• Complain

Erica Jong - The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller

Here you can read online Erica Jong - The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2013, publisher: Open Road Media, genre: Non-fiction / History. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Erica Jong The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller
  • Book:
    The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Open Road Media
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2013
  • Rating:
    4 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 80
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

The book begins with a question: Why Henry Miller? Miller remains among the most misunderstood of writers - seen either as a pornographer or a guru, a sexual enslaver or a sexual liberator, a prophet or a pervert. All the questions his life and oeuvre raise about the role of the writer in society, the impact of books on sexual politics, the impact of sexual politics on books, the threat of censorship to free speech and written expression are, unfortunately, as fresh today as they ever were. Part biography, part memoir, part critical study, part exploration of sexual politics in our time, The Devil at Large is an event: a book that promises to rescue Miller from the facile charges of misogyny, anti-Semitism, and titillation that have been lobbed at him over the years, and brilliantly captures the exuberance, audacity, and energy that defined his life and art. More than that, it is a reunion between a young writer and her mentor. In 1974, while Fear of Flying was still a relatively obscure first novel, Erica Jong received an enthusiastic fan letter from Henry Miller, then an old man of eighty-three. Miller credited himself with discovering Jong, and his faithful correspondence guided her through a year of enormous change. The two writers - chastised and celebrated for their lusty prose, accused of conflating autobiography with fiction in their respective generations - found they were kindred spirits, and began a friendship that would last until Millers death in 1980. Make it all up! was Millers appeal to Jong to become his biographer. But in reexamining Miller, Jong has not had to fictionalize. She has imparted a deeper understanding of a life whose dramatic particulars have long since been mythologized, dramatized, and cannibalized by those in search of a lusty life story.

Erica Jong: author's other books


Who wrote The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

The Devil at Large Erica Jong on Henry Miller Erica Jong For Georges - photo 1

The Devil at Large
Erica Jong on Henry Miller
Erica Jong

For Georges Belmont and to the memory of Hortense Chabrier Henrys gifts - photo 2

For Georges Belmont

and to the memory of

Hortense Chabrier

Henrys gifts,

dear friends

Because when you get down to the basic Henry Miller I think youll find not that youre dealing with a sex addict or an adventurer, youre dealing with a metaphysician, a juggler not a juggler but a magician, I think I like all thats very serious always looking for the secret of life

HENRY MILLER TO ERICA JONG, 1974

These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographiescaptivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences, that which is really his experience, and how to record truth truly.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Introduction
Why Henry Miller?

WHY SHOULD WE CARE about Henry Miller today and why should there be another book about him? Because we are no freer today than we were in 1934, when he published Tropic of Cancer, in many ways we are more enslaved. Because his message has still not been heardand if he were to be alive today, we would probably be equally oblivious to what he is trying to tell us. (Perhaps we would be even more resistant, because we falsely believe we have dealt with our sexual fears and phobias.)

Miller remains among the most misunderstood of writersseen either as a pornographer or a guru, a sexual enslaver or a sexual liberator, a prophet or a pervert. All the questions his life and oeuvre raise about the role of the writer in society, the impact of books on sexual politics, the impact of sexual politics on books, the threat of censorship to free speech and written expression are, unfortunately, as fresh today as they ever were.

What is the function of art in a society that has little use for anything but the most simple-minded entertainment or insidious propaganda? How does free speech survive? How does literacy keep a society free? How is our sexuality related to our intellectual honesty, our politics, our art? Millers work addresses these questions. And they are questions that desperately need answering in our time.

We do not see our society as one that is squashing freedom of expression on all sides because the very nature of expression has changed, hence the nature of censorship has changed. Our dominant forms of communication are visual, not verbal, and we seldom wish to analyze how the information that appears before our eyes as news, as entertainment, as politics, as public affairs, shapes our world and everything we think about it.

