I’m Not O.K, You’re Not O.K. The most severe scenario outlined in the Thomas Harris book, I’m O.K. You’re O.K. in the late 1960′s,released in the controversial wake of the Stanley Milgram and Zimbardo experiments.It is Transactional Analysis and a neurological basis for memory as point of departure; dealing with the individual’s capacity to relive past experiences with all its original emotional charge and intensity. Pertinent in examining Henry Miller’s seminal book Tropic of Cancer.Is Miller’s work a stream of dullness writing?, or a boredom being a greater sin than profanity? the juxtapositions he presented are complex and not comfortably reconcilable.
” Some critics have said that Miller was a man of attitudes, not ideas. Wrong again. Miller was a cipher as a writer, but a marvelous promoter – the P.T. Barnum of early 20th Century literature. And this should be acknowledged, for it was his only talent. Yet, to even attempt a deep analysis of what is clearly one of the premier put-ons in literature is waste of time and effort. And I’m hardly a prude. I simply demand quality. Henry Miller simply says less with more words than just about any writer that has ever been published.” ( Dan Schneider, Cosmoetica, 2006 )
Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer is not a book in the conventional sense, not literature or art in formal idiom from which to judge written words. It is anti-literature and anti-art. Its a protracted insult. A vomit express, a release of intestinal bile on the face of art. A kick in the balls of god’s sanctimonious ego-centric, perverted and unfathomable alter ego that keeps eating naked lunches and shits them on humanity with the regularity of Exlax induced frequency.It is the aesthetic of anti-plot, anti-narrative and anti-poetry. the little Dharma Bum tucked under the mattress like a talisman. He is an atheist weapon of mass destruction; the occidental world’s reply to Mein Kampf by Hitler.Where Hitler was rewarded with the Iron Cross for Bravery, Henry Miller garners the Irony Cross for passion, imagination and courage in the face of chaos. Shit bombing Dresden with human cow manure before igniting the pile.
”A glance at that dark, unstitched wound and a deep fissure in my brain opens up: all the images and memories that had been laboriously or absent-mindedly assorted, labelled, documented, files, sealed and stamped break forth pellmell like ants pouring out of a crack in the sidewalk; the world ceases to revolve, time stops, the very nexus of my dreams is broken and dissolved and my guts spill out in a grand schizophrenic rush, an evacuation that leaves me face to face with the Absolute.” ( Tropic of Cancer )
Less timid and introverted compendium of werid emotions and sexual tensions of Kafka, Flaubert, Rimbaud, Baudelaire etc. A Vagina Diaries.A literary necrophilia from a frustrated gynecologist.A last tango in paris with the old vinyl, scrathing and playing the same song, the name notes of false enthusiam ad nauseum.
When Mein Kampf was first released in 1925 it sold poorly. People had been hoping for a juicy autobiography or a behind-the-scenes story of the Beer Hall Putsch. What they got were hundreds of pages of long, hard to follow sentences and wandering paragraphs composed by a self-educated man. It was a shambling chaotic mess by someone who didn’t know how to write; jews were a convenient hook to hang his porkpie hat on, but ultimately incidental to the anti-narrative in the same sense as Miller’s obsession with women and sex.Both were not books in the normal sense. 
‘‘ The truth was that Miller’s feelings about Jews, for instance, were nearly as complicated as those about women, anchored as they were by his deepest disgust of all, which was for the Aryan, which is to say himself, since Miller openly hated everything about his German heritage and strove to reinvent himself free of it, perpetuating the self-image of a carefree bohemian living in happy and willful squalor when it has been duly recorded he was the most teutonic of housekeepers, the tidiest of domestic managers, the most compulsive and anal antithesis of the joyful anarchist in Tropic of Cancer who watches the lice leap to and fro on the bed mattress with great amusement and jauntily chucks extra francs and centimes out the taxi window just because they get in the way of his lower finances.”( Steve Erickson, 1997 )
”One might say he was America’s Parisian Rimbaud, except that there were glimmers of talent in that overhyped scatologist. Miller has nothing but books larded with banality, dullness, and the overuse of curse words. And, no, he does not use them creatively in the Imagine Pound writing fiction on a bad day at the asylum. The out that defenders of such garbage – the forebear of execrable pissings like James Frey’s Oprah-endorsed ‘A Million Little Pieces’ – never rely on the actual work to defend it. No one ever Even Jack Kerouac’s droning ‘On The Road’ is a masterpiece by comparison to these two utter pieces of nothingness.Had only Miller spent more time working on writing than his own most obvious talent, public relations, he may have been a greeting card writer in the offing. Of course, nothing much really happens in either book. Miller fucks, sucks, drinks and stinks. Yet, the work is not pornographic, as its detractors over the years have claimed. Porn actually induces a visceral reaction. This is just dull as sin. The truth is that the pre-War Paris of the 30s was the epicentre of indulgent expatriate American prose writing. Hemingway and Fitzgerald, at least, had talent to begin with, despite their flaws. Miller needed to set himself apart. If he couldn’t do it with words, why not shit?Miller’s descriptions of sex are so absurd, unintendedly, that they one might actually believe the man never was conscious during the act. He both degrades and hypes it, rather than looking at it with dispassion and examining what may lay inside – figuratively and literally.” ( Dan Schneider, Cosmoetica, 2006 )
‘‘It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us, but if that is so then let us set up a last agonizing, bloodcurdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war whoop! Away with lamentation! Away with elegies and dirges! Away with biographies and histories, and libraries and museums! Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance. But a dance!” ( Tropic of Cancer ) He is a forbidden archetype,auto-manipulated; he speaks from the dark heart of some place beyond ideology or the refinements of civilization, he is not progressive or regressive but the literary inhabitant of a place in the psyche where human experience recognizes no forward or backward, where the shadows of the soul know no time.
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