Tropic of Cancer

by

Henry Miller

Tropic of Cancer: Pages 1-17 Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
The narrator, named (like the author) Henry Miller, has been living in early 1930s Paris for two years now. Henry speaks in the present tense, vacillating between details of his life, friends, and immediate surroundings, and florid and disturbing philosophical ruminations, such as, “The world is a cancer eating us away.” Yet despite the world’s doom and Henry’s own hopelessness, he considers himself “the happiest man alive.” Henry now explicitly addresses the reader and states that what he’s embarking on is “not a book” but a “prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art.”
The  striking opening monologue sets the tone for the novel, which will consist of caustic meditations on art and society rather than a conventional plot. Henry’s announcement at the beginning of the book that he has consciously undertaken to write what the reader is reading blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction, involving the reader in the work. His proclaimed intention to violate artistic standards of decency likewise serves to warn the reader about the shocking and vulgar narrative ahead.
Themes
Literature and Artistic Freedom Theme Icon
Friendship, Loneliness, and Art Theme Icon
Quotes
Out of this welter of nihilistic reflections, details begin to emerge about Henry’s life in Paris. He lives in the Villa Borghese in the Montparnasse neighborhood with a man named Boris, who’s also a brooding philosophical type. Boris seems to be allowing Henry to stay with him for free, though he employs various excuses to avoid Henry’s repeated requests for breakfast. Henry has no money at all; he has spent his years in Paris as an aspiring writer, but he seems to be letting go of that ambition, though not relinquishing his sense of himself as an “artist” in a vaguer sense.
As the details of Henry’s existence gradually come to light, it becomes clear that he supports his unproductive artist’s life by freeloading at every turn. He narrates with a kind of hard-boiled stoicism, however, and he seems to have few illusions or vanity about his own artistic identity, to the point of apparently relinquishing his ambitions altogether.
Themes
Literature and Artistic Freedom Theme Icon
The United States vs. Europe Theme Icon
Friendship, Loneliness, and Art Theme Icon
Hunger, Sex, and the Human Condition  Theme Icon
Quotes
Henry begins to rattle off the names of his several friends and acquaintances in Paris: Carl, Moldorf, Sylvester, Van Norden, the Borowskis, and so on. Many of his friends also have literary ambitions, but he dismisses all of them except Carl and Boris as not being true writers. He laments, perhaps with tongue in cheek, that they are all Jewish (unlike himself). He is in love with a Jewish woman named Tania, however, and announces that he would even become Jewish for her sake.
Despite the harsh and solitary tone of his reflections, Henry has apparently accrued a large circle of bohemian and artistically inclined friends in Paris, mostly expatriates like himself. His tendency to befriend Jews perhaps reflects his own sense of not being at home anywhere, an exile and a wanderer.
Themes
The United States vs. Europe Theme Icon
Friendship, Loneliness, and Art Theme Icon
Henry’s stream of consciousness narration becomes more lyrical and impressionistic. He interweaves poetic evocations of loneliness felt while walking along the Seine with violent and quite graphic sexual fantasies about Tania, addressed directly to her. He burns with jealousy of Sylvester, who is Tania’s romantic partner. Thoughts of Tania send him into barely coherent tangents about the genitals and personalities of other women he’s slept with.
The rabid sexual fantasies Henry unfolds in this section give a sense of what he meant when he set out to write a “gob of spit in the face of art,” intentionally shocking the reader with his frankness about taboo matters. Sexual compulsions seem to play a profound role in Henry’s life.
Themes
Literature and Artistic Freedom Theme Icon
Hunger, Sex, and the Human Condition  Theme Icon
Get the entire Tropic of Cancer LitChart as a printable PDF.
Tropic of Cancer PDF
In an obscure passage, Henry compares Moldorf to God. He draws a distinction between his own suffering, which he enjoys, and the neurotic suffering of Jews like Moldorf. For Jews, Henry says, the world is like a cage filled with wild beasts. Henry’s narration devolves into incoherence. He then changes tone and states that he intends to revise nothing that he writes and simply to record what books have omitted. No one, he says, has been accurately recording the violence and chaos of modern life.
Henry’s incoherent theological ramblings lead one to question his cogency of mind. He seems to hover at all times close to the brink of madness, yet his narrative voice rarely, if ever, breaks from its flatness of tone and emotional neutrality, even when describing intense emotions or shocking events. He recommits himself here to venturing where no writer has gone before.
Themes
Literature and Artistic Freedom Theme Icon
Friendship, Loneliness, and Art Theme Icon
A couple, Mr. and Mrs. Wren, arrive at the Villa Borghese to discuss renting an apartment from Boris. This frightens Henry that he will soon have to move out, but he makes his peace with it. Boris dispatches Henry to buy wine for them from the store, and when Henry returns and uncorks it, he is flooded with memories of his down-and-out Bohemian days when first arriving in Paris two years before. In this period, he had no friends and struggled to survive but was oddly contented.
Henry’s recollections in this passage introduce an idea that he will return to, namely, that friends and company are counterproductive to an artist’s development. He feels nostalgia for the loneliness no longer available to him since falling into a circle of friends.
Themes
The United States vs. Europe Theme Icon
Friendship, Loneliness, and Art Theme Icon
Hunger, Sex, and the Human Condition  Theme Icon
Quotes
Henry recalls nights out on the town with Mona, at the time a serious romantic partner of his. On one of these nights, he had an impromptu sexual encounter with an American stranger in the bathroom, poorly concealing it from Mona and Borowski, who was with them. He returned home and vomited all over his manuscripts. At some point Mona left the country, and her later return precipitates several night of lust. Henry looks back fondly on this idyllic, carefree period in his life.
Once again, Henry’s narration seems bent on disgusting the reader, first through the seedy actions described and secondly through the approving tone Henry adopts towards them. The bathroom encounter contributes to the novel’s growing impression of Paris as an uninhibited den of wild sexual abandon and depravity.
Themes
Literature and Artistic Freedom Theme Icon
The United States vs. Europe Theme Icon
Hunger, Sex, and the Human Condition  Theme Icon