device in this last fantasy and illustrates both the bleak nature of the supraself’s domestic life and the hope embodied by Mara.

114 Californian tranquility Miller generally employs the fantasy element of spiral form to express the supraself’s hopes or fears. The fantasy that transports the supraself from depressed musings about the “bloody, futile telegraph life” and Maude’s “sly, repressed” sexuality to a vision of life with Mara proves no exception (94). Immediately before launching into this fantasy, Miller depicts the dejected supraself wandering from disgusted thoughts about Maude’s lack of carnal passion to Spivak’s incessant demands for Cosmodemonic efficiency. Longing for the “abrupt deliverance” promised by his friend Stanley, the supraself erects an elaborate, optimistic daydream about his forthcoming life with Mara (95). In this fantasy, Miller uses spiral form to reveal both the banality of the supraself’s current existence and the potential for rebirth offered by Mara. In terms of spiral form, Miller presents this fantasy to symbolize the profound changes that begin to overcome the supraself. Although the fantasy ostensibly focuses on geographic change—moving to “Texas or some God-forsaken place like that”—Miller locates the true psychological subject of his fantasy in the supraself’s mental outlook (95). Miller reveals that the supraself envisions that Mara will give him the confidence that the humiliating requirements of capitalism stripped from him. To a mysterious benefactor, for example, the supraself—aided by Mara’s love—blurts out the truth at the core of the fantasy: “We’re frightened to death that we’ll say something, something real” (96). No longer paralyzed by the ludicrous demands of society, the supraself of the daydream may leave the ranks of the living dead and begin to experience a more healthy existence as a writer, a theme echoed in practically all of Miller’s postBrooklyn work. Although Miller interrupts a rather bleak anecdote, his juxtaposition of fantasy allows him to portray the supraself’s imminent sense of psychological metamorphosis. Through his use of spiral form, Miller suggests complexities of the supraself’s emotional state that conventional narratives, with their insistence on plot, would fail to capture. In spiral form, Miller deems essential any “detour”—no matter how fantastic—that contributes to the aggregate subjectivity of the supraself. With his frequent intertextual references, Miller adds further dimension to the supraself’s character. While Widmer attributes such passages to Miller’s propensity to act as a poseur, a more plausible explanation concerns his obsessive attempt to trace the intellectual roots of the supraself. From boyhood braggadocio to Spengler, words and the personalities of their creators deeply affected Miller, and he strives in his narratives to provide an honest account of the supraself’s influences. Miller—either temporarily or permanently—halts anecdotes to discuss the likes of Dostoevski, Richter, Novalis, Lao Tzu, Agrippa, Wolfe, and Belloc. Through such references, Miller achieves much more than simply establishing the supraself’s (or Miller’s) reading history. While discussions—or, frequently, catalogs—regarding such figures certainly help to explain the supraself’s autodidacticism, Miller also reveals the supraself’s deep, consuming desire to join the ranks of the artist. In the intertextual references of Sexus—and The Rosy Crucifixion as a whole— Miller generally allots more space to how the book or author changed the supraself than to detailed explication of a particular passage. Miller notes that, in and of themselves, books hold little value for the supraself. Instead, Miller demonstrates in

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his intertextual moments that the supraself extracts from books their ability to alter perception and change their readers’ lives. Miller employs intertextual references to illustrate the cumulative effect certain writers had on the supraself, in terms both of literary style and of living. Such moments may seem like self-serving digressions, but since Miller seeks in spiral form to explore all aspects of the supraself, they actually constitute fundamental truths about the supraself and his passion for the artistic life. Miller provides a strong example of how he uses intertextuality in Sexus in chapter eight. Although the chapter initially comprises a series of anecdotes regarding Cockroach Hall and its denizens, Miller, in a maneuver typical of spiral form, derails a specific anecdote concerning an argument with doctors Onirifick and Kronski to muse on the supraself’s ironic situation, childhood in the 14th Ward, and Hilaire Belloc. While the reference to Belloc finds a tenuous link to the preceding anecdote—one of his books ignited the quarrel—Miller explores the meaning of Belloc to the supraself apart from any temporal or narrative link to the scene with the two doctors. Belloc holds a psychological significance for the supraself that transcends plot significance, and Miller, since he uses spiral form in Sexus, inserts a passage on the writer into the book without care for its consecutivity with the previous node. Miller demonstrates that in Belloc, the supraself—trapped in the culturally sterile confines of the Cosmodemonic world—sees the ideal artist: “a sensitive man, a scholar, a man for whom the history of Europe was a living memory” (162). Via this intertextual reference to Belloc, Miller allows the supraself to comprehend “the difference between process and goal, [his] first awareness that the goal of life is the living of it” (162). Miller fails through either sentiment, or others in the passage, to advance the narrative in any direct manner. The supraself neither progresses to nor retrogresses from his goals, and Miller seems to shed no light on the supraself’s complex relationship with Mara/Mona. Nevertheless, Miller, through this alinear technique of spiral form, allows readers to glean a sense of the vicarious, almost voyeur-like pleasure that the supraself derives from Belloc’s travels. To his readers, Miller illustrates how, full of unfulfilled desire to travel and write, the supraself finds a creative outlet in writers such as Belloc who can sacrifice everything for their artistic ideals. Miller, furthermore, positions the supraself’s distinction—drawn from Belloc—between process and goal functions as a metafictional gloss on the entire trilogy. Reflecting his own narrative concerns, Miller observes that the supraself seems drawn to those writers who place less accent on the final product than on the creative act itself, a phenomenon embodied in the trilogy’s lack of stress on conclusions and emphasis on questions. Miller partly explains the supraself’s willingness to follow Mara/Mona and her refrain of travel, freedom, and writing with the supraself’s readiness to embrace Belloc— “how I envied Hilaire Belloc his adventure!” (162)— without contributing directly to the narrative progression. Miller, who refers to “living books” in The Books in My Life, treats Mara/Mona as a figure who, like Belloc, entices the supraself and causes him to begin the cycle of death and rebirth necessary for the artist (1952a: 127). In the passage on Belloc, Miller underscores both the supraself’s receptivity of Mara/ Mona and his readiness to undergo a profound metamorphosis. The intertextual

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reference, and others like it, provide a wealth of insight into the supraself’s psychological state and illustrate how Miller uses spiral form to delve into the convolutions of the supraself’s character. Miller designs his catalogs, another device of spiral form, to function in a manner similar to that of intertextual references. As with his intertextual reference, Miller will seem to halt the narrative’s progression with his catalogs and focus on a minor aspect of an anecdote or other technique. Just as with an intertextual reference, Miller may insert a catalog at any point in his text. Consequently, he will often interrupt an anecdote at an apparently crucial point with a list or cluster of lists. Miller employs catalog rhetoric to suggest the potentially infinite number of nodes available to the practitioner of spiral form. Miller could expatiate on any component in the sequence, for each offers a slightly different perspective on the supraself. Miller cannot capture the universe within each second, but he can create the simulacrum of that universe by establishing the illusion of narrative limitlessness through his use of catalogs. By offering catalogs in lieu of action, Miller suggests alternatives to his own narrative and attempts to resolve what Italo Calvino regards as the primary stuggle of literature, “the effort to escape the confines of language” (1981: 77). He also gives his narrative a frenetic pace that contrasts dramatically with the book’s tremendous length and reflects the supraself’s own sense of urgency. While the catalogs in Sexus generally do not last as long as those in the Tropics, with them Miller nevertheless adds texture to the narrative and helps to establish the supraself’s character. Functioning as a type of narrative shortcut, the catalogs in Sexus generally appear when an overabundance of information threatens to collapse an anecdote. Miller frequently inserts catalogs in the midst of a passage that foregrounds his rococo-like descriptive powers. Examples include a list of modern ailments (“migraine, acidosis, intestinal catarrh, lumbago … ” [1949: 8]), a description of Kronski’s apartment (“butter running rancid, toilet stopped up, tubs leaking, dirty combs lying on the table … ” [74]), a gloomy picture of motherhood (“after thirty-five years of childbearing, wifebeating, abortions, hemorrhages, ulcers … ” [471]), and a portrait of India. Miller employs this last catalog in typical fashion. Interrupting a “statistically correct” monologue by Kronski that could potentially destroy the anecdote’s delicate juxtaposition of Eastern and Western culture—and the effects that they impress on the supraself—Miller redirects the narrative to the supraself by compressing Kronski’s points into a catalog that merely suggests the doctor’s pessimistic prolixity: “from disease to poverty and from poverty to superstition and from these to slavery, degradation, despair, indifference, hopelessness” (195). Rather than allowing the supraself’s narrative to turn into Kronski’s story, Miller lets the catalog crystallize the doctor’s various topics, and he simply hints at the incredible volubility with which he expounded upon them. While Miller occasionally grants his secondary characters the space to express themselves, he more often chooses to summarize the psychological import of their diatribes with a catalog, since in spiral form the primary focus should remain on the supraself. Miller uses a catalog in this scene because Kronski’s views ultimately seem less significant than how the supraself reacts to them. While Kronski’s

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monolog may last for hours in the chronological sense, Miller deflates its temporal importance by both compressing it and devoting much more space to the supraself’s largely internal response, a response expressed at first as a “countercatalog,” then as a reverie, and finally as a new anecdote. Since Miller writes in spiral form, he may avoid his narrative’s collapse into a verbatim account of a—for the supraself—tedious and inconsequential discourse on India’s problems and concentrate on the supraself’s subjective reshaping of the event’s significance. In presenting this subjective reshaping—the driving force behind spiral form— Miller allows the supraself to express himself most forcibly in Sexus via the internal monolog. Because Maude and the Cosmodemonic squelch any real attempt at literary creation on the part of the supraself, Miller illustrates the manner in which he “writes” in his head through extended internal monologs. By adorning the text with such monologs, Miller effectively mirrors the form of Sexus as a whole because he allows the supraself to expand on any node without having to concentrate on developing narrative suspense. He frees the supraself from the temporal chains of such suspense and lets the supraself expand on any theme he desires, regardless of how it advances the “plot.” As he writes in Sexus, “people have had enough of plot and character. Plot and character don’t make life” (36). Owing to this lack of constraint, Miller makes the supraself interrupt anecdotes or other devices in order to expatiate on a wide variety of topics that gloss the supraself’s psychology and bring it to “life.” In Sexus, Miller tends to revolve these topics around the supraself’s “difference” from those about him—a prime indication of his readiness to yield to Mara/Mona’s temptations and begin the process of spiritual death and artistic rebirth. Examples of such internal monologs include the supraself’s self-analysis (“the truth is I was so dissatisfied with myself, with my abortive efforts, that nothing or nobody seemed right to me” [46]), his musings on Mara’s “admirers” (“I didn’t give a fuck how many men were in love with her as long as I was included in the circle” [51]), his thoughts on his artistic future (“in my mind I saw my own temples in ruins, before even one brick had been laid upon another” [202]), his aesthetic concepts (“my task was to develop a mnemonic index to my inspirational atlas” [248]), and his psychological avoidance of contemplating Mona’s suicide attempt. Miller typifies his practice of the technique in this last internal monolog, and demonstrates how the supraself’s mind functions. Despite receiving a telephone call about Mona’s suicide attempt, the supraself continues his seduction of his exwife, “slowly and deliberately ramm[ing] [his] cock back and forth” (227). After the supraself leaves Maude, he enters the subway and begins an extended internal monolog ostensibly about Mona and the fear that she “might have bungled the job” (228), but that ultimately avoids direct analysis of her condition and exfoliates in an idiosyncratic manner. “My thoughts were running crabwise,” the supraself explains after a discussion of sexual slavery (230). Miller neatly summarizes his use of the internal monolog technique in the supraself’s statement, for it clearly suggests the nonlinear, nonlogical fashion in which the supraself thinks. Just as the entire book often appears like a random collection of anecdotes and impressions, Miller allows the monolog to drift from Melanie, the unselfconscious, mentally

118 Californian tranquility slow woman for whom “the hair on her cunt … was undifferentiated from her toenails” (230) to Japanese bordellos with their “music, incense, baths, massages, [and] caresses” (236) to a sexual romp with Maude to writing to Broadway, among other topics. Here and elsewhere in Sexus, Miller employs a free-ranging internal monolog to depict the emotional core—what he calls in Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch the “poetic aspect” of an event—of the supraself’s experience (1957: 318). With this device, Miller implies, of course, that the supraself engages in such a wild mélange, not from callousness, but instead, from a literal overflow of emotion at the thought of Mona’s suicide attempt. Throughout Sexus—indeed, throughout the trilogy—Miller reveals that Mara/Mona gnaws at both the supraself’s conscious and unconscious thoughts, causing him both extreme pleasure—due to the prospect of becoming an artist—and pain—because of her cryptic, possibly unfaithful, ways. These extremes manifest themselves in a creative, albeit internal, outpouring in which the supraself—in an effort to defuse the potentially harmful effects of Mara/Mona’s unpredictability—struggles to make sense of his life. The apparently chaotic internal monolog thus functions as both a therapeutic and artistic outlet for the supraself. In the above scene, the supraself—while not confronting Mona’s deed directly—explores, through the medium of “unconnected” thoughts, sexual power dynamics and their relation to love while at the same time developing the techniques that will eventually constitute spiral form. As this internal monolog suggests, Miller and the supraself approach problems such as Mona’s suicide attempt obliquely, combining fantasia with fact in an effort to transcend the facade and discover the truth, however subjective. Occasionally, when the supraself’s emotions reach a fevered pitch, Miller will allow an internal monolog to mutate into a reverie. Although Miller does not employ strict textual boundaries in spiral form, he distinguishes such reveries from a “standard” monolog through the use of intense, often mystical language and a sweeping, ethereal style.12 As these techniques suggest, Miller utilizes the reverie to transport the supraself from the confines of ordinary thought to a level of hyperconsciousness indicative of the supraself’s burgeoning artistic sensibilities. By establishing such a frenetic state of awareness, Miller illustrates the supraself’s ability to transform the mundane into the extraordinary, a phenomenon that mirrors Miller’s own ability to use spiral form to juxtapose ostensibly trivial facts and anecdotes with mystical pronouncements and outlandish fantasy. Miller may spawn his reveries from nearly any subject, from a sexual encounter between the supraself and Maude to Mona’s eyes to Cleo, the burlesque queen, to roller skating, and produces the textual simulacrum of the supraself’s utter creative abandon. In Sexus, Miller festoons his narrative with reveries that reveal the supraself’s relief in deciding to heed Mara’s admonition and cut his ties with orthodox society in order to write full time. While Miller does not make these connections blatantly, because of spiral form he may develop such passages cumulatively and demonstrate indirectly how profoundly Mara/Mona changes the supraself’s outlook on life. The roller-skating scene, for example, derives much of its power not from its eccentric situation—the supraself skates in his office after learning about the

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“death” of Mona’s “father”—but from the delirious reverie that the supraself undergoes.13 Miller strips his prose of any but the barest narrative and instead concerns himself with staccato images that echo the supraself’s wild temperament: Two or three wild turns … la Brueghel, and out the window! … Not Brueghel, but Hieronymous Bosch. A season in hell, amidst the traps and pulleys of the medieval mind … . The iron harp of Prague. A sunken street near the synagogue. A dolorous peal of the bells … Round and round, ringing doorbells, ringing sleigh bells. The cosmococcic round of grief and slats. (1949: 422) The reverie continues until Juan, a would-be messenger, frightened by the supraself’s crazed laughter, brings the supraself back to normal consciousness. By tendering this highly impressionistic reverie, Miller evokes a sense of the supraself’s ecstatic mood swings and illustrates his difference from nonartists. In the preceding reverie, Miller fails to “advance” the narrative in terms of story, but he does demonstrate both the exotic nature of the supraself’s thoughts and his tendency to yield control of his consciousness to almost mystical forces. Once unleashed, the supraself’s creative powers take over and lead the supraself on a fantastic journey through uncharted dominions. Only because of Mara/Mona, may the supraself experience—and attempt to record—such reveries, for she gave him the power to undergo the “rosy crucifixion” of death and artistic resurrection. Because of spiral form’s extreme plasticity, Miller may embrace such an atemporal technique as the reverie and disclose more about the supraself’s character than conventional narrative would allow. The diatribe marks yet another device of spiral form that Miller adopts in order to explore the supraself’s artistic growth. Despite accepting his place in the world, Miller never resists an opportunity to to rail against injustice via the diatribe. Miller achieves two purposes by using the diatribe. He first allows himself, in the guise of the “current” supraself, to offer his prescription for the ills of society—America in particular. Second and more important, however, Miller examines the ways in which the supraself acts out against his restrictive environment and begins to understand how to create. Both strategies rely on an alinear temporality because they do not necessarily hinge on the narrative progression within any particular anecdote. Miller may thus elaborate as long as he likes on his subject without impeding the narrative’s plot. Bal refers to this phenomenon in which “no movement of the fabula-time is implied” as a narrative “pause” (1985: 76).14 While pauses certainly occur with regularity in literature, Miller permits his pauses—of which the diatribe marks only one variety—actually to rival the narrative for primacy, for in spiral form action does not outweigh other techniques in terms of importance. The diatribes, therefore, constitute an essential way of comprehending the supraself’s difference from most members of society—a variance that manifests itself through art. Examples of diatribes in Sexus include such subjects as work—“an activity reserved for the dullard” (1949: 205)—the Hudson Valley—an “empty dream of a beer-logged Dutchman”

120 Californian tranquility (311)—tenement housing—“cozy little flats they are, if you have a strong stomach” (473)—and bourgeois complacency. Miller often returns to bourgeois complacency in his diatribes, since it clearly illustrates the plight of the supraself before Mara/Mona compelled him to abandon his ties with the ranks of society’s living dead. In the diatribe about “Mr. and Mrs. Megalopolitan,” Miller uses spiral form to illustrate how the supraself’s loathing of creature comforts makes him unfit to function in his community. Wedged in between an anecdote about the supraself’s thwarted attempt to seduce Maude and a tale concerning an orgy, the supraself’s diatribe about American life seems perfectly incongruous at first glance. When one examines the diatribe more scrupulously, however, one finds it obvious that Miller hopes—through his strange juxtaposition—to reveal just how far removed the supraself feels from conventional morality. Although estranged from Maude, the supraself has no compunction about copulating with her, even though in the anecdote immediately preceding the diatribe Maude rebuffs her erstwhile lover during a picnic with their daughter. This leads Miller to engage the supraself in a diatribe that mocks both his situation and American values in general: Mr. and Mrs. Megalopolitan with their offspring. Hobbled and fettered. Suspended in the sky like so much venison … . All day long you make innocent little gadgets; at night you sit in a dark hall and watch phantoms move across a silver screen. Maybe the realest moments you know are when you sit alone in the toilet and make caca … you leave the toilet and you step into the big shithouse. Whatever you touch is shitty. Even when it’s wrapped in cellophane the smell is there. Caca! The philosopher’s stone of the industrial age. (1949: 374–5) By suspending the narrative action with a diatribe, Miller enables his readers to penetrate to the heart of the supraself’s dissatisfaction with his life before Mara/ Mona and sense the supraself’s dislocation with the ethos that drives the typical American family. Miller suggests that accumulating possessions fail to interest the supraself, as does the vacuous entertainment that operates only to keep the wageslave in harness by simulating happiness and fantasy. As an artist, the supraself desires more from life than an existence filled with expensive, cellophanewrapped shit, and wants to unlock the potential being that resides within. In a maneuver typical of spiral form, Miller allows his diatribe to represent the poetic aspect of the supraself’s dilemma. While for many, or even most, American life may not conform to the supraself’s bleak picture, the supraself certainly feels alienated and disgusted by what he sees. With the diatribe, Miller may convey this sense of anguish without either stopping the action—he merely pauses it by ignoring chronology—or beginning a new anecdote. Dreams mark yet another device of spiral form by which Miller establishes the supraself’s mental condition. Unlike most naturalists, Miller concentrates heavily on the supraself’s unconscious, and in Sexus dreams divulge a great deal about the supraself’s rosy crucifixion. The dreams in Sexus comprise two basic types, the

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ethereal wish fulfillment and the hellacious nightmare. The former represents the supraself’s escape to a purely artistic realm similar to what Miller labels “China” in Black Spring and the Hamlet correspondence. In such dreams, Miller may employ nostalgic or fantastic settings, but generally he transports the supraself away from a sordid or demoralizing situation and lets him drift from image to image in a creative frenzy. As Miller writes in “Reunion in Brooklyn,” dreams often appear “far more vivid” than external reality (1944b: 100). Examples of such dreams occur following an unfulfilling sexual bout with Mara and after a night when reality becomes too much to bear. With the latter form, the nightmare—Miller illustrates the supraself’s general dissatisfaction with his condition and dramatizes the supraself’s feelings of anxiety. Typical nightmares include a sequence following a discussion about Europe and one that merges a vision of Mona’s relationship with Anastasia and a frightening confrontation with a gunman. This latter nightmare serves both to demonstrate how Miller uses dreams as a device of spiral form and to foreshadow the bittersweet ending of the entire trilogy and its effects on the supraself.15 True to form, Miller disregards any notion of a chronological narrative in his conclusion to Sexus, and jumps far ahead of the previous chapter’s temporal moment through a combination of dream and the 1940s-era supraself’s memories of what took place following Mona’s intrigue with Stasia. What begins as a flashforward in which Miller relates the (1920s) supraself’s “shame and humiliation” (1949: 489) at ostensibly losing Mona to Stasia, quickly transmutes into the supraself’s nightmarish walk through the city, a trip that finds him skulking through alleys and fleeing an anonymous gunman: “I was absolutely paralyzed. I watched him creeping closer and closer, unable to stir a muscle … when he got within a few feet of me he flashed a gun” (502). The supraself metamorphoses into a dog, and, after receiving “lash after lash” from a whip, wakes up momentarily after Mona rouses him (503). The supraself then falls asleep again and performs tricks for a knucklebone encircled by a wedding ring: “‘Now beg! Beg for it!’ ‘Woof woof! Woof woof!” (505). Although the supraself does not fully comprehend whether or not he experiences a nightmare or reality, Miller employs the scene as a metaphor for the supraself’s feelings of victimization, while at the same time he takes advantage of spiral form’s temporal flexibility. Throughout Sexus and The Rosy Crucifixion, Miller clearly depicts the supraself’s ambivalent feelings about Mara/Mona, but in the foregoing dream he reduces this ambivalence to its essence. Miller implies with his nightmarish conclusion that Mona acts both as benefactor and tormentor because she both inspires the supraself and causes him deep pain. Effectively, Miller argues in this dream that in exchange for her attentions the supraself must degrade himself, an action that renders him artistically paralyzed. Paradoxically, Miller reveals through the nightmare that, although the supraself possesses the freedom to write, he cannot because this liberty brings with he bondage to Mona’s whims. Without spiral form, Miller’s use of this nightmare would appear completely out of place, but since his aesthetic allows him to draw from his entire stock of memories in analyzing the supraself, Miller may juxtapose chronologically disparate events at will and develop any node that he thinks will clarify the supraself’s history. In this final dream, Miller anticipates the economic

