Henry Miller: His Craft Of Fiction

As an important and unique writer on the modern literary scene, Henry Miller (1891-1980) remains excruciatingly controversial due to his special aesthetics. His many works were accused of extravagant sexual descriptions and were banned for almost thirty years in English-speaking countries, the United States and Great Britain in particular. When alive, he was at once attacked and worshipped, and after his death he was soon forgotten.After his masterpiece Tropic of Cancer came out, most critics focused their attention on his bold sexual descriptions and regarded him either as a male chauvinist or as a herald of liberty and sexual freedom. Since a court decision ruled out the ban upon his books in 1961. Miller was drawing more and more critical attention. Critics began to attempt to interpret his works from different perspectives such as cultural, religious, linguistic, narrative, and ideological. Henry Miller studies abroad have yielded a great number of results, among which are Henry Miller by Kingsley Widmer, Critical Essays on Henry Miller by Ronald Gottesman, Always Merry and Bright by Jay Martin, Form and Image in the Fiction of Henry Miller by Jane A. Nelson, Henry Miller and His Surrealist Metaphor by Gay Louise Balliet, Henry Miller:the Modern Rabelais by John Parkin, Henry Miller and His Religion by Thomas Nesbit, and Henry Miller and Narrative Form:Constructing the Self, Rejecting Modernity by James M. Decker. These critical works are very helpful for readers'understanding of Henry Miller and his books, and provide a variety of perspectives for further research. Immensely interesting to me in these critical works are some scattered comments about the relationship between Henry Miller's aesthetics and his theme of self-reconstruction; these sporadic comments prove to be a source of inspiration for the idea and writing of this dissertation.Chinese scholars began to pay attention to Henry Miller's works since the 1980's, but their work has been mainly introductions and translations. As it is, there are two MA theses and doctoral dissertations concerning Henry Miller and his work. The related articles that can be found in CNKI databank amount to no more than ten in number, of which, The Preface to the Henry Miller Translation series by Yang Hengda is one of the best and proves to be another inspiration to the writing of this dissertation.On the whole, either in the West or in China, the critical and academic circles have not paid due attention to Henry Miller studies, and much remains to be done. For example, Henry Miller's aesthetics, his theme of self-reconstruction and especially the relationship between the two aspects of his craft are seldom touched upon. Both foreign and Chinese critics only mention these issues occasionally or they make tangential comments on them while discussing other topics in Henry Miller's works. So far in China no dissertation has been written about Miller's narrative strategies or his craft of fiction in relation to his theme of self-reconstruction.This dissertation discusses Henry Miller's works with reference to his life experience and the historical time he lived in. It also compares Miller with other writers in regard to his style. In the textual analysis, the biographical criticism is used throughout all chapters; in the analysis of the female image, Jungian psychoanalysis is employed. Using Miller's aesthetic strategies as its six-chapter subject and the self-reconstruction theme as its thematic focus, this dissertation attempts to view all Henry Miller's major works as an organic whole and tries to illustrate the features of his aesthetics.Chapter one introduces Henry Miller's life and his historical context and analyzes the two factors'influences upon his writing career. Henry Miller was born in a lower-middle class family in Brooklyn, New York. His amiable but weak father failed to be his role model. His strict and domineering mother intended to make him a successful man with a set of Puritan codes, but ended up making a rebel out of him. His mother's control and his second wife's betrayal, together with all his other numerous frustrations and failures, tore his selfhood to pieces. In addition, Miller's time witnessed loss of faith and the sense of disorderliness. Nietzsche's assertion of the death of God, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and Sigmund Freud's idea of split personality all contributed to modern man's sense of fragmentation. In a word, the combination of personal life and historical context leads to Miller's low self-esteem and agonizing diffidence and to the effort to reconstruct his self through writing.Chapter Two deals with all kinds of modem isms in Henry Miller's major works, such as surrealism, anarchism. Dadaism, expressionism, and Freudianism. Elaborating chiefly how surrealism and anarchism have influenced Henry Miller, how they are shown in his works, and how they are related to Miller's theme of self-reconstruction, Chapter Two points out that all Miller's modern isms have helped him in his quest for individualism.Chapter Three discusses the fragmentation, the phallic consciousness and the redemptive power of sex in Henry Miller's major works. Miller's narrative style of fragmentation ranges from form to content. His often misunderstood phallic consciousness is in fact his major medium for self-reconstruction. The omnipresent sex in his works serves as a gateway to redemption, helping both Miller the protagonist and Miller the writer to reach their personal and artistic maturity.Chapter Four, entitled "Filthy Language," tries to defend Miller's "dirty language" as a part of time-honored literary tradition and as a natural development of Miller's growing-up experience. This chapter holds that his "filthy language,' coupled with his poetic language, not only delineates a real world and his state of mind, but also helps make his voice heard all over the world, thus forming part of his aesthetic self. Also, this chapter briefly discusses the "first-person narrative point of view," and the "present tense," pointing out that they have become an integrated part of Miller's filthy language and helped achieve the effect of establishing an everlasting image of the archetypal "I."Chapter Five uses Jungian psychoanalysis to explore Miller's female images in relation to his theme of self-reconstruction. Miller's female images are mostly flat characters and represent either a positive or a negative force or the combination of the two in his self-rebuilding. Miller the writer as well as Miller the protagonist is unconsciously struggling between the two forces. The peculiar characterization of female images reveals such a stalemate of Miller's. Also, such characterization can not be separated from the fact that Henry Miller has been fighting against all women like his mother and the fact that he has been trying to explore and get rid of the mysteries of women embodied in his second wife, June, who has fascinated him as much as terrified him.The Conclusion summarizes the analysis above, concluding that Henry Miller's life and writing are inseparable, and that his autobiographical works are a record of his aesthetic pursuit and rebuilding of the self. To achieve this purpose, Henry Miller employs several aesthetic strategies such as the carnival of modern isms, the fragmentation and phallic consciousness, the filthy language, and the female image. Then, the chapter goes on to reveal what the "Miller" looks like after the reconstruction effort, pointing out that the self.Miller the writer manages to reconstruct represents archetypal Everyman as well as a particular individual. Finally, the chapter holds that Henry Miller is a transitional literary figure and a late modernist writer who has contributed to American and world literature through his autobiographical writing, has pushed the boundaries of literary expression further back and innovated and enriched literary expression through his craft of fiction, and has thus restored life to literature in his way. By virtue of all this, Henry Miller is here to stay for ever in literary history.