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 under-
standing 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 contempo-
rary 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 child-
ren’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
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2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

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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
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2005017533

ISBN 0-415-36026-9 (Print Edition)

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.”

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: spiral form

Brooklyn dawn

Parisian tempest

Californian tranquility

102

Conclusion: Henry Miller and the American literary tradition

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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.

Introduction

Spiral form

Henry once said to me, “When you write about me, make it all up!”

Erica Jong (1993: 6)

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 autobio-
graphy, 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 occa-
sionally protested, most famously to Edmund Wilson, that he never “use[d]
‘heroes’” and that everything he wrote paralleled his “real” life, Miller manipu-
lated 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).

Simultaneously lyrical and naturalistic, surreal and quotidian, Miller’s “auto-

biographical 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 photo-
graphic 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.

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 super-
structures 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) ostens-

ibly 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 recogniz-
able—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 representa-
tives of the cultural elite salved their anxieties over modern instability and whole-
sale slaughter with nostalgic optimism. As Nash observes, however, the tension

Introduction

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 opti-
mism 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 “cumula-
tive 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 resul-
tant 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

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 metaphys-
ical speculations. Nervous, yet confident, Miller formally expresses his cultural
anxiety through a pattern of constant interruption, through a myriad of begin-
nings. In this way, he simultaneously strives for spiritual “Truth” and acknowl-
edges 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 metaphys-
ical 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

Introduction

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 conscious-
ness, a place beyond the material, beyond art. Like Miller, Pierre Macherey recog-
nizes 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 consti-
tutes 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 commun-
icate with the few. For Miller, no one “plot” may suffice to liberate the conscious-
ness, 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 revela-
tion within his ideal reader. This method, spiral form, consciously thwarts narra-
tive 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 autobio-
graphy (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 conven-
tions, 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,

Introduction

myths and cosmologies mentioned earlier—it may be that another, for our
purposes better and more comprehensive, name for these would be “meta-
phors”: 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 expecta-
tions of discovering key facts about Miller’s life, readers should heed Olney’s argu-
ments and view the texts not as transparent renderings of raw biographical data,
but as metaphoric transformations of experiential material. By stressing autobio-
graphy’s metaphoric aspects, Olney concomitantly foregrounds the highly spiri-
tual 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 meta-
phoric 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 auto-
biographers 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 auto-
biographers 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.

Introduction

Style aids writers in discovering how they view themselves by forcing them to ques-
tion 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 examina-
tion 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 ulti-
mate 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).

Plasticity, to say the least, marks

Miller’s use of time, a concept reflected in the autobiographical romances’ rela-
tively “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.

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 develop-
ment 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

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)

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 auto-
biographical 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,

Introduction

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 “auto-
matic” writing in A Vision), Miller methodically revised his writing and, contrary to
Burroughs and Johnson, retained control of his readers’ textual purview.

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).

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 chro-
nologically, 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

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 “simul-
taneous perception,” a physical impossibility on a first reading (14).

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 impu-
tations—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 audi-
ences 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 charac-
ters” 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 “progres-
sion” (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

Introduction

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 experi-
ence. 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 impor-
tance 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, Miller-
as-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 veri-
similitude, 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).

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).

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

Introduction

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 psycho-

analysis. 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 experi-
enced 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 reconcilia-
tion—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 resem-
bles 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 relation-
ship 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)

Introduction

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.

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 uncon-
sciously, 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 substan-

tial 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

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 juxtaposi-
tions, 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 explana-
tions for his actions and emotions. Allen Tilley refers to just such a phenom-
enon when he claims that dreams “engage us in the imaginative reconstruction
of our own identities” (1992: 142). Miller uses reveries both to give his impres-
sions of intangible feelings that a more traditional narrative might fail to repre-
sent 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 allu-
sions 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.

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 inde-

pendent, fully developed characters, but as caricatures. Miller willfully depicts

Introduction

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 acquaint-
ances 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 func-
tioning 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 excep-

tions 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 self-
liberation. 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 inter-
course at an incredible rate.

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-aggran-
dizement 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

Introduction

undercut narrative expectation by exposing flaws in the straight temporal
rendering of experience. Miller realizes that his anecdotes often adopt the charac-
teristics of a “realist” mode, and thus he breaks the narrative frame with “gratu-
itous” 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.