122 Californian tranquility struggle of Plexus and the emotional drama of Nexus and allows his readers to realize that although the supraself’s situation seems rosy, his crucifixion will soon follow. No discussion of Sexus could exclude a mention of one final device of spiral form that Miller employs: a liberal dose of sexually charged material. Although a few critics maintain that Sexus consists of nothing but vulgarity, the previous analysis should indicate that Miller covers a broad range of subject matter in the first volume of his trilogy and in fact, as Ronald Sukenick postulates, takes as his subject “the crisis of the modern psyche” (1981: 42). While, Miller does of course employ numerous sexual scenes in Sexus, many of them come in the form of clustered memories rather than extended anecdotes.16 Miller rarely employs sex qua sex, however, and typically utilizes sexual incidents to deromanticize basic human urges and depict the supraself’s efforts to liberate his body and mind. Brown, in fact, justly observes that “the frank, unbridled sexuality of Sexus emphasizes Miller’s more general indictment of his culture and expresses his desire for complete autonomy” (1986: 77).17 Each sexual memory, therefore, just like any other technique of spiral form, functions on both a literal and figurative plane. Since Miller strives toward the impossible goal of completeness, possessing spiral form’s ability to traverse every area of the supraself’s experience offers him a powerful tool with which to dissect even the supraself’s most private moments. In Sexus, Miller employs the supraself’s sexuality both as an emblem of his unhappy, pre-rebirth state and as a token of his ability to free himself from that death in life. He develops this paradox by approaching sexuality on two levels, the physical and the mental. Essentially, he implicitly argues that before Mara/Mona, the supraself escaped into a sexual world that, while offering him some degree of freedom, ultimately kept him from rejecting his surroundings. Thus, Miller suggests that the supraself, while physically free, actually placed too much mental importance on sex, a phenomenon that essentially crippled him in terms of art. After meeting Mara, though, the supraself reevaluates his position and realizes that sex alone will not release him from the constraints of society and that he must undergo a more rigorous mental transformation. Despite sexual encounters with Ida, Carlotta, Irma, and others, the supraself cannot and will not locate the source of his freedom in others. Only by developing beyond physical freedom will the supraself become a writer. One sexual incident in which Miller elaborates this idea occurs after the supraself separates from Maude. Released from any sexual “obligation” to each other, Maude and the supraself suddenly realize that sex serves as a starting point for self-liberation, not as the destination. In the midst of a ménage à trois in which Maude yells “fuck me! fuck me!” (376) and the supraself “shov[es] it around inside her like a drunken fiend” (384), the estranged couple pause to reflect on their relationship and agree that for its problem they “were both to blame” (378). With this epiphany, placed within scenes of “labial caresses” (387), “oozing” sperm (385), and “fucks to a standstill” (377), Miller demonstrates how the supraself, in starting to accept responsibility for his own life, takes the first step toward rebirth. Although the orgy may seem gratuitous, it actually functions as a major turning point in the supraself’s life. Miller includes this incident because it confirms that, since meeting

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Mara, sex for the supraself embodies not a struggle of wills, but a healthy, lifeaffirming activity. Centering the anecdote on the above moment of clarity, Miller insists that instead of an all-consuming obsession for the supraself, sex now becomes natural and gratifying. Spiral form allows Miller to sprinkle sexual scenes throughout Sexus in order to annotate the supraself’s progress toward complete artistic and personal liberation. Miller utilizes the above devices of spiral form in Sexus not out of concern for sheer chaos, but because he deeply desires to delineate a portrait of how the supraself’s love for Mara/Mona compelled him finally to take the personal risk that, according to Hassan, precipitates an artistic quest. In Sexus, Miller argues that the meeting with Mara constitutes the single most important event in the supraself’s life. Thus, Miller clearly suggests that one needs to place all of the supraself’s experiences in the context of that chance occurrence. With his choice of spiral form, Miller assures such a phenomenon because he may cut from one scene to the next with no regard for conventional narrative contiguity. In Sexus, Miller employs a version of spiral form that both progresses through the present and develops crucial nodes from the past and future. Although he may frequently elide or gloss over the supraself’s life with his muse, Miller always keeps Mara/Mona’s presence in the background because of the aesthetic of spiral form. Miller realizes that even when Mara/Mona does not appear in an anecdote, spiral form—with its insistence on temporal and thematic interrelationships—locates her spirit in the midst of the action. Despite using the unconventional techniques of spiral form, Miller manages in Sexus to tell a compelling story of how the supraself’s unabiding love for a woman transforms him from a drudge with aspirations to a budding artist.

Plexus Plexus, the second volume of The Rosy Crucifixion, elicits the same types of extreme response that all of Miller’s autobiographical romances attract, a phenomenon easily traceable to spiral form and its aesthetic of inclusion and elaboration. Since Miller approaches the supraself from a geologic perspective, he must adopt a written mode that allows for both repetition and progression. In Plexus, Miller once again chooses spiral form and in, so doing, runs the risk of alienating even sympathetic critics such as Lewis, who, in his otherwise insightful monograph on Miller, refuses even to consider the trilogy’s second book in a study of the “major writings.”18 Dismissing Plexus as “long and boring,” Lewis fails to find in the narrative the innovations of Miller’s previous work (1986: 35). Lewis apparently misses the broader interpretation of a critic such as Maxwell Geismar, who labels Plexus the “core volume” of the trilogy (1966: 21). For Geismar, Plexus contains “the most complete description of Henry Miller’s basic values, beliefs, opinions, [and] judgments, both at the time of his ‘crucifixion’ and at the later time when the trilogy was written” (21). Geismar realizes that an overabundance of details constitutes the central tenet in Miller’s narrative strategy—because, as he asserts in The World of Sex, “every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as

124 Californian tranquility such” (1941g: 53)—and that the welter of prolixity characteristic of spiral form represents Miller’s grand struggle to liberate the supraself from the more economical—and, to Miller, more sterile—narratives of the bourgeois work ethic, with their simplistic equations that work equals money and that money corresponds with fulfillment. Although he repeats familiar refrains from earlier works, and despite his frequent refusal to resolve his anecdotes or points, Miller attempts in Plexus to juxtapose the ethos of the writer with that of the typical American. To achieve this effect, Miller, by invoking the techniques of spiral form, rehearses humiliation after humiliation that the supraself and Mona must undergo to meet basic needs without compromising the supraself’s artistic integrity. In Plexus, Miller dismantles narrative structure and time and adopts the methods of spiral form to chart the supraself’s struggles to remove himself from the numbing effects of the American economic system and achieve his goals of writing books, loving Mona, and, someday, achieving transcendence. In his use of structure and time in Plexus, Miller differs little from his application of spiral form in Sexus. As with the first volume in the trilogy, Miller employs chapters in Plexus. Just as in Sexus, though, Miller quickly abandons any notion of a plot curve, substituting instead a narratological strategy that relies on rapidly shifting nodes and psychological resonances, for, as he muses in a later work, “there is no beginning nor end” (1957: 207). Miller develops his story in such a fashion that the chapters function like a textual salmagundi in which anecdotes about the supraself’s life with Mona—the ostensible “main” narrative thread—exist side by side with tales about the supraself’s cronies and acquaintances, stories of childhood, dreams, discussions, and a host of other incongruities.19 As in Sexus, Miller utilizes such anti-structure—or, what L. Yakovlev less charitably refers to as the “complete degeneration of form”— to problematize notions of linear time and allow himself the flexibility to develop any node that he believes will annotate the supraself’s situation (1961: 37). Since he rejects photographic mimesis, but yet still strives to capture “truth,” however subjective, Miller must create the illusion of psychological mimesis by unfolding his narrative in an idiosyncratic manner that Suzanne Nalbantian refers to as “tunnelling and telescoping” (1994: 59). Miller, in adopting spiral form to capture the subjective essence of the supraself, employs an epistolary-like method that enables him to digress from subject to subject—and switch from mode to mode—in the manner of a wily raconteur who, even as he appears to ramble, realizes his final narrative destination. By focusing on spiral form’s digressive properties, Miller de-emphasizes time’s propensity to erect boundaries between past and present and renders such distinctions meaningless for the supraself. Miller makes the ramifications of his nodal approach to time and structure quite clear in Plexus. Despite presenting his readers with the supraself’s financially precarious situation, Miller—fully aware that the supraself, spurred on by Mona, has started to take the risks necessary to become a writer rather than simply question his deathlike existence in American society—returns to the past and looks forward to the future, time and again in Plexus. In most of Plexus’s chapters, Miller ranges from the “immediate” experience of the supraself and Mona (and their friends) to the supraself’s childhood and experiences in Paris, as well as explores realms such as

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dreams and fantasies much less rooted in time. Chapter two, for example, finds Miller flitting from an anecdote concerning the supraself’s “resignation” from the Cosmodemonic (“Hymie, I’m quitting” [1952b: 45]) to reminiscences about childhood and “the jovial sensual tub of flesh whom I called Uncle Charlie” (73) to disquisitions on subjects such as Blaise Cendrars, writing, and the apocalypse, to anecdotes relating false job searches and tepid writing assignments, among other diverse subjects. Although Miller charges the supraself’s resignation with significance by making the supraself reflect on “how stupid, meaningless, idiotic,” and “diabolical” the work ethic appeared to him (46), he chooses not to dwell on the incident, preferring to capture the aura of his importance by following the supraself’s excited thoughts and memories. Miller suggests in this chapter that the supraself’s newfound physical freedom mirrors his burgeoning artistic sensibility. Accordingly, Miller juxtaposes scenes from the “principal” narrative line —such as the supraself visiting his ex-wife and child and the “frightful scenes” that ensued when the girl resorted to “screaming and clinging” to stop the supraself from leaving (69)—with “secondary” material such as reflections on Van Gogh and his “flaming desire to live the life of the artist” (83) and a recollection about “reel[ing] off such filth, abuse and malediction as would do honor to a gallows bird” (78) as a boy and having a police sergeant berate him. Through such apparently odd collocations that actually typify spiral form, Miller establishes a sense of how the accumulation of random experiences shapes the supraself’s consciousness. Miller merges past, present, and future and demonstrates how early struggles and tribulations helped to forge the supraself’s artistic, antiestablishment sensibilities. Spiral form’s loose structure and alinear temporal scheme thus allow Miller to identify the salient features of the supraself without completely sacrificing narrative progression.20 If in Sexus, Miller investigates the mental and physical explosions the supraself undergoes after meeting Mara, then in Plexus the writer examines the supraself’s general unreadiness to write, despite his rejection of the bourgeois ethos. Through the many devices of spiral form, Miller demonstrates that the supraself’s economic hardships have little to do with his failures as an artist. Although he depicts numerous anecdotes in which the supraself and Mona degrade themselves for money, Miller also indicates through such techniques as internal monologs, fantasies, intertextual moments, reveries, catalogs, dreams, and microessays that the supraself’s artistic rebirth first requires the suffering of the crucifixion that he will undergo at the hands of Mona and Anastasia in Nexus. Miller demonstrates through spiral form that, although the supraself breaks with the societal forces that previously hampered his pretensions, he still needs to overcome his most monumental antagonist: himself. Such devices in Plexus clearly illustrate how Miller delves into the supraself’s artistic “apprenticeship to signs” and demonstrate the supraself’s incapacity to find his true literary voice. As always, Miller employs anecdotes, those “festoons of memory,” as his basic technique in spiral form (1947b: 300). In Plexus, these anecdotes often ostensibly revolve around the supraself or Mona’s efforts to secure enough money to subsist. Miller peppers his text with tales of financial misery and schemes to “earn” money quickly, although, as Parkin notes, “the inconsequential meetings, conversations, group

126 Californian tranquility p experiences, and partings do not amount to a constructive whole but more a deconstructive assemblage of parts” (1990: 159). Such spurious anecdotes include one about the arrival of O’Mara (“I was just wondering how you lived … you know, where you got the dough?” [1952b: 91]) and his golddigging ways, one concerning Karen, an eccentric genius who offers the supraself a grueling job (“we were literally without a cent when he happened along” [323]), and one regarding the supraself’s encyclopedia scheme (“I had to find something which would give me the semblance of freedom and independence” [550]). Miller undercuts the effect of the supraself’s pecuniary troubles, however, because even when the supraself does have enough money to devote himself to writing, he cannot produce anything but disappointing sketches. Thus, although Miller reels off anecdote after anecdote, without the explicit and implicit commentary provided by devices of spiral form such as the microessay and internal monolog, readers would not understand that the supraself’s true struggle finds his roots not in economic problems, but in mental ones: he cannot accept the fact that he, and he alone, must take responsibility for his artistic production. A fine example of how Miller uses anecdotes in Plexus occurs in chapter thirteen’s story of the Mezzotint scheme.21 Although Miller relates how the supraself comes up with the Mezzotint ploy to ease the financial burden, he employs the story as a metaphor for the supraself’s artistic impotence by juxtaposing it with a variety of other techniques reveal that the supraself has not truly experienced a crucifixion and rebirth. After O’Mara tells the supraself that his work will never sell, the supraself decides to print small essays or “Mezzotints”—so-named “owing to the influence of Whistler” (97)—and sell them door-to-door. Miller masterfully uses spiral form to demonstrate not only the supraself’s difficulty in writing these small texts—“to make a Mezzotint … was like working out a jigsaw puzzle … . Two hundred and fifty words was the maximum that could be printed. I used to write two or three thousand and reach for the axe” (99)—but how the supraself evades finding his artistic voice. Miller achieves this effect by juxtaposing the supraself’s mundane, artificial topics—such as architecture or wrestling—with the fascinating subjects of competing anecdotes— such as Osiecki and his lice or Woodruff’s obsessive gambling spree in Monte Carlo. Miller, moreover, relates one of the supraself’s dreams, a vision in which the supraself merges his childhood memories with pure fantasy, as well as employs internal monologs and intertexualism to illustrate the wealth of material that the supraself knows well but cannot write about effectively. Consistently rupturing the “primary” anecdote with narrative resources available to the supraself, Miller creates a psychological portrait of a man scared to face himself. Because he uses spiral form, Miller can indirectly make his points by accumulating detail after detail rather than overtly commenting on the source of the supraself’s artistic paralysis. Eventually, even the supraself recognizes this impotence when—after receiving the opportunity to earn outlandish sums for writing about its adventures—he asserts I don’t know how to write. Not yet! I realized that immediately he made me the offer to write the damned serial. It’s going to take a long time before I know how to say what I want to say. Maybe I’ll never learn. (1952b: 146)

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If Miller stuck only to the “primary” story-line, then such an admission would seem implausible. Since he uses spiral form, however, Miller may circle around the supraself’s experiences and offer annotations as to why the supraself rejected the proposal. Miller, therefore, turns a simple story of peddling prose poems into a metaphor for the supraself’s lack of voice by avoiding linear time and plot. Apart from the anecdote, another method of spiral form that Miller explores in Plexus includes the internal monolog. Several critics—including Hassan, who remarks that it “is the form created by a gifted raconteur excited primarily by the sound of his own voice” (1967: 99), and John Williams, who posits that “stylistically his work is a botch” (1992: 261)—chastise Miller for the apparent lack of form in Plexus, a phenomenon that one may easily attribute to Miller’s experimental usage of internal monologs in his mammoth narrative. Most people realize that Miller’s vital first-person narration distinguishes his texts from those of many of his contemporaries, but few realize that Miller turns to several techniques to achieve his colloquial, freewheeling effects. The internal monolog stands perhaps foremost among these devices and, indeed, generally functions as a catalyst for most of the methods of spiral form. Besides employing the internal monolog to express the supraself’s thoughts, Miller often will erect internal monologs as a type of textual scaffolding that “frames” the subsequent anecdotes. In developing such metatextualism, Miller frequently prompts the supraself to assume the guise of a commentator who digresses endlessly. Temporally, Miller—true to spiral form—often shifts his monologs anywhere from the 1920s to the 1950s, and blurs the boundaries between geologic levels of the supraself. Representative examples of internal monologs include one that glosses a trip to the lexicographer, Dr. Vizetelly, whom the supraself refers to as his “true father” (1952b: 512), one that describes the supraself’s “disconnection” and “discalibration” (574) with himself, and one that mocks the American Dream and the supraself’s attempt to seek the “lowest of all occupations,” that of messenger boy (29). Although the form of Plexus may seem at times disjointed, Miller uses spiral form in such a way that all of its devices—including the internal monolog—progress toward the ultimate goal of revealing the supraself’s character. An example of how Miller channels the apparent chaos of an internal monolog into a penetrating insight about the supraself’s inability to write occurs in chapter four. As mentioned above, Miller suggests throughout Plexus that the supraself’s financial instability blinds him to the real, and deeply personal, reasons he cannot write. After unfolding a series of anecdotes in which the supraself could escape his money troubles, Miller turns to an internal monolog that compels the supraself to confront his inadequacies: No matter with what celerity and confusion events succeeded one another, there were always intervals, self-created, in which through contemplation I lost myself … . But from this interior process to the process of translation is always, and was then very definitely, a big step … . The whole struggle is to squeeze into that public record some tiny essence of the perpetual inner melody. (1952b: 149–50)

128 Californian tranquility Since Miller writes in spiral form, he may, as he does above, conflate the moment of composition with the time of the primary narrative events. In this instance, Miller makes the “current” supraself reveal the secret that the previous supraself failed to comprehend: one cannot write without first learning to tap into one’s “inner melody.” No amount of money, motivation, or talent will enable a person who does not truly live to enter the ranks of artist. Miller characterizes the earlier supraself as an individual who, while not wanting in energy, lacks selfknowledge. By using an internal monolog, Miller, despite appearing to digress on an irrelevant topic, stresses this absence and demonstrates that, while money may obsess the supraself in Plexus, financial security alone would not alleviate the supraself’s problems: “there was a streak in me, a perverse one, which prevented me from giving the essential self” (150–1). Miller, therefore, seems to deflate the climax of his anecdotes by switching to another device of spiral form, but in actuality he simply extracts the essence from any given anecdote and views it from another angle. The internal monolog provides Miller with the means to reflect on ostensibly urgent events from a distance and recognize their true subjective import. If in the preceding citation Miller illustrates how the supraself struggled to find his artistic voice, then in his use of fantasy he foreshadows what the supraself will write about. While Miller certainly employs diverse elements in spiral form, he generally designs these components to contribute to the overall portrait of the supraself. In his fantasies, therefore, Miller—despite creating some outlandish scenarios—nevertheless represents some facet of the supraself that adds to the reader’s understanding of the supraself’s actions or motivations. Most often in Plexus, Miller creates fantasies that implicitly record the supraself’s reactions to Mona’s clandestine encounters with her “admirers” and presage the supraself’s crucifixion at the hands of Mona and Stasia. While ostensibly writing about symbolic or hypothetical situations, Miller actually links the supraself’s bizarre fantasies to his misapprehensions over Mona’s behavior. Examples of such fantasies include the supraself’s speech to Dostoevski (“We have all suffered more than is usual for mortal beings to suffer” [612]) and the faux three bears, story. Miller once again interrupts his anecdotes not arbitrarily, but with the purposeful chaos of spiral form. A representative scene in which Miller drifts from anecdotal time to fantasy time occurs in chapter seven. After relating the sordid details of the supraself and Mona’s life with Stanley and his family, Miller impels the supraself to develop a fantasy in which Stanley’s wife, Sophie, follows Mona on a typical day. Miller’s approach bubbles with irony, of course, for the jealous supraself knows little of how Mona spends her time when she fleeces her admirers. By using fantasy, therefore, Miller reveals much of the supraself’s feelings of resentment and fear—and, perhaps, even cuckoldry—over Mona’s covert activity. While Miller writes in his narrative that Mona’s admirers simply dole out money for the privilege of talking with her, he suggests through his ludicrous drama that such a scenario would truly constitute fantasy: “How much? Let’s get that over with, then perhaps we can chat a bit” (305). The supraself concocts this scene in which an admirer gives Mona fifty

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dollars for nothing, Miller implies, because the alternative makes the supraself nothing but a pimp. Miller inserts this fantasy, therefore, to illustrate how the supraself salves his conscience and suppresses the uneasy knowledge that Mona may prostitute herself to her admirers. The supraself rationalizes Mona’s golddigging in a romantic, dreamy fashion that belies both her preternatural sexuality and her calculating drive for money: a woman approaches him and hands him a Mezzotint to read. He invites her to sit down. He orders a meal for her. He listens to her stories. He forgets that he has an artificial limb, forgets that there ever was a war. He knows suddenly that he loves this woman. She does not need to love him, she only needs to be. (1952b: 309) Again, Miller implies that the supraself knows full well that for Mona to receive money time and again from dozens of different men, she would have to exchange some commodity. In his fantasy, the supraself equates this commodity with “love at first sight,” but Miller writes elsewhere in Plexus that the supraself wanted Mona to “stop lying … stop playing this foolish, unnecessary game” (594). Through the supraself’s fantasy, Miller demonstrates that although the supraself desired to believe Mona, he could not without first fashioning a feeble, almost laughable, fiction. Once again, spiral form allows Miller the flexibility to distend time and step back from the “primary” narrative and seek the subjective truth about the supraself. By utilizing fantasies, Miller enables the reader to witness the supraself’s capacity for rationalization. By employing intertextual moments, he allows his audience to focus on the supraself’s growing cognizance of his artistic mission in a manner that only spiral form would permit. Peppering Plexus with reference after reference, Miller places the supraself’s literary influences on display without fear of disrupting the plot. Beyond this, however, Miller, by liberally divulging the supraself’s sources through intertextual citations, concomitantly discloses how the supraself experiences life because, as Miller observes, in the remembrance of certain books, “the inner and outer worlds fuse” (25). Most often, Miller alludes to writers whose influence on the supraself extends to concepts such as self-awareness and mysticism in addition to obvious matters such as style or tone. Inserting intertextual references at key intervals, Miller—in a maneuver typical of spiral form—veers away from his more demotic, anecdotal method of analyzing the supraself’s unique qualities and pauses the text’s temporal flow in order to ponder the indescribable effects the words and lives of certain authors created within the supraself. He casts such sections with a type of personal symbolism and, in so doing, achieves the heightened sense of reality that pervades spiral form. Miller implicitly argues that while reading books may seem passive to some, to the supraself it constituted an emotionally charged activity. From quick mentions of Élie Faure’s “colossal” History of Art (254) or “the tragic, unprecedented artist” (20) Dostoevski to more extended reflections on Walter Pater’s “sensitive use of the language” (66) or Hamsun’s “enigmatic” Herr Nagel (295), Miller demonstrates the deep, soul-stirring power artists

130 Californian tranquility hold over the supraself, a force that the pre-crucifixion supraself often incorrectly blames for his lack of literary production. Since he generally focuses in Plexus on the supraself’s failure to take responsibility for his own artistic paralysis, in the book’s intertextual moments Miller concentrates on the muse—antagonist role certain writers play in the supraself’s life. Miller intimates that, as with Mara/Mona, who both inspires and thwarts the supraself, a handful of authors alternately fill the supraself with artistic insight and frustrate him with their very eloquence. Late in the book, Miller begins a chapter with an intertextual flight that typifies his use of the technique in spiral form. Despite building Plexus to a climax of sorts in the previous series of anecdotes by concentrating on Mona’s budding relationship with Stasia, Miller—in accordance with spiral form’s narratological doctrine of retreat and advance—freezes the narrative and enters the timeless, but nevertheless portentous, realm of the intertext. Since Miller purports to uncover the subjective truth about the supraself, he must not place too much emphasis on external events, even though Widmer laments the “chopped up, willful, egotistically indifferent presentation of Mona” that such a strategy entails (1990: 49). Miller—who, contrary to Widmer’s assumption, fragments his narrative not out of malice but out of an attempt to place Mona’s behavior in a sharper psychological context—therefore chooses a parallel course and explores one of the supraself’s most important literary discoveries, Oswald Spengler: I am fully aware that the study of this great work [The Decline of the West] represents another momentous event in my life. For me it is not a philosophy of history nor a “morphological” creation, but a world poem. Slowly, attentively, savoring each morsel as I chew it, I burrow deeper and deeper. I drown myself in it. (1952b: 618) Miller suggests in no uncertain terms that the book stimulates the supraself’s intellect and causes him to engage in fervent mental activity—no doubt because of Spengler’s ability to forge ordered poetry out of chaos, a phenomenon striking to the supraself because of his inability to make artistic sense of his own personal confusion with Mona and Stasia. Nevertheless, Miller reminds his readers through this device of spiral form that without a crucifixion and resurrection the supraself will continue to cast the blame for his incapacity to write in his own voice on others, even those whom he admires: “am I following, or am I being sucked under by a vortex?” (619). Accordingly, Miller implies that the sheer ecstasy that overcomes the supraself while reading Spengler will prevent him from achieving his goals because the supraself mimics the master too well. Miller astutely suggests that, instead of learning how to look within himself, the supraself crowds his pages with textual remnants of writers such as Spengler and then points to those writers as one reason why he cannot produce satisfactory art. As Miller points out, the same beauty that helps the supraself to view the world from an artistic perspective also proves frustrating because it blinds the supraself to himself. By employing such

