Sunday Abstracts

Michael Paduano (France) 

From “Plan of Novel / June” to “Capricorn Notes”: Planning The Rosy Crucifixion

Like many ambitious projects, Henry Miller’s The Rosy Crucifixion began modestly enough—with an outline. Compiled in 1927, Miller’s notes for a planned novel chronicled the first four years of his tumultuous relationship with his second wife, June Edith Smith.

The creation of this document was the most pivotal moment in Miller’s artistic life up to that point. His use of it spanned every major phase of his career—from the posthumously published Crazy Cock, through successive drafts of Tropic of Capricorn, and onto The Rosy Crucifixion. For this reason, it offers a valuable entry point into the study of Miller’s writing practices.

Yet a number of basic questions about the outline’s history remain unanswered. How many versions and copies did Miller produce, and when? Does the original still exist? If so, where is it, and what is its relationship to later versions?

My presentation addresses these questions through a first-hand investigation of two archival sources: “Plan of Novel / June” and “Capricorn Notes.” By clarifying the chronology and relationship of these documents, I aim not only to resolve long-standing uncertainties but also to reposition both as touchstones for understanding the genesis of The Rosy Crucifixion and Miller’s evolving approach to composition.

Tatsuro Ide (Japan)

Passivity of the "I" as Responsibility to Others: Reconsidering The Rosy Crucifixion through New Modernist Studies

This paper explores the question of the passivity of the "I" as a possibility of responsibility to others in Henry Miller's The Rosy Crucifixion, a trilogy consisting of Sexus, Plexus, and Nexus, through the lens of what is called "new modernist studies"--a contemporary trend in modernist studies that has emerged in the 21st century. Early in his career, Miller received harsh criticism from George Orwell, who characterized the narrator of Tropic of Cancer as completely passive, lacking any active engagement with the outside world. This portrayal of a passive figure with a self-contained disposition corresponds closely to the typical image of the modernist subject as an isolated individual in traditional modernist studies. What is particularly noteworthy is that Miller did not attempt to revise this passive stance in his later works; rather, he further radicalized it by writing The Rosy Crucifixion. This trilogy, whose title explicitly refers to the "passion" of Jesus Christ, is set in a formative period of Miller's life in Brooklyn, before he became a writer and far from being an active agent of writing. Strikingly, this radical passivity forces the narrator to expose himself to the outside world, destabilizing the notion of the self-contained individual often associated with the modernist subject. As a result, in contrast to Orwell's critique, the narrator's passivity emerges as a critical source of his ongoing engagement with the various people he encounters. This characteristic attitude of the “I” resonates strongly with Judith Butler's discussion of “responsibility” in the practice of giving an account of oneself as an ethical connection to others. Reconsidering the question of passivity in this way offers a fresh perspective for interpreting Miller's autobiographical novels through the new modernist studies that explore not only the question of the self-contained individual but also their engagement with others.

Cheyanne Gustason (United States)

Henry Miller, Bodice Ripper?: Free Speech, Romance Novels, and the Unexpected Legacy of Miller’s Work in the 21st Century

Scholars of Henry Miller’s writing agree that the value of his work extends far beyond his groundbreaking portrayals of sex. However, Miller scholarship has bypassed one very important sector of modern literature which owes Miller a surprisingly large and unrecognized debt: the modern romance novel. This paper explores the overlooked intersection between Miller’s writing and romance novels and finds that the relationship between the two has far-reaching implications for passion, publishing, and free speech itself. Long underestimated, much like Miller’s writing in many circles, romance novels are the lifeblood of modern publishing. Adult fiction is the largest segment of the industry and romance is its highest grossing category, with estimated sales of over $1.4 billion dollars annually. While Miller’s work does not fall into the defined genre of romance (which did not exist as we know it until the 1970s, just before Miller’s death), his writings and worldview provided essential groundwork for its existence.

Miller championed the exploration of sexuality in his writing and also furthered the acceptance of other pioneers, including D.H. Lawrence, whose Lady Chatterley’s Lover was a watershed work in considering the female erotic experience. This paper will examine these topics as well as their greater historical and social context. Key points of focus include Miller’s perpetuation of a pleasure-centric and nonjudgmental worldview, his support of key contemporaries, and the importance of his landmark free speech case, Grove Press v. Gerstein (1964) without which romance novels would likely not exist today- legally, at least. This is especially timely as book banning efforts have grown in recent years, with romance novels at their center. Ultimately this paper will illuminate a corner of Miller scholarship that has been woefully neglected but has immense value—culturally, financially, and legally—for American society in the 21st century.

