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Overview
An engaging invitation to rediscover Henry Miller—and to learn how his anarchist sensibility can help us escape “the air-conditioned nightmare” of the modern world
The American writer Henry Miller's critical reputation—if not his popular readership—has been in eclipse at least since Kate Millett's blistering critique in Sexual Politics, her landmark 1970 study of misogyny in literature and art. Even a Miller fan like the acclaimed Scottish writer John Burnside finds Miller's "sex books"—including The Rosy Crucifixion, Tropic of Cancer, and Tropic of Capricorn—"boring and embarrassing." But Burnside says that Miller's notorious image as a "pornographer and woman hater" has hidden his vital, true importance—his anarchist sensibility and the way it shows us how, by fleeing from conformity of all kinds, we may be able to save ourselves from the "air-conditioned nightmare" of the modern world.
Miller wrote that "there is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy," and in this short, engaging, and personal book, Burnside shows how Miller teaches us to become less adapted to the world, to resist a life sentence to the prison of social, intellectual, emotional, and material conditioning. Exploring the full range of Miller's work, and giving special attention to The Air-Conditioned Nightmare and The Colossus of Maroussi, Burnside shows how, with humor and wisdom, Miller illuminates the misunderstood tradition of anarchist thought. Along the way, Burnside reflects on Rimbaud's enormous influence on Miller, as well as on how Rimbaud and Miller have influenced his own writing.
An unconventional and appealing account of an unjustly neglected writer, On Henry Miller restores to us a figure whose searing criticism of the modern world has never been more relevant.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400889228 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/27/2018 |
| Series: | Writers on Writers , #10 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 208 |
| File size: | 490 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
In Praise of Flight
There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy.
— Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi
La fuite reste souvent, loin des côtes, la seule façon de sauver le bateau et son équipage. Elle permet aussi de découvrir des rivages inconnus qui surgiront à l'horizon des calmes retrouvés. Rivages inconnus qu'ignoreront toujours ceux qui ont la chance apparente de pouvoir suivre la route des cargos et des tankers, la route sans imprévu imposée par les compagnies de transport maritime. Vous connaissez sans doute un voilier nommé "Désir."
— Henri Laborit, Éloge de la fuite
A man wakes. He knows exactly what is going to happen today, or at least he thinks he does (like everyone, he knows that the unexpected might occur at any time, that he might go to see his doctor and be told he has an inoperable cancer, or his girlfriend, who stood by him all through that messy divorce, will call him at the office mid-morning to say that she has met someone else, but he keeps the thought of random harm at bay as well as he is able, usually by means of a combination of superstition, moral duplicity, and steady, if uninventive, self-medication). He knows what will happen today, not necessarily in the details, but in the overall pattern: he will go to work and try to achieve something that matters to him, but he will be subjected to a constant stream of tedious interruptions and dubious bureaucracy. When the phone rings, it will be somebody he doesn't want to talk to; when an e-mail arrives, it will convey yet another pointless demand on his time and energy. He will, in short, spend far too much, and oftentimes all, of his day rendering unto Caesar, and almost none of it doing what he wants to do. What this man needs is not a change in his lifestyle, or a new job, or a new wife. What he needs is la fuite.
La fuite: I use the French term (after French surgeon and philosopher, Henri Laborit) because there is no right term in English: "flight" is not only not good enough, but also carries undertones of "running away" to no other end than (cowardly) escape. La fuite, as described by Laborit in his extraordinary Éloge de la fuite is different. It is a leap of the imagination, a total renewal, a commitment to the soul's logic and, if necessary, a time-out from Caesar's world for long enough that our hypothetical office worker can tear himself open and try to heal what is buried in his frontal cortex, or his heart, or his gut. It is not a simple matter, like reculer pour mieux sauter — for that is still to abide by a societal logic. It is an act, not of cowardice, but of courage. Gide says it most succinctly: "On ne découvre pas de terre nouvelle sans consentir à perdre de vue, d'abord et longtemps, tout rivage" (One cannot discover new lands unless one consents, for a long time, to lose sight of the shore).
