The extended philosophical passages in Henry Miller’s work have little resonance for me. It’s just argle-bargle, written in glib confidence. His use of slurs also exhibits glibness. He sounds enclosed when using slurs. Rather than showing rugged power, as profanity can, his usage deflects towards emptiness and cold hell. I acknowledge that he wrote at a time when profanity and obscenity were synonymous and offensive. Nowadays one hears fuck commonly used as an intensifier. The word becomes more a flimsy noise and distraction than a meaningful stun gun. Miller’s slurs have the same effect. They sound unexamined, and barely give testament. I see Miller’s method as sluice-like where the quantum of writing involves unleashing the stream. He wants to get as much out as he can where much means ‘capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’, as Keats lastingly had it. Some of ‘it’ is malarkey and literary tripe. When his acerbic beam is working, as well his sense of the absurd, matters gain a raiment of wonder.
