My favorite model of consumptive writing is Henry Miller's. Though all of his work is relevant, I am thinking specifically of *Sexus*, which was written over a long period of time but published as part one of *The Rosy Crucifiction* in 1962 by the Olympia Press.
In it, Miller talks about his relationship with writing, which is at once ambitious, aggressive, athiestic, metaphysical, mystified and utterly passive. While Miller has a highly developed stylistic "personality," his ego-centered narrations reflect a fractured or dispersed subjectivity. I'm not engaging in psychoanalysis or telling you about Henry Miller the person, but trying to suggest a relationship between his radically inclusive style and massage (rather than message) and his rubbed-down spread-out I.
The I.D.-ology of the unified, cohesive, individual subject depends
on a strict logic of exclusion. Miller, like Walt
Whitman and William
S. Burroughs, challenges the necessity of exclusion. The flux and flow
of fate tumbles the body of Henry Miller through a tail of libidinality
and excess. No one is driving the vehicle, yet it moves and moves. Why
can't Henry hold down a job? He is not interested in getting fixed by the
ideologizing *Mirror
of Production*.
