Reading Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, I’m drawn by how contemporary his world feels, although it is clear that the author isn’t intending to present the story around this focus, and certainly not from the perspective of a reader almost a hundred years in the future. Telephones, taxis, radios all appear as active instruments shaping human behaviour and decisions, intimacy, and artistic life. They’re expressed more as aspects of a functioning world, less as innovations.
There is something also related in Miller’s deliberate profanity, although perhaps less as a consequence of technological change, than as an adjacent expression of the same broader cultural modernity. Breaking conventions even by today’s burdened DEI guardrails, the increasingly mechanised life feels very close to current cultural themes I experience living most of the year in downtown Toronto.
When the novel was first published in 1934, his language was shocking enough that the book was banned across many countries for decades. Everything from cocks to cunts, lewdness and fucking on a pornographic level is implemented. Arguably performative in its intention, certainly innovative, yet uncannily appropriate in a modern sense. Reminding me of my own experiences walking into seedy after-hours boozecans in Kensington Market, eaves-dropping on lascivious conversations, while ordering drinks at the makeshift bar. Particularly one night when I engaged with a man, that shared he’d offed his parents, apparently, spent years in prison, but had been recently released.
The copy of the book I’m reading is a beautifully ragged 1961 edition that itself became part of the legal struggle over the book’s obscenity and eventual publication.
There is something in this that very much interests me artistically. Miller’s creative life is more functionally connected to the entire symphony of technologies than just the telephone or typewriter. The writing happens inside of it, amongst sex, hunger and machinery.
This convention of implied modernity reminds me very much of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926, only eight years before Tropic of Cancer. Again here, the impression of about progress as a present condition. Hemingway’s trains, Paris’s accordion-playing bartop musicians, not too distant from early 2000s DJs at local cafés from San Francisco to Istanbul. This Parisian urban mobility, like Miller’s, belongs to a world already organised around human convenience.
It is easy from the perspective of 2026 to imagine earlier generations as relatively static because current technological progress appears so exponential. Yet the lived experience of someone born around 1870 and reaching adulthood at the turn of the century must have been extraordinary.
Indeed, my abuelo Manuel, within his lifetime, witnessed electrification, aircraft, cinema, and mechanised cities, yet he never got a driver’s licence. His close friend, Emilio, until his final days rode into the village on his wagon, pulled along by his beloved burro Cielito.
These things existed simultaneously, and this acceleration I suspect felt every bit as destabilising as ours today. A person could live inside the age of aviation while maintaining habits essentially inherited from earlier than the nineteenth century.
This also challenges the tendency to imagine earlier civilisations as technologically primitive in any simple sense. For example, imagine a traveller entering a major Roman provincial centre in Hispania or Gaul: they might have encountered aqueducts, paved roads, hydraulic engineering, cranes, underfloor heating, large-scale mining operations, and postal systems. To someone arriving from a comparatively isolated rural community, Roman urban infrastructure must have certainly felt futuristic.
Of course, sensations are always relative to the person experiencing them. The difference today is perhaps that earlier societies lacked computational technologies that propagate change at extraordinary speed. Digital systems can be reproduced almost instantaneously. AI and continuing robotisation at a structural level introduce another layer of acceleration again. But there is an underlying human problem that remains consistent: how do human instincts adapt to our new world, organised around technologies we didn’t ask for, and without our consent?
Which brings me back to Miller. Tropic of Cancer is interesting because technology is not what he is writing about. People work, telephone, and move through society that would have been astonishing decades earlier, and yet uncannily familiar today. And while the effects expose a rawer, more vulnerable aspect of the human condition, they are a consequence of our facility to creatively become. As he aptly tells us early on:
“I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am.”
