A Surprising Modesty Le Colosse de Maroussi by Henry Miller

Résumé

Sultry and downright pornographic, Henry Miller introduces into his first novels Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, Tropic of Capricorn, passages where he cheerfully straddles poetic and ethereal eroticism towards an assertive and flamboyant sexuality which earned him tough censorship and a ban of publication in the United States, impregnated at the time with puritanism and extreme vigilance towards all that undermines morals. Steeped in resentment, despair, same result, of the American way of life and existential conception, Henry Miller recounts, recounts himself, especially sexually, through countless very raw experiences, as for a sure affirmation of oneself in sexuality, for lack of being so socially and economically. Henry Miller calms down and almost inexplicably in The Colossus of Maroussi and becomes modest, very modest. The superlative enters the necessity, in view of his previous works. After years of exile and real misery in Paris, Henry Miller makes a trip to Greece, responding to an urgent invitation from his friend Laurence Durrell, himself a poet and novelist. It is a form of pilgrimage to the sources during which the author, disparaged and considered cursed, discovers, fascinated by the mythological, civilizational, cultural aura, not only immortal Hellenic monuments, but also a form of mysticism revealed Greek.