Fluidity in Henry Miller's Tropic of cancer : its effects on the subject and the urban landscape

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to reveal as to what extent the sick body is a reflection of the sick city and how these two spheres overlap, sometimes melting and merging into one. In accordance to this point, the body is presented as constantly falling into this sickness, or into a sort of mechanization of the quotidian in the figure of the individual as a proper machine. The city goes through the very same processes and it is compared in numerous occasions to a body that collapses over itself; that stops making sense because it has lost its harmonic arrangement. Therefore, in the novel, it is a fact that modern society turns the body sick, transforming the urban subject into a receptacle that absorbs the city’s fluidity and, at the same time, the delirium and the sickness of the world. The narrator will not establish a particular destination, conveying his aimless condition, as an expatriate and as a modern individual surrounded by the chaotic city landscape. This figure of the body does not only provide a parallel with the structure of society, but also with its inner composition and processes. It is important to study the sick body in the context of the modern city, because its fluid display would reveal us relevant aspects about the conformation of the narrator’s subjectivity. This individual experience is constantly paralleled with that of the city through liquid images associated with sickness, the loss of authenticity and health. Therefore, I propose that individual experience as such does not exist anymore, in the sense that it melts under the dominant and chaotic fluxes displayed by the urban landscape.