That said, there is nothing grand, or grandiose, about la fuite. Conducted in the right spirit, it can have the feel of a game (though it is one of our more common mistakes that, because it is not solemn, we assume that play is also not serious). Play is not only serious, it is essential. How, and if, we play is, in fact, a matter of (meaningful) life or death. Here is Miller, in a newspaper interview from the 1970s: "One of my ex-wives, when she left me, walked off with all the furniture — everything a bourgeois home should have she took. I began to get boxes from the grocery store to sit and eat on. I made a little table out of the boxes. I was at home with them and then I got the idea, 'Henry, goddamn it, why don't you buy a pair of roller skates and go roller-skating through the rooms here.' I had a marvellous time." From this example, it is clear that, from the first, la fuite defies conventional rationality. We do not embark upon la fuite to think about our possible options: on the contrary, we do so when we understand that our possible options can only return us to the condition we were in before — which is to say, governed by forces outside our own will. La fuite is a scrubbing of possible options, a rejection of the societal solution — though only because it seeks to go beyond the usual options, and push back the limits of reasoning. In fact, it's not simply that you cannot find a new land until you have courage to lose sight of the familiar shore, the sailor must lose sight of that shore — of the old system, the old way of life, the former wife, the possessions and even, in one of Miller's favorite exercises in la fuite, that most precious of entities, his homeland.
It should be remembered, though, that la fuite only works if the sailor can take it as a given, before weighing anchor, that everything is permitted to the imagination. As Miller says, "Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything godlike about God, it is that. He dared to imagine everything." Logic has its limits, but there are no actual limits to what could be imagined in a free world. As Terence says, "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto" (I am human, and nothing human is alien to me). Unless this is the case, la fuite is nothing more than a daydream. However, we live in a society bent on limiting, and even denigrating, the imagination (entrepreneurs excepted), and, as any anarchist can tell you, the first obstacle to a just community, in which men and women might govern themselves, is the early and ruthless application of social conditioning to the defenseless child's imagination, a process that begins as soon as he or she is old enough to mimic, to recognize punishment, and to listen. Societal conditioning aims at controlling every aspect of a person's life: body image, sexuality, expectations, sense of home, ability to grieve, earning capacity, societal role and status. Most of all, it seeks to control, to inhibit, and, wherever possible, to stultify the imagination and keep the machinery of Capital supplied with more or less docile operators. That the wastage rate is high is neither here nor there to the "1 percent."
THEORY OF LA FUITE
There is much more to Éloge de la fuite than can be discussed in the space available here. It is unfortunate, to say the least, that, to date, only two of Henri Laborit's books have been published in English translation. Certainly, Laborit is a fascinating figure, a genuine Renaissance man — scientist in several fields, philosopher, social observer, and maverick — yet he has long been unjustly overlooked and was even denied a Nobel Prize, for purely political reasons.
Henri Marie Laborit was born in Hanoi in 1914. Though he suffered from tuberculosis as a child, he excelled in school and, having gained his baccalauréat in Paris, he entered the School of Naval Medicine at Bordeaux (his father, who died of tetanus when Laborit was six years old, had also been a military physician). As a navy surgeon, Laborit began his first researches in anesthesiology, which in turn led to work in pharmaceutical research and, eventually, to the development of chlorpromazine, initially used to treat soldiers suffering from shell shock after World War II, and then later on a wider spectrum of conditions. In spite of the broad range of his research, his work in this area is considered Laborit's principal achievement. Chlorpromazine — also colloquially known as "Laborit's drug" — was marketed as Largactil at the end of 1952, and, though its use as an antipsychotic has been more or less discontinued over the past decade or so, it has been widely used to treat a variety of disorders since that date.
Yet Laborit's contribution to pharmacology is only one aspect of his wide range of interests and achievements, which included biology, town planning, human and animal behavior, biopsychosociology and psychosomatics, as well as social and political science. Nominated for the Nobel Prize in the 1990s, he was passed over for political reasons — for, like Miller, Laborit wasn't just a restless, multi-talented individual; he was also highly independent, a freethinker who did not follow the party line and did not suffer fools gladly. Most important, he was not to be governed. Indeed, he remained independent throughout his life, receiving no salary (other than his navy pay) or state money to run his laboratories, funding them instead through the sale of patents for his several innovations in pharmaceuticals.
