‘I’m laughing to myself as I write this’: Speculations on an African Laughing Record in Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1934)​

Lee-Price, Simon (2024) ‘I’m laughing to myself as I write this’: Speculations on an African Laughing Record in Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1934)​. In: London Conference in Critical Thought, 28-29 June 2024, Greenwich University. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

This presentation reflects on the process of writing a chapter about Henry Miller and racial masquerade (forthcoming, Palgrave Macmillan) that was inspired by a minor but, for me, piercing detail in Jay Martin’s biography of the author. Miller, says Martin, launched into writing Tropic of Cancer (1934) in his Paris hotel room in autumn 1931 amid the tumult of clattering typewriter keys and ‘Beethoven or jazz or an African laughing record blaring at full volume from the victrola.’1 Pursuing this intriguing reference to the African laughing record took me on a learning journey through an ever-expanding multimedia cultural archive of black laughter, which included phonograph recordings, films, cartoons, posters, poems, novels, essays, anthropological and psychological studies, and racialised minstrel performances. It provided an emerging context for attending to Miller beyond the frame of reference to largely American and European literary authors in which he is typically interpreted. One tantalising possibility that presented itself was that the ‘African laughing’ accompanying Miller’s percussive typing may have issued from the flipside of Louis Armstrong's jazz number ‘Blue, Turning Grey Over You,’ released in 1931. In this presentation, I speculate – using an approach which has a precedent in Miller criticism – that the contagious laughing record infected the text of Cancer, both sonically, as literal and figurative laughter, and visually, as free associations with the spinning shellac disc and the white light reflecting off its shiny black surface. I will suggest that reading Miller and other literary texts attentive to seemingly insignificant biographical, contextual, and descriptive details, and employing imaginative and multidisciplinary modes of interpretation can open gateways to experience differently and otherwise familiar authors and their works.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Depositing User:	Dr Simon Lee-Price
Date Deposited:	16 Jul 2024 06:55
Last Modified:	16 Jul 2024 06:55
URI:	https://bnu.repository.guildhe.ac.uk/id/eprint/19106

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