4 - Material Trifles

Summary

When I saw an external object, my awareness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, lining it with a thin spiritual border that prevented me from ever directly touching its substance; it would volatize in some way before I could make contact with it, just as an incandescent body brought near a wet object never touches its moisture because it is always preceded by a zone of evaporation.

— Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: Swann's Way

AS MENTIONED IN THE INTRODUCTION and chapter 1, Miller's writing, particularly passages of the urban landscape, has been analyzed under various genres, such as surrealism and romanticism, which appear in critical texts previously mentioned as well as in Henry Miller, the Modern Rabelais (1990) by John Parkin. Although these methods do provide interesting routes for specific modes of interpretation, my approach is to consider Miller's writing (his presentations of people and things) in light of the manner in which the language presents objects as being complete or, in some way, incomplete. Miller's language causes the reader to question conventional forms of literature, which suggest that descriptions of objects are unable to actually provide complete “pictures” of those objects.

This technique on Miller's part might appear to critics as a shortcoming, as if he is making this assertion in his own work, when, in fact, Miller alludes, deliberately and tactically, to volatility in language.