num_pages: 232
description: Form and Image in the Fiction of Henry Miller is a study of allegorical patterns in Miller's major fiction. The cities, characters, and scenes of his fictional world are described as "events" in the development and integration of the self. The analysis, which draws on several disciplines for its insights, especially on the psychoanalytic studies of C. G. Jung, is a deliberate and detailed attempt to explore the extent to which such insights can successfully support and assist a literary analysis. Consequently no biographical context for the explications is provided. Neither Miller's knowledge of psychoanalytic theory nor the details of his personal life are the concern of this study. The focus is on the fiction itself and the actions of the mind it may dramatize. The great Miller cities of Paris and New York are seen as projections or images in which the psychic landscape of the developing self has been given fictional form. The characters are not discussed as characters familiar to readers of the novel, but as figures of the mind which borrow only their superficial characteristics from the twentieth-century scene. The nature of their form shows that many of them are aspects of one archetype against which the I of millers fiction struggles. The development of this I provides the allegorical dimension in the fictional world of Miller and becomes the subject of his confession. The frankly described sexual adventures that prevented many of Miller's works from being distributed in this country until fairly recently are identified as parts of the archetypal world. Other analyses can satisfactorily defend Miller's obscenity but recognizing the relationship between the sexual imagery and other archetypal images provides a reading that reveals the allegorical character of his fiction and the unity of its action.
language: English
title: Form and Image in the Fiction of Henry Miller
titlecomplete: Form and Image in the Fiction of Henry Miller
publisher: Wayne State University Press