What narrative techniques and plot devices are used in Henry Miller's Black Spring?

A word that has often been used to describe Miller's style is anarchic. I would agree; although this description is not an original one, it does convey what Black Spring and other novels by Miller are all about.

The style and content of Black Spring have a lawless, defiant quality. Miller writes in a kind of headlong, rushing manner, as if the words are uncontrollably tumbling out of him. It's a narrative technique that grabs the reader's focus even if nothing definite is actually happening in the story. George Orwell, despite the fact that he wholeheartedly praised Miller (calling him a "friendly American voice"), described the author in his famous essay "Inside the Whale" as an "unconstructive [and] amoral" writer.

Miller's purpose, if he has one, seems to be upending the conventional modes of thought that were a holdover from the age before Modernism. He begins Black Spring by saying that the only reality for him is the street—particularly Brooklyn's 14th Ward, where he grew up. Yet the action transfers to Paris where he is living as he writes.

The long, overextended sentences combined with the unexpected and disparate ideas he seems to hurl at the reader one after the other create an off-balance feeling. But it is also impossible not to listen to Miller and take him seriously. He talks about disease almost as if he's enraptured by it, describing, for instance, syphilis as a "Morning Star" that greeted Europe upon Columbus's return—as the Black Death had earlier done when the Crusaders came back.

Not only does Black Spring contain sexual explicitness—which caused Miller's books to be banned in the US and Britain until the 1960s—but also a strident antagonism towards religion. An anti-religious stance is, of course, nothing unusual for a writer in this period, and there were even quite a few writers (or artists) in the Romantic and Victorian periods that had been freethinkers. However, Miller's particular manner of expression is self-consciously obscene—or was considered so in his time and might even be seen this way by many readers today.

Even so, there is (as is often noted) a lyrical quality to his writing. He describes the Brooklyn Bridge as a "harp against the sky," but joins this sense of the beauty of the city (and the world altogether) with a sense of its ugliness. He describes, for instance, a war veteran who returned home and vomited at his doorstep, then wiped up the vomit with his vest. Miller's portrait of life is both surreal and real to the point where he at times repels the reader with the unflinching detail.

The overall effect the prose of Black Spring creates is not only anarchic but contains within itself a kind of massive contradiction. Miller is a narcissist, but he seems to wish to speak for mankind as a whole. It's significant that the feminist writer Kate Millett, in her book Sexual Politics, considered Miller a prime example of sexism in literature, but stated that Black Spring was his "one honest book."

Narrative technique refers to any method a writer may use to narrate a story and convey the intended message. Narrative techniques can also be called literary techniques or literary devices. Narrative techniques can include point of view, plot elements, and style elements, among others.

Like many of his works, Henry Miller's Black Spring is a very Surrealistic novel. Surrealism is a literary and visual arts movement that began in the 1920s as a reaction against the rationalism Western society had built its culture and politics upon, the same rationalism that led to World War I. Instead of rationalism, Surrealism celebrated the unconsciousness by creating fantasy and dream worlds. Miller uses narrative techniques to create his Surrealism.

One narrative technique that takes the narrative out of the realms of rational thought and into Surrealism is the frequent change in point of view. As we can see by the use of the pronoun "I" in the first sentence, "I am a patriot--of the Fourteenth Ward, Brooklyn, where I was raised," the story is narrated in the first-person point of view. The narration also dominantly remains in the first-person point of view. However, the narrator also switches to speaking in second person as he analyzes his own thoughts, as if inviting his readers to accept his thoughts and experiences as their own. We can see an example of his switch to second-person point of view in the third paragraph in which he analyzes what it means "to be born on the street":

To be born on the street means to wander all your life, to be free. It means accident and incident, drama, movement. It means above all dream. A harmony of irrelevant facts which gives to your wandering a metaphysical certitude.

Since the narrator is addressing the reader as "you," the narrator is inviting us, the readers, to participate in understand what it means to be street-smart by picturing ourselves, not the narrator, on the streets.

How would you describe the style of Henry Miller's novel Black Spring?

George Wickes has written that “Stylistically, Black Spring is a dazzling book, the work of a rampant imagination intoxicated with words.” Miller, Wickes continues,

is a poet of reckless abandon, his language exuberant and prodigal, often used for sound rather than meaning. Fond of jargon and parody, he readily spins off into nonsense and jabberwocky. . . . Like the great parodist [James Joyce], Miller writes not in one style but in many. Not only is each section of Black Spring written in a different style, but individual sections are written in a chameleon style that borrows its constantly changing colors from a dozen sources. Besides Joyce the authors he most frequently resembles are Proust and Whitman. Miller’s rhetoric is like Whitman’s, with long rhythmic lines pulsing along through present participles . . . . Like Whitman, too, Miller is fond of catalogues [that is, lists].