Our access to information and entertainment (infotainment is a telling word) is so skillfully manipulated that we do not even see it as such. We flatter ourselves that we have free choice. We flatter ourselves that we are free. The truth is that we are already in a sort of Brave New World in which we are drugged by our distractions and by those who select them for us.

The fact that we are as oblivious to this manipulation as our puppetmasters wish us to be will anger some of us and provoke hearty denial in others. The most skillful manipulation looks like choice to those who are targeted. We may like to think we have free choice, but the truth is we can only choose between A and B. If, as Marshall McLuhan said, the medium is the message, then our addiction to visual images has already paved the way for our enslavement. It only remains for some unborn Hitler to learn how to use our pleasures to enslave us totally. As yet we use our media only for selling thingsincluding, of course, political candidates. What will happen when someone masters the art of selling souls?

Henry Miller foresaw our world of restricted opportunity and widespread mediocrity and railed against it before it arrived. He understood that we would rather relegate sex to a commodityalternately condemned and slavered overthan try to understand its deep and pervasive power in our lives. He became, like so many prophetsfrom Jesus to Savonarolathe victim of his own predictions. He railed against Americas sexual schizophrenia and he was rewarded by being banned, burned, pirated, deprived both of his livelihood and his power to reach his potential audience. He railed against the conformity and ugliness of Americas treatment of the nonconformist, the poet, the artist, and he became the victim of that treatment. Ironically, he was silenced first by close-minded puritans and then by open-minded feminists pursuing sexual honesty and gender-fairness. It fell to him to both express and to exemplify the role of the creative artist in a world that has increasingly little use for dissent, for art (except as a saleable item), for honesty, for any kind of entertainment or information but that which lulls the senses or sells a productfrom a president to a war to a pair of jeans.

The worst of all this is that the lulling and the selling are often indistinguishable from each other. The airconditioned nightmare has come to be our waking realityand we are all semisleepwalking to the flickering of our TV and computer screens.

Henry Miller predicted all this. Henry Miller never stopped fighting against our somnolence. Henry Miller still matters because he still has the power to wake us up.

There is a rumor abroad in literary America today that sex isnt sexy anymore. We have done it alland now with the tragedy of AIDS and a recalcitrant recession, the human hormones are exhausted.

I find this wishful thinking on the part of those who hoped sex would solve all their problems and, finding that it wouldnt, decided to rejoin the religion of their ancestors: puritanism.

The sexual revolution was deeply superficial: it never eradicated either guilt or anhedonia. Given the excuse of a tragic epidemic, dyed-in-the-wool puritans masquerading as pagans decided that sex was boring and that writers like Henry Miller were therefore irrelevant. These trimmersa lovely eighteenth-century term meaning those who cut their consciences to the timesnever understood Eros at all. Eros is life force and if you pronounce it boring, you inadvertently announce your own death. Perhaps we dont believe that sexual freedom will turn the universe from war to peacebut only the very young ever believed that, anyway. As we grew older, we realized that life is far more complex. Sex is not dead in the human psyche, it is only looking for new forms. The devastation of AIDS has given the zealots and vigilantes the excuse they needed to call again for censorship. But their motives are political, not sexual. The new slavery takes many forms: political correctness in the case of anti-First Amendment, pro-censorship feminists, supposed family values in the case of right-wing zealots. The message is the same: they want to tell us what to do and feel.

If Eros is life force, then censoring Eros is death. Henry Miller matters because he understood this; he demanded life more abundant above all. He did not use Eros promiscuouslyeven in his books. And he was not demanding that we do. What he was demanding was that we understand the connection between Eros and life. And we have still not understood. That is why I wrote this book.

I always knew it was to be an unconventional bookpart memoir, part critical study, part biography, part exploration of sexual politics in our time. But I did not anticipate how difficult the task was to become or how much of my own bag as a writer I would have to unpack before I could begin to unpack Henrys bag.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller»

Look at similar books to The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller»

Discussion, reviews of the book The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.