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intertextualism, Miller may examine the complexities of the supraself’s situation in a fashion that a nonspiral narrative method would not easily permit. Without spiral form, Miller’s use of another device—the reverie—would convolute a traditional plot and erect a barrier to sense. In fact, Miller generally fashions his reveries as antidotes to rational logic. Through spiral form, Miller hopes not only to trace the lasting effects of external events on the supraself, but to represent as well the aura of the internal ferment—an “expansion and deepening of truth” (169). Since interior activity frequently lacks a basis in rationality, Miller contrives in spiral form to create the effect of polyvalent, unmediated, mental rapture through the use of reveries. Miller usually precedes his reveries with an interior monolog, microessay, or some other non-anecdotal technique since the supraself must lose himself in contemplation before ascending to the mad, alinear heights associated with the reverie. Marking the reverie itself with bizarre juxtapositions and tremendous leaps of logic, Miller unleashes the unpredictable, joyous side of the supraself, even as he suffers indignities and humiliations in the external world. Miller rather sparingly injects reveries into Plexus, a phenomenon no doubt owing to the supraself’s general artistic malaise. Nevertheless, examples of reveries follow internal monologs on Stanley and language. While Miller, in effect, halts chronological time with his reveries, he dissects the universe within each second that contributes to the supraself’s development in Plexus. Even as Miller describes scenes in which the supraself plods through life without direction, he seizes upon spiral form’s ability to view the same event through a variety of lenses and compares the supraself’s artistic paralysis with his ardent writing of mental “books,” symbolized by reveries. For example, Miller follows anecdotes about selling encyclopedias and meeting Claude—one of Mona’s friends—with an astonishing reverie that belies the supraself’s demoralizing external circumstances. In a textual maneuver similar to one he employs in Tropic of Cancer, Miller merges the pseudo-reality of a theater with the supraself’s own disjointed—but nevertheless ecstatic—thoughts: It is no longer a theater, it is the nightmare. The walls close in, twisting and twining like the dread labyrinth. The Minotaur is breathing upon us with hot and evil breath. At precisely this moment, and as if a thousand chandeliers had been shattered at once, her mad, fiendish laugh splits the ear. (1952b: 577) Momentarily disregarding the drudgery forced on the supraself by peddling encyclopedias, Miller accents the supraself’s ability to transcend the obvious and view events from his singular artistic angle. Even though the supraself cannot yet translate such intangible feelings to the page, Miller, through the vehicle of the reverie, posits that the ability to write in his own voice lies within the supraself already and that, once the supraself recognizes this, he will no longer suffer from literary paralysis. With his wild imagery and outlandish collations, Miller seamlessly combines the supraself’s artistic flights with his pedestrian existence, and, by spiraling around the “primary” events, unearths a wealth of information

132 Californian tranquility about the supraself’s untapped mental resources. Although Miller may appear through spiral form to descend into jabberwocky and textual stasis, he actually progresses toward his goal of unraveling the subjective truth about the supraself. Miller consistently achieves the dual effect of apparent narrative stagnation and actual progression through still another device, the catalog. Despite seeming to wallow in a textual backwater time and again in Plexus’s many catalogs, Miller nevertheless manages to propel his story forward by injecting his lists with relevance. Rather than compiling a random catalog of pointless details, Miller attempts to underscore certain aspects of the supraself’s situation. For instance, since he tries in Plexus to highlight the supraself’s fruitless efforts at writing, Miller uses many of the catalogs to parody the supraself’s impossible goal of trying to say everything at once. At other junctures, he employs lists to reflect the supraself’s relative emotional state or to comment obliquely on some matter important to the supraself. By charging most catalogs with some “geologic” significance, Miller actually advances his narrative even as he appears to bog it down, for the lists contribute to the reader’s overall understanding of how the supraself viewed a particular event. Among the instances of catalogs in Plexus, a few resonate notably, including a list of European towns (“Ravenna, Mantua, Siena, Pisa” [67]), one of historical personages (“Sir Walter Scott, Gustavus Adolphus, Friedrich Barbarossa, P.T. Barnum” [359]), and one in which the supraself “reads” his surroundings for literary material (“faces, gestures, gaits, architecture, streets” [42]). In a representative example of how he integrates catalogs in spiral form, Miller illustrates the supraself’s supreme disgust for Karen—an acquaintance who provides the supraself with the degrading, and ultimately pointless, job of decoding and filing dictated messages—and the sterile notion of success that he embodies. After depicting Karen as an individual who possesses intelligence but who lacks humanity, Miller punctuates the supraself’s farewell note with a catalog that discloses the supraself’s abhorrence for Karen’s bloodless mode of existence without directly contributing to the narrative action: To be filed under C, for catarrh, cleanliness, cantharides, cowbells, Chihuahua, Cochin-China, constipation, curlicues, crinology, cacchination, coterminous, cow-flop, cicerone, cockroaches, cimex lectularius, cemetaries, crêpes Suzette, corn-fed hogs, citrate of magnesia, cowries, cornucopia, castration, crotchets, cuneiform, cistern, cognomen, Cockaigne, concertina, cotyledons, crapulated, cosine, creosote, crupper, copulation, Clytemnestra, Czolgosz—and Blue Label catsup. (1952b: 357) In this catalog, Miller captures the supraself’s deep-seated disdain for the mechanical, useless intellectual prowess embodied by Karen and his infernal filing system. Although Miller clearly demonstrates that Karen rescues Mona and the supraself from dire financial problems, by inserting this vitriolic catalog he once again draws the conclusion that the supraself requires more than money to thrive

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as an artist. Through his parodic admixture of arcane and earthy words, Miller implies that Karen, for all his systems and labor-saving devices, will never amount to anything more than a drudge, a fact that the supraself recognizes and ridicules. Miller sets the supraself in sharp relief to Karen’s plodding, hack-like approach to life by injecting more humor in this “postscriptum” than Karen displays in an entire chapter. Through his irreverent list, Miller illustrates the supraself’s antithetical relationship to the American work ethic and its insistence on success at the expense of individual expression. Thus, although he concludes the anecdote with what may at first seem like a superfluous or self-indulgent compilation of words that fails to contribute to the narrative action, Miller actually encapsulates the incident’s importance to the supraself and progresses in terms of the overall goal of spiral form, to seek the truth about the supraself’s artistic and personal liberation. Miller locates this subjective truth in the oneiric realm as well. Although Miller generally concentrates on the supraself’s consciousness in Plexus, he occasionally explores the supraself’s “dream landscape” in his effort to unravel the truth about the supraself (1947b: 337). Through his creative use of dreams, Miller contrasts the supraself’s pedestrian quest for economic stability with the riches of imagination. Miller clearly suggests that while pecuniary concerns—coupled with Mona’s behavior—may drain the supraself of the motivation to write, the key to artistic success lies within the supraself, a phenomenon that manifests itself in the supraself’s powerful dreams. Besides foreshadowing aspects of the supraself’s eventual crucifixion, Miller employs dreams to illustrate the fecund region of the supraself’s unconscious, an area that—once the supraself ceases to blame others for his problems—will provide the supraself with the means to translate his experience into art. Ever mindful of the aesthetic of spiral form, Miller realizes that subjective truth lies not only in the conscious plane but in dreams as well. Miller scatters dreams throughout Plexus, but important instances include one that melds the supraself’s childhood passion for bike riding with his travails at the Cosmodemonic (“Hymie riding beside me in a miniature bike” [1952b: 124]), a scene that reenacts an incident with the supraself’s daughter (“When she looked up at me she didn’t smile” [390]), and one in which Claude—the clairvoyant-like figure who fills the supraself with hope—appears in a variety of forms (“at times he did strikingly resemble the Christ” [558]).22 Miller inserts another, extremely important, dream after an anecdote concerning one of Mona’s many “admirers,” Cromwell, the government agent. While the dream may appear superfluous to many, through it Miller elaborates on several of The Rosy Crucifixion’s key themes, including the supraself’s artistic “difference,” his fear of losing Mona, and the futility of capitalism. By virtue of the apparent “digression” of the dream, Miller may approach these common subjects through the unconscious—or at least the simulacrum of the unconscious—and take advantage of spiral form’s plastic narrative structure. In so doing, Miller abruptly concludes an anecdote in which the supraself must humiliate himself and interact with Cromwell, a man with whom Mona shares a cryptic—and perhaps sexual—relationship. Suspending any pretense of temporal linearity, Miller then proceeds to relate a bizarre, intrigue-filled dream in which Cromwell transmutes into George Marshall,

134 Californian tranquility the supraself’s old Xerxes Society pal.23 In this dream, Miller places the supraself in a strange scenario—in which the supraself must fly to Tokyo to find the wife of his friend Charlie (now President of the United States)—that befuddles him so much that his “brain was … fatigued” (259). Among the strange images that Miller includes—such as a minotaur with “six horrible leering eyes” (268), an “enormous rubber penis filled with water” (273), and a Yiddish song “filled with bloody oaths and filthy imprecations” (276)—appears Mona “and her friend. A couple of bulldykers” (275). Despite appearing to interrupt his narrative with a rather pointless and silly incident, Miller explores many of the supraself’s fears and anticipates his anguish over Mona’s relationship with Stasia. Employing a dream allows Miller to prefigure Stasia and suggest more forcibly than the supraself will admit to in Nexus that Mona develops a sexual relationship with her. The supraself, Miller tacitly argues, feels more jealousy over Mona’s behavior than he will admit. Miller also links this dream with the one that closes Sexus by using the same dog imagery that reduces the supraself from a lover and partner to a pet: “he was a huge Newfoundland, playful as a cub” (260). Further exploring the supraself’s unconscious, Miller alludes to the sense of loss that the supraself feels over the Xerxes Society and its lack of commitment to intellectual and artistic pursuits: “You have degenerated. Some of you have atrophied. In a moment I am going to call for a vote to dissolve the organization” (274). As with the dream’s oblique references to Mona’s clandestine activities, with this pessimistic portrayal of the Xerxes Society Miller demonstrates the supraself’s ambivalent thoughts about becoming detached from his friends and striving for his frankly selfish literary goals. Although in this dream Miller fails to advance the narrative in the conventional sense, he succeeds in adding to the supraself’s cumulative psychological portrait. Miller quite subtly takes advantage of spiral form’s ability to dispense with “real” or chronological time and to pursue tangential and atemporal narrative lines when they lend insight into the supraself’s character, in this case the nagging doubts that surround his decision to follow Mona down the path of crucifixion and artistic rebirth. Never afraid to halt temporarily the narrative’s concern with the supraself’s external actions and situation, Miller makes use of a final technique of spiral form—the microessay—to explicate the supraself’s progress toward rebirth. Achieving an almost Menippean effect, Miller irregularly interpolates microessays into Plexus’s anecdotes so as to provide readers with the spirit of the supraself’s intellect. While he fails to sustain such essays, Miller succeeds in underscoring the types of problem that concern the supraself, along with his various solutions to those dilemmas and in turning “dead fact” into palpable symbols (1956: 55). Miller may irritate his audience with his seemingly congenital inability to tell a story without digressing, but those readers who do not resist the spirit of the text soon realize that, for Miller, nothing constitutes a narrative deviation so long as it contributes to one’s understanding of the (subjective) truth. Keeping with his overall focus on the supraself’s struggle with the economic demands of society and the rigors of art, Miller concentrates his microessays on such subjects as selling encyclopedias (“you get to believe that everyone on God’s earth must possess the precious book that you

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have been given to dispense” [1952b: 553]), visionaries and their encounters with authority (“The reward of the visionary is the madhouse or the cross” [88]), and research (“a debauch of digging and ferreting” [63]). Miller lapses into microessays with great ease, for spiral form allows him to interrupt anecdotal action without sacrificing progression. An excellent example of this phenomenon occurs in the midst of an anecdote regarding a trip to hear W.E.B. DuBois lecture. Merging commentary on DuBois’s discussion with a microessay on the “great liberator,” Miller creates a convincing and impressive picture of the supraself’s stance on both racial prejudice and governmental authority: Involuntarily I was making comparisons between [DuBois] and John Brown … . John Brown, in his passionate hatred of injustice and intolerance, had not hesitated to set himself up against the holy government of these United States. (1952b: 562) Narratologically, Miller, by inserting such an excursus, seemingly borders on textual inertia, but because he grounds spiral form in an associative, lyrical method of story-telling, Miller resists such stasis and actually advances his narrative indirectly. Although the supraself appears trapped by naturalist forces, Miller implies in the above passage that the supraself, like Brown and DuBois, will pursue his cause whatever the cost.24 Miller equates the supraself’s difference and independence with that of Brown, and argues that truly inspired individuals do not require official sanction to follow their course of action. Brown’s failed efforts, Miller suggests, mean more to the supraself than centuries of American economic progress. While the microessay may deflate the anecdote that precedes it, Miller juxtaposes the digression to great effect and illustrates how spiral form allows him to salvage and reinterpret any piece of information that may illuminate why the supraself behaves the way he does. Separately, devices such as the microessay may appear excessive, redundant, or convoluted, but when Miller arranges them in concert Plexus’s lyric organization becomes apparent and the truth about the supraself’s life begins to emerge. As he accomplishes in Sexus, in Plexus, Miller employs spiral form to arrange a vast number of ostensibly incongruous fragments into a powerful—if not unified— whole. Miller demonstrates time and again in Plexus that the subjective truth that he seeks exists in all aspects of the supraself’s existence, and that the analysis and collation of anecdotal fragments coupled with a variety of other devices of spiral form allows him to pursue that truth in a much fuller way than that allowed by conventional narrative strategies. While Miller may sacrifice monocentric narrative action in Plexus, he benefits from the diffuse plot engendered by spiral form because it allows him to approach the supraself from a geometric perspective that simultaneously decodes raw biographical data and encodes a mythopoeic vision of that data’s significance. By presenting multiple stories—or voices, to appropriate Bakhtin’s terminology—Miller permits contradictory or inexplicable material to coexist, a phenomenon that contributes to a more complex, psychologically mimetic portrait of the supraself. In this fashion, Miller uses spiral form to chart the

136 Californian tranquility supraself’s apprenticeship to signs by creating a number of competing—but nevertheless interrelated—metaphoric fields emblematic of the supraself’s artistic and personal struggle. Through such fields as love, economic hardship, and intellectual discovery, Miller presents in Plexus a supraself very much on the brink of the crucifixion that will prove so liberating in Nexus.

Nexus While in Sexus and Plexus, Miller respectively relates how Mara/Mona ignited the supraself’s passion to create and the arduous apprenticeship that he underwent before his artistic success, in Nexus he concentrates on the “crucifixion” itself. True to the tenets of spiral form, however, Miller repeatedly shifts his narrative attention from the drama-ridden love triangle of the supraself with Mona and Stasia to the depths of the supraself’s mind. Although the strange relationship between the three people teems with the elements of action—love, betrayal, suffering, and dark comedy, for example—Miller recognizes that, for the supraself, the importance of the events lies in their ultimate role in killing off the sterile hypocrite that the supraself had become and resurrecting the “potential being” within. Consequently, Miller frequently compresses or fragments key dramatic incidents and places them within the overall context of the supraself’s life, a technique that focuses at least as much attention on the supraself’s interior life as on his actions. Anticipating Roland Barthes’s notion that when distended “functional nuclei furnish intercalating spaces which can be packed out almost infinititely,” Miller concentrates his attention on the narrative interstices rather than on the actions themselves (1977: 120). Using this pattern and shunning “imposed order,” by the end of Nexus, Miller demonstrates that the supraself not only recognizes his artistic mission, but that he will also succeed in effecting that goal (Durrell and Miller 1988: 225).25 Miller achieves this effect in Nexus by using his many temporal and structural idiosyncrasies and by employing various techniques of spiral form. Although he devotes much less textual space to the supraself’s crucifixion than he does to his subjects in Sexus and Plexus, Miller adopts the same approach to structure and time in Nexus that he employs in the trilogy’s earlier volumes. Filling the book’s twenty chapters with a wide variety of narrative concerns, Miller substitutes heteroglossic juxtaposition for climax, and once again chooses an alinear, lyrically organized structure that de-emphasizes chronological progression in favor of spiral progression. By using spiral progression, Miller illustrates how each moment in the supraself’s life connects with the others, an effect that depends on a reader’s willingness to follow Miller’s erratic path from node to node. Thus, even as Miller convolutes his narrative’s structural and temporal pattern, he seeks relentlessly to comprehend the supraself because, as Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg observe, “every separable element in a narrative can be said to have its own plot, its own little system of tension and resolution which contributes its bit to the general system” (1966: 239). Miller may in quick succession, therefore, draw upon material from the supraself’s childhood, dreamlife, experience in Big Sur, or any number of other realms without losing sight of the ultimate goal that serves as a cohesive

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device. Even though he fragments time and structure, Miller recognizes that such pieces function collectively to delineate a portrait of both the supraself’s complex personality and the myriad forces that converged to crucify him. Depending on a spiritual affinity rather than a rigid logical relationship between the various parts of Nexus, in the third volume of his trilogy Miller lashes out against “that perennial jackass” called strict form, and continues the associative, freeranging use of time and structure that mark Sexus and Plexus (1952b: 67). Miller provides an example of his textual potpourri in the first chapter of Nexus. Rejecting more traditional opening gambits that “set the scene,” Miller—in an effort to demonstrate the profound suffering that the supraself will soon undergo—opts for the more plastic methods of spiral form. Although chapters in Nexus appear short in comparison to those of the earlier books, Miller manages within the first chapter to distill a wide number of themes and techniques. Beginning with a resumption of the dream that concludes Sexus (“barking, barking. I shriek but no one answers” [1959: 7]), Miller blurs the book’s temporality and establishes a partly nightmarish, partly comic milieu that depends less on logical relationships between events than on the supraself’s mental anguish. Miller adds further to the tragi-comic sense of foreboding that marks the opening fragment by employing a series of intertextual catalogs that introduce Stasia, the bane of the supraself’s existence: “The Imperial Orgy —The Vatican Swindle —A Season in Hell —Death in Venice —Anathema” (8). As he imparts these impressionistic details, Miller mentions isolated elements of the supraself’s life with Mona and Stasia, such as the information that “Anastasia, alias Hegororboru, alias Bertha Filigree of Lake Tahoe-Titicaca and the Imperial Court of the Czars, is temporarily in the Observation Ward” (8). He then proceeds to relate an anecdote regarding Mona, make an intertextual excursus, tell a story about Stasia, return to the moment of composition, and deliver a microessay on America. Through this odd textual jumble, Miller achieves a sense of the chaos that filled the supraself before he went to Paris and purged himself of Mara/ Mona’s love. While he fails to create much narrative suspense, Miller succeeds in locating the source of the supraself’s crucifixion in his own mind. Essentially, Miller implies that regardless of what Mona and Stasia did or did not do, the supraself causes much of his own suffering, a pain that will not abate until the supraself assumes responsibility for his own life. In recreating the supraself’s experience, Miller fuses the fragmented memories of past, present, and future to dissolve simple cause-effect relationships and search for more complex reasons for the supraself’s inner turmoil. By employing spiral form’s most basic methods, Miller approaches familiar material from a much more sophisticated vantage point. Avoiding much of the finger-pointing rhetoric and slipshod plotting that marred Crazy Cock, in Nexus, Miller weaves a rich tapestry from perhaps the most agonizing crisis of the supraself’s life.26 Whereas in Crazy Cock, Miller still clings to many of his naturalistic influences and so cannot translate the supraself’s rebirth adequately, in Nexus he abandons them in favor of his now well-honed spiral form. Throughout the narrative, Miller illustrates through a variety of devices how the supraself learns to transform the pain of his life—and specifically Mona’s betrayal—into art, for the true

138 Californian tranquility “artist is always crucified” (1941b: 8).27 Miller suggests that despite all the deception, self-doubt, and loneliness, the supraself grows richer as both a person and as an artist, for his humiliating crucifixion forces him to abandon the hollow ideals that impeded him from discovering his literary voice and inner harmony. While anecdotes concerning Mona and Stasia’s antics certainly contain a great significance for the supraself, Miller—by way of internal monologs, catalogs, fantasies, diatribes, microessays, intertextual moments, and reveries—recasts the supraself’s basic experience and indicates that the most important struggles come from within. By offering a perspective on the present that—in Daniel Frank Chamberlain’s terminology—also contains “a future prospection and a past retrospection,” Miller uses the most prevalent techniques of spiral form in Nexus to contribute to the recreation of the supraself’s crucifixion and impending rebirth (1990: 136). Miller approaches his anecdotes in a fashion slightly different in Nexus from that he employs in the preceding volumes. Since he places a higher degree of emphasis on the supraself’s inner turmoil than on external events, Miller offers more condensed anecdotes and fewer extended stories than he does, for example, in Plexus. By de-emphasizing even his microplots, Miller both anticipates David Hayman’s concept that the notion of impossible objectivity forces writers to establish a discourse that “continually and pointedly undercuts itself, producing something like conceptual dust and making the text seem transparently self-sufficient” and heightens the narrative’s focus on how key incidents affected the supraself rather than on the circumstances themselves (1987: 8). While Miller, who claimed not to “consider [himself] a realist at all,” occasionally tells expansive anecdotes in Nexus —such as the Stymer tale —he keeps such aberrations to a minimum, preferring to compress his stories or relate only brief details from them (1994e: 6).28 More typically, Miller allows the more internal methods of spiral form to consume the anecdotal content, and as a result, most of the time the narrative’s “non-active” and “non-realistic” elements dominate the “active” and “realistic” ones in terms of both pagination and consequence, a phenomenon that leads Brown to posit that Miller achieves an “epic intensification of the ordinary” (1986: 76). Nevertheless, even in these relatively concise anecdotes, Miller manages to unearth the subjective core that drives the supraself to act as he does. Numerous instances occur in which a short anecdote proves telling, such as an interview with Stasia (“‘[Mona] invents, she distorts, she fabricates … because it’s more interesting’” [1959: 15; Miller’s ellipsis), a debate over writing (“‘does a novel always have to have a plot’” [253]), or a meeting with Mona’s brother (“‘Stepmother? Did she say she had a stepmother? The bitch!’” [143]). In these and many other examples, Miller extracts the most emotionally charged details to help annotate the supraself’s inner turmoil. While the narrative technically progresses, Miller frequently employs anecdotes to skew chronological time. For example, Miller “arbitrarily” inserts an anecdote concerning the supraself’s suicide attempt after a microessay on love, a maneuver that both establishes an atemporal frame of reference for Nexus and highlights the supraself’s near-hysterical emotional state as he experiences his crucifixion:

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I recall the night I died to wonder. Kronski had come and given me some innocent white pills to swallow. I swallowed them and, when he had gone, I opened wide the windows, threw off the covers, and lay stark naked … . Shortly after dawn I opened my eyes, amazed to discover that I was not in the great beyond. Yet I could hardly say that I was still among the living. What had died I know not. (1959: 42) Portraying the spiral of memory, Miller disregards the above event’s position in any chronological or narrative sequence. Instead, Miller links one of the supraself’s lowest moments—matched in despair only by Mona and Stasia’s furtive departure for Europe—with love, the basis for some of his most positive memories. By apparently randomly inserting this anecdote, Miller deflates its importance to external “reality,” and charges it with subjective significance. Externally, Miller suggests, the anecdote reports a failed suicide attempt, but internally, it functions as a metaphor for the supraself’s crucifixion. While he writes that the supraself does not yet understand the scene’s true ramifications, in composing from a more knowledgeable vantage point, Miller underscores the act’s implications by intimating that for the supraself the physical act of attempting suicide constitutes a figurative mental death that signals his rebirth as an artist. Without spiral form, Miller could still emphasize the event’s symbolic import, but only under the constraints of plot or via a conventional flashback. As it stands, Miller develops his crucifixion theme by setting a key anecdote outside of standard temporality, and so succeeds in injecting into Nexus early on the bittersweet deterioration of the supraself’s relationship with Mona without dwelling on a moment-by-moment account of how that collapse occurred. Besides using anecdotes to offset linear time, Miller manipulates internal monologs to great advantage in Nexus. Since he limits the narrative importance of anecdotes in the final volume of The Rosy Crucifixion, Miller necessarily places a heavier burden on the internal monolog, the device of spiral form most identified with Miller’s oeuvre apart from sex. Apart from creating the colloquial, freeflowing tone that marks his prose, Miller firmly divorces his text from the demands of plot via his internal monologs. He changes narrative direction most often in Nexus by introducing an internal monolog into the text. Through this technique of spiral form, Miller may simultaneously deny preeminence to a single narrative element and focus on the supraself’s idiosyncratic associations. Rejecting climax for emotional impressionism, Miller tacitly argues through his pervasive internal monologs that a situation’s drama stems not from any inherent qualities, but from a perceiving and reshaping consciousness, such as the supraself. Miller suggests that only by reflecting on and mythologizing one’s experience may the true drama of an event reveal itself. Among the numerous instances of internal monologs include one that ponders the supraself’s bleak existence (“I had become the fool incarnate” [70–1]), one that comments on the supraself’s job as a manual laborer (“a new approach to death” [150]), and one that speculates about Pop, the admirer who commissions “Mona” to write a novel (“perhaps he was a better actor than either of us” [282]).