After such a framebreak, Miller launches

into another anecdote, which in turn will give way to another. Miller’s sexual anec-
dotes 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 sexu-
ality 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).

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 cata-
logs 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 “thorough-
ness” as a textual sham, a hollow gesture. The catalogs, moreover, foreground
Miller’s mythopoeic strategy by laying bare the fictive underpinnings of his enter-
prise 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

Introduction

choice, Miller does the choosing. Hassan, writing without the aid of Parkin’s argu-
ment, 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.

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 indi-
rectly 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 experi-
ence. 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 high-
light 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 frac-
tion 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.

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).

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

Introduction

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 haphaz-
ardly 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 atmo-
sphere 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 experi-
encing 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 isola-
tion. 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 compre-
hend 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 inde-
terminate length with his readers. The building block of this monologue, the anec-
dote, 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

Introduction

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 multi-
farious 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 perform-
ances—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 atmo-
sphere 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.

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

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 hier-
archy. 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.

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 func-
tions 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.

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

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).

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.

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 narra-
tor’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 indi-
vidual, 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 radi-
cally 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 immedi-
ately 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 produc-
tions—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 tech-
nique (243).

In rejecting spiral form without analyzing it thoroughly, Hassan casually

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).

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,” privi-
leges the naïve phase while ignoring the possibility that Miller—whom one might
reasonably state belongs to the critical phase—could interpret earlier temporal para-
digms 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

“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 prog-
ress 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)

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 inter-
dependence” (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 influ-
ence 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.

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.

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 “capti-
vating 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

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—relation-
ship 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 Cali-
fornian Tranquility (1940–80).

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.

Introduction

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 hith-
erto 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. Even-
tually, 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).

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

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 empha-
sizes process, becoming. In the early novels, Miller eschews the first-person narra-
tion 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 exper-
imentation of the early novels by containing them within a quasi-objective frame-
work 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 autobio-
graphical romances. Foreshadowing the epistolary technique of Tropic of Cancer,
Miller employs in Moloch a narrator who adopts the role of the raconteur by embel-
lishing 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 rudimen-
tary 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 sepa-
rating 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.

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

Brooklyn dawn

his male protagonists, Miller starts a trend that continues throughout his narra-
tives. 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 “heteroge-
neous 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. Dear-
born 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.

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 “geolog-
ical” 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.

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.

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 phenom-
enon that Dearborn aptly labels “Millerian amplification” (1992: xiii).

Instead of simply and straightforwardly recounting his experience as an employ-

ment 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 appli-
cation 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 auto-
biographical 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 prog-
ress 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, repre-
sents 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 metamor-
phose 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.

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 experi-
ences frequently seem nightmarish (1972: 14). Rushing from scene to scene, Miller
presents the contradictory memoranda, incompetent executives, thieving or addle-
pated 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

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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 messen-
gers 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 repre-
sents 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 third-
person narrator to contextualize the anecdotes about Moloch and his acquaint-
ances. 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 judg-
ment 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 ever-
expanding, 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).

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 posi-
tions 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. Antici-
pating 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 self-
consciously depicts Dion as a spatio-temporally fragmented individual. Neverthe-
less, 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 third-
person 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.

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 under-
score 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 under-
scores 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

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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-Pari-
sian 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 cata-
log’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 anec-
dote 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 conscious-
ness of the supraself (Martin 1978: 146). While in Moloch Miller distinctly separates
the tale about Hari from the discourse surrounding Moloch, in later books, struc-
turing 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, control-
ling 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.

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 infor-
mation about which Moloch knows nothing until subsequent chapters, a phenom-
enon 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 demon-
strate 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 self-
contained 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 devel-
oping 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 Tele-
graph 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 char-
acter, 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 exer-
cising 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,

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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 character-
izes 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 bound-
aries 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 non-
anecdotal 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—para-
doxically 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 convo-
luted 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 consis-
tently “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

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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 repre-
hensible 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 situa-
tion’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 inter-
action 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 roman-
ticized way. As Miller later recognized, he constructed in Una a symbol of unparal-
leled 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 pres-
sure” 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 occasion-
ally 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 compar-
ison. 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.

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

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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.

