Tropic of Cancer

by

Henry Miller

Tropic of Cancer: Pages 193-208 Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
When winter arrives, the apartment is freezing, and Macha disappears. With just the two of them around again, Henry and Fillmore spend their evenings discussing the differences between America and Europe, and specifically Paris versus New York. They agree that Europe has never produced a man like Whitman (Goethe being the closest thing), but also that Whitman was a one-of-a-kind figure. Henry takes walks in the bitter Parisian winter, reflecting on its uniquely “psychological” cold.
Macha’s departure seems to foster a return to the intellectual preoccupations that Henry had previously maintained. Henry somewhat surprisingly praises an American, Whitman, as in certain ways surpassing any European writer, showing that his anti-American feelings are not a blanket prejudice and that he can give credit where credit is due.
Themes
The United States vs. Europe Theme Icon
Friendship, Loneliness, and Art Theme Icon
Quotes
The squalor Henry encounters on his walks triggers a flood of meditations. Henry says he finds that people treat ideas and action as entirely separate, but he insists that they belong together. He recalls conversations with Fillmore about gold, vast deposits of gold allegedly stored by the French government underground. Henry’s narrative reflections make a metaphorical leap from this claim to the “gold standard of literature,” which he says up to now he has been trying to move away from.
Henry’s notion of ideas and actions belonging together gives some insight into his existence. He thinks that literature needs to accommodate the squalor that exists in life, so as a writer, he is not doing anything improper by actively engaging in those squalid elements; he’s merely acting on his belief about what literature should be, which in turn is informed by his actions.
Themes
Literature and Artistic Freedom Theme Icon
Quotes
This last idea about the gold standard of literature launches Henry’s narrative voice into a full-fledged rhapsodic flood, sprawling across several pages. He sees the prisoners across the road from his apartment as emblems of human servility and captivity, unrealized potential. No one before now has ever been free enough to soar off the earth.
The idea of abandoning the “gold standard of literature” reaffirms Henry’s opening intention to write not a book but “a gob of spit in the face of Art.” The revery this thought induces in him is perhaps the longest in the novel, soaring to ever greater heights of ambition (and perhaps self-delusion).
Themes
Literature and Artistic Freedom Theme Icon
Friendship, Loneliness, and Art Theme Icon
Henry briefly interrupts his narrative cascade to refer to his surroundings: he and Fillmore are rolling around on the apartment floor with a couple of prostitutes. Looking at one of the prostitute’s genitals again launches Henry into cosmic reflections and leaves him “face to face with the Absolute.” He distinguishes this gaping void from the “zero” that Van Norden saw in female genitalia, saying rather that it is an endlessly fertile cipher. Henry reflects on how no man has really ever dared to tell everything inside of him, since the weight of the world is too great; if a man ever did, the world would explode.
Just as Van Norden did previously, Henry finds in female genitalia an image of the cosmos, yet he finds productivity in this void rather than sheer nothingness, indicating his less depressive if equally severe view of the universe. Once again, the encounter occasions Henry’s rhetorical flights and sweeping condemnation of all literature that has preceded him.
Themes
Literature and Artistic Freedom Theme Icon
Friendship, Loneliness, and Art Theme Icon
Hunger, Sex, and the Human Condition  Theme Icon
Quotes
Get the entire Tropic of Cancer LitChart as a printable PDF.
Tropic of Cancer PDF
Henry compares the prostitute’s genitalia to the obscenity and “great yawning gulf of nothingness” that is the world itself. He continues in this vulgar yet lyrical vein at great length, revolving around ideas of embracing life’s horror and creating one’s own values. In between, he recalls how Mona once called him a great man. Henry then reflects on his artistic heroes and concludes they are all figures who strive too intensely to satisfy common tastes, rather than expressing themselves perfectly according to convention. Henry proudly places himself in that lineage and furthermore asserts that he and his forbears are properly “inhuman.” He reflects on Dostoevsky’s Demons and finally resolves into a freewheeling cosmic rhapsody that embraces “everything that flows,” from semen to stars.
Henry certainly seems to follow the example that he imagines his literary heroes to have set: nowhere more than in these passages does he indulge in such extremes of rhetorical excess. His embrace of “everything that flows” points to the cascading language of the passage itself. The ideas expressed, however, don’t seem different from anything he’s said earlier; they’re just delivered at greater length. His recollection of Mona once again shows the chink in his hardboiled armor.
Themes
Literature and Artistic Freedom Theme Icon
Friendship, Loneliness, and Art Theme Icon
Hunger, Sex, and the Human Condition  Theme Icon
Quotes