140 Californian tranquility Miller especially uses monologs in Nexus to give evidence of the supraself’s shift in artistic sensibilities following his crucifixion. Although he recognizes that the supraself must continue to experiment artistically, he also demonstrates that the supraself now understands its goal even if he cannot quite envision how to achieve that goal. In one of several internal monologs concerning the writer’s craft, Miller brings insight to the supraself’s remarkable new artistic vitality: Yes, in my stumbling, bumbling way I was making all manner of discoveries. One of them was that one cannot hide his identity under cover of the third person, nor establish his identity solely through the use of the first person singular. Another was—not to think before a blank page. (1959: 243) Taking advantage of spiral form’s plasticity, Miller annotates the “main” narrative action in which the supraself writes a novel under Mona’s name with the promise that Pop will provide enough money to send the pair to France. By commenting on the 1920s supraself from the perspective of the 1950s, he illustrates through this monolog that the supraself’s current undertaking, a novel that bears a strong resemblance to Moloch, will not end in the manner of previous abortions such as “Clipped Wings” or the supraself’s countless essays and sketches. Miller reveals that the supraself, liberated by his crucifixion, finally attempts to write on his own terms. Despite pausing the action, in this internal monolog he invests the supraself’s character with at least as much drama as he could have with an extended anecdote. Miller crystallizes the supraself’s efforts on his first true artistic production, and foreshadows the crucifixion’s rosy conclusion. Perhaps recognizing that the supraself’s new literary outlook entails a plethora of details, in a phenomenon that Omar Calabrese attributes to an “obsessive search for the acme of a dramatic action,” Miller places catalogs at closer intervals in Nexus than in the trilogy’s other books (1992: 82). Miller creates more of a fluid, atemporal effect with his catalogs than with almost any other device of spiral form, and, as a consequence of containing a more concentrated number of lists, Nexus casts an almost fantasia-like spell over its narrative content. Unchecked by plot, Miller unravels catalog after catalog and offers a sense of how the supraself views the world in the supraself’s crucifixion. Miller, in his generous application of word lists, indicates that the supraself looks upon his surroundings with a reinvigorated enthusiasm and soaks in too many details to study at once. Because he uses spiral form, Miller may hint at this oversaturation by offering dozens of apparently unmediated catalogs of the supraself’s impressions. By suspending the narrative in this fashion, Miller merges form and function and provides a glimpse of the emotional truth surrounding the supraself’s increased awareness. Representative instances of this technique include a list of the supraself’s solitary recollections (“voices, grimaces, gestures, pillars, copings, cornices” [1959: 44]), one concerning writing (“skies of blue-green copper, filigreed with lacy striata; umbrella ribs, obscene graffiti” [196]), and one regarding the supraself’s desire to travel (“Asia, Africa, Australia, Peru, Mexico, Siam, Arabia, Java, Borneo” [213]).

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Miller thinks so strongly of catalogs in Nexus that he concludes the book with a frenetic list that anticipates the revelations that the supraself’s first trip to Paris will bring him. Since he often strives in spiral form to create an impression of moods and feelings that transcend words, he tends to flood his prose with words when he wants to signify the supraself’s rapturous state. Enjoining signifier after signifier, Miller hollows out his language’s strict semantic properties and replaces them with rhythmic, intuitive qualities that, while often defying sense, reflect the torrent of emotions that the supraself experiences. Miller achieves precisely this effect in the final sequence of Nexus, which depicts the supraself on the verge of fulfilling his dream of traveling in Europe: Goodbye, dear old Walt … Goodbye Martin Eden, goodbye Uncas, goodbye David Copperfield! Goodbye John Barleycorn, and say hello to Jack! Goodbye, you six-day bike racers … Goodbye, dear Jim Londos … Goodbye, Oscar Hammerstein … Goodbye now, you members of the Xerxes Society … Goodbye, Street of Early Sorrows … Goodbye, everybody … . (1959: 316) Miller, of course, realizes that such a scene never happened in a literal sense, but, in keeping with his desire to capture the poetic aspect of events—distortion or not—he builds up the supraself’s anticipations to a frenzy capped off with a catalog that reflects the supraself’s imaginary farewell. Including among the supraself’s literary heroes such as Whitman and London more personal symbols such as the Xerxes Society and Jim Londos, Miller employs the list as a symbolic break with the supraself’s pre-crucifixion life. By concluding his autobiographical romance with a list, Miller contributes nothing to the narrative’s plot or action, but in terms of psychological drama he rather neatly summarizes the supraself’s hopes for a new artistic and personal beginning, despite William Gordon’s observation that “it is clear that [the supraself] has not yet arrived at a state of free and spontaneous awareness of life which can operate effectively in achieving [his] full potential as a person” (1967: 90). Miller certainly anticipates in the final catalog of Nexus the spontaneity that Gordon prizes, even if the supraself fails to recognize this quality himself, and by reconfiguring the farewell into a list, Miller may highlight those elements of the scene that bring out its poetic, rather than literal, aspect. Because spiral form allows him the license to reinterpret and mythologize external events, Miller may seek those incidents’ inner significance and subjective truth rather than produce a narrative that adheres closely to the “facts.” Because of this abiding concern for decoding and re-encoding external phenomena, Miller employs fantasies in Nexus as well. Training his narrative eye on the supraself’s imagination, Miller foregrounds his character’s fantasies in a way that few others achieve. Drawing on spiral form’s ability to embrace multiple narrative modes, Miller frequently punctures anecdotes with images of the supraself’s fancy. Since Miller keeps the supraself—and the reader—in the dark about Mona’s wanderings, he allows the jealous and hurt supraself to create scenarios that “explain” her actions. Miller clearly suggests, however, that the supraself’s explanations may completely

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muddle the facts, but, since spiral form concentrates on psychological rather than photographic mimesis, Miller permits such fantasies to coexist with the more verifiable elements of his narrative. Linking most of the supraself’s fantasies with Mona and her admirers, Miller maintains his focus on the supraself’s crucifixion. Such fantasies include one that stems from Stasia’s outburst that she and Mona will go to Europe (“I was already tramping the streets of Europe” [1959: 101]), one that speculates on Mona’s dealings with Pop (“it wasn’t really the book pages he was waiting for but a more juicy morsel —her” [195]), and one that combines the supraself’s lost love with his desire to write (“I saw myself standing on a table, an insignificant pouter pigeon dropping his little white pellets of pigeon shit” [304]). In these fantasies, Miller shifts the field of the supraself’s agonizing situation from Mona’s actions to his own inability to transform pain into art. Although by using spiral form Miller shuns narrative climaxes in favor of a nodal strategy, one of the most intense moments in Nexus occurs not on an external, anecdotal level, but in a fantasy. After relating the details of how the supraself accepted a job from his old friend Tony Marella subsequent to Mona and Stasia’s deserting it for Paris, Miller overtly depicts the supraself’s feelings of crucifixion in a fantasy: Slowly I became aware that I was bleeding, that indeed I was a mass of wounds from head to foot. It was then that, seized with fright, I swooned away. When at last I opened my eyes I saw to my astonishment that the Being who had accompanied me was tenderly bathing my wounds, anointing my body with oil. (1959: 176) Obviously, Miller alludes to Christ’s crucifixion in creating this fantasy about the supraself. Since the supraself feels that his pain exceeds all other, Miller creates an extended metaphor in which the supraself starts to recognize parallels between his situation and Christ’s. At precisely this moment of recognition, Miller reports of the supraself’s artistic rebirth: “rising to my feet, a new being entire, I put forth my arms to embrace the world. Nothing had changed; it was the world I had always known. But I saw it now with other eyes” (177).29 Miller, of course, employs this fantasy to capture the epiphanic quality of the supraself’s resurrection as an artist, a rebirth that, as Brown observes, “requires that the [supraself] reject the one who has freed him” (1986: 82). Because language cannot epitomize either the ethereal vision or the Dantesque torment that the supraself experienced, Miller resorts to entering the atemporal realm of fantasy, an avenue available to him because of spiral form. Deprived of spiral form’s device of fantasy, Miller could not present such an intangible—yet momentous—event without seeming either precious or pedestrian. By using a fantasy, Miller enables himself to impart the substance of the supraself’s miraculous rebirth without actually describing it on the demotic level. Miller transcends the confines of language through spiral form and permits his readers to witness indirectly the supraself’s profound psychological transformation, a metamorphosis that will cause him to grow as both human and artist. Throughout Nexus, though Miller strives to concentrate his narrative on this great change within the supraself, he never abandons many of the supraself’s most

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defining traits, as an examination of his diatribes will confirm. In spiral form, Miller depicts how the supraself alters over time, but he also preserves the record of the supraself’s previous geologic levels. Consequently, Miller juxtaposes past, present, and future versions of the supraself in Nexus and demonstrates in striking fashion how changing contexts affect and redefine the supraself’s past actions. Miller complements the supraself’s rebirth, therefore, with a number of diatribes. While such diatribes appear to contradict the theory of acceptance that marks the supraself’s artistic renaissance, Miller recontextualizes them so they actually focus on how negative aspects of society affect individuals other than the supraself. While Miller demonstrates that the supraself now accepts responsibility for his actions, he also relates that the supraself decries environments that breed intolerance. Thus, Miller suggests that the supraself stands outside the fray, but still offers his opinions through diatribes. Because of spiral form’s flexibility, Miller interrupts his anecdotes with such observations even, though they fail to contribute to any sequential action. Representative diatribes include one on America’s culture (“a hideous, empty, desolate land” [1959: 214]), one on Christian progress (“never anything among us dreary Christians that ever smelled of art” [223]), and one on New York life (“I was already saying goodbye to the familiar scenes of horror and ennui, of morbid monotony, of sanitary sterility and loveless love” [287]). Through such diatribes Miller makes it clear that the supraself escaped the death-in-life existence of most Americans only narrowly. Arguing through his diatribes that the American pursuit of money lacks a moral center, Miller also contends that the supraself’s rejection of such a life constitutes a remarkable achievement. Miller arranges his jeremiads to function in an annotative capacity in Nexus by rupturing his anecdotes with vitriolic condemnations of the society that impedes artistic liberation. Cutting short an anecdote about the supraself’s messengers, for example, Miller compels the supraself to look from atop the Brooklyn Bridge at the futility of American life: how like toy blocks appeared the skyscrapers which overshadowed the river’s bank! How ephemeral, how puny, how vain and arrogant! Into these grandiose tombs men and women muscled their way day in and day out, killing their souls to earn their bread (1959: 69) Positioning the supraself over his environment like an artist observing a canvas, Miller demonstrates that, while the supraself discards the American work ethic, he nevertheless concerns himself with the victims of that ethos. Thematically, Miller compares the supraself’s impotence as an employment manager—he could not help its employees—with his newfound power to disrupt the status quo via artistic condemnation. Narratologically, Miller, by digressing from his earlier point, refuses to conform, but he nevertheless strengthens his argument by concentrating on its intuitive elements rather than its logical ones. By employing spiral form, Miller voices the supraself’s dissent adjacent to his rather bleak external situation and illustrates how the artistic consciousness will eventually prevail. Through spiral

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form, Miller thus provides the supraself with the opportunity to return and reencode an earlier event by harping on that situation’s injustice. Miller employs a similar technique in Nexus through another device of spiral form, the microessay. Offering extended commentary on the supraself’s crucifixion, Miller in his microessays relocates the narrative thrust from the actual facts of the supraself’s life to contribution to the supraself’s overall liberation. Returning to the scene of the supraself’s degradation, Miller, in the guise of the 1950s supraself, frequently pauses the narrative action in order to place the events in a better context by inserting a microessay. In the microessays, Miller gives an impression of the supraself’s thoughts on themes that directly affect his general outlook. These digressions, Miller insinuates, constitute not meaningless or pedantic prattle, but important frames of reference to the supraself’s psychological character that “establish a greater reality” (1939a: 371). While he does not make the supraself’s anguished retreat to art the subject of all of his microessays (for instance, he includes one on prohibition), Miller tends to focus on this topic. Sample microessays include one on love (“beauty, though an attribute of the soul, may be absent in everything but the lines and lineaments of the loved one” [1959: 72]), one on writing (“to be born a writer one must learn to like privation, suffering, and humiliation” [244]), and one on openings (“varied as they were, all these methods of breaking the ice were symptomatic of personality, not expositions of thought-out technique” [130]). In his microessays, Miller elaborates—in expository form—on the central concern of Nexus: how the supraself can survive his crucifixion. By employing microessays, Miller treats the supraself’s plight in the same oblique style that marks much of his analysis, preferring to entangle ostensibly straightforward narrative events with questions, philosophical disquisitions, and any number of the other complications and “incessant digressions” inherent to spiral form (Kellman 1980: 128). For instance, in a microessay on love, Miller offers the following commentary, seemingly on love in general, but actually on the supraself’s desperate battle to regain Mona’s complete attention: To be free of the bondage of love, to burn down like a candle, to melt with love—what bliss! Is it possible for creatures like us who are weak, proud, vain, possessive, envious, jealous, unyielding, unforgiving? Obviously not. For us the rat race —in the vacuum of the mind … Believing that we need love, we cease to give love, cease to be loved. (1959: 39) Although he writes general observations and appears detached from his examination of the supraself, Miller draws too many parallels to the supraself’s own case to avoid direct comparison. While Miller may shift his narrative attention, it seems obvious that the shift reinforces in Nexus the portrait of the supraself’s initial inability to accept responsibility for his life and love Mona without restriction or demand. Inserting the above microessay immediately following an internal monolog about Mona and Stasia, Miller simply views the supraself from another angle and establishes a connection between the pre-crucifixion supraself and the mass of humanity

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who live in “bondage.” Once again, Miller adopts spiral form to penetrate deeper into the mind of the supraself than a straight narrative would provide. Miller spirals around the supraself’s angst with intertextual moments as well, and thus lays the intellectual foundation for the supraself’s crucifixion. Seeking to recognize as many of the forces that contributed to the supraself’s crucifixion as possible, Miller explores in Nexus the crucial role that writers and their books played in the supraself’s life, and suggests that, although he languished outwardly, the supraself percolated with mental activity. Lauding writers by way of either simple but telling mentions to protracted discussions, Miller demonstrates how the supraself placed a high premium on books—a fact that both helped and hindered him—and reflects the constructed nature of his project.30 While literature certainly inspired the supraself, Miller implies that books also prevented the supraself from assuming a definite course of action with regard to both Mona and his own artistic pretensions. Miller writes in The Books in My Life that “one should read less and less, not more and more,” because books may detract from action (1952a: 11). Nevertheless, since he desires to tell the truth about the supraself, Miller must faithfully record the essence of what moved the supraself, and so he turns to a device of spiral form— the intertextual moment—that inevitably interrupts anecdotal action but that attempts to fill in lacunae in the supraself’s psychology. In his intertextual moments, Miller includes ubiquitous favorites of the supraself such as Dostoevski (“myself, I have never pretended to understand Dostoevski” [1959: 18]) and Élie Faure (“that flood of torrential images, those great swollen phrases, sentences, paragraphs” [265]), but also writers such as Sean O’Casey (“nothing like him since Ibsen” [224]) and Thomas Mann (“such a marvelous craftsman” [310]). By employing these details, Miller recounts how the supraself achieved the dual goals of coping with Mona’s betrayal and learning to write. In such intertextual moments, Miller often depicts how the magisterial authority of the supraself’s favorite texts prevented him from writing for fear that he could not measure up to the strict standards of excellence. Miller indicates that despite possessing the freedom to write, the supraself frequently suffered from what Harold Bloom labels the “anxiety of influence” and could not produce any art of consequence—to himself (1973: 5). Before the supraself’s full resurrection in Paris, Miller dramatizes in passages such as the one below, awe-inspiring influences could lead to literary inertia: More thoughts, plaguey thoughts … . How to fit these thoughts into the novel. Always the same dilemma. And then I think of Twelve Men. If only somewhere I could do one little section which would have the warmth, the tenderness, the pathos of that chapter on Paul Dressler. But I’m not a Dreiser. And I have no brother Paul. It’s far away, the banks of the Wabash. (1959: 194) In this telling “aside,” Miller vividly encapsulates the supraself’s crippling dependence on the very authors who motivate him to write. Returning once more to Dreiser, who figures prominently in Moloch and Tropic of Capricorn, Miller suggests

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that the supraself’s propensity to draw comparisons between himself and other writers leads to a paralysis of his imagination. Although Miller pursues what would conventionally constitute a narrative tangent, he strikes once more at the trilogy’s theme of personal accountability. Because spiral form permits him to elaborate even ostensibly trivial nodes, Miller may suspend the action of Nexus and expend considerable textual space on an “event” that contributes little in the way of plot. Miller extends the duration of an incident that probably lasted but a few moments and, in exploring that node’s convolutions, discovers tremendous insights about the supraself’s early creative process. Miller achieves similar results in a final device of spiral form, the reverie. Obsessed with transcendent language, Miller attempts in spiral form to press beyond the boundaries of the signifier and represent the aura of the supraself’s reality. In Nexus, Miller moves closest to this goal in his emotionally charged reveries. By concentrating on rhythms, sounds, and juxtapositions rather than logic or action, Miller creates an effective means whereby he may recast the supraself’s ineffable—and, therefore, inexpressible and “uncapturable”—epiphanic moments and indicate their subjective significance. Painting the spirit, rather than the “factual” substance, of the supraself’s divine artistic flights, Miller demonstrates how the crucifixion affects the supraself in a positive, life-affirming manner. Since in Nexus the supraself begins to reap the fruit of his rebirth, Miller fashions his reveries so that the reader may witness the powerful flights of fancy that will eventually gel into the supraself’s literary and personal aesthetic.31 Sample surrealist reveries include one inspired by a dancehall (“here the baboons in full rut swim the belly of the Nile seeking the end of all things” [170]), one experienced on a walk (“gorgonzola hobbling along on two burned stumps” [288]), and one related to the supraself’s impending voyage to Europe (“the sun was eating into me like a million mothballs” [314]). In such reveries, Miller neither dramatizes nor describes the supraself’s elated mental state, but he nevertheless recreates it in mythopoeic fashion. Miller clearly suggests that the post-crucifixion supraself beholds his environment from a much more healthy, vibrant perspective, and in his reveries Miller— rather than simply indicate this metamorphosis through a conventional narrative maneuver—takes advantage of spiral form’s struggles against, in Morson’s terminology, an “anisomorphic” approach to time and refashions the supraself’s more ecstatic worldview in an equally enthusiastic way (39).32 Noting the importance of the supraself’s first trip to Europe, Miller—by “nonactive” narratological means— mythologizes the supraself’s giddy expectations in a representative reverie: following him [Sirota] like one of the devout, my lips moving mutely to the rhythm of his words, I swayed to and fro, rocked on my heels, fluttered my eyelashes, splattered myself with ashes, scattered gems and diadems in all directions, genuflected, and with the last eerie notes, rose on tiptoe to fling them heavenward. (1959: 305) Miller, of course, concerns himself less with the supraself’s reactions to the Cantor Sirota’s music than with the supraself’s feelings of liberation and hope.

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Detaching the event from its place in the sequence of the supraself’s actions, Miller illustrates how the supraself places a symbolic, emotion-filled importance on the Cantor, who represents the “Old World” of Europe that he will soon visit. Eschewing literalism, Miller mines spiral form’s figurative elements and depicts an entranced, sublime supraself who, finally released from spiritual bondage, attaches a quasi-religious significance to his imminent physical release from America. Since spiral form allows Miller not only to juxtapose temporally disparate incidents but to extend his analysis into nontraditional mental spheres as well, he may reconfigure the “facts” of any experience to augment the truth about the supraself. Distorting, disavowing, and deconstructing the external facts of the supraself’s life, Miller crafts out of Nexus and The Rosy Crucifixion’s spiral form a spirited “mnemonic index” that captures the essence, if not the letter, of the truth as it appeared to the supraself. By adopting a polyvalent narrative strategy in Nexus, Miller may depict not only the external circumstances surrounding the supraself’s crucifixion, but their psychological nuances as well. Writing to Bob MacGregor in a letter of 12 December 1956, Miller explains his spiral form: “whatever disorder, illogic, irrelevancies, etc. one may find in my works—and they exist, viewed objectively—they nevertheless belong and form an integral part of my books because they are always facets of me” (Miller and Laughlin 1996: 116; Miller’s emphasis). With these comments, Miller confirms that the artistic process, rather than the product, assumes primacy in his aesthetic, for his spiral form rejects artificial tidiness in favor of the more psychologically accurate structure erected from the chaotic remnants of personal struggle and evolution. As Lewis remarks, “the revelation that finally occurs in Nexus is, paradoxically, that there will never be any revelation; that it is the process itself which has been important” (1986: 217). Throughout Nexus and The Rosy Crucifixion, therefore, Miller attempts to account for the innumerable and contradictory worldly and mental forces that initially hampered the supraself’s growth as an artist, but that ultimately allowed him to experience the cleansing of rebirth. Employing the supraself’s alternately invigorating and traumatic relationship with Mara/Mona as a narrative scaffold, Miller ranges fluidly from the momentous events to personal ephemera, noting all the while that the latter cannot exist without the former and that personality and art stem from both. Making full use of spiral form’s plasticity, in Nexus, Miller collapses temporal distance and recontextualizes the supraself’s crucifixion by conflating the past, present, and future and rejecting “chronocentrism” (Morson 1994: 235) and the “heuristic rule” of coherence (Foucault 1972: 149). In fragmenting the events leading up to the supraself’s crucifixion, Miller indicates that no simple cause-andeffect relationship marked the supraself’s artistic ascent. Ruling out even Mara/ Mona’s cryptic behavior as the source of this rise, Miller demonstrates in Nexus and The Rosy Crucifixion that the convolutions and involutions of the truth—even subjective truth—defy simple narrative reductionism. In spiral form, then, Miller creates an “accidental masterpiece” and offers a heteroglossic alternative to plotting one’s life (1936b: 76).