To travel any further on this path would be to digress. My present interest in Laborit is in his theory of la fuite, or to paraphrase, his tenet that, at times, escape is the only way to stay alive and keep dreaming. However, as he also notes, there are different kinds of escape, and the reasons why we fail to get clear of danger are not always clear. On the first point, it is important that the escapee is driven by a strong desire to change his life, a desire that is usually predicated on refusal of unacceptable, unjust, or stifling environmental conditions, and/or a desire to fulfill a potential that has been denied: "When it can no longer battle the wind and the rough sea, there are two ways a sailboat can continue on its way: by drifting at the mercy of the wind and the tides, or flight before the storm, with a minimum of sail. Often, far from shore, flight becomes the only way to save the ship and its crew. It also allows for the discovery of unknown shores that appear on the horizon after the storm has passed. Unknown shores that lie far from the sea lanes of the great cargo boats and tankers, sea lanes imposed by the great shipping companies. No doubt you have heard of a sailboat called 'Desire.'"
La fuite, then, is a strategy for preserving the integrity of "Désir" in a hostile world that would bend or break that desire to its will — and Laborit is an adept at describing exactly what constitutes "times like these." In his beautifully eloquent, yet profoundly unsettling, conclusion to the book, he provides a catalogue of modern ills (many of them overlap entirely with the diagnoses made by Miller in his social criticism) that appear both overwhelming in their variety and severity, and inexcusable in their blatant injustice. Reading this list, we are obliged to confront an industrialized culture that can no longer be tolerated, yet we seem not to know how to change it. Why? Laborit's suggestion, in part, is that our social conditioning marries each human organism's primal instinct for self-preservation with what societal institutions claim is the greater good of the whole, even though it is blatantly only the good of a privileged few (or, according to another, more generous argument, which sees the compulsion to accrue excess wealth as a kind of psychiatric disorder, the good of nobody at all).
This view depends on a certain understanding of how evolutionary imperatives govern all living organisms and of how social institutions mobilize these imperatives in pursuit of their own organizational ends. According to Laborit, there are four types of behavior in humans: (1) At the most basic level, we consume, that is, we satisfy our "basic needs," such as eating, drinking, sleeping, and so forth. As long as these needs are met, we (2) seek gratification, that is, whenever we experience a stimulus that causes pleasure, we attempt to repeat it. We can see these behaviors as pre-social in a sense: they will happen in any living organism, as long as the wherewithal for consumption and gratification are at hand. However, the next behavior, (3) a variation on the standard fight-or-flee mechanism, is, in most humans, almost entirely social, or at least, is usually a response to pressure from a social group (family, peers, chain of command, neighbors, community, spouse, among others). This behavior is reactive, an attempt to avoid punishment or aggression, whether by fighting, in hopes of destroying the aggressors, or fleeing (at least temporarily) to avoid them. Finally, there is (4) inhibition, when the defeated subject waits anxiously — but passively — for the next uncontrollable, seemingly random occurrence that will "happen to" him. As Laborit notes, anxiety of this kind marks the impossibility of mastering a situation, and it would seem essential, to safeguard the integrity of the individual, to avoid this final behavior at any cost:
Tant que mes jambes me permettent de fuir, tant que mes bras me permettent de combattre, tant que l'expérience que j'ai du monde me permet de savoir ce que je peux craindre ou désirer, nulle crainte: je puis agir. Mais lorsque le monde des hommes me contraint à observer ses lois, lorsque mon désir brise son front contre le monde des interdits, lorsque mes mains et mes jambes se trouvent emprisonnées dans les fers implacables des préjugés et des cultures, alors je frissonne, je gémis et je pleure. Espace, je t'ai perdu et je rentre en moi-même. Je m'enferme au faite de mon clocher où, la tête dans les nuages, je fabrique l'art, la science et la folie.
(As long as my legs allow me to flee, as long as my arms allow me to fight, as long as my experience of the world allows me to decide what I can fear or desire, there is no problem: I can act. But when the human world compels me to observe its laws, when my desire butts its head against the forbidden, when my hands and my legs are imprisoned in the relentless irons of prejudices and cultures, then I shudder, I moan and I weep. Space: I have lost you and I return to myself. I close myself up in my steeple [clocher] where, head in the clouds, I manufacture art, science and madness.)
