Saturday Abstracts

 Abhijit Bhattacharjee (India)

Gods without number and without name”: Henry Miller, India and Mysticism

Henry Miller's mysticism is a widely overlooked aspect of his literary and philosophical project. While widely characterized as a transgressive writer of semiautobiographical fiction, Miller was deeply influenced by diverse spiritual strands, and particularly Indian traditions of mysticism. In The Books in My Life, he cites The Gospel of Ramakrishna as an influence, and Karl Orend goes so far as to assert that “Henry Miller was essentially a Hindu writer.” India, to Miller, was not merely an imagined, exotic geography but a rich intellectual and spiritual reference point—a limitless repository of mysticism that shaped the philosophy of American writers from the Transcendentalists to Miller.

Miller's mysticism pervades his entire oeuvre, from the surrealist Black Spring and the transgressive Tropic novels to the burlesque-inflected Sexus and the deeply interior Plexus and Nexus. Of these, Nexus, the third and final book of The Rosy Crucifixion, contains some of Miller's most explicit meditations on Indian spiritual figures such as Ramakrishna and Vivekananda. And yet, despite all this, Miller’s later works are underread and under-examined both in the West and in India. This paper attempts to bring the importance of The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy to the fore and to reinterpret Miller's work in the light of mysticism.

Drawing on Indian monistic traditions, and particularly Kashmiri Śaiva metaphysics and soteriology, I argue that Miller's mysticism is tune with the Śaiva theory of pratyabhijñā (self-recognition), according to which the body is itself a site of mystical realization rather than a barrier to transcendence. Through an analysis of Miller's involvement in the mystic tradition—both in its spiritual and desacralized forms—this paper reexamines the conventional view of Miller as solely a writer of transgressive fiction. Instead, it places his work within an expanded mystical discourse, demonstrating that his writing maps a persistent desire for oneness, richly informed by India, which for Miller was the land of “Gods without number and without name”.

 Sebastian Słowiński (Poland)

How Have We Read Henry Miller in Poland and How Should We Read Him Today?

Metamodern perspective Henry Miller in Poland was first published in the 1960s. It was an inconspicuous story The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder. It was not until 12 years later that The Colossus of Maroussi was published, and then in 1987 an entire volume devoted to the work of the author of Tropic of Cancer. For those 20 years, Miller was a writer whose reception was narrowed to these two most non-Miller (because of its lack of obscene) items. It was not until the late 1990s and early 2000s that all of Miller's important books reached Polish readers. And despite Miller's presence on the Polish publishing market for many years now, he still remains an unknown writer and neglected from the Polish literary circuit. How did this happen and what are the possible interpretative strategies of his work? The very first notice on Henry Miller in polish literature comes from Czesław Miłosz’s essay “Henry Miller or Rock Bottom” from 1948, where the author considers Miller’s prose as well written pornography. He also undermines Miller’s authenticity and challenges his philosophy as a dangerous for the world (mainly through his declared neutrality). As we might think, the poet’s interpretation consolidated Henry Miller’s place in polish literary and critical circuit: that is both disregard and reducing him to a pornographic, obscene writer. After the decades of misreading Miller, I would like to present a metamodern perspective through which he can be read today. Metamodernism thus can be understood as – like Timotheus Velmeulen and Robin van den Akker put it – “an oscillation between a typically modern commitment and a markedly postmodern detachment.” This interpreting frame might bring Miller to a new ground understanding his as a writer who picks up a current need for an existential change of the western attitude in humanities, politics and everyday life.

Katy Masuga (France)

Writing toward a Continually Receding Horizon

Miller’s works exemplify writing as a space of rebellion against fixed meaning, where the act of creation disrupts the traditional relationship between the author, the text, and the reader. Through this lens, Miller emerges not only as a provocative writer, but a pioneer of linguistic experimentation and narrative subversion, engaging with the limits of language and the elusiveness of meaning in literature. Like Orpheus in the underworld seeking to rescue his beloved Eurydice, looking back to confirm her presence thereby losing her and himself eternally, Miller annihilates the end of the text, emphasizing how language refers not to the physical thing, but only to an idea of it. With this discovery, he plays fully and indiscriminately. Miller writes at the end of language, presenting the world in literature as incomplete, a joke, a plaything. With much humor, his work embodies the buzzing tension where language reveals (and revels in) its limits, constantly striving and necessarily failing (joyously) to articulate it. Through humorous subversion, fragmented narrative form and self-reflexive language, Miller highlights not only the inability of language to fully represent lived experience but also that literature is doing something else entirely. As Blanchot writes in The Space of Literature (1955), the art of literature “reveals itself only through dissembling itself in the work.” Like Camus' Sisyphus, whom “one must imagine happy” (1942), Miller is the great dissembler, blissfully showing how writing is a process of moving toward a continually receding horizon.