5

Conclusion Henry Miller and the American literary tradition

The word “realism” is something I hate almost, abominate. Reality is another matter … there’s no end to reality, to the meaning or depth of it or the extent of it. But “realism” such as you get in writing, like certain of our American writers, to me is like the scum on water … anything that springs from the imagination, that’s poetic, and that disregards facts—facts to me are only stumbling blocks Henry Miller (1994a: 209–10)

While most critics of the late modernist period completely ignore Miller, his achievements in autobiographical fiction—particularly spiral form—merit him a more permanent place in the pantheon of American literature. More than seventy years after its publication, Tropic of Cancer, read but not taught, lacks academic canonization. Despite this, Miller extended the bounds of American literature in a meaningful and influential fashion through his use of the radically subjective spiral form. By employing spiral form, Miller created a truly organic novel that exploded previous thematic and narratological constraints and established a protean, antimimetic mode for exploring subjectivity and its relation to “Truth.” Despite this feat, many American critics view Miller either as a historical oddity or a misogynist ogre, a phenomenon perhaps arising from Miller’s own distaste for academics, revealed in statements such as “the most boring group in all communities were the university professors,” during the era when the modernist canon began to take its current shape (1945: 19).1 Neither perspective captures the complex ideas that contributed to Miller’s autobiographical romances, and, despite Miller’s still enormous popular following, such misguided interpretations threaten to reduce the writer to critical oblivion.2 Thus, one must trace Miller’s current place in the American literary tradition and then suggest the inadequacy of that reputation. In a comic scene in Ivan Ângelo’s novel, The Tower of Glass, two male characters discuss the books that they used for masturbation purposes as adolescents. Significantly, among such scurrilous-sounding titles as Memoirs of a Nun and Flesh, the name Henry Miller makes an obligatory appearance as a titillating and forbidden writer. Ângelo’s characters, in their disregard for the nonsexual aspects of Miller’s writing—and especially spiral form—represent not an aberration, but a confirmation of Miller’s critical reputation in the late twentieth and early twenty-first

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centuries. Despite developing the profoundly complex narratological strategies of spiral form, and despite Miller’s own proclamations that sex only functioned as a technical device in his work, Miller exists in the minds of many critics largely as a glorified—and outmoded—pornographer.3 To echo Slavoj
iek, Miller and his books seem “always already” read in the light of sexual content alone. Although several excellent critical studies exist, Miller’s representation in broad surveys of the modernist era, literary histories, anthologies, reference works, conference panels, and other indicators of academic interest proves rather scant.4 One of the more revealing signs about Miller’s academic status occurred in 1991— the centennial of Miller’s birth—when the Modern Language Association failed to dedicate a single session to Miller or his work among the more than 800 panels at its annual convention. Such a situation certainly does not seem an “accident,” for a handful of Miller scholars proposed sessions. Other sessions on far less influential writers, moreover, suggest that Miller’s omission from the 1991 convention—indeed from every MLA convention in the 1990s—stems either from a lack of familiarity with Miller’s work or a pseudo-familiarity with certain aspects of it. With all of his major works in print long after his death in 1980, it seems ludicrous to suggest that most Americanists rely on their knowledge of Miller’s notoriety to “evaluate” the worth of his texts, but such an unfortunate—and most unlearned—scenario appears to exist. In their zeal to categorize and distill, most literary historians—when they deign to mention him at all—focus on the more prurient aspects of Miller’s work and pedantically chide the writer for his faults. Marcus Cunliffe, for example, manages to summarize the complexities of Miller’s narratives by calling them “attractively scabrous confessions” (1990: 372). Reducing Miller’s penetrating analysis of the supraself to a burlesque sideshow, Cunliffe effectively divorces Miller from the canon of important American literature, a simplistic hermeneutic maneuver repeated by Kenneth Young in the Reference Guide to American Literature. Young completely misinterprets Miller’s oeuvre, labeling his autobiographical romances “large, inchoate, rambling works with an autobiographical thread” (1987: 393) and celebrating the “novelty” of Miller’s depictions of sexuality (394). Basing his judgments on how well Miller’s texts fit into a formalist template, Young mistakes the writer’s problematizing of linear temporality and photographic mimesis for a lack of control and perspective. Although other literary historians such as Malcolm Bradbury—who views Miller as a “forerunner of post-war experimentalism and post-modernism” (1992: 147)—and Wendy Steiner—who claims that Miller “brought the novel closer to poetry than it had ever come in America” (1988: 870)—more accurately reflect Miller’s narratological and thematic concerns, too many concur with Linda Wagner-Martin’s tacit dismissal of Miller from the American canon. While Wagner-Martin discusses far less influential novelists—Michael Gold and Edward Dahlberg come to mind—she fails to mention Miller at all in The American Novel 1914–1945.5 In reducing Miller to a historical footnote or worse, American literary historians completely ignore both Miller’s enormous impact on writers such as Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, and Jack Kerouac and his affinities with numerous important trends in American literature. These critics thus fail to recognize both the significant—in Raoul R. Ibargüen’s

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words—“alternative aestheticization of modernity” that Miller explored in his groundbreaking narratives and the amalgam of several fundamental strains of American literature that his works represent (1994: 489).6 Critics with a narrower scope tend to ignore or distort Miller’s significance to American literature as well. Those scholars specializing in modernism or the early twentieth century regularly omit Miller from their studies, while those who incorporate him generally seize upon the more “scandalous” qualities of his works. The writer J. Gerald Kennedy, with his well-conceived analysis of American expatriates and their notions of place, proves a rare instance of a commentator who treats Miller seriously—Kennedy also includes Fitzgerald, Barnes, and Hemingway—but most “critics” of Miller capitalize on his reputation for sexual sensationalism.7 Louise DeSalvo, for example, traces Miller’s relationship with June, and remarks that he “was obsessed by wanting to know what lesbians did when they had sex” (1995: 321), while John Tytell speculates that Miller “relished sexual gratification shamelessly, and he expected women to do the same” (1991: 145). Other critics, such as Maurice Charney—who argues that Miller prophesied “a sexual apocalypse” (1981: 93)—Susan Kappeler—who aligns Miller with the “sadistic tradition” (1986: 137)—and Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar—who claim that Miller “reconstitute[s] the penis as a pistol to shoot women into submission” (1988: 46)— even more overtly reduce the complexities of spiral form to only one of its numerous elements. By emphasizing only the components of Miller’s aesthetic that most easily draw opprobrium, such analysts re-entrench Miller’s position at the margins of American literature.8 Blind to the narratological inroads of spiral form, these critics pursue their own ideological agendas at the expense of Miller’s still vital and multifaceted literature. Fortunately, Miller’s reputation does not rest solely in the hands of such narrowminded scholars. A steady number of monographs on Miller appeared throughout the past three decades (none, tellingly, on university presses), and a cottage industry surrounding Miller and his achievements ensures his continued popular readership.9 Despite finding themselves constricted by the type of general scholarship propagated by a “series” on American literature, most of Miller’s commentators—for example, Kingsley Widmer, Leon Lewis, and J.D. Brown—manage to advance study of Miller significantly. Several new essays in Ronald Gottesman’s anthology, for example, apply some of the latest critical approaches to Miller’s work, while John Parkin and Caroline Blinder respectively employ Bakhtinian and surrealist approaches to great success. Critics such as Gottesman, Parkin, and Blinder succeed in looking past the obvious in Miller’s work and bringing to his texts a fresh, open-minded perspective that avoids condemning books such as Sexus either for their frank subject matter or their rejection of mainstream modernist and naturalist narratological tenets. Nevertheless, even with the dynamic scholarship of such advocates, many students of American literature—indirectly absorbing their professors’ lack of interest—either disdain, without having read, Miller because of his more sexist elements, or they mistake the writer for another literary Miller, Arthur. Such disdainful critics overlook Miller as an important figure in the transition from romanticism and transcendentalism to modernism and postmodernism.

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While Miller himself claimed that his influences primarily lay in the European and Asian traditions, he nonetheless reveals many visible connections with the American literary tradition. Karl Orend observes that colleges [and critics] neglect Miller … due to a fundamental misunderstanding of his work and the context of his achievement. He was not, at heart, an American writer, but rather a European writer, heavily influenced by Hindu and Buddhist thought, as arguably were his predecessors Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman (2004b: B6) Certainly Nietzsche, Duhamel, Petronius, Cendrars, Dostoevski, Lao Tzu, and a host of others impacted both Miller’s philosophy and his aesthetic, but Miller certainly shares traits with a number of American writers as well, even those he professed to hate. Few American traditions, after all, loom as large as the literary exile who turns his back on America and looks toward Europe and elsewhere for inspiration and validation. From the earliest days, sensitive artists found the unremitting mercantilism of America hostile to their needs. Indeed, Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s depiction of the ideal American lacks an aesthetic dimension, and Benjamin Franklin openly discourages artistically bent Europeans from coming to America. Alexis de Tocqueville later employs this image of the practical American, devoid of poetic sensibility, in his indictment of American culture. Even before the Republic, however, many “American” writers found it difficult to practice their craft on their terms. Representative of these, Thomas Morton—a sensuous poet who, like Miller, drank from a Rabelaisian “holy bottle” and found God in fleshly pleasure—found himself persecuted by William Bradford and the guardians of conventional spirituality. Only through (forced) “exile” could the English Morton express his thoughts on American life and spirituality. Other exiles would follow, of course: Washington Irving, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound. Miller, with his international eye, takes his place among this pantheon, and, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Kay Boyle, writes distinctly American books suckled on the nourishment of foreign lands. Within Miller lies the convergence of at least two great American literary traditions, the spiritual and the picaresque. The former—embodied by such writers as Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, Jonathan Edwards, R.W. Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Emily Dickinson—examines and, as the centuries progress, questions the impact of a creator on individual and social behavior. Miller’s silent moments, those when he acknowledges both a creator and the difficulty of transcendence in a callous world, find antecedents in the ambivalence of Bradstreet’s best poetry, the intertwined emotion and calm of Edwards’ Personal Narrative, the self-reliance of Emerson. Orend observes that Miller’s writing contains “a core of spirituality” and Thomas Nesbit points out that Miller transforms “his allegedly obscene existence into a religious confession” (2004d: 15; 2004: 149). Miller’s search for self exemplifies a search for God. His outrage mirrors the outrage of Thoreau and Hawthorne in their rejection of easy morality, of surface compliance. Miller’s eschatological

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celebrations, his longings for Armageddon speak not of the end of God but a return to God. The delirious joy often masks a deeper pain, a realization that humanity, in its obsession with material progress, has spiritually atrophied. Certainly more notorious in Miller’s work, the second tradition, the picaresque, also finds its roots in the beginnings of American literature. John Smith’s selfaggrandizing exaggerations, for instance, prefigure Miller’s colossal exploits, and Sarah Kemble Knight’s ludicrous portraits of ill-cultured farmers call to mind Miller’s caricatures of the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company’s legion of grotesques. William Byrd, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Royall Tyler, and Charlotte Lennox provide other early examples of this mode. As Kingsley Widmer, observes, Mark Twain’s “nullifidian” exploitation of the picaresque mode prefigures that of Miller (1987: 220, 221). Miller reflects his debt to the picaresque in spiral form’s use of the anecdote, but he breathes new life into the convention by going beyond the surface and exploring the supraself with surreal flights, apocalyptic jeremiads, and other techniques. Miller famously, notoriously, foregrounds the sexual component of earlier picaresque narratives—always present but rarely depicted in any graphic detail—and consummates “on stage” acts previously left to the imagination. While the two traditions appear antithetical, even mutually exclusive, Miller merges them nearly seamlessly via spiral form. As with the English poet, John Donne, the carnal and the divine coexist naturally in Miller’s work. Miller consistently remarks that he employs sexuality not in a vacuum but for its relationship to the dampened passions of modern civilization. Miller implies through characters such as Maude and Van Norden that the sex impulse, which should reflect some of the strongest human instincts and therefore connect people closer to God, finds itself repressed, hidden in the shadows, because of unnatural laws and immoral social taboos. While Miller’s mysticism and surrealism look toward the heavens and the unconscious for spiritual clues, his unfettered sexuality and gritty anecdotes of marginal street life find signs of God in the everyday, just as his hero Whitman had decades earlier. While commitments to institutions distract one from God—as Emerson, and even Bradford, noted long ago—sexuality can, if listened to rather than repressed, lead one back to pre-modern “instinct” and a sense of divinity. In merging these two central American literary traditions, Miller shows a particular affection for the transcendentalists. As Brown, Paul Jackson, Edward J. Rose, and Arnold Smithline, among others, point out, Miller shares the transcendentalists’ penchant both for idiosyncratic spiritualism and bold social critique. Particularly, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman provided Miller with several stylistic and thematic veins that he would later mine in spiral form. From Emerson—in his Journal as well as in essays such as “Nature,” “Self-Reliance,” “Circles,” “The Poet,” and the “OverSoul”—Miller absorbed the notion of organic form, as well as the concepts of universal energy and the transcendent eye/I. Drawing on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Hegel, and others, Emerson rejected poetic conventions as unreflective of the psyche. As Miller would later, Emerson felt that each creative act should fuse theme and style seamlessly, should connect the writer to the universal flow of energy. In Thoreau, Miller found both the moral outrage and acceptance that he (and his apocalyptic peer, Robinson Jeffers) would employ in his explorations of the world and the self.10 A master of the

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jeremiad, Thoreau could also—in Walden, for instance—quietly reveal a connection with the divine. Miller, too, fluctuates between these rhetorical poles in his spiral form. Whitman, perhaps, offers the most obvious connection to Miller, especially in his celebrations of sexuality and his refusal to turn away from the squalid side of life. Straining Emerson’s notion of organic form to its limits, Whitman’s style overflows the page with catalogs, sensuous language, and startling juxtapositions. Like Whitman, Miller embraces filth as equally as he does the sublime, and his spiral form, with its breathless catalogs, delirious reveries, graphic sexual scenes, and egoistic apostrophes, also bursts rhetorical conventions to their limits. While the transcendentalists provide the most obvious direct influence on Miller, a glance at the reading list appended to the French edition of The Books in My Life demonstrates that he read far more American literature than he would later claim.11 Well-represented amongst the luminaries of European literature and Eastern mysticism, American authors as diverse as Jane Addams, Amy Lowell, Eugene O’Neill, and Booth Tarkington provide intriguing clues about Miller’s connections to literary history. For example, the sanguine Horatio Alger, ironic catalyst behind Miller’s “Clipped Wings,” stands in dramatic contrast to stark naturalists such as Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and Frank Norris and help gloss spiral form’s frequent condemnations of the “American Dream.” Miller shares with the naturalists both a cynicism regarding institutions and an attraction to the dark recesses of urban life. The presence of Alger also illuminates the impact of American “boy’s fiction” on Miller. In addition to British figures such as Rider Haggard and G.A. Henty, American writers such as George Wilbur Peck, Mark Twain, and James Fenimore Cooper sparked within Miller a sense of adventure and the exotic, traits that frequently appear within his works. The fragmentation prevalent in spiral form finds echoes in many of the American modernists that Miller read and links him to a broader American literary tradition. Gertrude Stein, Thomas Wolfe, Nathanael West, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Djuna Barnes— these and other writers (a good number of them expatriates) on Miller’s list pursue similar methodologies in their quests to explore the self and its surroundings. While Miller’s presence in literary histories pales against the writers in the preceding list, his spiral form offers an important contribution to the Modernist attempt to come to grips with the sense of alienation promulgated by World War I and its attendant urbanization, scientific Fordism, and depersonalized mass communication.12 Writers such as Stein, Eliot, and West, for instance, mirror Miller’s concern with the unconscious and surrealism, while figures such as Dos Passos, Pound, and Barnes ally themselves with Miller’s belief that a compound, additive style enhances literary “realism” and offers a projection of the unconscious that both transcends the ego and connects the present to the past in dynamic new ways. With authors such as Faulkner and Wolfe, Miller explores the impact of place on the spirit and returns again and again to the locus of creation. Clearly, Miller shares traits with these authors, yet his spiral form adds to this common project with its anecdotal foundation, graphic sexuality, and metaphysical flights. Although Miller suffers from a skewed reputation, one may nonetheless argue that spiral form constitutes one of the more remarkable American prose achievements of

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the twentieth century. By completely rejecting the notion that novels must employ some sort of plot—even a nominal one drawn from mythology—Miller, in his use of spiral form, aligns himself more with European experimentalists such as Joyce or Breton than any other American modernist novelist, with the possible exceptions of Barnes, Faulkner, Wolfe, and West.13 Fusing anecdotal observation with spiral form’s diverse array of inwardly focused devices, Miller anticipates the chaotic, freeflowing works of postmodernism, and even shares that movement’s disdain of established genres with his statement that “I never wrote a novel” (1994b: 146). While Miller deviates from “actual” postmodernism by attempting to locate “Truth,” he shares both the postmodernist assumption that a uniform, objective truth does not exist and that movement’s hyperfragmented, centerless aesthetic. Despite always focusing on the supraself, Miller recognizes that concept’s unflagging propensity to mutate, a phenomenon that constantly shifts spiral form’s narrative locus. Each node of existence, Miller argues through his work in spiral form, becomes so dramatically re-contextualized with each moment that forming a definitive portrait of a personality—even one’s own—constitutes a chimerical pursuit. As with the best postmodern writers, Miller realizes that the process—rather than the goal—of discovery should take precedence. One should not, however, construe Miller and his spiral form as postmodern. Miller extracts important elements of spiral form from the romantics, Victorians, and naturalists, and much of his vital subject matter stems from sources as diverse as Rabelais, Van Gogh, and Zen. From such a potpourri, Miller takes many of the tenets operative in spiral form and confirms his status as an important transitional figure in American literature. In his opinion, Miller merges the most prescient qualities of a wide number of ostensibly mutually exclusive movements and individuals and discovers his textual personality, the supraself, amidst the admixture. As Jay Martin remarks, Miller “wished to fuse transcendent ecstasy and terror in one gargantuan image” (1996: 9). Approaching self-knowledge from a dual process of accumulation and recontextualization, Miller in spiral form redraws the boundaries of American fiction and extends the novel’s into areas hitherto reserved for nonfiction and “nonliterary” writers. As Miller fills his texts with vitriolic jeremiads, nightmarish fantasies, explicit sexual encounters, and reflective essays, he makes a concerted effort to derail the efficacy of plot and replace it with an anecdotal collage that exceeds the sum of its parts. Rebutting the well-crafted novels of such luminaries as Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Miller opts for a guerrilla-like approach to fiction. Employing staccato bursts of emotion, action, and observation, Miller disregards continuity for an alinear, associative prose that destablizes its audience by problematizing how stories unfold. By spiraling around his subject, Miller offers a more detailed analysis of psychological motivation than a plot-centered novelist could hope for. Instead of burying or rationalizing contradictions, Miller simply allows them to co-exist, recognizing, no doubt, that in these apparent discrepancies lies the key to the supraself. For all of the prolixity inherent to spiral form, Miller never writes the final word on the supraself, a fact that suggests the monumental nature of his project. One may not overstate Miller’s impact on later writers, even those who never read a line he wrote. Certainly, American writers now employ sex in far more

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graphic and experimental ways than Miller, but the landmark court cases sparked by Tropic of Cancer laid the groundwork for this phenomenon. Beyond his indirect impact on such novelists as Nicholson Baker, Kathy Acker, and Bret Easton Ellis, Miller, whose Tropic of Cancer ranked fiftieth on the Modern Library’s list of the most important books of the twentieth century, inspired members of the Beat movement with his blend of spirituality, sex, and social critique. Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, among others, admired Miller greatly, no doubt recognizing in spiral form’s fugue-like flights the jazzy improvisation that marked their own compositions. Other American writers—such as Roth, Mailer, Terry Southern, and John Updike—saw in Miller a continuation of the realist project, now combined with psychoanalysis and sexual frankness, while authors such as Pynchon, Acker, Robert Duncan, Erica Jong, and Jim Harrison reacted to Miller’s violent rejection of modernity. The expansive, teasingly metaphysical style of writers such as T. Coraghessan Boyle, David Foster Wallace, and Jeffrey Eugenides also finds an antecedent in Miller’s spiral form and its gallery of bizarre anecdotes, historical oddities, and fantastic excursions. Younger writers continue to read Miller and debate his project, ensuring that his place in America’s literary history will endure with or without academic support. From the first tentative lines of Moloch to the densely textured prose of Nexus and beyond, Miller set an ambitious textual agenda that deserves academic recognition. In spiral form, Miller created a richly fertile new outlook on narrative construction that amalgamates structure, theme, tone, and spirit into a wonderfully diverse whole without becoming rigid. Disenchanted with the frequently static novels of his contemporaries, Miller—like Poe before him—looked beyond the borders of his country to find the inspiration for a radically different—and ultimately influential—approach to writing, an effort that spawned spiral form. Miller and his spiral form merit a more productive place in American literary scholarship because he both opened up avenues previously closed to American writers—and from which contemporary writers continue to benefit—and explored this uncharted territory not in a merely competent fashion, but in a truly innovative one. Miller belongs in the American academic canon because he offered an alternative to the aesthetic route pioneered by his more well-known contemporaries by first asking and then successfully and artistically answering the question, “does a novel always have to have a plot?” (1959: 253).

