Leon Trotsky in the Tropic of Capricorn

by

Don S. Olson

©2002 All Rights Reserved

   Henry Miller’s novel Tropic of Capricorn, viewed with elements of Leon Trotsky’s literary theory, reveals itself as being revolutionary despite the fact that Miller was not a Marxist of any kind. Miller’s work will be examined using these fundamental principles of Trotsky’s theory of literature: 1) it is based on experience of class struggle; 2) it engages in dialectic to confront that experience; 3) revolution must arise from the awakening of personhood in the masses.

    Leon Trotsky believed that all meaningful art is derived from experience in the material world. Trotsky praised Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night in his essay, “Celine: Novelist and Politician,” because “Celine’s style is subordinated to his receptivity of the objective world.”[1] Henry Miller was greatly influenced by Louis-Ferdinand Celine[2] and was writing Tropic of Capricorn in the years immediately following publication of Journey to the End of the Night in 1932, which he is known to have read.[3] Trotsky then focuses objective experience even more finely:

However fantastic art may be, it cannot have at its disposal any other material except that which is given to it by the world of three dimensions and by the narrower world of class society. [4]

    Literature, in order to have social utility, must be based in an author’s experience not only of the material world, but in the class struggle that defines the individual in society. The imperative of using the lens of class struggle is not an arbitrary dictate, but historically inevitable if literature is to serve the revolution.

This is not a state order, but an historic demand. Its strength lies in the objectivity of historic necessity. You cannot pass this by, nor escape its force. [5]

    The second principle of Trotsky’s theory of literature to be used here is the application of dialectic to examine experience.

Generally speaking, the artistic work of man is continuous. Each new rising class places itself on the shoulders of its preceding one. But this continuity is dialectic, that is it finds itself by means of internal repulsions and breaks…[Art] is not a disembodied element feeding on itself, but a function of social man indissolubly tied to his life and environment. [6]

    If an artist is to examine history through class struggle and to keep his art relevant and useful, he or she must use dialectic to map the evolution of the struggle to determine the stage it has reached and where it is headed. Miller’s narrator in Tropic of Capricorn uses a dialectical approach to examine the system in which he works and lives in a manner that Trotsky would approve: “The man of letters is fascinated by the dialectic of the individual and society, the human and the impersonal.”[7]
The third principle to be used in this paper is Trotsky’s belief in the awakening of consciousness in the masses through the enlightenment of the individual, and in particular the artist. He writes in Problems in Life ,

But the Revolution is, in the first place, an awakening of human personality in the masses – which were supposed to possess no personality.[8]

Although the characterization of the proletariat as “the masses” depersonalizes the individual, only the discovery of selfhood by each individual can bring about the collective movement that is required for revolution. Although Trotsky and Miller share in the idea of the awakening of the individual as necessary for movement toward change, they will be shown to differ in the specifics of this idea.

    Henry Miller was no Marxist, Trotskyite or otherwise. When attacked for his appeal to the “Trotskyite intelligentsia audience” in New Masses magazine, he wrote to Anais Nin in 1943, “I had to laugh when I saw their dig.”[9] Aside from some sympathy for anarchist theory, itself antithetical to socialism, Miller was completely apolitical.[10] He made no distinction among those who sought power as a means for change: “Such people (and Hitler and Trotsky are examples of it) turn the world upside down, trying to right things – looking outside for the malady, instead of within.”[11] Miller even disdained Trotsky’s literary criticism, calling his review of Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night, “sophomoric and conventional to the extreme. Like an old lady writing.”[12] In spite of Miller’s orientation, the milieu from which Tropic of Capricorn was written and the view of society it contains suits it well to critical examination from a Trotskyite perspective. Trotsky would lump Tropic of Capricorn in with the “transitional art which is more or less organically connected with the Revolution, but which is not at the same time the art of the Revolution.”[13] Such a classification is consistent with his estimation of Celine’s novel which was a strong influence on Miller. Trotsky would consider both writers to be what he termed “fellow-travelers” because, “They do not grasp the Revolution as a whole and the Communist ideal is foreign to them.”[14]
Although Tropic of Capricorn is classified as a work of fiction, its narrator goes by the same name as the author and the book is based on Miller’s life in New York in the early 1920s[15] . Near the beginning of the book, Miller writes,

If the self were not imperishable, the ‘I’ I write about would have been destroyed long ago. To some this may seem like an invention, but whatever I imagine to have happened did actually happen, at least to me.[16]

According to Trotsky, despite Miller’s use of “imagine,” whatever he has written is wholly the product of his experiences, “given to it by the world of three dimensions,” and not some “invention.” That Miller uses his own name for the protagonist further reinforces the truth of his narration. When Miller writes the first passage in the book that relates to class struggle, it is general, but from his direct experience – “I was one.”