Some sense of the stylistic flavor of Black Spring is already evident in its second paragraph, in which the narrator describes his youth:

But I was born in the street and raised in the street. “The post-mechanical and beautiful street, where the most beautiful and hallucinating iron vegetation,” etc. Born under the sign of Aries which gives a fiery, active, energetic and somewhat restless body. With Mars in the ninth house!

Some of the traits outlined by Wickes are already evident here. The focus is autobiographical, but even the first sentence here, with its repetitions, shows Miller’s interest in sound effects. The emphasis on the verbs “born” and “raised” gives the sentence a kind of verbal energy. The immediate and unexplained shift to a quotation – a quotation without a cited source – already signals that this book will not be organized in any conventional, predictable way. This fact is also suggested by the fact that the quotation is broken off before it is finished.  The phrase “hallucinating iron vegetation” is almost surrealistic. Apparently the narrator assumes that the quotation is familiar enough to his readers that he need not continue citing it.  (Apparently it comes from an essay by the surrealistic artist Salvador Dali.) The narrator seems to presume that his readers are interested both in the world of the streets and the world of sophisticated art. Meanwhile, the narrator’s love of lists is exemplified in the next sentence, as is his exuberance and energy.  Finally, the italicized final sentence continues to display an interest in, and familiarity with, astrology, and perhaps the italicized phrase, too, is an unexplained allusion to some other text.

In short, even in this brief second paragraph, the narrator is writing in a style that is original, unorthodox, and unpredictable – traits found in the  rest of the book as well.

How would you describe the writing style in Henry Miller's novel Black Spring?

The style of Henry Miller’s novel Black Spring is famously varied, and some of its variety is suggested by passages reported in the review cited below.  One of those passages, for instance, reads as follows:

I go to the urinal to take a leak.  As I stand there looking up at the house fronts, a demure young woman leans out of a window to watch me.  How many times have I stood there in this smiling, gracious world, the sun splashing over me and the birds twittering crazily, and found a woman looking down at me from an open window, her smile crumbling into soft little bits which the birds gather in their beaks and deposit sometimes at the base of of a urinal where the water gurgles melodiously, and a man comes along with his fly open and pours the steaming contents of his bladder over the dissolving crumbs.

Here the phrasing of the first sentence is surprisingly frank (at least for Miller’s day), while the phrasing in general is clear and straightforward. The narrator is attuned to beauty of various kinds (such as that of the “demure young woman” and various aspects of nature). Yet the phrasing is also surrealistic, as in the description of how the woman’s smile crumbles into bits which are then deposited on the urinal by birds and then urinated on by another man. The passage begins, in short, realistically, but soon evolves into something impossible to take at face value. It begins with something shocking, moves to something beautiful, and concludes with something shocking again.  Here as elsewhere in the novel, Miller’s writing can often prove unconventional and unpredictable.

In contrast, a passage describing the faces of “the homely women of Europe” is far more consistently realistic, as when the narrator notes

. . . a worn beauty about their faces,  as if like the earth itself they have participated in all the cataclysms of nature.  The history of their race is engraved on their faces; their skin is like a parchment on which is recorded the whole struggle of civilization.  I see on their faces the ragged, multi-coloured map of Europe. a map . . . streaked with ineradicable prejudices and rivalries.

Similarly conventional are passages such as this one:

below me the valley of the Seine.  The whole of Paris thrown up in relief, like a geodetic survey. . . ring upon ring of streets; village within village; fortress within fortress.  Like the gnarled stump of an old redwood, solitary and majestic she stands there in the broad plain of the Seine.  Forever in the same spot she stands, now dwindling and shrinking, now rising and expanding . . . she stands soft, gem-like, a holy citadel whose mysterious paths thread beneath the clustering sea of roofs to break upon the open plain.

Even the following description of unconventional practices of painting is not, itself, as unconventional in phrasing as the practices it describes:

We discovered how to get interesting results with coffee grounds, and breadcrumbs, with coal and arnica; we laid the paintings in the bathtub and let them soak for hours, and then with a loaded brush we approached these dripping omelettes and we let fly at them.  As a last experiment we walk over them, spilling a little wine as we go.

In short, Miller’s style in Black Spring can vary from realism to surrealism (often in the same passage) and then back to realism again.