Notes

1 Introduction 1

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Jay Martin reports a remarkably similar statement by Miller: “I am … highly suspicious of well-documented biographies, just as I am skeptical about historical records and events. If, on the other hand, the biographer would write about his subject purely from his imagination, from what he thinks the subject was or is, that is another matter” (1978: ix–x). Despite his advice, Miller complained to Lawrence Durrell that “these fucking biographers are like leeches. They invent, imagine, suppose, ‘no doubt’, etc. ad infinitum” (Durrell and Miller 1988: 482). See, for instance, Miller’s famous response to Edmund Wilson’s review in the New Republic. Miller quite vehemently argues against Wilson’s characterization of Tropic of Cancer’s “Henry Miller” as a hero, claiming “I don’t use ‘heroes’ … nor do I write novels. I am the hero, and the book is myself” (1938a: 49). Miller develops a similar line of reasoning in Max and the White Phagocytes’ “An Open Letter to Surrealists Everywhere” (1938b: 254–99). Interestingly, Miller writes to Michael Fraenkel in The Michael Fraenkel-Henry Miller Correspondence Called Hamlet that although the calendar reads 7 November, according to his [Miller’s] personal chronology the date should read 2 November (Fraenkel and Miller 1962: 14). Obviously, Miller feels bound by no obligations to standard temporality, a trait that continues throughout his career. Miller first published The World of Sex in a private limited edition in 1941 (Chicago: J.H.N. [Ben Abramson]). A somewhat larger, but still limited, edition appeared in 1946 (New York: J.H.N. [Ben Abramson]), followed by a revised version of the book in 1957 (Paris: Olympia) and the first mass American edition in 1965 (New York: Grove). John W. Bagnole alerts readers that the 1957 revision followed an unpublished revision and suggests the latter’s probable existence (1994: 434). Miller’s revised text reads: “In telling the story of my life I have frequently discarded the chronological sequence in favor of the circular or spiral form of progression. The time sequence which relates one event to another in linear fashion strikes me as falsely imitative of the true rhythm of life. The facts and events which form the chain of one’s life are but starting points along the path of self-discovery. I have endeavored to plot the inner pattern, follow the potential being who was constantly deflected from his course, who circled around himself, was becalmed for long stretches, sank to the bottom, or vainly essayed to reach the lonely, desolate summits. … Thus, for no apparent reason, I revert now and then to a period not only anterior but unrelated to the one in hand. … A sudden switch, a long parenthetical detour, a crazy monolog, an excursus, a remembrance cropping up like a cliff in a fog—their very instantaneity kills all speculation (1978: 126–7).” In the revised version, Miller tightens the prose by excising unnecessary verbiage (“so to speak,” for example) and altering word selection (“time development,” for instance, becomes “progression”), but his sentiment remains consistent with

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10 11 12 13

that of the first edition. One notable emendation, however, concerns authorial intention. Whereas in the original text Miller intimates that no overt rationale plays a role in how incidents unfold temporally within the autobiographical romances, in the revision he suggests by his subtle italicization of “apparent” that he maintains a firmer technical grasp on his narratives. Miller stressed the importance of revision to a young Lawrence Durrell, explaining in the Durrell-Miller Letters, 1935–1980 that “as I retype and revise I do a lot of peripheral thinking” (Durrell and Miller 1988: 53). In Letters to Emil, moreover, Miller claimed that “there never [is] a final draft” (1989: 131). As the Tropic of Cancer manuscript suggests, Miller revised his texts extensively and repeatedly. While a study of Miller’s manuscripts goes beyond the scope of this study, such an analysis would no doubt illuminate his careful attention to form and refute critics such as Kingsley Widmer who attribute Miller’s chaotic style to carelessness rather than to method. Luz Aurora Pimentel, in Metaphoric Narration: Paranarrative Dimensions in À la recherche du temps perdu, while not directly referring to Frank’s concept of lyric organization, does explore what seem natural implications of the theory. Pimentel’s notion of metaphoric narration extends Frank’s discussion of the necessity for simultaneous perception in lyrically organized texts by differentiating between observed and constructed metaphor: “To speak of metaphoric narration is to speak of special effects of meaning resulting from transformations characteristic of metaphorization which may be either observed at the level of the manifestation in language or constructed from the mode of organization of the text. Therefore, metaphoric narration defines that class of narrative texts in which the process of metaphorization functions narratively on two basic levels: at the level of the manifestation in language and at the level of the organization of the text (1990: 35).” The organizational method itself, therefore, contributes to the reader’s conceptualization of a text’s metaphoric qualities. Because a lyrically organized narrative tends to present its content in an ostensibly random fashion, a reader must construct a metaphor that will explain, or at least contain, the potentially disorienting effects of alogical associations. Form thus becomes as much a part of the overall “story” as content because a particular form’s metaphoric features will gloss, or even supplant, observed metaphor. Once again, Pimentel provides an implicit gloss on Frank’s theory with her notion of “back-reading”: “A given segment of a text establishes meaningful relationships with a noncontiguous segment. The reader is then forced to ‘reread’ the previous portion of the text in the light of the present one, thus abolishing the intervening textual distance between the two” (1990: 204). Back-reading functions as a pragmatic counterpart to Frank’s “simultaneous perception” and illustrates how readers must reconstruct their comprehension of a particular image group in view of all other groups. Miller takes a similar geologic approach to selfhood in The Michael Fraenkel-Henry Miller Correspondence Called Hamlet, a work written concurrently with his book on Lawrence. Critic J.D. Brown notes in Henry Miller that rather than displacing previous “selves” by “creating a monumental palimpsest,” Miller “generated a fragmentary, ultimately circular series of distinct self-creations” (1986: 116). Brown’s observation dovetails nicely with Miller’s own geologic vision of personality and points toward spiral form as a method of understanding the writer’s multitudinous identities. Durrell noted Miller’s organic form in his 1945 essay, “The Happy Rock.” See Tropic of Capricorn and Sexus for two such assertions. Kingsley Widmer, for example, refers to Miller’s literary essays and allusions as “quaintly irrelevant” (1990: 106). Miller, pointing out the lacunae inherent in narrative, tells Digby Diehl that “It’s only because I put it in print that it’s made such an impact. You mention 20 or 30 women; that sounds like a thousand when you put in print” (1994i: 170). Ironically, while sexual incidents constitute only a small percentage of Miller’s anecdotes, they attract a majority of the public’s attention. Even esteemed critics such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar erroneously accuse Miller of establishing a “theology of the cunt” (1988: 116).

158 Notes 14 15

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Seymour Chatman comments that all descriptive passages constitute the “arrest of story-time” (1980: 125). For more complete responses to Millett’s accusations, see Norman Mailer’s forceful response to Millett’s remarks in The Prisoner of Sex and Mike Woolf’s essay “Beyond Ideology: Kate Millett and the Case for Henry Miller,” which alerts readers to the striking similarities between Miller and Millett’s treatment of sexuality as a liberating metaphor. Other responses to Millett include Mary Kellie Munsil’s “The Body in the Prison-house of Language: Henry Miller, Pornography, and Feminism” and Erica Jong’s The Devil at Large, which argue for more sophisticated feminist approaches to Miller’s sexuality/sexism. For his part, Miller admonishes both those who would frown on his works’ sexuality and those who would revel in it. Writing in The World of Sex, Miller opines that “only a few discerning souls seem able to reconcile the so-called contradictory aspects of my being [i.e., the sexual and the intellectual] as revealed through my writing” (1941g: 5). Miller consistently employs sex as a means to an end rather than as a goal. Gordon argues much more convincingly that “The artist who dramatizes the self does more than reconstruct his past. The re-examination of life history is itself creative in that it chooses, modifies, colors, and even changes outright the actual relationships of events and people in order to create the person whom the author wills himself to be in the present (1967: 52).” Gordon’s comments anticipate Olney’s idea of the autobiographical metaphor, as well as suggest the concept of the supraself. By emphasizing relationships between events rather than the events themselves, Gordon indirectly refutes Hassan and illustrates a key point of spiral form. These “external” events obviously play a large factor in creating a context for the “inner” being. Tropic of Capricorn, with its inversion of the Horatio Alger mythos, and Plexus, with its equation of physical and artistic hunger, offer perhaps the best examples of this phenomenon. Miller never allows socioeconomic realities to recede completely into the background, for even in the midst of a sexual fantasy or an epiphany he will remark on apparently banal subjects such as clothing or furniture that remind the reader of the world outside of the mind. Wickes, in a move typical in Miller criticism, discounts much of Miller’s “nonfictional” discourse and laments its manifestation in the autobiographical romances, ignoring both the metaphoric and metafictional facets of such prose units, as well as their disruptive qualities. Critics generally attribute Miller’s comedic elements to his reading of Rabelais and others (see, for instance, Parkin’s Henry Miller, the Modern Rabelais). Such approaches, however, ignore or underemphasize the importance of the burlesque on Miller during his formative years as a writer. Gordon explores Miller’s romanticism—including the function of childhood within that paradigm—in The Mind and Art of Henry Miller. Miller’s letters often run in excess of twenty pages, and many examples of more than thirty pages exist. Stuhlmann duly notes the open-ended quality of Miller’s work, but unfortunately does not pursue his comments on the epistolary nature of Miller’s work beyond a few sentences. Numerous examples exist, but see Brown, Henry Miller; Charles Glicksberg, The Sexual Revolution in Modern American Literature; and Gordon, The Mind and Art of Henry Miller for typical arguments. Not especially written for a scholarly audience, Jong’s full comment asserts that “Henry himself invented spiraltime, structured like the DNA molecule, time that curves back on itself. His ‘novels’ constitute an immense Mobius strip.” One wishes that Jong had extended her rather intriguing metaphor. Mellard further argues that “any item in the ‘field’ can be identified as naïve or critical or sophisticated depending on its relationship to other items in a hypostatized series.”

Notes 159 See Miller’s “Walking Up and Down in China” and the Hamlet correspondence, among others. 27 Thinking of discrepancies as different manifestations of the same concept, Miller, like Whitman and Emerson, loves to revel in apparent contradictions. He writes in several texts that one must delve beyond the surface to reconcile ostensible paradoxes. Consider the following passage from Aller Retour New York: “Confusion and logic! A surface contradiction only. Fundamentally there is no contradiction. For that perfect equilibrium which the individual Frenchman represents there must be an external chaos matched by an internal order and precision all the more wonderful in that it is perfectly autonomous, that each one creates it for himself (1936a: 67).” Like Faure’s “man,” Miller attempts to build an order based on his limited view of reality. Miller realizes this, however, and celebrates the phenomenon as an artistic achievement. 28 Before settling in California in 1945, Miller traveled in Greece and the United States. See The Colossus of Maroussi, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, Remember to Remember, The Red Notebook, and The Nightmare Notebook for Miller’s depictions of his journeys. Miller resided at Big Sur from 1945 to 1961, and moved to Pacific Palisades in 1961, where he resided until his death in 1980. 26

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Much doubt surrounds the actual nature of June’s relationship with Kronski. While the pair unquestionably enjoyed a flirtatious intimacy, Miller’s biographers—Jay Martin, Mary V. Dearborn, and Robert Ferguson—avoid direct speculation as to whether the couple engaged in sexual activity. Anaïs Nin quotes June claiming to have “faced [her] feelings” but “[having] never found anyone [she] wanted to live them out with, so far” (1986: 22). Nin further relates that June seemed “frightened” by her physical advances (23). Miller universally refers to Moloch and Crazy Cock pejoratively. Miller provides a typical example of his disdain for his early novels in The World of Sex: “I produced several abortions which fortunately were never published” (1941g: 55). Several of his Parisian confidantes concurred with his estimation, including Nin, Alfred Perlès, Michael Fraenkel, and Richard Osborn. Nin tells Miller in a letter of 12 February 1932 that Moloch, despite some “staggeringly beautiful” passages, “[was] flat, lifeless, vulgarly realistic, photographic” (Nin and Miller 1987: 4). Fraenkel entertained a similar notion of Crazy Cock, claiming that certain sections “exploded like rockets,” but these came between “long and dreary stretches of inexecrably flat, insipid, sterile writing” (1945: 44). Perlès and Osborn lacked Nin and Fraenkel’s charity, Perlès bluntly asserting that Crazy Cock “was worse than no good, it was beyond repair” (98), while Osborn quips that the book “[was] old-fashioned” (Martin 1978: 218). In some ways, Miller’s first two efforts seem necessary steps toward the formulation of the autobiographical romance. Tzvetan Todorov, for instance, argues that genres never arise in a finished state and “are always the transformation of an earlier [genre],” a process achieved by “inversion … displacement … and combination” (1990: 15). Miller discusses his disgust for such circumlocutions in several places, including The World of Sex and “Obscenity and the Law of Reflection.” In The World of Sex, Miller stresses the symbolic import of intercourse, while in the latter essay he argues that sexuality functions as a “technical device” whose “purpose is to awaken, to usher in a sense of reality,” something that an artist could not achieve with euphemisms (1947a: 287). “Raimu” also shows Miller mocking the American propensity to avoid delineating sex with his pronouncement that “it must never be openly shown—it must be imagined only” (1941d: 56). For another, truncated version of Miller’s self written during approximately the same period as Moloch, see “Gliding into the Everglades.” Interestingly, Miller wrote this short account of his ill-fated trip to Florida in the first-person. Miller later employed this material in several places, most extensively in Plexus. In a passage suggestive of

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spiral form in Aller Retour New York, Miller tells Perlès that “I will put it down in every book I write—with variations” (1936a: 10). During her relationship with Miller, June hustled money, clothing, liquor, and other goods from a variety of affluent males. June claimed not to grant sexual favors in exchange for either the pecuniary offerings or the “gifts,” but Miller suspected otherwise (Dearborn 1991a: 80). The biographical model for the character Miller called “Pop,” Ronald Freedman—a joke-writer for the New Yorker—promised June a trip to Paris if “she” could write a novel (Ferguson 1991: 156). Miller, excited at the prospect of finally visiting Europe, complied, producing Moloch in about a year. Freedman, who eventually committed suicide over June’s lack of interest, upheld his part of the bargain, and the Millers toured Paris in the latter half of 1928 (161). Miller recasts these events in Nexus. In the mature works, Miller refers to this agency as the Cosmodemonic or Cosmococcic Telegraph Company. Miller modeled this capitalist purgatory on Western Union, for whom he worked from 1920 to 1924. A perceptive reader will also note that much of what Dearborn correctly labels the book’s “stilted and awkward” language occurs during the narrator’s expositions, as in the above passage (1992: xi). This phenomenon stems possibly from Miller’s selfconscious attempt to create a “literary work,” for even though his dialog in Moloch shares affinities with the later autobiographical romances, the presence of an “objective” narrator acts as a buffer to the psychological nuances these later, more openly colloquial, works represent. Miller did not yet understand that in striving for conventional literary standards he squelched his natural, more freewheeling voice. Miller never claims, as do some critics, such as Tom Wood or Kingsley Widmer, that his books present an idealized—or self-deluded—version of self. He explicitly states in an interview with David Dury, for instance, that he “was more interested in showing the scoundrel in myself than the good side,” a fact that illustrates his Whitmanesque acceptance of his flaws (1994k: 129). Miller makes a similar disclosure to Lawrence Durrell in a letter of 1 April 1958 (Durrell and Miller 1988). Plexus contains a scene in which the supraself transforms into an Emersonian eye and gathers impressions. A blade of grass, for instance, metamorphoses into a “mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnified world” (1952b: 53). Miller thus employs Emersonian aesthetics as a foundation for spiral form: an artist should strive to capture the infinite possibilities within any object and discount nothing as trivial or irrelevant. For more on Miller’s adaptation of Emersonian principles, see Paul Jackson’s “Henry Miller, Emerson, and the Divided Self.” Jackson cogently argues that Emerson taught Miller the process of “‘deepening’ … autobiographical fact [so that] it includes the essential truth that comes from the simultaneous revelation of all the levels of selfhood” (1971: 234). Such deepening obviously shares much in common with spiral form. Even though Ben Abramson published The World of Sex in a limited edition, Miller still feared that his first wife, Beatrice, would pursue legal action if she read her ex-husband’s account of their marriage (Dearborn 1991a: 211). This apprehension no doubt caused Miller to avoid supplying the character modeled on Beatrice with even a false name. Judith Fetterley examines Irving’s creation of the trope in which “hen-pecked” husbands fail to achieve their potential or dreams in The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Fetterly argues that shrewish wives such as Dame Van Winkle operate as metaphors for “the values of work, responsibility, [and] adulthood” that impede the ultimate masculine “dream of pleasure” (1978: 3). Miller’s Blanche— who reinforces the work ethic that functions as the cornerstone of the capitalist code— undoubtedly stems from this tradition, and the writer mentions Rip Van Winkle in another context in chapter fourteen. Miller himself, in referring to his previous marriages, later recognized that “we are inclined to demand too much from marriage,” a statement that tacitly indicts Moloch for placing the blame for his lack of productivity on Blanche (1994k: 113).

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Moloch’s relationship with Prigozi problematizes the notion that Moloch entertained “unmistakable anti-Semitic” beliefs (8). As Dearborn notes, Miller’s “feelings toward Jews were fraught with ambivalence” (1992: xii). While capable of passages—via the narrator—referring to the Jewish immigrants as the “lice and ticks of mankind” or as “disgusting creatures,” Moloch loathes Blanche for making similar barbs against Prigozi: “to Blanche, this man whom he called friend was nothing more than a disgusting little Jew” (197, 102, 252). Moloch also attempts to seduce Naomi, a Jewish woman, and socializes regularly with his Jewish employee, Dave. Moloch’s dinner with Prigozi, during which he commiserates over the loss of his friend’s wife, best illustrates Moloch’s—and Miller’s—mixed feelings toward Jewish people. While completely empathizing with Prigozi and treating him like a true friend and unique individual, Moloch launches into a diatribe against the Jewish race directed at Prigozi’s friend Dr. Elfenbein, who joins their table. Karl Orend, however, disputes Dearborn’s reading and suggests that Moloch functions as a “damning indictment of American racism and anti-Semitism of the 1920s” (2004c: 24). Miller dramatically curtailed his comments about Jews after World War II, a phenomenon that probably caused him not to republish Aller Retour New York after New Directions and Grove started publishing his earlier work. Miller explains to Emil Conason—the individual on whom he based Prigozi and Kronski—that he “set about consciously to distort [him],” and tells his friend that he does not regard him as grotesque (Ferguson 1991: 158–9). Pictures of Conason reveal a rather dapper individual and illustrate the lengths Miller went to align his portrait of Prigozi with a “deeper” truth. Martin (1978: 129) and Dearborn (1991a: 108) report that Miller kept a notebook detailing some of June and Jean’s more outrageous behavior. Miller professed that he needed notes for a play about the ménage, but his biographers claim that Miller simply fabricated this project in order to torment his wife and her friend. Miller refers to Jean as “Thelma” in The Time of the Assassins. Miller frequently told the story of his Capricorn notes on June, often altering the details of their inception. In a 1964 interview with Bernard Wolfe (1994h: 91), for example, Miller claims that he wrote thirty-five pages of notes, while in 1970 he tells Julie Burns that he composed twenty-five or thirty pages (1994b: 145). To Digby Diehl, Miller relates that he wrote—forty pages—from the afternoon until five in the morning and then slept for a few hours before work (1994i: 177), but in Nexus, he claims that he finished “long after midnight,” and had time to nap and eat breakfast before work (1959: 165). Miller’s notes, and his stories about them, illustrate his readiness to abandon a strict adherence to facts and delve deeper into the personal significance of those facts. The notes function as landmarks or catalysts rather than as textual boundaries. Miller also employs this technique in The Rosy Crucifixion. While Miller separates the three autobiographical romances into various chapters, his prose undercuts such arbitrary demarcation by flooding many chapters with a variety of styles and anecdotes. Widmer accurately aligns Miller’s Mara and Mona (and, by extension, Hildred) with the shadowy figure who “is partly the femme fatale of the romantic, an inverted traditional muse of the artist, the Eve-Lilith of primordial knowledge, [and] a witch-goddess of sexuality and power” (1990: 43). Widmer correctly asserts that Miller transforms June into an overarching feminine metaphor, one that Lacanian critics might label the “other.” Miller’s various June figures embody the mysteries of both pain and pleasure and function as a catalyst for the supraself’s quest. Although Ferguson argues that Miller’s first June figure “is a more normal, believable character … than the dramatic, shadowy symbol she later became,” Hildred displays most of the properties of Mara/ Mona, including her propensity to fabricate, her habit of disappearing inexplicably, her sexual power, her golddigging, and her complete hold over the supraself’s imagination (1991: 184).

162 Notes June’s “reaction” to Crazy Cock exemplifies her enigmatic character. Dearborn asserts that June praised the novel and “viewed it as a celebration of herself” (1991a: 118), but Ferguson claims that the woman “took exception” to Miller’s depiction of her in Crazy Cock (1991: 166). In all likelihood, June probably expressed both views, despite their mutually exclusive appearance. 21 Tony tries to kill himself by taking pills and opening up the windows in the middle of winter. Another, more ambiguous attempt to pull “the Dutch act” occurs during a nightmare (160). Tony dreams that someone shoots him, but when he wakes up Hildred and Vanya act as though Bring tried to kill himself but “didn’t have the guts” (160). This scene illustrates the surrealism that surfaces in Miller’s later works and displays a spiral-like technique by which he breaks down narrative boundaries. The merging of dream and consciousness reflects the deeper truth that, even if Tony did not actually try to hurt himself, he desired to. Miller reconfigures this event in several places, including Nexus (1959: 42–3) and Henry Miller in Conversation (1972: 24). 20

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Miller sums up the revitalizing effect of Paris on his writing in The Nightmare Notebook, where he claims that “only when I lost touch with America did I find myself—which is to say, God” (1975: n. pag.). See Kent Ekberg’s “Studio 28: The Influence of the Surrealist Cinema on The Early Fiction of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller” for a cursory treatment of the cinema’s effect on Miller. Although he correctly observes that much of Miller’s work “is infused with the spontaneity of associational improvisations,” Ekberg by no means exhausts the topic (1981: 10). In contrast to Ekberg, Jean Méral discounts the influence of surrealism on Miller, arguing that “Miller’s writing reveals only the less important features of surrealism, and when analyzed, proves to contain much that is gratuitous or irrelevant” (1989: 203). Méral, of course, fails to consider that, as an adherent to the idiosyncratic polystylism of spiral form, Miller never fully aligned himself with any specific aesthetic movement (such as surrealism), although he drew freely from many artistic trends. Caroline Blinder, Paul Jahshan, and Gay Louise Balliet all devote books to Miller’s connections to surrealism. All three argue that Miller drastically modifies “pure” surrealism. Balliet, for example, claims that Miller rejects the political dimensions of surrealism yet “‘expand[s]’ realistic images into the imaginative world of the surreal by joining them with the incongruous images that ranged from the primordial to images of disease and fragmentations and infestation of the human body” (43, 141). See Suzanne W. Jones’ “The Miller-Matisse Connection: A Matter of Aesthetics” for an analysis of Matisse’s influence on Miller. While Jones misinterprets Tropic of Cancer as “bleak,” her insights about Miller’s appropriation of Matisse’s use of color and analogy of shape prove illuminating (1987: 415). Miller reveals his true preference for oral story-telling in “Anderson the Storyteller”: “A story, to achieve its full effect, must be told; there must be gestures, pauses, false starts, confusion, raveling and unraveling, entanglement and disentanglement. … To preserve it between cloth covers and study it as if it were a dead insect … is lost motion and kills creation” (1962b: 176). With spiral form, he attempts to counteract such an entomological approach to literature by employing the textual equivalents of the gesticulations and slippery rhetoric inherent to the oral tale. Miller also retains an oral quality to his autobiographical romances because of his propensity to repeat anecdotes and images. In Tropic of Cancer, Miller provides sporadic chronological markers that make it difficult to pin down the exact passage of time. At the narrative’s outset, the supraself announces that “it is now the fall of my second year in Paris” (1934: 1), while in the concluding section it remarks that “it was spring” (291). Between these two intervals, the supraself refers to Easter (spring), the Fourth of July (summer), the close of summer (fall), and

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Christmas (winter). Based on this evidence, Miller concerns himself with about eighteen months of chronological time in Cancer. Psychologically, of course, he traverses a much wider span. In several of the book’s 60+ obscenity trials, many of the opposing attorneys and hostile witnesses seized on Tropic of Cancer’s lack of plot as “proof” of the text’s status as pornography. Most viewed Miller’s radical dissolution of plot and spiral form as an excuse to move from sexual episode to sexual episode rather than as a means of exploring the self. In Chicago, for example, a lawyer grilled Richard Ellmann over the autobiographical romance’s plotlessness (Norris 1962: 52), while a witness in California lamented that “there is no continuity in [the] story” (Bess 1962: 22). In addition to Norris and Bess, see Edward de Grazia, Elmer Gertz, E.R. Hutchison, Charles Rembar, and Eleanor Widmer, among others, for more information on Tropic of Cancer’s censorship travails. Miller stressed the self-reflexivity of Tropic of Cancer in an interview with Lionel Olay: “[Cancer] was the story of how I’m writing that book, you see … it’s a book about how I’m writing a book” (1994g: 67; Miller’s ellipsis). Miller continued his use of such techniques throughout his career. Donald Pizer offers one of the best interpretations of Van Norden in his American Expatriate Writing and the Paris Moment: Modernism and Place. Pizer characterizes Van Norden as “an expatriate anti-Christ” whose life “runs counter to the potential of Paris to nourish and fulfill the artist” (1996: 134). Miller’s supraself, of course, succeeds in taking advantage of this potential. Miller contrasts Van Norden’s failure to discover anything in “cunt” with his own view in a letter to Emil of 1 January 1933: “I will insert some final pages in Tropic of Cancer before it goes to press. A truly Joycean picture of the cunt, equals sign, putting back into the equation all that Wambly Bald missed when he put his flashlight on it and found it wanting” (1989: 114). Ibargüen claims that “Moldorf is a caricature of … Joyce” (1989: 154), but since Miller and Joyce ran in different circles and the Irish writer appears elsewhere in the book as “the great blind Milton of our times” this seems unlikely (260). Miller also mentions Moldorf’s Jewishness. Miller, who places Friedrich Nietzsche’s “works in general” on his list of primary influences, no doubt fully absorbed the theory of the Übermensch (1952a: 316). While the supraself’s philosophy of acceptance certainly has some striking parallels with Nietzsche’s superman, Miller clearly feels that anyone may achieve such a rebirth. Nietzsche limits the phenomenon to rare instances. Once again, Miller shows his debt to Joyce, whose Ulysses explores the power of the omphalos. Miller moved to the “street of early sorrows” at age eight (Martin 1978: 12). Another distortion, a reference to his “brother,” masks the biographical fact that Miller had only one sibling, a sister named Lauretta. For a discussion of Miller’s connection to anarchism, see Eric Laursen’s “Nirvana Needed: The Anarchist Politics of Henry Miller.” Laursen observes that “the politics of social revolt—and particularly of anarchism—are integral to Miller” (2005: 100). Miller later published “Into the Night Life …” as a stand-alone publication. The lavish book fused Miller’s text with nightmarish silkscreens by Bezalel Schatz. Miller frequently demonstrates the traditional clergy’s insensitivity to suffering and seeks solace elsewhere. In “Gliding into the Everglades,” for instance, Miller describes the failure of the supraself and his friends to move a Catholic priest with their plight. Beside himself, the supraself declares, “Why we didn’t choke this scrofulous rat I don’t know. Certainly I was in a towering rage” (1977a: 35). Miller later rechristens this project The Rosy Crucifixion. Miller tells Georges Belmont that he “wanted to talk about [his] sufferings during those seven years” with June, but highlights his design of spiral form with his claim that such a temporal limit “doesn’t prevent everything being closely concentrated into those seven years … enclosed

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within them” (1972: 10). His relationship with June thus functions as a memorial catalyst that will lead him to recover his past. Miller refers to Tropic of Capricorn as the “cornerstone” of this project in The Books in My Life (1952a: 46). Micky Riggs astutely links Bergson to Miller’s attack on imposed order when he claims that Miller opposes the hollow, geometrical order of the city to the vital, intuitive order of the self. Riggs further argues that the narrator’s recognition of this opposition yields one of the “major symbolic progressions” of the book (1978: 10). Like so many moments in Black Spring and Tropic of Cancer, this description of Miller’s watercolor (and literary) aesthetic finds its prototype in a letter to Emil. Miller provides Schnellock with this sketch in a letter of 20 May 1933 (1989). In Hamlet, Miller comments that the “artist lives and dies in each work. His works are a succession of births and deaths, a spiritual progression, a quickening that mocks the slow, torpid life-death or death-life of the mass about” (Fraenkel and Miller, 1962: 81). Besides offering another implicit definition of spiral form, Miller’s assertions help explain his willingness to “digress” about the supraself’s artistic struggle. Miller modeled this unpublished manuscript on Theodore Dreiser’s Twelve Men, a book of character sketches. Interestingly, while some of Dreiser’s characters possess a trait that alienates them from society in general, others achieve an astounding success, a phenomenon quite different from Miller’s portrait of universal suffering. Only one of Miller’s sketches survives, “Black and White,” a study of the messenger Charles Candles. The piece was published by W.E.B. DuBois in his journal Crisis in May 1924. Miller signed the sketch with a pseudonym—Valentin Nieting, his grandfather’s name—suggesting his dissatisfaction with his work. Departing from his treatment of Kronski’s (Prigozi’s) wife’s death in Moloch, Miller relates that the supraself learned of the death the next day rather than a few hours later. He also alters Maude’s reaction from one of skepticism to one of trite sympathy. Moreover, rather than eating with Kronski as Moloch does with Prigozi, the supraself takes his friend on a walk. While Miller alters the “facts,” he recaptures an atmosphere of hysteria and friendship in both versions. Peter Brooks remarks that narratives with an abundance of textual energy “are always on the verge of permanent discharge, of short circuit” (1984: 109). Tropic of Capricorn certainly evinces such a tenuous avoidance of breakdown due to its staccato pace and use of paralipsis.