Over this cesspool the spirit of work weaves a magic wand; palaces and factories spring up side by side, and munitions plants and chemical works and steel mills and sanatoriums and prisons and insane asylums. The whole continent is a nightmare producing the greatest misery of the greatest number. I was one, a single entity in the midst of the greatest jamboree of wealth and happiness (statistical wealth, statistical happiness) but I never met a man who was truly wealthy or truly happy.[17]

This general declaration is soon supported by more detailed and specific personal examples of class conflict that cascade throughout the first third of the book. Miller positions himself like the fulcrum in a set of scales, perfectly poised to view the dialectic at work in this passage. Despite the “greatest jamboree of wealth,” everyone is poor and miserable. The class struggle is clearly drawn in the “palaces” for the rich that sit right next to “factories” for the workers. “Prisons and insane asylums” exist for those not fit for the factories, signifying tools of enforcement for the status quo. Even the medical profession exists only to serve the system, not the worker, as Miller writes of a psychiatrist, “The purpose of his treatment was to render the subject fit for society,”[18] rather than help him achieve enlightened awareness. Miller sets the thesis of vast American prosperity against an antithesis of universal misery. He also shows that the rich are few while the working people are many by the number of elements in his list that corresponds to each; 1 for the rich, and 7 for the working class, and all under the control of those who reside in the palaces. The courts and the clinics exist only to enforce their control, embodied in this psychiatrist, “the suave sadist who operated this clinic with the full concurrence and connivance of the law.”[19]

    Miller shows the particular struggle of the individual in this society when he is turned down for a menial messenger job in the “Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company:”

No, what rankled was that they had rejected me, Henry V. Miller, a competent, superior individual who had asked for the lowest job in the world. That burned me up. I couldn’t get over it.[20]

    Miller then decides to return to the offices of the company to protest his rejection, setting up a kind of dialectic with the powers in the company. Expecting the bum’s rush, he is instead hired on as a spy for a vice president who is impressed by his chutzpah and eloquence. Soon after he is moved into the job of employment manager, apparently co-opted into the bourgeoisie. The man he replaces dies of a broken heart.

In a few months I was sitting at Sunset Place hiring and firing like a demon. It was a slaughterhouse, so help me God. The thing was senseless from the bottom up. A waste of men, material, and effort. A hideous farce against a backdrop of sweat and misery. But just as I had accepted the spying so I accepted the hiring and firing and all that went with it. I said Yes to everything.[21]

    Despite his early enthusiasm for his job, he soon sets up dialectic between what he sees every day and what the corporate executives believe to be going on in the company.

I even accomplished the miracle of stopping the crazy turnover, something that nobody had dared to hope for. Instead of supporting my efforts they undermined me. According to the logic of the higher-ups the turnover had ceased because the wages were too high. So they cut the wages. It was like kicking the bottom out of a bucket. And, just as though nothing had happened they insisted that the gaps be plugged up immediately.[22]

Even when Miller plays the game according to the rules as he perceives them, they are in fact dynamic and unknowable because even the “higher-ups” use dialectic to continually evolve their point of view of corporate operations. Miller is trapped in a recursive system of dialectic with management in which each is reacting to the other in such a way that balance can never be achieved. At this point, the dialectic leads Miller to the conclusion that the failures he sees are not his failures or the failures of those he hires and fires, or even of those running the company but rather are the product of the whole system itself. Through his analysis of this personal experience of the class struggle, Miller makes a decision that he hopes will bring change or at least balance the scales somehow.

I did everything they instructed me to do, but in such a way that they had to pay for it.[23]

    As Trotsky, from Marx, says, the seeds of the system’s own destruction are carried within it, and Miller sees himself and each person who passes through his office as such a seed, and he believes that he might be the vector through which each achieves its full flowering.

Men are poor everywhere – they always have been and they always will be. And beneath the terrible poverty there is a flame, usually so low that it is almost invisible. But it is there and if one has the courage to blow on it it can become a conflagration[24]

    Miller is asked by the vice-president to write a book in the manner of Horatio Alger, and decides that he will use the opportunity to expose the corruptions he sees all around him, to blow on the flames. He won’t glorify the messengers in the vein of Horatio Alger, but describe their suffering as it really is, “determined to wipe Horatio Alger out of the North American consciousness.”[25] Miller spends his entire vacation writing the book. Despite his efforts, he knows nothing about writing and when he finishes, the book is horrible, “the worst book any man has ever written.” But rather than feel discouraged, Miller is proud: “I knew at least what it was to fail. I knew what it was to attempt something big.”[26] He has an epiphany that is itself dialectical.

To get beneath the facts I would have had to be an artist, and one doesn’t become an artist overnight. First you have to be crushed, to have your conflicting points of view annihilated. You have to be wiped out as a human being in order to be born again an individual.[27]

    Miller wanders the streets of New York, caught between the idea of America and the reality of America, between the ironclad logic of the corporate executives and the meaningless chaos he witnesses at ground level, between his need to express himself about what he sees and his desire to run away from it. He wonders if any of the thousands of people passing him in the street see the world as he does.

