In Memoriam J. Hillis Miller (1928–2021)

Abstract

In Memoriam J. Hillis Miller (1928–2021) Charles Altieri and Jahan Ramazani Editorial note: Our Editorial Board Member J. Hillis Miller passed away on February 7, 2021, at the age of ninety-two, at his home in Sedgwick, Maine. Below we would like to honor him with two personal testimonies by fellow Board Members Charles Altieri and Jahan Ramazani about how they remember the man and the influence exerted by his work. We kindly invite the reader to turn also to the Editor’s Column, the second half of which is likewise taken up by personal recollections. The bibliography there contains an overview of Hillis Miller’s copious writings on Wallace Stevens over a period of more than fifty years. Memories of J. Hillis Miller J. Hillis Miller’s passing away provokes vivid reminders of the difference he made in my life, although I was never his student. The first reminder directs me to a time long before I ever met him. I had thought myself lucky that my philosophy program at Le Moyne College emphasized phenomenology rather than scholastic thinking. But when I went to graduate school at Chapel Hill, then an intensely historicist school, I feared that how I liked to think about poetry would be a considerable distance from how I was being trained to analyze texts. Then, one day in 1966, I came upon a review that led me to read Miller’s Poets of Reality, and then re-read it. I was not quite convinced that Williams was obsessed by modes of nothingness nor that Stevens was so clearly phenomenological, especially given how I was learning to register the impact of the voices he had heard at Harvard. What mattered more, however, was that I now knew I could use a philosophical language in which I felt relatively at home. And, even more important, thanks to Miller’s example I was able to push my imagination as far as I could, using historical concerns as shaping pressures but allowing myself to be fascinated by what poetic imaginations could do with those circumstances. Thank you, Hillis, for facilitating what allowed my mind to discover what it could do in the reading of poets’ confrontations with this history. The second reminder dates to my time at SUNY Buffalo between 1968 and 1976. Hillis was close with two of his ex-students there, Ed Dryden and Roy Roussel, and had become friends with Joe Riddel. These colleagues had become my friends as well, although I never got over my terror at how quick their minds were to leap on errors. And I endowed Hillis with an even more intensified version of those powers. Then we were both [End Page 275] invited to a conference on Whitehead at the University of British Columbia. Hillis was assigned as a respondent to a sweet and very intelligent person who had written the classic book on birdsong. He had actually done some work on birdsong himself and completely departed from his own familiar language in order to see where that mode of dwelling might lead. The event was inspiring, and I could not help contrasting it with how I imagined that many leading philosophers might have engaged the topic. My final memory derives from another academic event, about six years ago, a modernist studies conference in Irvine where Hillis was one of the main speakers. I do not remember his speech very well, but I clearly recall the rapt attention with which the audience listened to what he was saying. This is probably the most compelling evidence of esteem that a professor of literature can receive. Yet what I most remember from the conference was a different experience. I was stunned that he came to my paper, giving me a pleasant greeting before the talk. Maybe almost fifty years in the academy were producing rewards. I was even more delighted by what happened after the session concluded. After complimenting me graciously, Hillis went directly to a then-graduate student at Berkeley, Michelle Ty, who had given a terrific, dense talk on forms that modern fiction felt compelled to pursue. Hillis’s response to her combined the roles of sage...