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 manipu-
lating 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 ironic-
ally 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 empha-
sizes 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 juxta-
position, 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 contradict-
ory 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 mascu-
line 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 self-
hood. 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

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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.

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.

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 exhi-
bition 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 inten-
sity 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-revela-
tion. 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 neverthe-
less 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 antici-
pates the internal monologs that demonstrate how the supraself signifies a tran-
scendence 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 anec-
dotes—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 mytho-
poeic 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 immi-
grants—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 alterna-
tive 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 intru-
sive 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 sugges-
tive 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.

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 tremen-
dous 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 tech-
nique 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 nebu-
lous 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 rela-

tionship with June and her close friend, Jean, the Anastasia of the trilogy.

Left alone

in America while June and Jean toured France, Miller, tormented by June’s clandes-
tine 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.

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, ulti-
mately, the effect of that love on his writing (1941g: 55). Miller initially hoped to delin-
eate 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 never-

theless 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 inter-
ruption 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 frag-
mentation 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 charac-
ter’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 hemor-
rhoids “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

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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 decep-
tions, 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 “drip-
ping 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.

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” contriv-
ance. 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 Spengler-
inspired 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

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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 expan-
siveness 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 trans-
fers 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 transi-
tions from one mode to another and anticipate Tropic of Cancer and the later auto-
biographical 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 autobiograph-
ical 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 import-
ance 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 occa-
sionally—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—jour-
neys 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 impos-
sible for her to formulate, even to herself, the meaning of that flood which illu-
mined 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 rudi-
mentary 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 “mastur-
bates 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 concep-
tion. 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—antago-
nist. 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).

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.

Miller further complicated June’s protean image, for, as Dear-

born 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 unequiv-
ocal 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 opportu-
nity, 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 autobiograph-
ical 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 prac-
ticing 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

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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 scrib-
bling” (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 repre-
sents 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 Bohe-
mian existence he leads as an “artist” in Greenwich Village and the puritan conser-
vatism of his upbringing—to drive him to attempt suicide at least once.

On the deeper, more symbolic level characteristic of spiral form, however,

Miller employs the fire to operate as an emblem of Tony’s burgeoning autobio-
graphical 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 anec-
dote 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 attach-
ment 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 rela-
tion 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 “inex-
haustible” 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

Brooklyn dawn

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 expan-
sive, 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. Undoubt-
edly adding the scene in a Parisian revision, Miller offers in Tony’s fantasy a rudi-
mentary definition of the artistic philosophy that will soon drive his work. Tony
dreams of the interconnectedness of past, present, and future, and in the dissolu-
tion 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 psycholog-
ical 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 real-
izes 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 compre-
hensiveness, for Tony stops feeling sorry for himself and begins to compose litera-
ture 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

Brooklyn dawn

on Moloch. Most important, in Crazy Cock, Miller reduces the third-person narra-
tor’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 char-
acters’ 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.

Brooklyn dawn

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.

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, first-
person reality.

From painters such as Matisse and Chagall, Miller gleaned a sense

of color and perspective.

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 autobio-
graphical 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:

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, buffer-
like, between him and his auto-creative instincts. On the blasted-out ruins of his
two previous third-person failures, Miller then erected the principal accomplish-
ment of spiral form, the supraself. No longer enslaved by a wish to remain objec-
tive, 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 Caro-
line 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

Parisian tempest

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, spiri-
tual 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 natu-
ralist; 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 experi-
ence 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 anti-
sequencing, 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 conversa-
tional 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 approxi-
mates the style of conversation—surges, rapid changes of emphasis and tone, repe-
tition, and, most significantly, digressions” (1986: 42). Miller hinges spiral form on
precisely this colloquial pattern, but he reconfigures the oral mode into an episto-
lary one.

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

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 imper-
ative to transcending thrownness,” the Heideggerian feeling of spiritual displace-
ment (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, “specula-
tions, 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

Parisian tempest

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 encum-
brance 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.

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 third-
person 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 previ-
ously 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

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 inhab-
itants, 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” repre-
sents 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

Parisian tempest

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 anec-

dotal 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 them-
selves 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 phenom-
enon that allows him to shift focus at will. Miller cannot depict each spot or anec-
dote 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

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 illu-
sion 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.