This latter point may seem a little worrying in its apparent agreement with Freud's rather strict notions of how sublimation works. However, it is not suggested as a model to be followed. Beyond that withdrawal into my own space (clocher), is the most mature choice of all: to act (which, paradoxically, may be the choice to refrain from acting, or rather, the refusal to act as expected). In the end, la fuite offers a temporary withdrawal that is not, on the one hand, an ivory tower or false community in which a cruel, ugly world is rejected for the sake of the finer things in life (clocher not only means bell tower, or belfry; it can also suggest a narrow parochialism), nor, on the other, a simple breathing space from which to take stock of "real-world" (i.e., societal) options, but a voyage into unknown waters in pursuit of a new way of being.
This form of flight, this game, is possibly Henry Miller's favorite pursuit: he played la fuite often, in his personal life, and in his fiction, sometimes by choice, sometimes by contriving social conditions where he had no other option than to strip everything away and begin again. "I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive," he says, as Tropic of Cancer opens. Later, he notes: "Nobody, so far as I can see, is making use of those elements in the air which give direction and motivation to our lives. Only the killers seem to be extracting from life some satisfactory measure of what they are putting into it. The age demands violence, but we are getting only abortive explosions. Revolutions are nipped in the bud or else succeed too quickly. Passion is quickly exhausted. Men fall back on ideas, comme d'habitude."
The beauty of la fuite is in going beyond the point where it is possible to fall back on ideas. The era of comme d'habitude is over: now is the time of the assassins. This idea sits at the center of Miller's world, but, his own life and work notwithstanding, the most elegant, the cruelest, and the most extravagant instance of la fuite that he would encounter came from an obscure autobiographical work by a onetime author and sailor from Germany, a man who abandoned everything — family, homeland, passport, identity — to be "one with the sea."
HEIMAT
In 1946, Miller published a substantial review of George Dibbern's Quest, the true story of one man's journey from Nazi Germany to New Zealand, where, in his youth, he had spent some time living with the Maori at Dannevirke, after jumping a merchant vessel in Sydney in 1909. Then, in 1918, he was placed in an internment camp for a year before being deported back to Germany. Dibbern seems to have formed strong ties in New Zealand, especially with a Maori woman named Rangi, whom he considered his "spiritual mother." However, he made a genuine effort to settle in Germany, marrying a woman named Elisabeth Vollbrandt in 1921, and setting up as a small farmer in Schleswig-Holstein, where he and Elisabeth had three daughters over the next five years. His attempts at farming were not particularly successful, however, and after several other business ventures failed, he moved to Berlin, where he began to publish short stories based on his experiences among the Maori. Finally, as the situation in Germany became more and more uncertain, he decided to return to his first love — the sea. He had, by now, few assets, but he still had a boat that his brother-in-law had built for him, and, in 1932, he left his family behind and crossed the Atlantic in that newly refurbished vessel, a thirty-two-foot ketch he called Te Rapunga (Maori for "Black Sun"), eventually landing in San Francisco after 101 days without touching land. From there, he proceeded via Hawaii to New Zealand, where he found that Mother Rangi had died in his absence. Meanwhile, after death threats were issued from Nazi groups in New Zealand and at home in Germany, Elisabeth refused to make the journey to join her husband, and he was now alone.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
By Way of a Preface, ix,
In Praise of Flight, 1,
Like a Fluid (The False Pornographer), 25,
On Love and Property, 46,
Henry Miller as Anarchist, 72,
Like a Fluid (The Great Romantic), 96,
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, 106,
The Time of the Assassins, 131,
The Creature World, 141,
Notes, 165,
What People are Saying About This
"Exploring Henry Miller's reputation and work and making the case for his relevance today, John Burnside has written a lively, engaging appreciation with an exhilarating, globe-trotting literary range."—Kasia Boddy, University of Cambridge"John Burnside, a remarkable writer, vividly shows his affinities with Henry Miller. Paralleling Miller's style, Burnside is impressionistic, digressive, hyperbolic, and sometimes outrageous. He argues that Miller wrote to ‘find out if books can help us to live better,' and this is Burnside's aim too. Burnside and Miller make a good match."—Jay Martin, Claremont McKenna College