Henry Miller and Deleuze's "Strange Anglo-American Literature"

The University of Nottingham, School of American and Canadian Studies, 2000

Conradiana , 2018

The disappearance of J. Hillis Miller left a yawning void among the community of literacy critics and theorists around the world, but the traces of his admirable readings live on and remain to be followed up. Professor Miller was, in fact, a brilliant teacher, an inspiring scholar, a generous and cherished friend, and, last but not least, an exemplary reader of literary and theoretical texts. As a Victorianist by training who soon transgressed antiquarian disciplinary boundaries, he had a special philological interest in modernism in general and in Joseph Conrad in particular. As he explains in his Introduction to Reading Conrad (edited by John Peters and Jakob Lothe), when he was thirteen or so he accidentally found a copy of Conrad's Typhoon in his father's library that cast a lifelong spell on his imagination-a spell so long that it will lead him to end his career with a performative promise about Typhoon. Early on, then, Conrad stood out for J. Hillis Miller, occupying a privileged place in his distinguished intellectual trajectory-beginning, middle, and end. One of the most influential critics and theorists of the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries, J. Hillis Miller started reading fiction early. As he explains in his last interview, he "taught [him]self to read at the age of five" (Lawtoo, "Critic" 97) so he could read children's books like Winnie the Pooh, The Swiss Family Robinson, and Alice in Wonderland-a formative experience that eventually led to an impressive, exploratory, and inimitable career in literary study. After obtaining a PhD in English Literature from Harvard University in an intellectual environment that was "actively hostile to literary theory" (98), as he recalls, Miller's critical and theoretical work took off with his engagement with New Criticism and phenomenology at The Johns Hopkins University, where he befriended Georges Poulet and first encountered Jacques Derrida, continued at Yale where he became an influential advocate of the "Yale School of Deconstruction" along with Derrida, Paul de Man, and Geoffrey Hartman, and culminated at the University of California, Irvine, where he contributed to the ethical turn by developing untimely readings on the importance of literature, reading, and community. After his retirement as Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus in 2002, Miller continued to write numerous books. In his

2009

By means of a writing style he calls "spiral form" Henry Miller undermines conventional literary codes. His narratives jump and twist through time and space and are not guided toward cohesive or coherent systemization. This sensibility clearly does not regard writing as the constructing of a closed or complete text but as a mapping of open-ended experience. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari speak highly of Miller's writing style, in the two volumes that compose "Capitalism and Schizophrenia," Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, and they use his work as an exemplar of their observation that any reduction of the diachronic narrative form to a "unity" or "whole" is an illusion, insofar as it represents the world within the text as a linear and finite object that is capable of being rendered completely. Miller's affinity with Deleuze and Guattari's theory of rhizomatic writing brings him toward a critique of a Western establishment of codes in spaces of living and of writing that are determined through such literary vehicles as circumscription and naming. In the works investigated here-Black Spring, Tropic of Capricorn, Hamlet and The Rosy Crucifixion Trilogy-the East, China and Mongolia specifically, is the metaphorical location for openness and free, unbounded space as Miller uses it to consider the formation of identity and generally how space is established into becoming specific locations and how this subsequently establishes it as locatable as an autonomous body.

Journal of Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, 2008

This article investigates the work of Henry Miller in relation to Deleuze and Guatarri's concept of a minor literature. It examines several passages from Miller's work in detail, demonstrating how his writing subverts the major language of English under which it operates. Language is exposed, and exploited, as instable and dynamic through a writing style that rests on the periphery of conventional functionality. Miller's seemingly mundane prose at once becomes fragmented and fluidic, surprising the reader into no longer engaging with the text as a straightforward and transparent construct but as a reexamination of the inherent complexity, and ultimate impossibility, of such a project. Miller's style defies literary expectations of pre-existing genres. It undermines the presumptuous and banal definitions ascribed to the purpose of writing and instead permits it to remain an activity that is definable and perpetuated only by its very resistance to concretization, encouraging new and marginal, or perhaps "minor," forms of writing.

This essay reads Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1934) as the trace of a belated expatriate moment that forms an American literary nexus by drawing together a number of provocative European artistic contexts. Miller’s relationship to the rhetoric of the manifesto is discussed, as is the creation of a powerful literary persona and narrating voice from the traces of a tissue of intertextual quotations. Miller draws on contemporary tropes of death, decadence and last things, and in the process, I argue, brings late Romantic and early twentieth-century texts from Nietzsche, Spengler, Strindberg, Goethe, Joyce, Élie Faure and Giovanni Papini together to articulate a late apocalyptic modernism.

European Journal of American Culture, 2011

This essay reads Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (1934) as the trace of a belated expatriate moment that forms an American literary nexus by drawing together a number of provocative European artistic contexts. Miller's relationship to the rhetoric of the manifesto is discussed, as is the creation of a powerful literary persona and narrating voice from the traces of a tissue of intertextual quotations. Miller draws on contemporary tropes of death, decadence and last things, and in the process, I argue, brings late Romantic and early twentieth-century texts from Nietzsche,

Journal of Humanities, 2008

Henry Miller's works, specifically the unofficial "Obelisk" trilogy and The Rosy Crucifixion Trilogy, provoke questions concerning the representation of the visual in the literary text, as the inclusion of real and fictional paintings and painters in Miller's texts are frequent occurrences. Such widespread traces of painting in Miller's work mediate both the narrator and the reader's relation to the text and to the world and raise questions of the stability of language in depicting other forms of art. Indeed, through the narrator's experiences with these arts, the reader enters, by means of ekphrastic descriptions, the world of the depicted art to the extent that written language permits. In this article, I provide a mapping of the ways in which the act of painting surfaces in Miller's work, which I separate into three categories. I call the first notional ekphrasis, where episodes experienced by the narrator are described as if they could be paintings themselves or as resembling paintings that do not actually exist (that, in fact, Miller is creating in the passages). The second category involves the manner in which Miller refers to paintings and to painters in order better to articulate or depict an episode in his own text. In these passages the narrator suggests that the events around him, which he is incidentally describing, remind him of actual paintings or suggest to him that they could be, or should be, part of actual paintings. I term this writing function referential ekphrasis. Lastly, Miller describes himself in * Ph.D., Comparative Literature, University of Washington, Seattle 174 detail in the act of painting and refers to various elements concerning the process and the medium of painting, a form of writing that I dub active ekphrasis. Thus, by engaging in several rather complex and self-conscious forms of ekphrasis, Miller develops an innovative writing style that encourages the reader to reflect on the impossibility of language as a stable, communicative tool and to reconsider the act of writing as a straight-forward mode of representation, and instead to recognize that all language use is an ongoing mode of creation, blurring the lines between artistic mediums and the expectations from those mediums.