The one-book man is forbidding and funereal, but the man of too many books is like a sewer that retains only the worst and the outside of what passes through it. Such a man am I. In the convincing model, Roger Griffin lays out in Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of A Beginning Under Mussolini and Hitler, the threats of western modernity to the community and to the self were such that they were widely troped by the intellectual communities, especially those coming after Marx and Nietzsche, as decadent, and often as apocalyptic.
This sense of crisis precipitated movements for renewal across the political spectrum, stretching to the extremes of political left and right.
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Although Miller does not adopt what Sheppard calls the Vorticists and the Futurists March 8, As the biographies of Pound, Artaud, Nietzsche and Strindberg suggest, one cannot step in and out of this portentous rhetoric without repercussions for the self; there is a kind of hubris that haunts eschatological language when it is secularized. The language of the apocalypse puts the writer in a double bind: Through this will to power the first-person narrative becomes a kind of Faustian bargain, and it is striking how many of the inter- texts for Tropic of Cancer are megalomaniac at some point in their narratives, and how many of the accounts Miller touches on bring their own first-person narrators to the point where they attempt to wield great and demonic forces — fascism, the subconscious and the occult included.
Before crossing the Atlantic as the prophet of the new kingdom I must be, really and actually be, what I had dreamed of for myself during the long period of vigil, and what I had proposed that others should also become — a saint, a guide, a demi-god. In other words, to perform miracles. Moravagine cameos in Tropic of Cancer, travelling down the great flow of the Orinoco. Now and a thousand years ago. Tomorrow and a hundred thousand years ago. If you want to live, kill. Kill so that you can be free, or eat, or shit. The shameful thing is to kill in masses at a predetermined day, in honor of certain principles under cover of a flag, with old men nodding approval, to kill in a disinterested or passive way.
As Nietzsche demonstrates in his Anti-Christ, in shar- ing rhetoric with the diabolic these late Romantic voices seem to summon the catastrophe even as they rail against it. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, not a chair misplaced. He is a meteorologist, a weather prophet.
The weather will continue bad, he says. Pound, Comens argues, arrives at the March 8, You wear a piece of black crepe on your arm, you have a little ribbon in your buttonhole, and, if you are lucky enough to afford it, you buy yourself a pair of artificial lightweight limbs, aluminum preferably, and the public toilets reserved for veterans as a bathetic stab at a rich Ameri- can tourist: Let me show you, you velvet-snooted gazelle!
Abandoning Hope to Discover Life | Rain Taxi
The toilet, you say? This seems also to be true in , in the looming shadow of World War II. Miller never writes of the war, instead he writes around it and through it, using the apocalyptic voice to try to devour and absorb the power of death, disease and conflict.
More nuts and bolts, more barbed wire, more dog-biscuits, more lawn-mowers, more ball-bearings, more high explosives, more tanks, more poison gas, more soap, more tooth-paste, more newspapers, more education, more churches, more libraries, more museums. Forward without pity, without compas- sion, without love, without forgiveness.
Ask no quarter and give none! More battleships, more poison gas, more high explosives! More and more of it — until the whole fucking works is blown to smithereens, and the earth with it! For Miller the vocabulary of destruction is used more as March 8, The translations of Faure undertaken by Walter Pach and published in America in the mids are especially close to Miller in full steam — the passage I quote above about the Western Union messengers is a good example — both in their shared encyclopaedism and in the way they both use an anaphoric flow to marshal the creative destruction of the modern: Here are the tall chimneys like temple columns, the living animals of steel, with a heart, intestines, nerves, eyes, limbs, bones articulated like a skeleton, the turning, the sliding, the mathematical coming and going of belts, of pulleys, of connecting rods, and of pistons; here are the rigid roads, shining, and extending and intersecting to eternity, and the silent round of astronomical cupolas following the movement of the skies; here are the giant halls, and the bare facades of the factories, cathedrals dedi- cated to the cruel god who knows no other law than that of unbounded production.
It was an experiment which I felt obliged to conduct, and experiment between myself and my readers. The lines I chose to quote had become my very own and I felt that they had to be transmitted. Where they not every bit as important in my life as the haphazard encounters, crises and events which I had described as my own?
Why not pass Oswald Spengler on intact also since he was an event in my life? Nevertheless, the connection of Joyce with a religion of the word remains, and the section of the Wake Miller has chosen to plagiarize appeals to the same passion for the rare word and the startling prose rhythm that we see all the way through Tropic of Cancer. Even as Miller attempts to contain and dominate Joyce, he still finds the need to speak through these fragments of other texts.
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Here, where the river gently winds through the girdle of hills, lies a soil so saturated with the past that however far back the mind roams one can never detach it from its human background. I feel this river flowing through me — its past, its ancient soil, the changing climate. The hills gently girdle it about: The ancient soil that holds the cemeteries of European history is the still centre that Miller has found through creating a voice for himself out of the contrary and conflicting words of others, and so it is fitting that this is a moment with a literary history too.
Upon this rocky hilltop where the wind is never still I have once more found myself and my serenity.
Within the circle of these dark and pointed hills, in these fields, poor in flowers and grasses and rough with stones, in the shadow of these sturdy, untended oaks, to the sound of this clear and narrow stream which will flow through Rome broad and dirty, beneath this sky which is really blue, is transparent and delicate even when it is strewn with clouds, I have come once more to know the true smell of the earth, the taste of the air, the flavour of bread, the pleasant heat of a fire of logs and brushwood.
Little by little life has won me back through the beauty of its simplicity. I have become a child again, have become primitive, wild, and sylvan. University of Toronto Press.
Abandoning Hope to Discover Life
University of Min- nesota Press. A Century of Isms, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Brown from French , London: University of Alabama Press. A Literary Odyssey of the s, New York: Constructing the Self, Rejecting Modernity, London: Pach from French , London: University Press of Mississippi. The International Henry Miller Journal, 4, pp.
Hollingdale from German , London: An Age Like This, — The Collected Journalism, Essays and Letters, vol. Agnetti from Italian , London: Southern Illinois University Press. Northwest- ern University Press. Abridged Edition by Hel- mut Werner trans. Atkinson from German , London: Field from Swedish , London: Deborah rated it really liked it Oct 25, Simon Hyde rated it it was ok Dec 06, Lawrence A Callahan rated it really liked it Nov 09, Craig Hitchings rated it really liked it Jul 27, Marsha Mcgregor rated it did not like it Nov 10, John Hill rated it it was amazing Jul 22, Bedouinjester rated it liked it Jul 23, Jim Stallings rated it really liked it Aug 24, Ioana marked it as to-read Apr 19, Jess Van belkum marked it as to-read Aug 04, Logan marked it as to-read Feb 24, Stewart Muir marked it as to-read Aug 13, Coleen Long is currently reading it Mar 11, Kyla Dozier marked it as to-read Apr 11, Debbiedoesdctoo marked it as to-read May 04, Marsha is currently reading it Aug 26, Miriam Juan-Torres marked it as to-read Feb 06, Christopher Perez added it Mar 22, Bruno Ricciardi added it Apr 06, John Krueger is currently reading it Jul 02, Beate Huber marked it as to-read Jul 16, Ward is currently reading it Dec 22, Ted Strickland is currently reading it Dec 27, Kelli Mcknight is currently reading it Jan 04, Laurel is currently reading it Jan 26, Linda Grimshaw is currently reading it Feb 19, Finkbeiner is currently reading it Apr 15, Richard Larson is currently reading it Jun 19, Aaron is currently reading it Aug 12, Hegland is currently reading it Aug 12,