| According to Serres and Latour, "time flows in a turbulent and chaotic manner; it percolates." How then can the "truth" of a subject’s own history be written? Clearly, a linear narrative is inadequate to convey the "temporal whirlpool" of a life: "Time is paradoxical; it folds or twists; it is as various as the dance of flames in a brazier--here interrupted, there vertical, mobile and unexpected" (Serres and Latour 57-9). Twentieth-century American author, Henry Miller, wrote what he called "auto-novels: |
It is not a mixture of truth and fiction, the genre of literature, but an expansion and deepening of truth. It is more authentic, more veridical, than the diary. It is not the flimsy truth of facts . . . but the truth of emotion, reflection and understanding, truth digested and assimilated. The being revealing himself does so on all levels simultaneously. (The Books of My Life 169) |
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| Not only "on all levels" but all times: past, present and future, a process that continually provokes a rereading and a rewriting of meaning. Miller’s first novel, Tropic of Cancer, was written about events that were concurrent with his life. His other three novels, The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, related to his life up to the time of writing Cancer. Cancer is both the first and the last of a series that forms an infinite circle of ever changing sense and subsequent rewriting. "The word means nothing on its own: its sense waits on what will follow . . . and it looks back to all the other words which have been uttered, to rewrite them" |
How does Henry Miller deal with the problem of conveying a non-linear representation of the historic self that can be presented "from inside the boiler" as well as from outside of time?
Henry Miller regularly, even typically, distorted both the internal and external facts of his life through a process he called spiral form. By filtering memories, dreams, fantasies, and thoughts through an anecdote matrix, Miller anchors his narratives in a time-frame that blurs categories of past, present, and future, allowing him to depict a persona--the supraself--that stands both in and apart from the historical continuum. Such a framework lets Miller fuse real events with fabrication without sacrificing the "truthfulness" of his representations. Rejecting photographic mimesis for psychological essence, Miller creates in his auto-novels a mythopoeic vision and revision of the self. (James Decker, PHD Abstract)
Bruce Stapleton