4 Californian tranquility Before settling in Big Sur, California, Miller took two extended trips. After fleeing the specter of war in France, Miller visited Lawrence Durrell in Corfu and toured Greece. He then criss-crossed America on the journey he would describe in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare and Remember to Remember. Miller moved to Pacific Palisades, California in 1961, where he resided until his death in June 1980. 2 Miller originally titled this undertaking Capricorn. Miller explained the original project to Lawrence Clark Powell and Robert Snyder in the following way: “I remember Tropic of Capricorn, it began with the Ovarian Trolley. And I intended to write two or three volumes under the title Capricorn. And then I forgot. There was an interruption and I forgot what I was going to do” (1974: 82). 3 Maxwell Geismar provides a notable exception to the critical hegemony with his assertion that “The Rosy Crucifixion, repeating large parts of the earlier books, is a far better work of art” (1966: 20). While Geismar’s comments stem in large part from his proletarianoriented political agenda, they also express an intuitive grasp of Miller’s spiral form and its method of constantly refining and redefining recurrent personal tropes. 4 Mara changes her name to Mona in the middle of Sexus. This rechristening both provides a tangible emblem of her enigmatic nature and allows Miller to reconcile the “Mona” of Tropic of Cancer with the “Mara” of Tropic of Capricorn. I will refer to “Mara” 1

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or “Mona” when referring to a specific event in the text and to “Mara/Mona” when generalizing. A “disappointed” Durrell wrote to Miller part of the way through his initial reading of Sexus that Miller left in too much “twaddle” and, upon finishing the book, sent him a telegram advising him to withdraw and revise the text (Durrell and Miller 1988: 232, 233). Despite the objections of many formalist critics, most naturalist novels—for example, those of Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser—adhere to a fairly rigid “story” (to employ Genette’s term). Although these texts often use copious detail, they generally do not deviate from their plots apart from an occasional flashback or synchronous scene. Miller’s autobiographical romances, conversely, abandon their ostensible plots with regularity. Miller’s texts, with their emphasis on subjective truth, thus employ much more plastic stories than their naturalistic counterparts. Everman earlier argues correctly that Miller’s “anti-aesthetic rejects the well-crafted novel of coherent characters and a logical cause-and-effect plot in favor of free association, digression, and contradiction” (1992: 332). Once again, Miller dispenses with photographic realism in favor of a more psychologically accurate subjective truth. The temporality of this truth lies not in a succession of actions building upon one another, but in the symbiotic relationship between the past, present, and future that contribute to the universe within each second. Miller, therefore, seeks to establish a textual realm that reflects this interdependence, and his use of “free association, digression, and contradiction” functions to provide his texts with a temporal elasticity. Alan Trachtenberg accurately characterizes Miller’s resistance to objectivity as a historiography wherein “the personal past becomes a virtual alternative to world history” (1992: 246). As readers of The Colossus of Maroussi and other of the “nonfictional” narratives quickly realize, Miller generally treats external events such as World War II only insofar as they resonate on a subjective, emotional level. This change of “attitude” constitutes the supraself’s metaphoric death and rebirth. Mara/Mona makes the supraself realize that he will never write if he does not abandon the bourgeois ethic that compels him to work for others. By supporting the supraself, Mara/Mona allows him to pursue his craft full time. Plexus, as Brown reminds his readers, explores this economic liberation much more fully than does Sexus, although in the latter narrative Miller clearly posits the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company’s inverted Algerism and Maude’s financial tyranny as central to the supraself’s personal and artistic malaise (1986: 80). One of Miller’s characters, Dolores, undercuts Miller’s minute-by-minute rhetoric when she tells the supraself, “it must be over a year since I saw you last” (411). The offhand remark—which Bal would characterize as a “psuedo-ellipsis” (1985: 72)— underscores Miller’s use of spiral form because it reminds readers that Miller selects only those experiences that resonate for the supraself and neglects many “facts” that occurred in the preceding year. Indeed, Miller’s hurried pace through much of the narrative suggests that the framing anecdote takes place over a few months rather than years. Once again, Goodwin’s observation that Miller employs an “undefined referentiality” accounts for the narrative’s often vague sense of time (1992: 305–6). Bal writes of achrony that “the linearity of the fabula and the linearity of its presentation to the reader no longer have any correspondence at all” (1985: 68). For Bal, achrony represents a unit of narrative time that “cannot be analysed any further” (66). Achrony, therefore, seems quite closely related to Goodwin’s notion of inflectional form. Both concepts account for Miller’s occasional “digressions” into the ostensibly timeless realms of thought, dream, and fantasy because they emphasize spatial, rather than chronological, narrative elements. Many critics argue that such passages rank among Miller’s best, and claim that they function to carry the prose beyond the dictates of language and into the realm of pure emotion. In an earlier scene, the supraself confronts Mona about an elderly man with whom the supraself saw her. Mona calls the fragile man her father, although—given Mara/

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Mona’s history of prevarication and her propensity for “vamping” older men—the supraself cannot fully believe her. The subsequent, and dramatically rapid, demise of “Father” lends credence to the supraself’s suspicions. Bal’s “fabula” essentially differs from Genette’s “story” in terminology rather than substance, and one may thus consider it a virtual synonym. Both refer to the real or fictitious event that the narrative (“story” in Bal’s terminology) reorders. Indeed, Paul R. Jackson views this dream as central to the volume, opining that “its sheer vitality does much to redeem an otherwise often tedious book” (1969: 40). These clusters lead many to assume that the supraself has sex at every turn. Actually, since the supraself’s sexual memory covers about two decades at this point (the 1920s), Miller often compresses several years’ worth of encounters into the span of a few pages—as he told Georges Belmont, “it’s concentrated stuff” (1972: 82). Because they falsely assume that Sexus unfolds chronologically, many critics overlook the fact that the supraself recalls many of his sexual partners when aroused or when in a postcoital moment of reflection. Furthermore, since the “principal” narrative of Sexus takes place over the course of approximately two years, hasty readers might also erroneously assume that the supraself’s exploits defy physical limits. Actually—with one major exception—the supraself rarely attains orgasm more than twice in a day, hardly an impossible—or even noteworthy—achievement. For corroboration of Brown’s statement, see Charles Glicksberg’s comments on Miller in The Sexual Revolution in Modern American Literature. Like Brown, Glicksberg views Miller’s sexual passages as contributing to the supraself’s liberation, and argues that Miller “seeks to focus on the most repulsive aspects of existence in order to recognize them as intrinsically beautiful” (1971: 129). Interestingly, Gordon reads Miller’s sexual scenes even more figuratively than Brown and Glicksberg, remarking that “a number of arguments may be brought against any literal acceptance of Miller’s sexual episodes, the strongest being that he is always embroidering and expanding everything he writes” (1967: 23). Lewis thus attempts to rationalize the rather odd hermeneutic maneuver of explicating only the first and third volumes of the trilogy. Despite containing six fewer chapters than Sexus, Plexus exceeds its companion volume in length by over 130 pages. This fact illustrates Miller’s propensity to cover a broad range of material—and time—within the same textual unit. Miller’s textual units, therefore, correspond less to the narrative events of a plot than an overall psychological portrait of the supraself. Brown remarks that Miller’s loose structure in the trilogy “is often a surprisingly effective solution to a central problem of autobiographical narration, namely the presentation of actual events without resorting to obvious or obtrusive literary devices” (1986: 84). With this observation, Brown underscores a key component of spiral form: its ability to progress toward a goal without the need for an abundance of rhetorical scaffolding. For a good commentary on Miller’s Mezzotints, see Roger Jackson’s introduction to The Mezzotints. Jackson writes that the Mezzotints’ dimensions of six by nine inches “would limit the length of each essay to about 350 words” and reminds readers that Miller and June peddled them for only a few months (1993: 6). Martin, Dearborn, and Ferguson also extensively discuss the Mezzotints, as do DeSalvo and Tytell. Throughout the trilogy, the supraself meets a series of individuals who, like Claude, convince him that he will become an important artist if he will only shoulder the blame for his problems and write like he talks. Other such semi-mystical, doppelgänger-like figures include Sylvia of Sexus and John Stymer of Nexus. A quasi-cultural social club, the Xerxes Society figured prominently in Miller’s late adolescence and early twenties. According to Miller, the club served to bring his differences into the open and forced him to recognize his artistic potential. Besides the supraself and George Marshall, MacGregor—another important character in the trilogy—also belonged to the society.

Notes 167 24

25

26 27

28

29

30

31

32

Miller later refers to John Brown—along with Joan of Arc, Mary Baker Eddy, and Marie Corelli—as a “fanatic about life everlasting” (1977b: 66–7). Miller places such individuals in high regard, likening them to artists of the soul. Miller originally planned to write a second volume to Nexus that would trace the supraself’s life from his first trip to Paris (“volume one,” of course concludes with the supraself about to embark on this journey) to his final breakup with Mara/Mona. While Miller never published Nexus II, he frequently reported working on it in interviews and letters, and fragments appear in El Corno Emplumado 9 (1964: 7–27). In The Henry Miller Archive, Roger Jackson and William Ashley report that Miller wrote approximately 112 pages of Nexus II (1994: 29), while Miller tells William Gordon that he actually wrote 150 pages (Gordon and Miller 1968: 38) and Playboy that he has “nearly completed” the volume (1994h: 91). Elmer Gertz, an attorney who both defended and befriended Miller, tells his friend in a letter of 16 January 1963 that Miller seems “to have a sort of inhibition about completing that work, almost as if you believed that it marked the end to a part of your life that you want to hold on to” (Miller and Gertz 1978: 155), a comment that echoes Miller’s remarks in an interview with Wickes that “part of my delay in finishing it is that I don’t want to bring the work to an end” (1994d: 63). The unfinished draft of Nexus II appeared in French in 2004, and its contents represent little more than an attempt to establish the sequel’s main narrative line. Only the adolescent supraself’s unspoken love for Una could potentially match the anguish the supraself felt over Mona’s liaison with Stasia. One may legitimately question whether Mona betrays the supraself. Although she holds clandestine meetings with wealthy men and appears at times to prefer Stasia to the supraself, Mona claims that she does everything for the supraself. Indeed, one easily recognizes in the supraself the same blind jealousy that destroys Othello, and many of the supraself’s agonizing suspicions probably exceeded Mona’s actions in their depravity. The Stymer anecdote—in which the supraself remembers one of his father’s eccentric customers who recognized the supraself as a potential writer—marks a rare occurrence in any of Miller’s works, for it encompasses an entire chapter. In most of his tales, Miller “digresses” to such a degree that it becomes difficult to distinguish between primary and secondary narrative material. For another chapter-long anecdote, see chapter two of Moloch. Miller offers a contradictory version of his own rebirth in a letter of 10 May 1942 to Claude Houghton, referring to the “picture of chaos and confusion which the exterior world presents to one during the moment of rebirth” (Miller, Houghton and Abramson 1995: 46). This sense of disconnection contrasts dramatically with the feelings of unity and acceptance that the supraself feels in Nexus. Nalbantian writes of intertextuality in autobiographical fiction that “the perspective which the actual artist figures project seems to reflect the aesthetic orientation of the works themselves” (1994: 56). While the supraself experiences his rebirth in Nexus, he nevertheless fails immediately to transform its altered perspective into satisfying art. In Nexus II, Miller presumably would have carried the supraself’s story up to the point just preceding the events related in Tropic of Cancer, wherein the supraself’s artistic philosophy—spiral form—emerges. The French version follows the supraself on his travels through Europe with Mona but by no means exhausts the Capricorn notes (Miller 2004). Anisomorphism refers to a narrative temporality that differs in shape from “actual” time in that it lacks the open-ended quality of “real” experience. While virtually all narratives must conform to anisomorphism, Miller attempts in spiral form to create the textual illusion of isomorphism by constantly rewriting the same material and leaving his narrative options open.

168 Notes 5 Conclusion 1

2

3

4 5 6

7

8

9

10

11

12 13

Interestingly, Miller’s reputation in countries other than his native land by far exceeds his posthumous critical reception in America. In Europe (with the exception of the UK), Asia (especially Japan), and South America, Miller enjoys a vigorous critical debate. Most importantly, foreign commentators tend to discuss Miller’s work in a much broader manner than those in America, who invariably emphasize the sexual element in the autobiographical romances. Practically all of Miller’s principal titles remain in print, and—in posthumous testament to his prolific output and broad popular base—new collections of ephemera and letters continue to appear with astonishing regularity. See, especially, “Obscenity and the Law of Reflection” in Remember to Remember, where Miller claims that the purpose of sexual scenes “is to awaken, to usher in a new sense of reality” (1947a: 287) and The World of Sex (1941g). The major anthologies of American literature—published by Norton, Heath, and Harper— fail to include any of Miller’s works. Wagner-Martin includes Miller’s Tropic of Cancer in a chronology, however. Ibargüen examines Miller’s marginalized status at some length in his “Céline, Miller, and the American Canon.” He argues that Miller’s “institutional defeat” (1994: 490) stems not merely from charges of misogyny but from an “antithetical aesthetic proximity to [his] contemporaries” (499). Donald Pizer and Jean Méral also include Miller in their excellent studies of American expatriate writers, and William Solomon includes a perceptive and original examination of Miller’s debt to the burlesque in his recent Literature, Amusement, and Technology in the Great Depression. Such reductivism echoes much of the general public’s naïve views on Miller’s literature. A t-shirt company, for example, depicts Miller as a flasher, while episodes of Seinfeld and Saturday Night Live exploit the sexual aspects of Tropic of Cancer. While acceptable for the purposes of entertainment and marketing, this type of distorted perspective contradicts the goals of erudite criticism. At least one publisher, Roger Jackson, devotes the majority of his time to Miller, a phenomenon that bespeaks of the tremendous demand for new work by and about Henry Miller. Jackson also served as the driving force behind the massive, wellexecuted two-volume bibliography of Miller’s primary texts. While Miller’s readers recognize the significance of autobiographical romances such as Tropic of Capricorn, many scholars persist in their facile belief that Miller did not affect American literature in any meaningful fashion. See Robert Brophy’s “Henry Miller Meets Robinson Jeffers” and Elayne Wareing Fitzpatrick’s “The Raconteur and the Poet: Henry Miller and Jeffers” for more information on the Jeffers/Miller connection. The American publisher of The Books in My Life, New Directions, did not publish Miller’s appendix, which contains all of the books that he can remember reading up to 1952. The list no doubt omits some of Miller’s early reading but provides a fascinating glimpse into Miller’s intellectual life. Obviously, these trends started prior to the war. Apart from Barnes, even these experimentalists retained more than a vestigial interest in plot.

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—— (1941b) “Creative death,” in The Wisdom of the Heart, Norfolk, CT: New Directions. 1– 12. —— (1941c) “Into the future,” in The Wisdom of the Heart, Norfolk, CT: New Directions. 159–72. —— (1941d) “Raimu,” in The Wisdom of the Heart, Norfolk, CT: New Directions. 47–62. —— (1941e) “Reflections on writing,” in The Wisdom of the Heart, Norfolk, CT: New Directions. 19–30. —— (1941f) “Tribute to Blaise Cendrars,” in The Wisdom of the Heart, Norfolk, CT: New Directions. 151–8. —— (1941g) The World of Sex, New York: J.H.N. [Ben Abramson]. —— (1944a) “More about Anaïs Nin,” in Sunday after the War, Norfolk, CT: New Directions. 276–97. —— (1944b) “Reunion in Brooklyn,” in Sunday after the War, Norfolk, CT: New Directions. 63–106. —— (1945) “Preface,” The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, by H. Miller, New York: New Directions. 9–25. —— (1947a) “Obscenity and the law of reflection,” in Remember to Remember, New York: New Directions. 274–91. —— (1947b) “Remember to remember,” in Remember to Remember, New York: New Directions. 292–377. —— (1949; 1965) Sexus, New York: Grove. —— (1952a) The Books in My Life, New York: New Directions. —— (1952b; 1965) Plexus, New York: Grove. —— (1956) The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud, Norfolk, CT: New Directions. —— (1957) Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, New York: New Directions. —— (1958) The Red Notebook, Highlands, NC: Jonathan Williams. —— (1959; 1965) Nexus, New York: Grove. —— (1962a) “Anderson the storyteller,” in Stand Still Like the Hummingbird, Norfolk, CT: New Directions. 174–80. —— (1962b) “The immorality of morality,” in Stand Still like the Hummingbird, Norfolk, CT: New Directions. 86–92. —— (1962c) “My life as an echo,” in Stand Still Like the Hummingbird, Norfolk, CT: New Directions. 79–85. —— (1962d) “Preface,” Stand Still Like the Hummingbird, by H. Miller, Norfolk, CT: New Directions. vii–x. —— (1962e) “Stand still like the hummingbird,” in Stand Still like the Hummingbird, Norfolk, CT: New Directions. 184–94. —— (1962f) “To read or not to read,” in Stand Still like the Hummingbird, Norfolk, CT: New Directions. 157–60. —— (1971) My Life and Times, New York: Playboy. —— (1972) Henry Miller in Conversation, with Georges Belmont, trans. A. Macnabb and H. Scott, Chicago: Quadrangle. —— (1974) This Is Henry, Henry Miller from Brooklyn, Los Angeles: Nash. —— (1975) The Nightmare Notebook, New York: New Directions. —— (1977a) “Gliding into the Everglades,” in Gliding into the Everglades, Lake Oswego, OR: Lost Pleiade. 11–45. —— (1977b) “Marie Corelli,” in Gliding into the Everglades, Lake Oswego, OR: Lost Pleiade. 65–9. —— (1978) Quiet Days in Clichy and The World of Sex, New York: Grove.

174 Bibliography —— (1980) The World of Lawrence: A Passionate Appreciation. Santa Barbara, CA: Capra. —— (1981) Reflections, ed. Twinka Thiebaud, Santa Barbara, CA: Capra. —— (1989) Letters to Emil, ed. G. Wickes, New York: New Directions. —— (1991) Crazy Cock, New York: Grove-Weidenfeld. —— (1992) Moloch; or, This Gentile World, New York: Grove. —— (1994a) “Henry Miller at 84,” with R. Jones, in F.L. Kersnowski and A. Hughes (eds) Conversations with Henry Miller, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 207–23. —— (1994b) “Henry Miller: I wonder who the hell I’m writing for,” with J. Burns, in F.L. Kersnowski and A. Hughes (eds) Conversations with Henry Miller, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 141–55. —— (1994c) “Henry Miller now,” with K. Turan, in F.L. Kersnowski and A. Hughes (eds) Conversations with Henry Miller, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 224–31. —— (1994d) “Henry Miller: the art of fiction XXVII,” with George Wickes, in F.L. Kersnowski and A. Hughes (eds) Conversations with Henry Miller, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 44–65. —— (1994e) “Interview,” with R. Girson, in F.L. Kersnowski and A. Hughes (eds) Conversations with Henry Miller, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 5–6. —— (1994f) “An interview with Henry Miller,” with A.J. Booth, in F.L. Kersnowski and A. Hughes (eds) Conversations with Henry Miller, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 25– 43. —— (1994g) “Meeting with Henry Miller,” with Lionel Olay, in F.L. Kersnowski and A. Hughes (eds) Conversations with Henry Miller, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 66– 78. —— (1994h) “Playboy Interview: Henry Miller,” with B. Wolfe, in F.L. Kersnowski and A. Hughes (eds) Conversations with Henry Miller, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 79–98. —— (1994i) “Q & A: Henry Miller,” with D. Diehl, in F.L. Kersnowski and A. Hughes (eds) Conversations with Henry Miller, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 168–80. —— (1994j) “Reflections of a Cosmic Tourist,” with Jonathan Cott, in F.L. Kersnowski and A. Hughes (eds) Conversations with Henry Miller, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 181–202. —— (1994k) “Sex goes public: a talk with Henry Miller,” with David Dury in F.L. Kersnowski and A. Hughes (eds) Conversations with Henry Miller, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 105–16. —— (2004) Nexus 2: Vacances à l’étranger, trans. Christian Séruzier, Paris: Autrement. —— and E. Gertz (1978) Henry Miller: Years of Trial and Triumph, 1962–1964, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. —— and James Laughlin (1996) Henry Miller and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, ed. George Wickes, New York: Norton. ——, C. Houghton and B. Abramson (1995) Writers Three: A Literary Exchange, ed. R. Jackson, Ann Arbor, MI: Roger Jackson. Miller, J.H. (1998) Reading Narrative, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Millett, K. (1970) Sexual Politics. New York: Doubleday. Moore, N. (1943) Henry Miller, Wigginton, Herts, England: Opus. Morson, G.S. (1994) Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Munsil, M.K. (1992) “The body in the prison-house of language: Henry Miller, pornography, and feminism,” in R. Gottesman (ed.) Critical Essays on Henry Miller, New York: G.K. Hall. 285–96.

