In the opening pages of Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller announces the extravagant anti-art that will be his theme. Beyond the lice and the cancer of time, beyond hope and convention, Beauty and Art, the auto-hero offers his book as libel and insult, the studied rejection of accepted literary values: "I am going to sing for you," he promises, "a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse." With fractured echoes of Whitman's celebration of the self, the passage insists on its own bellowing song…. If singing here is a last modern echo of Homeric invocation, music more generally becomes an insistant metaphor both for Miller's own discordant lyricism and for the collapsing world that Tropic of Cancer exposes.

Miller has his own inverted muse, the character named Tania, expatriate herself and wife of an American playwright. Fecund but conventional, Tania becomes at once both inspiration and the focal point of the chaos that Miller, singing only tunes of dying splendor, invokes as the hallucinated topic of the book…. Registering the death of time and the dissolution of the world itself, Miller announces the ultimate metamorphosis Tania inspires: "I am thinking that when the great silence descends upon all and everywhere music will at last triumph. When into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored and chaos is the score upon which reality is written. You, Tania, are my chaos. It is why I sing."… Miller's song, then, will be a carefully adopted cacophony, the literary equivalent, off-key and triumphant, of the very chaos a conventional world generates.

Convention has its own music, though, and Miller's strident lyricism works constantly against the harmonies that predictability creates. Thematically, music is used throughout Tropic of Cancer as a sign of the flagging vitality Miller everywhere rejects. He will sing off key precisely because the rest of the world sings on key with the tunes that security composes and safety plays. As a sign of spiritual exhaustion, music pervades the book; people sing what is unreal, orchestras play what only soothes, down-and-outers turn to guitar and accordion, while stuffed-shirts of all varieties pompously and erroneously identify in the music of convention a false sense of life's possibilities. For Miller the music of habitual order is a pale tune indeed. (pp. 40-1)

[The accordion is represented as the] popular instrument of a commonplace world. Along with the guitar, it signals the humdrum and usual. Although Miller had linked the two at the beginning of the book as instruments irrelevant to his song, one is not surprised to find them assuming suggestive importance later. (p. 42)

Paris, alternating despair with ecstasy, either sings "a demented song" …, or—on pleasant days at least—is "like a piece of music for the pianoforte."… The flux of Parisian life is as aural as it is visual, its discordant music sounding the themes of the modern metropolis.

More personally, Sylvester and Tania, given to fads, pomposity, and dullness, rent a new piano, a concert grand. Positioning himself on a balcony to better announce his distance from their values, Miller sees the piano as proclaiming the end of his affair with Tania. The latter is playing "the adagio," and the music "says very distinctly: no more words of love."… With the violent rhetorical aggressiveness that marks his response to women throughout Tropic of Cancer, Miller looks down from the balcony: "The keys are black and white, then black, then white, then white and black. And you want to know if you can play something for me. Yes, play something with those big thumbs of yours. Play the adagio since that's the only goddamned thing you know. Play it, and then cut off your big thumbs."… (pp. 43-4)

[The] most extended thematic treatment of music as sign of this collapsed world is reserved for the concert hall. Appropriately, Miller has found a ticket for the concert in a lavabo, and the scene dramatizes the collision between the representative of the world of the sewers and the dead automatons, over-dressed, self-satisfied, cataleptic, the emblems of a rich world, bored but secure. While Miller immediately feels out of place, his insecurities are converted to rhetorical strength as he realizes that the concert is only a self-inflected form of torture for those who attend. Both Miller and the audience withdraw from the reality of the music. While the robots of the audience try to avoid thinking at all costs—for that way madness lies—they nevertheless recollect shop windows where an attractive scarf or hat stirs vital juices more profoundly than the music. Miller, on the other hand, becomes more intensely alive as he loses all sense of time and place, the pores of his body becoming windows through which glimpses of a felt world pass. (p. 44)

The harmony of a conventional world … consistently strikes Miller as a sterile expression of waning life and calls into being his own most grotesque and outraged gestures. Confronted by the music of ideas or music as sentimental evocation of female ties that bind, Miller violently, enthusiastically, rejects the harmonies he hears…. What exists as reality beneath the broken structures of form and meaning is finally the flux of life itself, the absurd flow of human passion, the sewer, the river, the discreet shards of buried emotional life. To these bits of life Miller directs his own song and dance. (p. 48)

Searching for the fragments of resuscitated life, Miller invites the reader to one final dance: "It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us, but if that is so then let us set up a last agonizing, bloodcurdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war whoop! Away with lamentation! Away with elegies and dirges!… Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance. But a dance!"… (p. 49)

Tropic of Cancer is precisely that last, expiring dance. Often criticized for his lack of dramatic skill, Miller is at his strongest in the sheer lyricism of the book. His ability to evoke both paralysis and life exists beyond his solipsism and the book's unevenness…. That lyricism informs not only … passages of acceptance—and the end of the book is an elegiac acceptance of the flow of time, of Paris and its past—but also the violently charged moments of rejection. Imagistic and concrete, the language at its best is the off-key cacophony, the score of chaos announced in his early invocation of Tania.

In Black Spring Miller continues to make much of the music theme. In "Third or Fourth Day of Spring" he identifies with Beethoven as he affirms creation and destruction…. [As] he says later, "Either you start with pure melody or you start with listerine." In Tropic of Cancer, Miller affirms a life, finally, without people. Acceptance at the end depends on a joy found outside the boundaries of Paris itself with the author insulated against those whose lifeless order had crippled earlier. Miller alone finds peace; the human world around him remains unchanged. That, too, had been anticipated: "I had moments of ecstasy, and I sang with burning sparks. I sang of the Equator, her red feathered legs and the islands dropping out of sight. But nobody heard."… Alone or not, Miller has sung his song, his own aroused lyrical voice clashing with the harmonies of convention. (pp. 49-50)