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 experi-
ence. 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 euphem-

isms of the hypocritical living dead. Via the supraself, Miller issues a blunt chal-
lenge 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 cele-
brate 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, biolo-
gical 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 demon-
strates 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 natur-
alist observation into anecdotal observation,” most of the narrative’s various divi-
sions 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).

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 strate-
gies 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 deca-
dent, 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 bitter-
ness 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).

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 manifes-
tations 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).

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 anec-
dote’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

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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).

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 insignific-
ance 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 particu-
larly 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 liber-
ates 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

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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).

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 them-
selves 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 word-
canvas 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 narra-
tive 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, three-
dimensional 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 anec-
dote 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 psycho-
logical picture (1976: 24). Far from writing idiotically, in the reveries Miller meta-
phorically reconstructs the overwhelming creative impulses that entrance the
supraself and compel him to create. Unfolding a brilliant effusion of sensory

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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 inter-
rupts 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 anec-

dote 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 physi-
ology 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 neces-
sarily 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 iden-
tical 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.

(1934: 247)

In this monolog, which possesses the characteristics of an essay, Miller drama-

tizes 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

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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 virtu-
ally 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 them-
selves 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 auto-
biographical 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 auto-
biographical 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 perspect-
ive. Consisting of ten separately titled narratives, Black Spring, Miller’s favorite Pari-
sian 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 “recapitu-
lating its contents … instead of examining it analytically” (2004: 23). The frag-
mented 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 trans-
formed 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 commer-
cial 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 self-
actualization before the reader. In constant movement, “round and round,” the
supraself persists in “seeking the hub and nodality” lost with the onset of adoles-
cence 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 autobiograph-
ical romances, fantasy, reverie, and burlesque dominate the book. In fore-
grounding 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.

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 pres-
sures 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 cruci-
fixion (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; butter-
scotch 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 fore-
boding 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 medi-
cines,” 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 porcu-
pines toes” (29). Miller interrupts this flight with a discourse on writing, an anec-
dote, 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 spatio-
temporal 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 prog-
ress” (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 frag-
ments 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 hermaphro-
dites. 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 hairsplit-
ting, 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 frag-
mentation. 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 tran-
scribe 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 intel-
lectual prejudices, his abysmal sufferings. The “color” coalesces to stimulate a tran-
sient 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

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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 shed-
ding of desire, transcendence, requires a Spenglerian destruction of civilization
and its discontents, demands that the conditions that spawned modernity’s frag-
mentation 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 individ-
uals 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 inge-
nuity 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 coun-
termands 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 thou-
sand 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 elec-
tricity” (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 instinc-
tive, 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)

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The supraself’s earliest work—derivative, literary—lacked the forceful first-

person 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 self-
indulgence. 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.

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 deliri-
ously 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 high-
octane 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 import-

ant facet of spiral form: dream. Prompted by Nin and her immersion in psycho-
analysis, 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.

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

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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 “shit-
pumps” 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 meta-
phorical “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 differen-
tiated 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 equiva-
lent of the supraself’s epiphanic delirium and stir within the reader an emotion-
based (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 meta-
phor, 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 commu-
nicating 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 appro-
priating 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 evangel-
ists—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 reli-
gious spectacle and collective energy evident in the street. The supraself finds reli-
gious power not in the traditional Church, but within idiosyncratic personalities
who feel God’s presence.

The supraself lampoons the preacher, yet also recog-

nizes 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 clean-
liness. 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 loneli-
ness,” 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 spiri-
tual realm and plunge humanity into despair:

Men are delirious in their new-found freedom. A perpetual séance with mega-
phones 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 spiri-
tual 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 fragmenta-
tion 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-deca-
dence, 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 jour-
neys, 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).

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 fash-
ions 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 para-
doxically 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 empha-
sizing the narrative’s spiral form.

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 impres-
sions that typify spiral form. Instead of a continuous narrative, or even a consist-
ently 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, leit-
motif and sudden counterpoint” (1967: 75). In this form, Miller first compels anec-
dotes 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 employ-
ment 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 devel-
opment 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 denuncia-
tions of American capitalism and his tendency to enfeeble the individual pervade
Capricorn’s first untitled division. There, rebaptizing Moloch’s Great American Tele-
graph 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. Fore-
shadowing 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 “what-
ever 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 ulti-
mately 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).

