Published in 1939, it is the last of Henry Miller's autobiographical trilogy originally published in France.The titles of the three works have a certain correspondence. "Tropic of Cancer" and "Tropic of Capricorn" are also called "summer solstice" and "winter solstice" respectively. Between "summer solstice" and "winter solstice", there is a "black spring". Although it is the latest published in Henry Miller's first autobiographical trilogy, it is known as the first of Henry Miller's six-volume autobiographical romance, including "The Sacrifice Trilogy". department.Because it mainly narrates and describes Henry Miller's early life experience in New York, as well as various impressions, associations, reveries and fantasies related to it.Henry Miller was in Europe when he wrote this book, and he has been away from the United States for many years. His homesickness is palpable. Obviously, he is a nostalgic person, but from the standpoint of cultural criticism, he believes that American culture has begun to decline. , the whole of American life is like a "red sore", "more rotten than cheese crawling around with worms", "all the streets of the United States combine to form a huge filthy place, a spiritual cesspool , in which everything is sucked and drained, leaving only a permanent pile of stinking shit. Above this cesspool, working spirits wave their wands; palaces and factories spring up one after another, such as gunpowder factories, chemical factories, steel factories factories, sanatoriums, prisons, asylums, etc., etc., etc., and so on. The whole continent is a nightmare, producing the greatest misfortunes of the greatest number." Therefore, Henry Miller "to see America destroyed, from top to bottom down. To be eradicated completely."He "wanted to witness this happen purely out of revenge" as "a kind of compensation" for the crimes committed against him and others like him.

So what crime did America inflict on Henry Miller that he hated America so much that he wanted to see it destroyed?This is because the high material civilization of the United States only makes people alive, but the alienation of human nature and the loss of self are the most painful things that make Henry Miller go crazy.He said: "My lifelong desire is not to be alive...but to express myself. I understand that I have never had the slightest interest in being alive, only in what I am doing now, which is parallel to life, to have Things that live and transcend life. I have little or no interest in real things, not even real things; only things that exist in my imagination, things that I suffocate every day to live, interest me "Henry Miller expresses his basic intention of creation here, he does not create simply to live, he wants to truly own himself, own his own spiritual world, and express it, so Henry Miller's The works mainly write about his spiritual world.Facing the alienated and self-lost American culture, he is determined to rebuild himself with a strong spirit of rebellion.His lived experience served as a crutch in this process of rebuilding himself, and once he had elicited his inner world, he let his consciousness flow freely and unfettered, leaving the crutch aside.He describes his spiritual world in order to express the pain, loneliness and tremendous mental pressure he feels in the desert of the modern metropolis, which is often just a feeling, a reverie, an illusion, and an anger Vent, all this constitutes a chaotic and disorderly world, but this is the reproduction of Henry Miller's true self at that time.

Baudelaire once artistically reproduced the chaos and ugliness of the world's metropolises, thus enriching the expressive field of poetry.Henry Miller artistically reproduces the chaos and ugliness of the personal spiritual world in the chaos and ugliness of the modern metropolis, thus enriching the expressive field of prose.Several of his major works are called autobiographical novels, but more precisely, they should be called prose poems that mainly express his spiritual world. Although his prose poems also wrote about people and things, such as his father who had been drinking for a long time, then suddenly quit drinking, became enthusiastic about religion, and radiated religious enthusiasm, but because a priest he admired made him sad, he finally fell into a A state of hopeless paralysis; writing about the experiences of his own childhood friends in Brooklyn and his later colleagues and friends; Sexual relations with countless women, etc., but, as mentioned above, these are just crutches to elicit his inner world, and once elicited his inner world, his prose poetry fully develops its unique Advantages, put the pen to write, gallop freely, presenting profound thoughts, original impulses, mysterious hallucinations, complex feelings, and rich associations.

In Henry Miller's free-running spiritual world, the profound influence of the two German philosophers is revealed from time to time.Henry Miller talks about unwillingness to leave his mother's warm womb at the beginning of this book. This is the same as the ancient Greek myth that Nietzs used to explain his thinking. That is to say, what is the best thing in the world?If you don't want to be born, once you come to this world, you won't get the best things.Henry Miller came to this world, faced with a highly materialized civilized society, but could not find himself, he deeply felt the crisis of this civilized society's prosperity and decline.Influenced by Spengler's "The Decline of the West", he believed that Western society, especially American society, was hopeless, and the fate of the final decline was irreversible, so he tried his best to deny this society and the possibility of establishing any order , and this negation eventually turned into an affirmation of himself.But his affirmation of himself is mainly to affirm his own spiritual world, that is, his unrestrained sex life, to some extent, is just to prove his own rebellious spirit, not succumbing to tradition, and his physical self So deeply influenced by civilization that he even had the idea of ​​removing his own body; "I was born into civilization, and I accepted it as natural - what else could I do? But the irony is that no one else Take it seriously. I am the only truly civilized person in the public. There is no place for me yet. Yet the books I read and the music I listen to convince me that there are others like me in the world. I must not Instead of drowning myself in the Gulf of Mexico, in order to have an excuse to continue the existence of this false civilization. I had to get rid of my own ghostly body like a louse." This contains Nietzsche's disintegration of the principle of individuation Thought, the self can only become a free self and get rid of the shackles of civilization only when it gets rid of the principle of individualization. At this time, according to Nietzsche, it is the transformation from the Apollonian spirit to the Dionysian spirit.In the Dionysian state, the painful ego is fully expressed, including primitive impulses, mysterious hallucinations, etc., and at the same time the ego is ecstatic because it has been fully expressed.Henry Miller tried his best to achieve the Dionysian aesthetic state advocated by Nietzsche in his works.Nietzsche believed that the most basic Dionysian state-drunkenness is a musical mood and contains sexual impulses, so Henry Miller used music, sex and a Dadaist-style sensory disorder to constantly pursue the ecstasy of self-expression .Apart from the initial large part and some irregular paragraph divisions in the form of blank lines, there are only two formal parts: the interlude and the epilogue, both of which are borrowed from musical terms, as if the whole work is a piece of self-expression. A complete composition of musical moods.Henry Miller's sexual impulse was closely related to music, and his first object of sexual impulse was his female piano teacher when he was only fifteen years old.The sexual impulses he described in his works constitute a sexual rhapsody, and his sexual symphony is part of his amoral tendency of criticizing western culture and rebuilding himself.His amoral tendency is to go back to the original impulse, to pursue ecstasy, but it is also an extremely painful process.

At the beginning of this book, Henry Miller quotes the French medieval moral philosopher Peter Abelard to explain why he wrote this book.He said: "I did this in order to let you find out by comparing my pain that your pain is nothing, at most a trivial matter, so that you can more easily bear the pressure of your pain." translator March 1995