Physical hunger is an omnipresent force in Tropic of Cancer. The novel depicts a world of penniless creatives living from meal to meal, scrounging whatever food or pocket change they can get from wherever they can get it. Henry and several of his friends conform to the typical “starving artist” profile—aspiring writers with big ideas and no desire to work any kind of conventional job. Yet everyday working people are likewise presented as scavengers for whatever meager scraps of food they can find. This ravenous atmosphere of undernourishment reflects the economic Great Depression going on in the early 1930s, when the book was written and set. More fundamentally, however, it serves to underscore Miller’s vision of humanity as utterly animalistic and driven by base instincts like the need for food.
Yet perhaps even more potent than physical hunger in Tropic of Cancer’s world is sexual appetite. Henry and practically all of his friends, and seemingly everyone Henry meets, are constantly thinking about or actively having sex. For most of the book, Henry and his friends all seem to pursue sex out of sheer animal instinct, and not even necessarily for pleasure—certainly not for love. At a critical moment, Van Norden confesses to Henry about his hopelessly divided and tormented internal state, and how he seeks one orgasm after another because in those singular moments he “obliterate[s] [him]self,” relieving his anguish. Henry comes to a similar conclusion much later, when he lies awake thinking of all his past sexual partners and realizes that the common theme in his affairs is a “fear of living separate, of staying born.” The novel implies that this fundamental urge to recover a lost primal unity underlies humanity’s unabating physical as well as sexual hunger. It likewise suggests that food and sex alone will never fill this spiritual void. The novel does, however, close on an image of successfully merging into a primal unity: “The sun is setting. I feel this river flowing through me—its past, its ancient soil, the changing climate.” Henry achieves this serenity only after definitively renouncing his birth country and his estranged wife. Only by welcoming “living separate” and “staying born” instead of fleeing these things can he find the peace and sense of oneness that he feared were irrevocably lost. Only in embracing alienation, the novel hints, can one find one’s home.
Hunger, Sex, and the Human Condition ThemeTracker
Hunger, Sex, and the Human Condition Quotes in Tropic of Cancer
And while it's all very nice to know that a woman has a mind, literature coming from the cold corpse of a whore is the last thing to be served in bed. Germaine had the right idea: she was ignorant and lusty, she put her heart and soul into her work. She was a whore all the way through—and that was her virtue!
It seems to me Papini misses something by a hair's breadth when he talks of the need to be alone. It is not difficult to be alone if you are poor and a failure. An artist is always alone – if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.
And so I think what a miracle it would be if this miracle which man attends eternally should turn out to be nothing more than these two enormous turds which the faithful disciple dropped in the bidet. What if at the last moment, when the banquet table is set and the cymbals clash, there should appear suddenly, and wholly without warning, a silver platter on which even the blind could see that there is nothing more, and nothing less, than two enormous lumps of [feces]. That, I believe would be more miraculous than anything which man has looked forward to. It would be miraculous because it would be undreamed of. It would be more miraculous than even the wildest dream because anybody could imagine the possibility but nobody ever has, and probably nobody ever again will.
"That guy," he begins, meaning Carl, "that guy's an artist. He described every detail minutely. He told it to me with such accuracy that I know it's all a god-damned lie... but I can't dismiss it from my mind. You know how my mind works!"
"I try all sorts of things," he explains to me. "I even count sometimes, or I begin to think of a problem in philosophy, but it doesn't work. It's like I'm two people, and one of them is watching me all the time. I get so god-damned mad at myself that I could kill myself... and in a way, that's what I do every time I have an orgasm. For one second like I obliterate myself. There's not even one me then... there's nothing […] It's like receiving communion.
Now and then, it's true, I did think of Mona, not as of a person in a definite aura of time and space, but separately, detached, as though she had blown up into a great cloud-like form that blotted out the past. I couldn't allow myself to think about her very long; if I had I would have jumped off the bridge. It's strange. I had become so reconciled to this life without her, and yet if I thought about her only for a minute it was enough to pierce the bone and marrow of my contentment and shove me back again into the agonizing gutter of my wretched past. For seven years I went about, day and night, with only one thing on my mind — her.
Sex everywhere: it was slopping over, a neap-tide that swept the props from under the city.
There was nothing pressing, except to finish the book, and that didn't worry me much because I was already convinced that nobody would accept it anyway.
When I look down into that crack I see an equation sign, the world at balance, a world reduced to zero and no trace of remainder. Not the zero on which Van Norden turned his flashlight, not the empty crack of the prematurely disillusioned man, but an Arabian zero rather, the sign from which spring endless mathematical worlds […]
Going back in a flash over the women I've known. It's like a chain which I've forged out of my own misery. Each one bound to the other. A fear of living separate, of staying born. The door of the womb always on the latch.
The sun is setting. I feel this river flowing through me – its past, its ancient soil, the changing climate. The hills gently girdle it about: its course is fixed.