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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 meta-
phoric 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 exis-
tence. 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 anec-
dotes—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 inter-
rupting 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 meta-
phoric heart of the book because they help explicate the supraself’s current
aesthetic and illustrate why he had to die.

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).

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 unreadi-
ness 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 self-
reflexively 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 recog-
nizes 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 periodic-
ally, 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 comprehen-

sive 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).

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,

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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 work-
place, 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 satis-
factions of art and personal freedom and that he requires a complete rebirth. He
further intimates that, while the supraself undergoes a tremendous process of humili-
ation 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 devel-
opment 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 automatic-
ally 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, fecun-
dating, 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 point-
less 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 abso-
lutely 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 imagi-
natively—“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 swim-
ming 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, “re-
enter” the “primary” line of narrative action at any point—he does not need to re-
commence 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

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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 expan-
sion 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 under-
take 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 depart-
ment 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 myth-
ical, 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 individ-
uals—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 amor-
phous 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 parame-
ters, 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

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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 other-
ness, 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.

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 super-
nova. 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. Ulti-
mately, 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

100

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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 Capri

corn “[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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101

Californian tranquility

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.

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.

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 recog-
nized 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 transfor-
mations. 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 chro-
nology. 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

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 divers-
ity allows Miller to mirror the supraself’s geologic strata. Theoretically, no one
node —for example, the supraself’s life with Mara/Mona —should attain pre-
eminence 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 self-
contained 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.

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 propo-
nent 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 narra-
tive 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 privi-
lege—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 deni-
grate 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.

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 experi-
ence 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 neverthe-

less 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 struc-
tural 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 auto-
biographical romances. The principal alteration concerns his concept of progres-
sion. 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 indi-
cates 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 unsur-
passed quality is, among others, to unite things which seem to be remote or unre-
lated” (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 new-
found 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 sepa-
rates 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 sacri-
ficing 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

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form to avoid this potential hazard by concentrating not on the end of the narra-
tive, but on the hermeneutic process itself. Despite employing an apparently encyc-
lopedic 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 illus-
trates 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] disor-
ganized” (1966: 40). Kathryn Winslow, moreover, bemoans that Miller’s anec-
dotes “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.

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 impres-
sions 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 “autobiograph-
ical 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 pre-

Tropic” writing (Durrell and Miller 1988: 230). While Miller undoubtedly over-
states 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 phenom-
enon 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 aban-
dons 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

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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.

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 “chap-
ters” 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).

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 experi-
ences.

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 initi-
ates 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 conversa-
tion 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

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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 interpreta-
tion 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 juxta-
pose typical incidents from the supraself’s pre-Mara existence—the mind-
numbing 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.

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 under-
standing 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 para-
graphs 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).

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 post-
Parisian 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 psycho-
logical 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).

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 even-
tually 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 “untrans-
missibility” 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 tempo-
rally. 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 counter-
acts 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 fanta-
sies—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.

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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 post-
Brooklyn work. Although Miller interrupts a rather bleak anecdote, his juxtaposi-
tion of fantasy allows him to portray the supraself’s imminent sense of psycholog-
ical 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 influ-
ences. 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, cata-
logs—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 actu-
ally 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 psycho-
logical 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 refer-
ence, 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 limitless-
ness 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 narra-
tive 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 “counter-
catalog,” 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 ex-
wife, “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

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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 plea-
sure—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 consti-
tute 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.

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 demon-
strate 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.

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 syna-
gogue. 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 narra-
tive 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 environ-
ment 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).

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 essen-
tial 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”

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(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, cellophane-
wrapped 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 alien-
ated 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.

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 meta-
morphoses 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 feel-
ings 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 atten-
tions 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

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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.

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).

Each sexual memory, therefore, just like any other tech-

nique 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 rela-
tionship 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, life-
affirming 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 sympa-
thetic 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 writ-
ings.”

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] judg-
ments, 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

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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 econom-
ical—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 func-
tion 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.

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 subjec-
tive, Miller must create the illusion of psychological mimesis by unfolding his narra-
tive 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 destina-
tion. By focusing on spiral form’s digressive properties, Miller de-emphasizes time’s
propensity to erect boundaries between past and present and renders such distinc-
tions 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 precar-
ious 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 child-
hood and “the jovial sensual tub of flesh whom I called Uncle Charlie” (73) to disqui-
sitions 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, prefer-
ring 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, antiestab-
lishment sensibilities. Spiral form’s loose structure and alinear temporal scheme thus
allow Miller to identify the salient features of the supraself without completely sacri-
ficing narrative progression.