Finn Jensen (Denmark)

Comparative Study of Henry Miller and Louis-Ferdinand Céline – and an Evaluation of Their Relevance in Modern Society.

In this study I will follow their individual development starting form a mutual platform: Paris in the 30’ies to their philosophy later in life as “refugees” from modernity. Miller in Big Sur, Céline first on the run, then as a prisoner and refugee, and finally in his “exile” in Meudon outside of Paris.

They shared the eschatological view of a society in dissolution, they shared the violent language and a willingness to shock. They shared the belief that they lived in the end of a civilization, but for Miller this meant new possibilities, for Céline it really meant the end. I will focus upon examples from their early works and from their latest statements. 

Munehiro Nohira (Japan)

The Significance of Henry Miller for Vietnamese Poet-Thinker Pham Cong Thien

Pham Cong Thien (1941–2011) was a poet-thinker who emerged in South Vietnam during the 1960s under the Vietnam War and gained attention. Deeply moved by reading the works of Henry Miller during his teenage years, Thiện praised Miller in his critiques, saying such things as, “To say that Henry Miller is the greatest genius of the whole history of Western and Eastern Culture is only a way of using the verbal process to express what is inexpressible and inevitable.” He actively introduced Miller's works to South Vietnam in the 1960s.

In 1965, Thien visited Miller's home in Pacific Palisades and, upon meeting him for the first time, declared, “I will kill you, Henry Miller.” This statement, reminiscent of the Zen motto “If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha,” was the highest form of praise directed toward Miller. Miller came to recognize Thien as the “Vietnamese Rimbaud.” Subsequently, Thien and Miller continued their relationship through an exchange of letters, maintaining their friendship until the late 1970s.

Although Pham Cong Thien and his friendship with Henry Miller are mentioned in David Stephen Calonne's The Colossus of Armenia (Roger Jackson, Michigan, 1997), Thien remains virtually unknown in Western countries beyond this reference.

In this presentation, I will introduce the correspondence and relationship between Pham Cong Thien and Henry Miller and analyze why Thien admired Miller. More specifically, I will argue, based on Thien's writings, that he resonated with Miller's critique of modern material civilization, as represented by the United States. Additionally, Thien perceived Miller as someone who grasped the concept of “Being”—a notion forgotten in Western modernity, as Heidegger pointed out in the 20th century—through an Eastern philosophical perspective. By doing so, I aim to shed light on the possibilities that Henry Miller offers regarding the question of “Being.”

Partha Sarathi Gupta (India)

The “Debris of the Disinherited”: A Comparative Study Between Miller's Tropic of Cancer and Nabarun Bhattacharya's Herbert (1993)

This paper will present a comparative reading strategy, drawing parallels between Henry Miller's aesthetics of the diseased, pulverized, charred, and ulcerated, and that of the modern Bengali novelist Nabarun Bhattacharya (1948–2014), a radical Bengali writer known for his unflinching portrayal of urban decay, subaltern resistance, and Marxist critique. Best known for Herbert (1993), his sewage aesthetic—ejecting filth and cockroaches “streaming out of from the lattice of the sewer,” emitting “the pungent odour of the hot, sour and slippery vomit...” strangely resonates with Miller's aesthetics of the sordid in Tropic of Cancer, where bodily effluvia and the degradation of flesh become central to the experience of modernity.

The spirit of the flânerie in Miller, out in the streets of Paris in the 1930s, to live on the edge, spontaneously blends into the focalizer's world in Herbert, Nabarun's first novel set in the underbellies of the city of Calcutta in the 1990s, still feeding on the carcass of a disintegrating communist Soviet.

I argue that both authors employ a radical aesthetics of dirt both in response to their own city and also as an existential and political criticism of their times. From this comparative perspective, the study will demonstrate how Miller and Bhattacharya create narratives wherein dirt and rot are sites of resistance, defying literary convention and offering alternative modes of interaction with the city, the body, and the abject.

Joan Ganny (Netherlands)

Henry Miller Asleep and Awake

I have written what has been thought to be one of the last interviews with Henry in 1974-7 and photographed him in color and black and white. My interviews were published in Penthouse magazine and Viva, their women’s glossy magazine, and Shakespeare & Company journal 1984. I also had an excerpt of the interview on my syndicated radio program Off the Record on KWST Los Angeles. in 1976 . I will talk about my conversations with Henry and photographing him.

