Last month I have been reading a lot of Henry Miller (I reread Tropic of Cancer and Black Spring and I also read Tropic of Capricorn for the first time). Since I think that Henry Miller is not a well-read author today, partly because of his alleged misogyny, I would like to point out what I think are the most interesting and valuable aspects of his work. But before that let me make it clear that I don't have any reservations about the importance of Henry Miller's work. He is undeniably a great writer and his work definitely deserves to be read and even studied on universities. Despite his extraordinarily uneven writing - there is hardly any other great writer from the 20th century whose writing showcases that much oscillation in quality - I still regard Miller as one of the innovators of the 20th-century novel, alongside Céline, Beckett, Guyotat, and a few others.
First of all, there is an agreement among today's readers of Henry Miller that the sexual explicitness of his language and a few explicit sexual scenes found in his works, which is what initially got him famous, are the least interesting aspect of his work. Indeed, it is not hard to find other writers from the same period who showed much more craft and imagination in the description of human sexuality or eroticism than Henry Miller. However, that is not to say that sexuality is a negligible or unimportant aspect of his work, but simply that its most interesting expression should not be necessarily sought in sexual scenes.
With that said, there are many interesting aspects of Miller's work which all in some way or another have to do with his innovative and experimental use of language. One of those aspects are definitely Miller's poetic descriptions and surrealist visions, such as his descriptions of Paris in Tropic of Cancer, description of Broadway during the evening rush in Tropic of Capricorn, his highly poetic account of his early life with his second wife, Mona, and others. Some of these descriptions/visions use such a violent and bizarre imaginary that will not appear again in the American literature until the publication of Burroughs' Naked Lunch.
Another aspect of Miller's work that I find particularly interesting are his reflections which often expose a kind of philosophy of immanence or ontological monism present in the narrator's worldview. There are many such examples throughout his work. It is thus not surprising that Gilles Deleuze was drawn to his work. There are even some of Deleuze's concepts and famous thesis for which it can be argued that they were influenced by Miller's reflections.
Finally, possibly Miller's greatest contribution to literature, at least in terms of content, are his thoughts on the self. I think that at that time there was no other writer in the world who could be compared to Miller when it comes to his insights into the formation of self. This is after all not surprising if one remembers that self-revelation and self-expression stand in the center of Miller's literary project, as he himself proudly admitted on many places throughout his work. Indeed, I think that many philosophical theories of the self fall into the shadow of Miller's insights. This aspect of his work was first emphasized by George Orwell who in his essay on Tropic of Cancer, wrote that reading Henry Miller creates an impression that he wrote this especially for you, that he knows all about you, including your most intimate thoughts. This is again something of which Miller himself was well aware when he wrote in Black Spring that he believes that his personal history has universal importance. But it is important I think to add that the self into which Miller's work gives us insight is not a self of an ordinary man but a self of an exceptional individual, of a writer, artist, or philosopher. In that sense, it could be argued that Henry Miller is essentially a writer's writer. In other words, if other writers love to read his work, as many did, it is certainly because it reveals them something about themselves. This is also the way I experienced Miller's work, especially his second novel, Tropic of Capricorn. I would say that reading the works of Henry Miller had huge importance for my own understanding of myself and I would even go so far as to say that I wouldn't be the writer that I am now if there wasn't Henry Miller.
