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Pages 17-29
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Tropic of Cancer, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Literature and Artistic Freedom
The United States vs. Europe
Friendship, Loneliness, and Art
Hunger, Sex, and the Human Condition
Summary
Analysis
On Sunday, Henry restrains himself from asking for food from either Boris or his friend Cronstadt, whom he goes to visit. He then wanders around Paris, staring at all the food for sale. He admires the title of a book in a window, A Man Cut in Slices, and wishes he had thought of it himself for his own novel. His memory drifts back to his days in New York, comparing it with the squalor of Paris.
Henry probably finds the novel’s title interesting for a few reasons: it connects the trendy practice of psychoanalysis, a fascination of Henry’s in which people are figuratively “cut in slices” to expose hitherto unseen parts of the mind, with a gory literal image of the kind that equally stokes Henry’s literary imagination.
Themes
Henry now thinks back to the day he met Germaine, a Parisian prostitute. At the time he was flush with cash sent to him by his wife in America (possibly Mona, although this is not explained here). Henry recalls how he was immediately taken with Germaine, with whom he shared a more mutually enjoyable relationship than with the typical Parisian prostitutes, who were brazenly transactional. He admires her pubic hair as if it were an entity distinct from her.
This is the first time that Henry divulges that he has or had a wife, a surprising revelation given both his insistence on independence and his relentless sexual pursuits.
Themes
Henry compares Germaine to another prostitute with whom he had recurrent rendezvous, named Claude. Henry was fond of Claude, but her melancholy and delicacy bothered him. Germaine’s evident enjoyment of her work pleased Henry more than Claude’s sentimental brooding. Whereas Claude could be demure, Henry, in the fits of his passion, wants to see everything about a woman, even watching her go to the bathroom. Henry cares little about a prostitute having a fine mind or an interest in literature; what he admires is Germaine’s passionate and unillusioned performance of a prostitute’s fundamental job.
Henry’s account of Germaine and Claude gives more insight into the psychological appeal that sleeping with prostitutes holds for him. The very seediness of the activity is what makes it compelling, rather than the event simulating a traditional romance. In this sense Henry’s taste in sexual encounters matches his ideas about literature, where the sordid and seedy should be celebrated for their own sake.
Themes
