The City of Light in Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer

摘要

This study contemplates artificial light, and specifically electric light, in Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1934). [1] A great deal remains to be explored regarding the presence of electric light as technology, as urban and domestic feature, and as contributor to mass culture in British and American literature in the early part of the twentieth century. Alex Goody explains, in Technology, Literature and Culture (2011), that “In attempting to give expression to the modern world, it seems inevitable that literature was articulated through the technologized perspective of the present.” [2] The technologized perspective at the heart of this study is Miller’s artificially lit perspective. Using light as a cultural platform to explore Miller’s novel, and setting the novel within the context of Paris’s celebration of lighting technology, one can access his ambivalent attitude towards technological advancement in a changing world. Miller uses the symbolic power of electric light to impart his dissatisfaction with an increasingly technologized world and yet Miller’s narrator is elated by the Seine “streaked with lights.” My analysis of artificial light in Miller’s text reveals his opposite and conflicting responses to life in the modern city. Furthermore, depictions of electric light contrast with the internal light of artistic genius, a leitmotif for Miller. I conclude by arguing that the novel’s self-referential ending, in which the sun sets on the Seine, leaves the reader with the light of Miller himself. [1] Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (1934) (London: Harper Perennial, 2005). [2] Alex Goody, Technology, Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 15.