"Choking on My Own Saliva": Henry Miller's Bourgeois Family Christmas in 'Nexus.'(Family Systems Psychotherapy and Literature/Literary Criticism) (1997)

Due to his hyperfragmented narrative style and abiding interest in sexual candor, Miller remains one of American literature's most enduring literary gangsters, a figure chided both for supposedly propounding a theology of cunt (Gilbert and Gubar 116) and for writing and silly thinking (Widmer viii). Ever boy, Miller, who once declared that the most boring group in all communities were university professors, would probably relish such critical lashings (Preface, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare 19). Indeed, he generally maintained that he desired to show scoundrel in himself and that conventional literary form meant nothing to him. Sexuality, as he often stressed, never served as his literary goal, and one may trace much of what commentators attribute to bad writing to Miller's experiments with narrative form. Nevertheless, such acerbic statements reflect a larger critical tendency to ignore cathartic nature of Miller's literary project. Miller frequently asserts that he writes only to free himself from bonds of past and that process of writing helps him attain a more complete level of self-awareness. From what, however, did Miller need to escape? The more obvious answer to this question would no doubt center on some notion of capitalist society. In books such as Sexus (1949), Miller represents his persona Henry Miller(1) deriding American business ethos and Mr. and Mrs. Megalopolitan, who, hobbled and lettered, experience their realest moments while defecating, an act symbolic of big shit-house where everything they touch is shitty. Even when it's wrapped in cellophane smell is there. Caca! The philosopher's stone of industrial age (374-75). A more sensitive reading of Miller's oeuvre, however, suggests that his quarrel with capitalism reveals a deeper conflict within his own family. Although Miller readily launches into jeremiads concerning public sphere, he reserves some of his more vitriolic attacks for his own family, such as in this passage from Tropic of Capricorn (1939): My people were entirely Nordic, which is to say idiots. Every wrong idea which has ever been expounded was theirs. Among them was doctrine of cleanliness, to say nothing of righteousness. They were painfully clean. But inwardly they stank. Never once had they opened door which leads to soul. (3) While he occasionally tendered some kind words for his father, his Uncle Dave, or his Aunt Caroline, Miller's recollections of his family - especially of his mother - lean toward vicious sentiments of above citation. In his condemnation of his family's values, Miller positions(2) himself as an independent artist searching for Truth and Beauty quite apart from insipid platitudes and unexamined mores of his family of idiots, and, indeed, most readers would agree with J. D. Brown that Miller's autobiographical quest powerfully expressed rebellious nature of an narrator in a collapsing culture (108). Through his writing, Miller desperately seeks to abandon sterility of American life typified by family alcove where he heard nothing but inanities (Black Spring 22). Nevertheless, many adherents of contemporary family systems therapy recognize that even most ostensibly autonomous individuals owe much of their behavior to their reactions to others. Michael E. Kerr and Murray Bowen elaborate: Both rugged and obligatory conformity are strongly influenced by togetherness force. The rugged operates as much in reaction to others as compliant person. His determination to be independent stems more from his reaction to other people than from a thoughtfully determined direction for self. He has trouble being an individual without permanently disrupting his relationships with others. (64)(3) Such a perspective suggests that Miller's fierce individualism may well find its roots not in high intellectual sources, but in family. …