![]() It is generally agreed upon that Miller’s problematic writing (or, perhaps, nature) was a blasé aside of his personality, rather than a deep-seated aspect of his belief-system. More than once, there seems to be a door opening unto previously overanalyzed topics with a new and halcyon backlight – Miller’s misogyny and vitalism amongst them – only for that same door to be abruptly slammed in the reader’s face. This is not to say that Cowe, in this work, covers all that there is to say about Miller. As Cowe introduces the first chapter, in which she discusses the profound influence that Otto Rank had on Miller before he turned to Buddhism, she tacitly implies that the personality trait that rendered Miller appreciative of psychoanalysis was the same as that which opened him up to religious fervor: “Having painfully broken the prevailing social contract, Miller opened himself up to an eclectic range of influences he was actively searching for new ways to comprehend society and his place in it” (21). Cowe deftly shifts from a reading of Miller’s life via Otto Rank’s psychoanalysis to the same apposite Henri Bergson’s own form of continental philosophy, Surrealism et al, and religion broadly all the while keeping in mind, though perhaps in the back of it, the revelatory notion that all are in some way connected to Miller’s Buddhist intuitions. However, what is novel about Cowe’s study is the ways in which it traces Miller’s spiritual advancement through his pre-Buddhist phases and all the attendant-isms (anarchism and surrealism, for example) that the author engaged with and subsequently shirked. What’s left, in the wake of these many pedantic studies, to uncover about a writer in relation to their religious philosophy? After all, one doubts that there is much industry left for the base study of James Joyce vis-à-vis Catholicism. McMahan’s The Making of Buddhist Modernism (2008). Calonne’s “Samhadi All the Time: Henry Miller and Buddhism” and David L. A cursory glance at preceding studies which Cowe herself includes in the bibliography of the text displays just how well-trodden is the paper on which the author at hand writes a representative but not exhaustive list evidences titles including: Thomas Nesbit’s Henry Miller and Religion (2007), David S. Indeed, much critical attention has been paid to Miller and his relationship with Buddhism. Cowe begins by confirming her belief in the widely accepted factoid that Miller was “a deeply spiritual man who had gained a level of awakening through his suffering” (12), and that “he to see the suffering he endured through the lens of Zen Buddhism Miller seeks to understand his suffering through the Second and Third Noble Truths” (15).Īt first, for those familiar with Henry Miller and the critical studies that have emerged about him and his writing, the thrust of Cowe’s argument might seem to lack novelty, perhaps veering towards derivativeness. Although it in many ways keeps with the general trajectory of late modernist studies, the latest work to emerge out of this milieu, Jennifer Cowe’s svelte Killing the Buddha: Henry Miller’s Long Journey to Satori (2020), attempts to pave a new spiritual path in reading, thinking and writing about Henry Miller.Ĭowe – a lecturer in the University of British Columbia’s School of Journalism, Writing and Media – aims, in this work, to demystify the notoriously polarizing Miller by way of situating the entirety of his oeuvre in relation to both his perceived and voiced absorption in the world of Zen Buddhism. Vancouver has become quite the centre for late modernist studies, the locus of which is the Fairleigh Dickinson University Press offices, headed by Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell scholar, James Gifford. Jennifer Cowe, Killing the Buddha: Henry Miller’s Long Journey to Satori (Vancouver: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, 2020) John Clegg, University of British Columbia
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