47 pages • 1 hour read
Henry MillerTropic of Cancer
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1934A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary
Henry visits his friend Van Norden, a terminally gloomy figure, and vividly describes Van Norden’s attitudes towards life, work, and women. Van Norden refers to women as “cunts” and frequently complains about them, describing their bodies and sexual practices in decidedly unflattering terms. He also bemoans his rotten teeth and blames Paris for their deterioration. He invites Henry to a dance the following night, where he is planning to meet a woman, and delivers a lengthy monologue about how lonely he is in Paris.
Henry’s friend Carl has been exchanging letters with a rich woman named Irene. Irene decides she wants to meet Carl in person, and they arrange a rendezvous at a hotel. Irene and Carl call Henry from the hotel room, and the latter notes Irene’s beautiful voice. Carl visits Henry the next day and will not describe the events of the previous night directly. Finally, after considerable prodding, he admits that while he did not have sex with Irene, she still wants him to run away with her to Borneo. However, she is older and less attractive than he had expected her to be. The two of them debate the benefits of dating older women, with Henry arguing that older women—especially wealthy ones—are perfectly tolerable as companions. In a long monologue, Carl wishes to suffer an accident that would render him wheelchair-bound so someone else would have to care for him.
The next day, Henry arrives at Van Norden’s room to help him move and they talk about Carl and Irene, discovering Carl’s declaration to Van Norden that he and Irene did have sex and that he compared her very positively to a figure from a Matisse painting. Frustrated, Van Norden declares that no one has the right to tell a fictional story that seems so convincing. They arrive at Van Norden’s new hotel, which is gloomy and dingy. Upon seeing a baby carriage filled with books, Henry notices similarities between the hotel room and a dream he recently had in which Van Norden’s penis became detachable. The dream becomes increasingly blended with real life and Henry has a number of grotesque, fantastical visions about the hotel room. He and Van Norden talk about women and writing, and Henry describes Van Norden’s friendly, sexless relationship with a woman named Bessie.
Henry and Van Norden go out drinking and learn that Peckover, the proofreader with the false teeth, fell down an elevator shaft. They feel disgusted with their coworkers’ performances of sadness, knowing that Peckover was a “zero” and not worth honoring in death (139). Towards morning, they talk about women again: Van Norden describes a recent encounter with a woman who had shaved her vulva, which he found disgusting. They meet up with a sex worker, and while neither of them is really interested in having sex with her, they feel obligated to do so because they paid her. Henry watches Van Norden have sex with her and imagines him as “a machine […] grinding away for no reason except the fifteen francs” (144). He remembers the same dream he had recalled before, but in this one, Van Norden is a passionless automaton.
A week later, Henry assumes Peckover’s proofreading position at the newspaper. He compares the environment to a mental hospital and loves the job, appreciating its simplicity and lack of larger responsibilities. He also compares it positively to American attitudes about work in which one is expected to have unlimited ambition and never be content with menial, low-paying jobs. He describes the back room at a bistro near the office in which the newspaper employees can eat on credit, focusing in particular on the toxic relationship between one of his coworkers and the man’s girlfriend, Lucienne. Lucienne believes that her boyfriend visits sex workers on the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre, and as punishment, she is physically and emotionally abusive to him. Henry describes the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre in detail, calling it a place where “sex [runs] through the street like a sewer” (158). In an extended fantasy sequence, he imagines Lucienne as a giant bird soaring through the city.
Henry is propositioned by a pregnant woman and reflects on the enormous variety of sexual opportunities available in Paris. He goes to an art gallery, where he looks at paintings by Henri Matisse and feels inspired. In a long reflection on the artist, he concludes that despite the terrifying changes that characterize the modern world, Matisse’s work communicates a comforting sense of balance and wholeness.
Chapter 8 Analysis
Much of this lengthy chapter is devoted to Henry and Van Norden’s complex relationship, for although Henry seems to like Van Norden, his narration criticizes and mocks his friend quite extensively. The various dynamics between Henry, Van Norden, and Carl also become important, and all their interactions ultimately seem balanced on the issue of sex. Henry spends a great deal of time describing how Van Norden and Carl each feel about women, and it is notable that each of them approaches sex and relationships very differently. The women themselves are largely dismissed from their conversations, downgraded to sex objects (“cunts,” in Van Norden’s terms) or criticized for having very human flaws. (A prime example occurs when Carl deems the 40-year-old Irene to be too old.) Instead, each man is obsessed with the other man’s sex life: how he feels about it, how he describes it, how it affects him socially. Thus, while this portion of the novel is concerned superficially with heterosexual sex, the dynamics between the men are actually more significant to the development of the narrative. The male characters identify with each other so deeply that they even call one another “Joe.” Although this affectation ostensibly occurs because it is “easier that way,” (102) it also has the effect of erasing all boundaries and distinctions between the men, meaning that, at least symbolically, they all share a single sex life.
In a sharp contrast to this tendency to minimize women’s significance throughout most of the novel, one scene in particular positions a woman as the central object of profound yet disturbing contemplation: the incident in which Van Norden describes a recent sex partner’s vulva and vagina and uses her body as a rhetorical means to touch on the confusion and emptiness of the world at large. This woman had shaved her pubic hair, which Van Norden found simultaneously disgusting and alluring. After examining it for a long time, he concludes that it is “absolutely meaningless” and “nothing—just a blank” (140). While this scene certainly reflects the male characters’ derisive feelings about women in general, it also speaks to the novel’s anxieties about whether modern life has any authentic substance or value.
Additionally, this chapter includes one of the novel’s first extended dream sequences, placing it firmly in the tradition of Surrealist literature and art, which was extremely influential in France while Miller was writing Tropic of Cancer. Van Norden’s many monologues mirror the novel’s increasing reliance on dream states and the unconscious mind, and he wanders from one subject to another, rarely bothering to connect them logically, and makes multiple references to reveries, dreams, and the desire to obliterate himself. Also surreal is the scene in which Henry perceives Van Norden and his sex partner as machines “whose cogs have slipped,” lacking authentic human passion (144). By using figurative language to imaginatively transform humans into machines—and then into goats—the text acknowledges the fundamentally malleable nature of words and images and thus departs even further from the traditional, structured forms of storytelling.
Peckover’s violent demise is one of the first instances in which the novel’s representation of death is not imaginative or metaphorical. Henry’s description of this event focuses very little on Peckover himself and instead serves as a critique of inauthentic public mourning, one of many social behaviors that seem to disgust Miller. The cruel treatment Peckover experienced at the hands of others is part of the novel’s larger philosophical ecosystem, one in which strength and vitality are rewarded and weakness is punished.
Much of the confusion and hopelessness in this chapter is counterbalanced by Henry’s exploration of Matisse’s influence, which brings him “back to the proper precincts of the human world” (162). He connects Matisse directly to his own cosmic preoccupations, arguing that the painter was capable of taking all the negative aspects of life, dissolving them, and restructuring them as substantial works of art. He also sees Matisse as part of a specifically Parisian type of representative tradition, arguing that Paris “belongs” (166) to Matisse and claiming to see the artist’s unique odalisques hovering in the city’s trees. This part of the text ultimately serves to strengthen the connections between urban life and artistic creation and continue the development of Henry’s philosophical position.