Supposing I intercepted one of them and just asked him a simple question. Supposing I just said to him suddenly: “Why do you go on living the way you do?” He would probably call a cop.[28]

That someone so questioned might bring the police illustrates the sensitivity of the system to dialectical examination of itself. Anyone who raises such a question is subversive, criminal, or crazy, ready for those “sanatoriums and prisons and insane asylums.” Miller also realizes that it will be the individual engaging in personal dialectic with himself that matters, not dialectic between the individual and the system. For Miller, such self-examination ought to lead to having one’s “conflicting points of view annihilated.” However, unlike Trotsky’s belief that, “Dialectic training of the mind, as necessary to a revolutionary fighter as finger exercises to a pianist, demands approaching all problems as processes and not as motionless categories,”[29] Miller seeks a way out of the process.

I wanted to be alone for a thousand years in order to reflect on what I had seen and heard – and in order to forget. I wanted something of the earth which was not of man’s doing, something absolutely divorced from the human of which I was surfeited. I wanted something purely terrestrial and absolutely divested of idea. I wanted to feel the blood running back into my veins, even at the cost of annihilation.[30]

    Miller does not hope for political revolution, but only a personal kind. He wants to be reconnected with his humanity, his natural roots. He wishes to quit thinking and simply be. Thus does he become only a “fellow-traveler,” and what Trotsky wrote about Celine applies to Miller as well: “He does not occupy himself with the goal of reconstructing society, which is chimerical in his eyes.”[31]

    Miller does not fashion himself as a revolutionary or a leader or seek to understand specifically what is wrong in society so that he might right it. However, Miller completely conforms to Trotsky’s estimation of the masses when it comes to their knowledge of economics. Trotsky points to a fundamental problem with the understanding of the masses for the economic system in which they labor – that of money and other abstract mechanisms.

Yet, while the realities of the economic process are human labour, raw materials, tools, machines, division of labour, the necessity to distribute finished products among the participants of the labour process, and the like, such categories as "commodity," "money," "wages," "capital," "profit," "tax," and the like are only semi-mystical reflections in men's heads of the various aspects of a process of economy which they do not understand and which is not under their control.[32]

And as though directed by Trotsky to illustrate this point, midway through Tropic of Capricorn Miller wanders down Broadway, staring into the lights of the Great White Way, pondering the fundamental question for which Trotsky believes himself to hold the answer.

To walk in money through the night crowd, protected by money, lulled by money, dulled by money, the crowd itself a money, the breath money, no least single object anywhere that is not money, money, money everywhere and still not enough, and then no money or a little money or less money or more money, but money, always money, and if you have money or you don’t have money it is the money that counts and money makes money, but what makes money make money?[33]

    Here, for Miller, the dialectic stops. Unlike Trotsky, he doesn’t believe that some systematic solution can mend things. He doesn’t buy into the same sort of “ironclad logic” of Marx in working through the dictatorship of the proletariat to achieve the abolition of wealth and the state and create a workers’ paradise. Miller feels that mankind’s liberation can only come from the heart of each and every individual and that systems built on logic, even when successful, are not the answer, and in fact may be even worse than the chaos he has witnessed. As he moves into the dancehall to find a momentary annihilation in the arms of a woman who dances with him only for money, he has his moment of revelation. “In the moment it is all clear to me, clear that in this logic there is no redemption.”[34]

Between these interstices of the dream, life vainly tries to build up, but the scaffold of the city’s mad logic is no support. As an individual, as flesh and blood, I am leveled down each day to make the fleshless, bloodless city whose perfection is the sum of all logic and death to the dream…I am going to die as a city in order to become again a man. Therefore I close my ears, my eyes, my mouth.[35]

For Miller, the greatest revolutionary act one can perform is simply to say no to all of it, to refuse to participate in the existing system or in some future system. Such is the annihilation that is required before one can be reborn as a true man, and until each human finds this in his or her own heart, there can be only chaos, cruelty, and pointlessness. In direct opposition to the Marxist materialist view, Miller closes off his senses and in the dark silence of his own consciousness remakes the world. He abolishes his desire, and with it, all that desire has created.

I want to prevent as many men as possible from pretending that they have to do this or that because they must earn a living. It is not true. One can starve to death – it is much better. Every man who voluntarily starves to death jams another cog in the automatic process. I would rather see a man take a gun and kill his neighbor, in order to get the food he needs, than keep up the automatic process by pretending that he has to earn a living. That’s what I want to say, Mr. John Doe.[36]

Speaking to everyman via Mr. John Doe, Miller’s prescription for revolution involves no Cominterm, no five-year plans, no Council of Peoples’ Commissars, no Fourth International. Trotsky, on the other hand, rejects such solipsism, and expelled people from the Bolshevik party for this sin, calling them, “pitiful isolated individuals” who belong only in “the rubbish-can of history.”[37] But Miller sees the revolution in the single act of the individual to annihilate himself, if necessary, to stop the “automatic process” which persists only because of the willingness of the masses to remain part of it. And, of course, Miller finds such transcendence through the sexual act, rather than endless dialectic – something that Trotsky may have ceased only while playing with Frida Kahlo in Mexico City just prior to his murder.[38] Perhaps the true revolutionary is Henry Miller after all.