Conclusion

Summary

If now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with his back up, a man whose only defenses left are his words and his words are always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than all the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the miracle of personality. If any man ever dared to translate all that is in his heart, to put down what is really his experience, what is truly his truth, I think then the world would go to smash, that it would be blown to smithereens and no god, no accident, no will could ever again assemble the pieces, the atoms, the indestructible elements that have gone to make up the world.

— Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

THE PICTURES MILLER PAINTS with his words do not give the reader any better sense of the actual world than dreams, or even speaking, might do, again confirming Deleuze and Guattari's observation: “At any rate, what a vapid idea, the book as the image of the world” (A Thousand Plateaus, 6). A text does not enable the actual world to be more accurately understood. (If it did, as Miller explains, “the world would go to smash.”) In fact, the text often betrays the reader in this truth-telling posture. Writing is an act of creation and always one of multiplicity and is constant, indeterminate, and in flux.