Arthur Hoyle (United States)

Henry Miller in Paris, A Screenplay

The screenplay draws from several sources in the Miller oeuvre to tell the story of his first years in Paris, during which he wrote his breakthrough novel Tropic of Cancer while juggling romantic relationships with Anais Nin and his second wife June. The script blends scenes from Cancer, Capricorn, and other written works such as “Madame Claude” with factual accounts of Miller’s daily life in Paris to blur the line between his art and his life, as Miller sought to do through his writing. Viewers of the intended film can never be certain if they are witnessing Miller’s life or his fictionalized version of it. The script attempts to create the psychological atmosphere of Tropic of Cancer.

Mark SaFranko (United States) 

ADAPTING MILLER FOR THE STAGE

Mark SaFranko (novelist, playwright) will discuss his experiences adapting parts of the Rosy Crucifixion for his stage play Miller In Love in the 1990s and the complex play development process. In addition, he will talk about his career as a novelist with a following primarily in Europe, and how cultural values and the zeitgeist make for a schism between audience acceptance in the US and Europe –- a parallel experience to that of Henry Miller during his lifetime.

Lisa Elliot-Rosas (United States)

Henry Miller as Archetype

“There is a resemblance between men and women, not a contrast. When a man begins to recognize his feelings, the two unite. When men accept the sensitive side of themselves, they come alive.” —Anaïs Nin

When one thinks of Henry Miller, images of a fearless bohemian writing about graphic sexuality, philosophical yearnings, surrealistic imaginings, mysticism, and uncompromising truths emerge. However, one cannot escape visions of a man based on “I” whose musings exemplify today's ego based  masculinity. Masculinity is often associated with the way the outer world views us. Our Masculinity displays our conquest and ego, boldness, or power. Masculine connotes the external, and Feminine the internal. If the male role is to hunt, the female role is to gather, introspect, reflect on our conquests and make meaning out of them. At a superficial glance, Miller did illustrate the traits of ego based masculinity. However, he transcended this characterization as he sought to rebalance himself by turning to nature, finding inner peace, facing his Feminine side, and therefore became an archetype for transformation.

“Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again.” —Anaïs Nin

After Miller and his long-time lover and collaborator, Anaïs Nin, separated, Miller was out of balance. However, he knew it and yearned to become whole again; this makes his story especially relevant today. In light of the current #metoo movement and the continued allegations about the abuse of power by creative men, our film, Henry, allows us to examine the mythological image of the ego based male and the artist. An intelligent, reflective, and determined writer, Miller struggled his entire career with the selfish, entitled behaviors his talent and fame allowed. He was not only an outstanding writer who first wrote about sex. He was also a seeker, digging for spiritual truths about human existence, community, connection, peace, joy, laughter, and what it means to live a transcendent life. Miller's story offers potential for cultural expansion, a move away from the image of the descending artist created by the myth of many others, including Ernest Hemingway.

This outdated myth has permeated the collective consciousness. Miller had a banned book and hardship holding onto intimate relationships. He faced an existential crisis, and took the road less traveled: the road towards himself. He in his own right was a hero as he looked within to reflect! Here is where his path deviates from the likes of Hemingway. Miller sought to balance his Masculine and Feminine aspects and turn inwards. He turned to Mother Nature and, in doing so, humbled himself beneath her power. Miller confronted and reconciled his demons leading him into a dark night of the soul. With looking outside himself for a place or person to save him,  Miller could have quickly walked down the path of so many men before and after him — looking outside themselves for validation. However, he knew there was more. Miller determined to face his defects and therefore liberated himself from their captivity.

Miller had so far to go, which makes his story relevant: the path he took in Big Sur, he battled his shadow amidst the wilds of nature and found community, joy, and inner peace. Once pushed by the unexpected challenge of parenthood, Miller found the drive to dig deeper into himself and chase away the demons that held him back. Not only was he a truly devoted and loving father, but he also evolved and became a caring individual who impacted and inspired so many. He was one of the creators of the Bohemian movement in Big Sur. As Miller stated, “Big Sur kills the weak. Literally. Figuratively. Spiritually. Egotistically. You name it, and this place will cleanse you of it, and I'm dying, but I need to be reborn.” His awareness and willingness to succumb to nature allowed him to change. True to the nature of his work, Miller challenged himself and started the complicated process of becoming a better man and, through that process, a deeper writer. Through awareness, community, nature in Big Sur and freedom he was able to transform from ego to true self and live a life of truth from the heart!  This was a ripple effect to so many others that created in an array of art forms and an upward mentality.