SOURCE: "The Life in Fiction," in his The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett, Knopf, 1967, pp. 59-67.

Hassan is an Egyptian-born American critic and educator who has written numerous books on modernist and post-modernist literature, including Radical Innocence: The Contemporary American Novel (1961) and The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (1971). In the following excerpt, he analyzes the themes and technique of Tropic of Cancer, characterizing the novel as a profane yet lyrical paean to the chaos of raw experience.

The trilogy that begins with Tropic of Cancer (1934) is still Miller's most compelling work. Cancer itself is primarily an act of obedience to flow; it shows neither recognition on the part of its hero nor conversion in his outlook. There is no "hero" and no central "point," and there is no form but the shape of disintegration, the rhythm of humility and rage endured by human...