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176 Bibliography Shifreen, L.J. (1981) “Faction in the Villa Seurat,” Deus Loci: The Lawrence Durrell Newsletter, 5.2: 1–19. Smithline, A. (1966) “Henry Miller and the Transcendental spirit,” Emerson Society Quarterly, 43.1: 50–6. Solomon, W. (2002) Literature, Amusement, and Technology in the Great Depression, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spengler, O. (1934) The Decline of the West, 2 vols, trans. C.F. Atkinson, London: George Allen & Unwin. Steiner, W. (1988) “The diversity of American fiction,” in E. Elliott (ed.) Columbia Literary History of the United States, New York: Columbia University Press. 845–72. Stuhlmann, G. (1987) “Introduction,” A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, 1932–1953, by A. Nin and H. Miller, ed. G. Stuhlmann, New York: Harvest/HBJ. v–xxi. Sturrock, J. (1993) The Language of Autobiography: Studies in the First Person Singular, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sukenick, R. (1981) “The new tradition in fiction,” in R. Federman (ed.) Surfiction: Fiction Now and Tomorrow, Chicago: Swallow. 35–45. Tilley, A. (1992) Plot Snakes and the Dynamics of Narrative Experience, Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Todorov, T. (1990) Genres in Discourse, trans. C. Porter, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trachtenberg, A. (1992) “‘History on the side’: Henry Miller’s American dream,” in R. Gottesman (ed.) Critical Essays on Henry Miller, New York: G.K. Hall. 241–50. Tytell, J. (1991) Passionate Lives, New York: St. Martin’s. Vidal, G. (1969) “The Sexus of Henry Miller,” Reflections upon a Sinking Ship, Boston: Little Brown. 111–17. Wagner-Martin, L. (1990) The Modern American Novel, 1914–1945, Boston: Twayne. Wald, P. (1995) Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wickes, G. (1966) Henry Miller, University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers 56, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Widmer, E., ed. (1970) Freedom and Culture: Literary Censorship in the 70s, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Widmer, K. (1987) “Twisting American comedy,” Arizona Quarterly, 43: 218–30. —— (1990) Henry Miller, rev. ed., Boston: Twayne. Williams, J. (1992) “Henry Miller: the success of failure,” in R. Gottesman (ed.) Critical Essays on Henry Miller, New York: G.K. Hall. 251–64. Winslow, K. (1986) Henry Miller: Full of Life, New York: St. Martin’s. Womack, K. (2004) “Spiral form and Henry Miller’s altered ethics,” Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal, 1.1: 163–74. Wood, T. (1976) “Hooray for Henry Miller, the dirty old man,” Lost Generation Journal 4.4: 14–17; 24–5. —— (1980) “Bald trapped in Miller’s fiction,” Lost Generation Journal, 6.2: 8–9. Woolf, M. (1989) “Beyond ideology: Kate Millett and the case for Henry Miller,” in G. Day and C. Bloom (eds) Perspectives on Pornography and Literature: Sexuality in Film and Literature, London: Macmillan. 113–28. Yakovlev, L. (1961) “Literature of decay,” in E. White (ed.) Henry Miller: Between Heaven and Hell, Big Sur, CA: Emil White. 27–38. Young, K. (1987) “Henry Miller,” in D.L. Kirkpatrick (ed.) Reference Guide to American Literature, Chicago: St. James. 392–4.

Index

Abramson, B. 160n11 Acker, K. 155 Addams, J. 153 Agrippa, H.C. 114 The Air-Conditioned Nightmare 159n27, 164n1 Alger, H. 3, 153, 158n17, 165n9 Aller Retour New York 7, 159n27, 160n5, 161n13 American Dream 3, 153 anarchism 163n14 “Anderson the Storyteller” 162n4 anecdotal style 1, 7, 11, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18–19, 27, 30, 32, 34, 41, 48, 61, 65, 92, 106, 125–6, 138 Andrews, M. see Kronski, J. “The Angel is My Watermark!” 81–2, 91 Ângelo, I. 148 anti-Semitism 161n13 Ashley, W. 167n25 autobiography 1, 5–6, 35, 37, 54, 61, 102, 148 Bagnole, J.W. 156n4 Baker, N. 155 Bakhtin, M.M. 65–6, 107, 135, 150 Bal, M. 112, 119, 165n10–11, 166n14 Bald, W. 68 Balliet, G.L. 3, 162n2 Barnes, D. 150, 154, 168n13 Barthes, R. 8, 28, 29, 136 Beat movement 155 Belloc, H. 114, 115 Belmont, G. 31, 36, 163n17, 166n16 Bergson, H. 22, 23, 25, 94, 100, 164n18 Berthoff, W. 70 Bess, D. 163n6 Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch 118 “Black and White” 164n21

Black Spring 15, 20, 56, 60, 61, 62, 71, 76–89, 97, 121, 164n19; original title of 76 Blinder, C. 3, 98, 150, 162n2 Bloom, H. 145 The Books in My Life 4, 41, 80, 114, 145, 153, 164n17, 168n11 bourgeois complacency/ethic 120, 123, 125, 143, 160n12, 165n9 Bourne, R. 2 Boyle, K. 151 Boyle, T.C. 155 Brackenridge, H.H. 152 Bradbury, M. 149 Bradford, W. 151, 152 Bradstreet, A. 151 Breton, A. 51, 84, 153 Brooks, P. 164n23 Brophy, R. 168n10 Brown, J.D. 11, 45, 59, 62, 64, 138, 142, 150, 152, 157n9, 158n23, 165n9, 166n17, 166n20 Brown, J. 135, 167n24 Brown-Sequard, C.E. 42 Buñuel, L. 51, 59 Burns, J. 161n17 “Burlesk” 87–8 Burroughs, W. 9 Bursey, J. 76, 84 Byrd, W. 152 Calabrese, O. 140 Calvino, I. 116 Candles, C. 34 capitalism 3, 4, 17, 35, 39, 42, 45, 62, 72, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 113, 114, 160n7, 160n12 Carroll, L. 84 Céline, L. 59, 84 Cendrars, B. 2, 59, 60, 125, 151

178 Index Chagall, M. 59 Chamberlain, D.F. 138 Charney, M. 66, 150 Chatman, S. 158n14 “China” 5, 24, 36, 86 “Clipped Wings” 29, 34, 93, 103, 140, 153 Coleridge, S.T. 152 Colossus of Maroussi 159n28, 165n8 Commengé, B. 86 Conason, E. 161n14 Cooper, J.F. 153 Corelli, M. 4, 14, 167n24 The Cosmological Eye 61 Cott, J. 104 Crazy Cock 26, 27, 28, 45, 46–58, 59, 62, 63, 65, 102, 104, 105, 106, 137, 159n2, 162n20; original title of 54 Crèvecoeur, H.S.J. 151 Crews, J. 113 Cubism 76 cultural anxiety 2 Cunliffe, M. 149 Dadaism 3, 9, 14, 45, 59, 70, 113 Dahlberg, E. 149 Dante Alighieri 91, 142 Dearborn, M.V. 28, 29, 46, 52, 54, 159n1, 160n8, 161n13, 161n15, 162n20, 166n21 Defoe, D. 80 De Grazia, E. 163n6 DeLaney, B. 4 Deleuze, G. 21 Derrida, J. 27, 47, 60, 64, 113 DeSalvo, L. 150, 166n21 Dickinson, E. 151 Diehl, D. 21, 157n13, 161n17 Donne, J. 152 Dos Passos, J. 153 Dostoevski, F. 14, 34, 78–9, 100, 114, 128, 129, 145, 151 Dreiser, T. 46, 51, 102, 108, 145, 153, 164n21, 165n6 DuBois, W.E.B. 135, 164n21 Duhamel, G. 4, 59, 151 Duncan, R. 155 Durrell, L. 3, 62, 76, 92, 102, 106, 156n1, 157n6, 157n10, 160n9, 164n1, 165n5 Dury, D. 160n9 Eddy, M.B. 167n24 Edwards, J. 151 Ekberg, K. 162n2 Eliot, T.S. 153

Ellis, B.E. 155 Ellmann, R. 163n6 Emerson, R.W. 2, 68, 80, 86, 151, 152, 153, 159n27, 160n10 Eugenides, J. 155 Everman, W.P. 108, 165n7 Faulkner, W. 153, 154 Faure, É. 22, 23, 24–5, 89, 129, 145, 159n27 Felber, L. 86 Ferguson, R. 29, 47, 54, 159n1, 161n19, 162n20, 166n21 Ferlinghetti, L. 155 Fetterley, J. 160n12 Fitzgerald, F.S. 150, 151, 154 Fitzpatrick, E.W. 168n10 Flaxman, A.M. 3, 86 Foucault, M. 147 “The Fourteenth Ward” 77–9 Fowler, A. 22 Fraenkel, M. 2, 22, 31, 46, 47, 51, 52, 59, 61, 84, 113, 156n3, 159n2 Frank, J. 9–11, 157n7 Franklin, B. 151 Fraser, G.S. 106 Freedman, R. 160n6 Freud, S. 12, 13, 56, 85 Fuller, M. 151 Gauguin, P. 44 Geismar, M. 123, 164n3 Genette, G. 7, 29, 95, 109, 165n6, 166n14 Gertz, E.R. 163n6, 167n25 Gilbert, S. 66, 150, 157n13 Ginsberg, A. 155 Glicksberg, C. 67, 158n23, 166n17 “Gliding into the Everglades” 103, 159n5, 163n16 Gogol, N. 34 Gold, M. 149 Goldman, E. 2, 84 Goodwin, J. 110, 165n10–11 Gordon, W. 7, 11, 18, 60, 61, 141, 158n16, 158n20, 158n23, 166n17, 167n25 Gottesman, R. 150 grotesque 35, 36, 42, 45, 51, 52, 68, 69, 70 Gubar, S. 66, 150, 157n13 Habermas, J. 3 Haggard, R. 14, 153 Hamlet letters 52, 121, 156n3, 157n9, 159n26, 164n20

Index Hamsun, K. 40, 41, 107, 110, 129 Harrison, J. 155 Hassan, I. 6, 17, 21, 22, 30, 31, 61, 67, 90, 103, 106, 108, 127, 158n16 Hawthorne, N. 151 Hayman, D. 65, 138 Hegel, G.W.F. 80, 152 Heidegger, M. 62 Hemingway, E. 150, 151, 154 The Henry Miller Archive 167n25 Henry Miller in Conversation 162n21 Henty, G.A. 153 Honda, Y. 105 Houghton, C. 167n29 Howe, E.G. 2 Howells, W.D. 10 Hutcheon, L. 108 Hutchinson, E.R. 163n6 Ibargüen, R. 8, 66, 67, 98, 104, 108, 111, 150, 163n10, 168n6 immigrants 3, 44 “Into the Night Life …” 76, 85–6, 163n15 Irving, W. 40, 151, 160n12 “Jabberwhorl Cronstadt” 84–5 Jackson, P.R. 84, 152, 160n10, 166n15 Jackson, R. 166n21, 167n25, 168n9 Jahshan, P. 2, 3, 77, 81, 82, 162n2 James, H. 151 Jeffers, R. 152, 168n10 Jensen, F. 63–4 Jeremiad 4, 9, 17, 54, 62, 72, 79, 82, 143, 152 Jesus Christ 2, 142 Joan of Arc 167n24 Johnson, B.S. 9 Jones, S.W. 162n3 Jong, E. 1, 21, 55, 103, 106, 155, 158n15, 158n24 Joyce, J. 22, 45, 46, 48, 63, 154, 163n10, 163n12 Jung. C. 12, 56 Kappeler, S. 150 Katsimbalis, G. 4 Kellman, S.J. 61 Kellogg, R. 136 Kennedy, J.G. 75, 150 Kern, S. 3 Kerouac, J. 9, 149, 155 Knight, S.K. 152 Kristeva, J. 84 Kronski, J. 26, 46, 159n1, 161n15–16

179

Kropotkin, P. 4 Kuhn, T. 22 Lao Tzu 2, 114, 151 Laursen, E. 103, 163n14 Lawrence, D.H. 4 Leibowitz, H. 6 Lennox, C. 152 Letters to Emil 20, 157n6 Lévi-Strauss, C. 5 Leviticus 29 Lewis, L. 8, 61, 62, 65, 79, 91, 92, 104, 123, 147, 150, 166n18 Littlejohn, D. 55 London, J. 46, 141, 153 Londos, J. 141 Lowell, A. 153 Lowenfels, W. 47, 51, 84 Ludlow massacre 3 Lyotard, J. 5 lyrical organization 10, 25, 27, 62, 97, 135, 136, 157n7 MacGregor, R. 147 Machaty, G. 59 Macherey, P. 5 Mailer, N. 3, 15, 63, 105, 149, 155, 158n15 Mann, T. 145 Martin, J. 13, 29, 45, 76, 154, 156n1, 159n1, 161n15, 166n21 Marx, K. 34 Mathieu, B. 11 Matisse, H. 59, 69, 72, 74, 162n3 Mayné, G. 105, 110 Max and the White Phagocytes 76, 156n2 “Megalopolitan Maniac” 88 Mellard, J. 22, 158n25 Melville, H. 14, 82 Méral, J. 162n2, 168n7 metafiction 8, 18, 31, 49, 53, 57, 67, 69, 88, 91, 93, 94, 101, 127, 163n7 Mezzotints 29, 126, 166n21 Miller, A. 150 Miller, B. see Wickens, B. Miller, H. acceptance of 104, 152, 160n9; aesthetic theories of 7, 27; apocalypse and 79, 84, 88, 151; boyhood and 19, 77–8, 97–8; breakthrough of 46, 58, 59–60, 62, 102, 162n1; burlesque in 19, 87, 158n19; caricature and 14–15, 19, 45, 97; catalogue rhetoric and 16, 72–3, 94, 116–17, 132–33, 140–1; chapter headings and 49, 63, 89, 104, 107, 124, 161n18; diatribe and 17, 72, 92, 119–20,

180 Index 143; dislocation of 3, 4, 20, 80; distortion and 12, 13, 163n13; dreams and 13–14, 56, 71, 120–2, 133–4; emotional essence (greater reality) and 48, 61, 91, 93, 96, 118, 139, 147; epistolary technique of 21–2, 27, 42, 61, 124, 158n21–22; fantasy and 70, 94, 113–14, 128–9, 141–2; interior monolog and 74–5, 117–18, 127, 139– 40; intertextualism and 14, 114–16, 129–30, 145–6; metaphysical reverie and 17, 73, 94, 118–19, 131, 146–7, 165n12; microessay and 54, 111, 112, 134–5, 144; orality in 18–19, 61, 162n4; passion and 69; polystylism and 64, 66, 67, 102, 111, 147; rejection of plot 8, 15, 33, 34, 38, 45, 55, 63, 98, 105, 112, 117, 137, 153; rejection of reason 5, 17, 63, 77, 137; reputation of 25, 148–51, 168n1–2, 168n4; temporal theories of 7, 8, 10–11, 16, 22, 27, 63, 65, 108–9; third-person narration and 27, 28, 30, 32, 39, 45, 49, 55, 58, 63, 64; see also various works Miller, J. 26, 29, 46, 52, 59, 102, 104, 113, 150, 159n1, 160n6, 161n15, 161n17, 161n19, 162n20, 163n17, 166n21 Miller, J.H. 1 Millett, K. 15, 16, 158n15 Minsky, B. 87 modernism 104, 148, 150, 153 modernity 2, 3, 84, 88, 89 Modern Language Association 149 Moloch; or, This Gentile World 26, 27, 28, 29–45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 52, 57, 58, 63, 91, 93, 104, 106, 140, 145, 155, 159n2, 159n5, 160n6, 160n8, 164n22, 167n28 Moore, N. 17, 70 Morson, G.S. 107, 146 Morton, T. 151 Munsil, M.K. 158n15 “My Life as an Echo” 33 Nalbantian, S. 124, 167n30 Nash, R. 2, 45 naturalism 3, 46, 51, 57, 89, 107, 137, 153, 154, 165n6; Miller’s parody of 108 Nelson, J. 15, 105 Nero 70 Nesbit, T. 151 “The New Instinctivism” 4, 77 Nexus 36, 43, 102, 105, 122, 125, 134, 136–47, 155, 160n6, 161n17, 162n21, 166n22, 167n25, 167n29, 167n31

Nexus II 167n25, 167n31 Nieting, Valentin 164n21 Nietzsche, F. 2, 4, 70, 83, 84, 151, 163n11 The Nightmare Notebook 159n27, 162n1 Nin, A. 9, 10, 26, 59, 61, 63, 71, 86, 102, 105, 159n1–2 Norris, F. 10, 108, 153, 165n6 Norris, H. 163n6 nostalgia 3, 19, 40, 76, 77, 82, 83 Novalis 114 obscenity 1, 149, 159n4, 163n6 “Obscenity and the Law of Reflection” 159n4, 168n3 O’Casey, S. 145 Olay, L. 163n7 Olney, J. 5–6, 8, 12, 25, 61, 158n16 O’Neill, E. 153 Ong, W. 19 “An Open Letter to Surrealists Everywhere” 76, 156n2 orality 18, 19, 20 Orend, K. 5, 151, 161n13 Orwell, G. 4, 63 Osborn, R. 159n2 Palmer, A. 51 Parkin, J. 16, 17, 67, 72, 95, 104, 108, 125, 150, 158n19 Pater, W. 129 Peck, G.W. 153 Perlès, A. 4, 47, 159n2, 160n5 Petronius 151 Pimentel, L.A. 90, 157n7–8 Pizer, D. 9, 163n8, 168n7 Plexus 15, 38, 76, 102, 105, 122, 123–36, 137, 158n17, 159n5, 160n10, 165n9, 166n19 Poe, E.A. 14, 155 postmodernism 150, 154 Pound, E. 151, 153 Powell, L.C. 164n2 Proust, M. 22, 46 Pullman Strike 3 Pynchon, T. 149, 155 quest 30, 31, 37, 39, 40, 45, 66, 89 Rabelais, F. 79, 151, 154, 158n19 “Raimu” 159n4 Ramakrishna 2 Rank, O. 12, 22, 56, 63, 91 Ravel, M. 71 realism 1, 28, 51, 57, 89, 138, 155, 165n7

Index The Red Notebook 159n27 “Reflections on Writing” 7 Rembar, C. 163n6 Remember to Remember 159n27, 164n1, 168n3 “Reunion in Brooklyn” 121 Richter, C. 114 Ricoeur, P. 13, 27 Riggs, M. 164n18 Rimbaud, A. 52 romanticism 3, 105, 150, 154, 158n20 Roosevelt, T. 3 Rose. E.J. 152 The Rosy Crucifixion 4, 27, 39, 41, 54, 57, 76, 85, 100, 101, 102–47, 161n18, 163n17 Roth, P. 149, 155 Saint Francis of Assisi 2 “A Saturday Afternoon” 80–1 Saturday Night Live 168n8 Schafer, R. 12 Schatz, B. 163n15 Schnellock, E. 12, 26, 47, 58, 59, 163n9, 164n19 Scholes, R. 136 Seinfeld 168n8 self-reflexivity see metafiction sex and sexuality 15, 19, 28, 39, 66, 68, 69, 83, 98–99, 122–3, 148–9, 150, 152, 154, 157n13, 159n4, 166n16–17, 168n3 sexism 2, 148, 150, 158n15 Sexus 31, 33, 35, 41, 42, 55, 102, 105, 106–23, 124, 125, 134, 135, 136, 137, 150, 157n11, 164n4, 165n5, 165n9, 166n16, 166n19, 166n22 Seward, C. 38, 39 Shifreen, L.J. 13 Sinclair, U. 153 Sirota, G. 146–7 Smith, J. 152 Smithline, A. 152 Snyder, R. 164n2 Solomon, W. 19, 76, 87, 168n7 Southern, T. 155 spatial form 9, 10 Spengler, O. 14, 22, 23–4, 25, 49, 79, 82, 84, 86, 114,130 spiral form 4, 5, 9, 11, 13, 18, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 66, 109, 118, 135, 147, 148, 150, 153–4, 155, 162n4, 166n20, 167n32; difference from spatial form 9–11; Miller’s definition of 7–8, 156–7n5, 164n20; psychoanalysis and 12, 42; see also various works

181

Stein, G. 151, 153 Steiner, W. 149 Stuhlmann, G. 21, 158n22 Sturrock, J. 61 Sukenick, R. 122 supraself 1, 15, 16, 18, 23, 25, 27–8, 29, 154, 165n13, 166n22, 167n26–7; acceptance of 71, 76, 80, 88, 143, 163n11, 167n29; centrality of 34, 39, 41, 45, 50, 51, 62; definition of 11–12; escapism of 99, 113, 122; partial knowledge of 32, 101, 106; rebirth of 36, 52, 60, 71, 86, 89, 93, 96, 101, 115, 119, 122, 136, 141, 146, 147, 165n9, 167n31; self-liberation and 21, 96, 166n17; writing and 93, 96, 110, 111–13; see also various works Surrealism 3, 8, 9, 45, 48, 51, 56, 113, 146, 152, 162n2 Swift, J. 88 “The Tailor Shop” 76, 77, 82–4 Tarkington, B. 153 Taylor, E. 151 Taylorization 3 “Third or Fourth Day of Spring” 77 Thoreau, H.D. 151, 152 The Time of the Assassins 52, 161n15 Tilley, A. 14 Todorov, T. 159n3 Toqueville, A. de 151 Trachtenberg, A. 165n8 transcendentalism 150, 152 Triangle Shirtwaist fire 3 Tropic of Cancer 2, 8, 9, 11, 20, 26, 27, 29, 36, 46, 47, 49, 50, 60, 61, 62–76, 77, 79, 83, 89, 102, 130, 148, 155, 157n6, 162n3, 162n5, 163n6, 163n7, 164n19, 164n4, 168n5, 168n8 Tropic of Capricorn 2, 7, 27, 31, 33, 35, 38, 39, 42, 55, 60, 62, 73, 76, 83, 89–101, 102, 104, 107, 145, 157n11, 158n17, 164n17, 164n23, 164n4, 168n9 Tulsa riots 3 Turan, K. 10, 68 Twain, M. 152, 153 Tyler, R. 152 Tytell, J. 150, 166n21 Updike, J. 155 Van Gogh, V. 125, 154 Vidal, G. 5, 111, 112

182 Index Vizetelly, F.H. 127 Wagner-Martin, L. 149, 168n5 Wald, P. 2, 4 “Walking Up and Down in China” 86–7, 159n26 Wallace, D.F. 155 West, N. 153, 154 Whitman, W. 2, 9, 16, 24, 43, 45, 77, 80, 141, 151, 152, 153, 159n27, 160n9 Wickens, B. 160n11 Wickes, G. 3, 17, 26, 90, 103, 106, 112, 158n18, 167n25 Widmer, E. 163n6 Widmer, K. 2, 52, 70, 89, 101, 105, 108, 112, 114, 130, 150, 152, 157n6, 157n12, 160n9. 161n19 Williams, J. 127 Wilson, E. 1, 156n2 Wilson, W. 2 Winslow, K. 106

The Wisdom of the Heart 76 Wolfe, B. 161n17 Wolfe, T. 114, 153, 154 Womack, K. 89 Wood, T. 5, 73, 111, 112, 160n9 Woolf, M. 158n15 Woolf, V. 45 The World of Lawrence 65 The World of Sex 7, 9, 13, 20, 27, 31, 33, 39, 60, 104, 123, 156n4, 158n15, 159n1, 159n4, 160n11, 168n3 World War One 2, 3, 88, 153, 168n12 World War Two 165n8 Xerxes Society 134, 141, 166n23 Yakovlev, L. 124 Yeats, W.B. 9 Young, K. 149 Zen 154
iek, S. 149