On the dehumanizing universe of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer: the code of obscenity and its interaction with other elements

Abstract

The following article shows why Henry Miller’s novel Tropic of Cancer should not be labelled as a pornographic nor dehumanizing novel through the prism of a scientific and non-sentimental approach. The author of the article argues that even though Henry Miller creates in his novel a certain project of dehumanization, the article explains how usage of poetic language prevents Tropic of Cancer being a sexist insult to woman as often claimed by the feministic discourse of the 1980s and 1990s. Reacting to the popular and standardized interpretational traditions, the article contributes to the discourse about the dehumanizing aspects of Henry Miller’s novel by analysing the code of obscenity present in the materia of literary text. The code of obscenity is put into context with other features of materia of Miller’s text in order to explain how its specific “energy” functions. The author of the article applies the thinking of influential Russian literary scholars such as Mikhail Bakhtin and Yuri Lotman on the autonomous world of a literary text.