Kevin Wolke (Finland)

Henry Miller: The Antihumanist Existentialist

This paper finds a literary and philosophical home for Miller. It questions his spiritual transcendence and scrutinizes humanist ascriptions. To contextualize Miller’s writing, World War One proved humanity’s transformation into destroyers of worlds. The years before World War Two spawn imagery of decadence and decline. Somewhere between Fitzgerald’s exuberant Jay Gatsby and Céline’s disillusioned Ferdinand Bardamu, the excess of existence came to an apocalyptic halt. This was also the case for Miller’s Paris of the thirties. If Enlightenment humanism had once rendered individuals creators of meaning, his antihumanist reaction probed this individual. Was it overcoming nature through meaningful deeds? Was it an advanced or depraved animal? Or was humanity close to divinity? Late modernists like Miller considered all these options valid. This ambiguity mirrored philosophical advancements of the nineteenth century. Existential determinism, the metaphysical inevitability of dread, and the autonomous body were hard-won truths posited against reason and progress.

I hold that the American Miller can be read alongside continental philosophers like Cioran, Camus, or Sartre. Looking at recent volumes of the Miller journal Nexus, philosophical readings are still rare. No existentialist framework was ever detected, and we are left with comparative readings alongside Dostoevsky or Céline. While Miller’s reception of thinkers like Bergson or Nietzsche was studied by Jennifer Cowe (2020), Finn Jensen (2019) and Indrek Männiste (2013), the late modernist appears hostile to systematization. Any allegiance to metaphysical beliefs dissolves through the fluctuating contradictions within Miller’s musings. The self-aware, insecure nature of late modernism paired with the pessimism of antihumanist existentialism captures his prewar writing most aptly. In my paper, Miller will be embedded in European literature rather than identifying him with American modernists or the Beats. Through excerpts from his prewar writing, new themes will be disclosed to Miller scholarship: existential absurdity, unfulfilling mysticism, and bodily perception.

Diego Menendez (United States)

Henry Miller: Human or Inhuman?

Henry Miller is an understudied writer who is rarely treated with serious philosophical consideration. Indrek Männiste is one of a few critics recently who have approached Miller in a serious philosophical manner. Männiste views Miller as fundamentally on the side of the inhuman against the human; that is, the inhuman artist who surmounts the human and its failings. In this paper, I explore a different view of Miller’s system. Miller’s writing on the inhuman and human is too complex to place him squarely on the side of the inhuman and squarely against the human. In this paper, I attempt a more complete approach which fully takes into account Miller’s varied usages of his terms. I seek to reorient the view on Miller’s use of the terms human and inhuman by affirming equally the value of both in his writing. This is done by reorienting Miller’s philosophy around the Cancer and Capricorn— symbols Miller employs throughout his writing which stem from the zodiac. Miller, in a letter to Anaïs Nin, summarizes Cancer as essentially the “disease of civilization” and Capricorn as “renaissance in death.” There is the human and inhuman in both of them. This creates apparent contradiction in his writing in which he views the human both positively and negatively. Some have seen this as a reason to disregard Miller philosophically. I propose that there is a coherent philosophical system. However, I argue that it is not the human surmounted by the inhuman, but of Cancer surmounted by Capricorn.

James Reich (United States)

Henry Miler, Wilhelm Reich, and Twenty-first Century Existentialism

Colin Wilson, the English “new existentialist” author of The Outsider (1956), credits two articles by Mildred E. Brady as key to the reputational destruction of psychologist Wilhelm Reich. The first, in 1947, was Brady’s notorious Harper’s article “The New Cult of Sex and Anarchy.” Although this article uses Reich’s biopsychic work as a theoretical frame, the piece was more concerned with the destabilizing influence of Henry Miller. Brady constellated Miller and Reich from a critical, conservative perspective. She saw the Big Sur and Californian countercultures as informed by these two subversive figures. A decade later, Norman Mailer aligned Miller and Reich in his contentious 1957 essay “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.” Both Miller and Reich were engaged in forms of heroic embodiment that anticipate much of what concerns transpersonal psychology today. Each had a relationship to poverty and flesh, to nature and libidinal energies that are important to a twenty-first century existentialism and transpersonal psychology. As artificial intelligence and virtuality generate a new cult of animism —a retrograde move in a futurist disguise—how can Miller and Reich, aligned by both allies and critics in the mid-twentieth century, provide a guide for the middle of the twenty-first?