Introduction

Summary

Let us suppose that literature begins at the moment when literature becomes a question. … as soon as the page has been written, the question which kept interrogating the writer while he was writing — though he may not have been aware of it — is now present on the page; and now the same question lies silent within the work, waiting for a reader to approach — any kind of reader, shallow or profound; this question is addressed to language, behind the person who is writing and the person who is reading, by language which has become literature.

— Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire

THIS BOOK EXPLORES the “secret violence” that the American writer Henry Miller inflicts on language over the course of his expansive body of work from the 1930s through the 1970s. Few critics have examined the provocative questions of linguistic volatility raised in Miller's works, ignoring his innovative style and thereby missing the potential impact of his work in literary studies. Having been marginalized on moral grounds since first publication in 1934, Miller's works require reexamination in order to bring new attention to his unwritten connections with other writers during this period, including Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce. Miller is not often thought of in academic circles in studies on modernism, despite the innovative and influential style of his work. The aim of this book is to suggest a new way of reading Miller that is alert to the aggressively writerly and self-conscious form of his work, and to undertake an examination of his texts without integrating him into another socially constructed, literary category.