Politics and English - Sujiao Library (English-Chinese Contrastive)

Author: Orwell
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-08-01
Features: When Henry Miller's novel Tropic of Cancer was published in 1935, it received considerable cautious praise, and this attitude was clearly often due to the fear of being perceived as liking pornography. Those who praised it included T.S. Eliot, Herbert Read, Aldous Huxley, John Dos Passos, Ezra Pound—all basically writers who were not yet prominent at the time. In fact, the theme of this book, in a sense, its spiritual atmosphere belongs to the 1920s rather than the 1930s. Tropic of Cancer is written in the first person, or rather, it is a novelized autobiography, depending on how you look at it. Miller insisted it was a straightforward autobiography, but in terms of rhythm and narrative style, it adopts the form of a novel. It is a story about Americans in Paris, but not an ordinary one, because the Americans in the story are exactly penniless. During the economic boom, the dollar was plentiful, and the exchange rate of the franc was relatively low; a large number of artists, writers, students, literary enthusiasts, tourists, vagrants, and loafers flocked to France, a phenomenon almost unprecedented. In some districts, the number of so-called "artists" actually exceeded the working population—in fact, statistics show that in the late 1920s, there were 30,000 painters in Paris, but most of them were frauds. However, the common people were quite indifferent to artists. Those wearing corduroy pants and having loud voices, those young people dressed in Greek or medieval-style clothes—when they walked on the streets, people would not even look at them. On the Seine River by Notre-Dame Cathedral, it was almost impossible to pass through the road lined with sketching tools. It was an era of dark horses and neglected geniuses. Everyone was talking about it: "When will I be a gun knight?" Yet in reality, no one was a "gun knight." This decadence was like another ice age, the worldwide gathering of artists disappeared. In many Montparnasse cafes with only ten years of history, a large group of loud, pretentious shouters filled the place until midnight, only to return to their graves-like, pitch-black, even ghosts would not dare to enter habitats. Miller described such a world—as it had also been described in Wyndham Lewis's The Tarr in other novels—but he only dealt with the lower rungs of this society, those class-conscious edge proletarians. This class could survive in such a decadent world because it was composed of a part of true artists and a part of true rascals. The neglected geniuses, the arrogant ones who would "write a novel that would leave Proust speechless" were all there; but they were geniuses only when they had no mouths to feed. Most of the novel tells the story of the bacteria-filled rooms of workers' lodgings, fights, drinking contests, cheap brothels, Russian refugees, hawking, fraud, and temporary jobs. There is also a panoramic view of poor Paris from the perspective of a foreigner—a cobblestone alley, pungent garbage, small restaurants with greasy zinc counters and brick floors.