Tropic of Cancer ground-breaking in its day, has not held up

I sincerely hope Tropic of Canceris on the list of 100 greatest 20^thcentury novels based on its history and not for Henry Miller’s actual writing. The novel was banned in the USA for nearly 30 years, for being obscene and vulgar. When it came out in 1934, I’m sure the language in it was eye-popping, but in today’s generation it doesn’t stand out from the latest stand-up comics. I have to think all of the critics, who raved over this novel, loved it for breaking down barriers and bringing an underground culture to the mainstream, but on its own, again, I don’t think it is much of a novel.

In it, the main character “Henry” is living a wasteful life in Paris, France. He is about the worst human being I can imagine. He is intelligent and introspective, is well versed in all the great authors and painters and artists, but doesn’t use his knowledge for anything that can further the human being. He sets himself up above other authors, deriding their work as irrelevant, but never writes anything of his own. He feels entitled and wishes to live a life of luxury and opulence, but refuses to get a regular job. He mooches off his other bohemian-living friends where he can, spends his nights floating from one prostitute to another, and wastes any money he does happen to come across. For awhile he manages to scrape by off the money his wife in America sends him, but when she stops, he basically becomes homeless. By the end of the novel, he has even started stealing from his friends, the only way he can survive at that point.

If that were all there was to it, it would just be a dirty novel, but Miller spends whole sections of the novel rambling on about ideas and philosphy, or nothing at all. For instance, “I look again at the sign but it is removed; in its place there is a pane of colored glass. I take out my artifical eye, spit on it and polish it with my handkerchief. A woman is sitting on a dais above an immense carven desk; she has a snake around her neck. The entire room is lined with books and strange fish swimming in colored globes; there are maps and charts on the wall, maps of Paris before the plague, maps of the antique world, of Knossos and Carthage, of Carthage before and after the salting. In the corner of the room I see an iron bedstand and on it a corpse is lying; the woman gets up wearily, removes the corpse from the bed and absent-mindedly throws it out the window. She returns to a huge carven desk, takes a goldfish from the bowl and swallows it. Slowly the room begins to revolve and one by the one the continents slide into the sea; only the woman is left, but her body is a mass of geography…”

What is that even supposed to mean? It sounds like the ravings of a madman, and all I did was flip to a random page. There are huge portions of the book that are worse than that. If that is brilliant writing, maybe I’m not as much of an intellectual as I thought I was. Again, props to Miller for breaking down walls. I’m all for free speech and no censors in literature or art, but I didn’t get this book at all.