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, fanta-
sies, 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 monu-
mental 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 tech-

nique 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

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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.

Although Miller relates how the supraself comes up

with the Mezzotint ploy to ease the financial burden, he employs the story as a meta-
phor 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 psycho-
logical 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 contem-
poraries, but few realize that Miller turns to several techniques to achieve his collo-
quial, 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 trou-
bles, 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)

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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 self-
knowledge. 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 actu-
ality 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 fanta-
sies 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 sexu-
ality 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 experi-
ences 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 influ-
ence 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 height-
ened 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 emotion-
ally charged activity. From quick mentions of Élie Faure’s “colossal” History of Art
(254) or “the tragic, unprecedented artist” (20) Dostoevski to more extended reflec-
tions on Walter Pater’s “sensitive use of the language” (66) or Hamsun’s “enig-
matic” Herr Nagel (295), Miller demonstrates the deep, soul-stirring power artists

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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 concen-
trates 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 assump-
tion, 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] repre-
sents 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 convo-

lute 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 demoral-
izing 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

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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 rele-
vance. 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 antithet-
ical 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 inci-
dent’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 even-
tual 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]).

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 “digres-
sion” 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 Crom-
well, 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,

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the supraself’s old Xerxes Society pal.

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 bull-
dykers” (275).

Despite appearing to interrupt his narrative with a rather pointless and silly inci-

dent, 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 clandes-
tine activities, with this pessimistic portrayal of the Xerxes Society Miller demon-
strates 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 intel-
lect. 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 inter-

rupt 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 indir-
ectly. 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.

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 narra-
tive 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

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135

supraself’s apprenticeship to signs by creating a number of competing—but never-
theless 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 cruci-
fixion 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. Conse-
quently, 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).

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 struc-
ture 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 willing-
ness 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, free-
ranging 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.

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 narra-
tive, Miller illustrates through a variety of devices how the supraself learns to trans-
form the pain of his life—and specifically Mona’s betrayal—into art, for the true

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“artist is always crucified” (1941b: 8).

Miller suggests that despite all the decep-

tion, 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 signifi-
cance 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 recre-
ation 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 estab-
lish a discourse that “continually and pointedly undercuts itself, producing some-
thing 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).

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 ordi-
nary” (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 (“‘Step-
mother? 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 anno-
tate 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 appar-
ently 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 under-
stand 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 conven-
tional 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, free-
flowing 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]).

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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” narra-

tive 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 conse-
quence 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 verifi-
able 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 specu-
lates 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, anec-
dotal 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 accom-
panied 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).

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 anec-
dotes 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 annota-
tive 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 gran-
diose 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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143

form, Miller thus provides the supraself with the opportunity to return and re-
encode 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 insinu-
ates, constitute not meaningless or pedantic prattle, but important frames of refer-
ence 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 linea-
ments 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 comment-
ary, 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 examina-

tion 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 estab-
lishes 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.

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). Neverthe-
less, 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 conse-
quence—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 concen-
trating 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.

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 environ-

ment 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 term-
inology, an “anisomorphic” approach to time and refashions the supraself’s more
ecstatic worldview in an equally enthusiastic way (39).

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, splat-
tered 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 dispa-
rate 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, para-
doxically, that there will never be any revelation; that it is the process itself
which has been important” (1986: 217). Throughout Nexus and The Rosy Cruci-
fixion, therefore, Miller attempts to account for the innumerable and contradic-
tory 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-and-
effect 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 subjec-
tive 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).

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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, anti-
mimetic 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).

Neither perspective captures the complex ideas that

contributed to Miller’s autobiographical romances, and, despite Miller’s still enor-
mous popular following, such misguided interpretations threaten to reduce the
writer to critical oblivion.

Thus, one must trace Miller’s current place in the Amer-

ican 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. Signific-
antly, 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 confirma-
tion of Miller’s critical reputation in the late twentieth and early twenty-first

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.

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.

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 Amer-
ican 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.

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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149

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).

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 incorpo-
rate 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.

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 shame-
lessly, 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.

