A Hidden Chain of Death in
Henry Miller’s “Jabberwhorl Cronstadt”
Abstract
Black Spring, Henry Miller’s second major publication, is often treated in a somewhat cursory fashion by scholars. Instead of subjecting the fiction to a consistently close reading, many critics recapitulate its contents and give the plot of each piece, when present, while others regard the book as a form of biographical writing. Though work has been done on “The Angel Is My Watermark!” and “The Tailor Shop,” there are few adequate explorations of the eight other pieces. “Jabberwhorl Cronstadt,” while not neglected, has not been examined at its roots, on the word level, where hidden meanings reside, and in that respect this paper sharply departs from previous criticism.
The argument begins with a sketch of the thematic and aesthetic role “Jabberwhorl Cronstadt” fulfils in Black Spring. From there the essay moves into the piece’s similarities with Lewis Carroll’s wordplay, to reach the point where the text’s language becomes the focus. Through denotative analysis of one illustrative passage a deliberately constructed yet previously unseen message is revealed, one of sickness leading to death, which rests in what look like random notes filled with odd words and nonsense phrases. This discovery opens a window into the piece’s full implications.
Far from being, as many regard it, a sunny word painting of Miller’s friend, the poet Walter Lowenfels, or, alternately, a whimsical exercise in word games, “Jabberwhorl Cronstadt” is a darker and more pregnant work than commentators have recognized. It is the aim of this essay to explicate a subtle and insufficiently analysed work by a skilful United States modernist.
Theater in a Novel:
Plexus’ Deep Structure
Abstract
The bulk of criticism devoted to the literary aspects of Henry Miller’s fiction deals with a limited set of broad topics: realism, surrealism, imagery, sexual content, and the depiction of characters. In addition, scholars usually concentrate on Miller’s early novels, expressing relatively little interest in his last fictional work, The Rosy Crucifixion, an unfinished trilogy. On questions of structural devices, the use of time, and chains of meaning in seemingly nonsensical sequences of words, Miller criticism has ground to make up. This paper attempts to move scholarship forward by rereading one book of the trilogy and showing its previously undiscovered, yet very definite, structure. A careful examination of Plexus, the second book, and Sexus, the first book, reveals that the organizing device Miller uses to contain the disparate material in Plexus is the theater.
I argue that the form of Plexus is a combination of vaudeville and burlesque. Evidence is plentiful within the text for such an interpretation: the deliberate set pieces, the numerous references to acting, and the narrator’s professed fascination with the stage. Significantly, Plexus’ form is foreshadowed in the carefully written second last chapter of Sexus.
Plexus, then, is not, as many critics charge, shapeless or uninteresting. Instead, it is a mixture of media, a literary variety show with the narrator at times in the role of compère. Far from writing in a sloppy manner, or lazily reconstituting memories of his youth, Miller artistically works out a structure that best showcases the variety of performances - fables, adventures, comic skits, melodrama - which is his primary material. Until now, Plexus’ debt to the theater has been overlooked.
Agapé Agape: A Novel
Afterword by Joseph Tabbi
Books in Canada - The Canadian Review of Books,
April 2003, Volume 32 No.3, pp.15-16.
Three Reviews:
Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections.
NY: Picador USA, 2002, 592 pp., $15.00, paperback, fiction.
James Buchan, The Persian Bride.
Boston: Mariner, 1999, 343 pp., paperback, fiction.
Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves.
London: Doubleday, 2002, 709 pp., paperback, fiction.
Quarter After Eight: A Journal of Prose and Commentary, Volume 9 (2002), pp.201-04, published in March 2003.
Cesare Pavese:
The Selected Works of Cesare Pavese
Trans. and introd. R.W. Flint
from Review of Contemporary Fiction,
Summer 2002, Vol. XXII No. 2, p. 234.
God, Hell, Sex and Tobacco
review of Collaborators by Janet Kaufmann
The Literary Review, London, England, No. 128, February 1989.
Spanish Fly By Night
review of City of Marvels by Carlos Mendoza
The Literary Review, London, England, No. 126, December 1988.
Unholy and Not Innocent
review of The Holy Innocents by Gilbert Adair
The Literary Review, London, England, No. 124, October 1988.
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