Tropic of Cancer

Paris is central to almost everything that happens in Tropic of Cancer, for it is present not only as a setting, but as a character in its own right, shaping Henry’s relationships, worldview, and literary production. During his composition of the novel, Miller actively studied guidebooks about the city, particularly those that included the history of literary Paris. In fact, a number of descriptions in the novel are taken directly from these guidebooks, picked apart, and put back together to better reflect Miller’s memories and emotions. But for both Miller the writer and Henry the character, the city is not just a part of various literary and intellectual histories; instead, it exists primarily as a material realm in which unending consumption—of food, goods, visual experiences, and most of all, sex—is the driving force of everyday life.

From the beginning of the novel, Henry connects Paris directly to sexualized women. He writes, in an early scene, “Nothing better between five and seven than to be pushed around in that throng, to follow a leg or a beautiful bust, to move along with the tide and everything whirling in your brain” (16). There are certain streets in the city that attract sex workers, and he describes being almost overwhelmed by their bodies while traversing these spaces. For example, while he and the Hindu disciple are walking down the Boulevard de la Chapelle, they are suddenly drowning in a “flock” of women, and there is “a subdued pandemonium in the air, a note of repressed violence” (95). Later, he describes the women on the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre in similar terms, saying, “To walk from the Rue Lafayette to the boulevard is like running the gauntlet; they attach themselves to you like barnacles, they eat into you like ants, they coax, wheedle, cajole, implore […] each bar is alive, throbbing, the dice loaded” (158). He even goes so far as to grant the city a sense of identity and personal will, separating it from the individual women who inhabit it and personifying Paris itself as a sexually aggressive woman. Describing Carl’s reluctance to go to Crimea with Tania, he says, “[When] you’ve suffered and endured things here it’s then that Paris takes hold of you, grabs you by the balls, you might say, like some lovesick bitch who’d rather die than let you get out of her hands” (171-72). In all of these moments, Paris is simultaneously a space that is defined by the sexuality of its occupants and capable itself of sexual attraction.

The sexualized and sexualizing city is part of a much broader tradition in Western literature, one with roots in the late 18th century: As more people left the countryside for rapidly growing urban centers, literature began to depict cities as critical sites of collective and individual development. In these narratives, characters’ personalities are drawn from the very streets around them, and in turn, the urban landscape is symbolically shaped by those characters and their experiences. Henry articulates this when he says, while recounting a particularly sad memory of his marriage,

I was utterly alone in the world and for friends I had the streets, and the streets spoke to me in that sad, bitter language compounded of human misery […] it is that sort of cruelty which is embedded in the streets […] it is that which gives the lampposts their ghoulish twists (184-85).

The intimate bond he shares with Paris is thus undoubtedly sexual, but it goes beyond sex and into the territory of an emotional, psychosocial connection. In Tropic of Cancer, specifically modern urban experiences, like being anonymous within a crowd or having access to unending public spectacles, are ultimately part of the characters’ sexual and psychological landscapes, and Miller’s particular vision of Paris allows him to explore those concepts fully.