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 narrow-

minded 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.

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. Never-
theless, 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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Conclusion

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 misunder-
standing 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 unre-
mitting 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 tradi-

tions, 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 exempli-
fies 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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151

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 self-
aggrandizing 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 consist-
ently 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 stron-
gest 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 “Over-
Soul”—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.

A master of the

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Conclusion

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 cele-
brations 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.

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 illu-
minates 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.

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 tran-
scends 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

Conclusion

153

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.

Fusing anecdotal observation with spiral

form’s diverse array of inwardly focused devices, Miller anticipates the chaotic, free-
flowing works of postmodernism, and even shares that movement’s disdain of estab-
lished 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 person-
ality—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 natu-
ralists, 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 re-
contextualization, 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 effi-
cacy 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, asso-
ciative 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 ratio-
nalizing 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

154

Conclusion

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 recogni-
tion. In spiral form, Miller created a richly fertile new outlook on narrative
construction that amalgamates structure, theme, tone, and spirit into a wonder-
fully 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 ulti-
mately 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).

Conclusion

155

Notes

1 Introduction

Jay Martin reports a remarkably similar statement by Miller: “I am … highly suspi-
cious 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 Every-
where” (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 tempo-
rality, 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 imita-
tive 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 remem-
brance 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 unneces-
sary verbiage (“so to speak,” for example) and altering word selection (“time develop-
ment,” for instance, becomes “progression”), but his sentiment remains consistent with

that of the first edition. One notable emendation, however, concerns authorial inten-
tion. 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 manu-
scripts 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 lyri-
cally 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 inci-
dents 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).

Notes

157

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 autobio-
graphical 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 disrup-
tive 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.”

158

Notes

See Miller’s “Walking Up and Down in China” and the Hamlet correspondence,
among others.

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.

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.

2 Brooklyn dawn

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] feel-
ings” 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 abor-
tions 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 sexu-
ality 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

Notes

159

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 other-
wise (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 self-
conscious attempt to create a “literary work,” for even though his dialog in Moloch
shares affinities with the later autobiographical romances, the presence of an “objec-
tive” 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 conven-
tional 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).

160

Notes

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 repub-
lish 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 tradi-
tional 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 imagina-
tion (1991: 184).

Notes

161

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.

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).

3 Parisian tempest

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” surre-
alism. Balliet, for example, claims that Miller rejects the political dimensions of surre-
alism 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

162

Notes

Christmas (winter). Based on this evidence, Miller concerns himself with about eigh-
teen 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 pornog-
raphy. 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 tech-
niques throughout his career.

Donald Pizer offers one of the best interpretations of Van Norden in his American Expa

triate 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 advan-
tage 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 influ-
ences, no doubt fully absorbed the theory of the Übermensch (1952a: 316). While the
supraself’s philosophy of acceptance certainly has some striking parallels with Nietz-
sche’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

Notes

163

within them” (1972: 10). His relationship with June thus functions as a memorial cata-
lyst 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. More-
over, 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.

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).

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 proletarian-
oriented political agenda, they also express an intuitive grasp of Miller’s spiral form and its
method of constantly refining and redefining recurrent personal tropes.

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”

164

Notes

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 associa-
tion, 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 histo-
riography 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” narra-
tives 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 presenta-
tion 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 func-
tion 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/

Notes

165

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 intrinsi-
cally 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 effec-
tive solution to a central problem of autobiographical narration, namely the presenta-
tion 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 differ-
ences 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.

166

Notes

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.

Notes

167

5 Conclusion

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 testa-
ment 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 prox-
imity 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 examina-
tion 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 litera-
ture. 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 accept-
able 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, well-
executed 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 infor-
mation 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.

168

Notes

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—— (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) Conversa

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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.

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Conversations with Henry Miller, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 168–80.

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A. Hughes (eds) Conversations with Henry Miller, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
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——, C. Houghton and B. Abramson (1995) Writers Three: A Literary Exchange, ed. R.

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176

Bibliography

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

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

178

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

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,

Index

179

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

180

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

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

Index

181

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

182

Index

Document Outline

Book Cover
Half Title
Series Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: Spiral Form
2. Brooklyn Dawn
3. Parisian Tempest
4. Californian Tranquility
5. Conclusion: Henry Miller and the American Literary Tradition
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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