Context

Like James and Wharton, Hill focuses on the life of the mind, the painful coming-to-consciousness suffered by those, as James would have it, of fine sensibilities. At the same time, like them, Hill writes social fiction, paying especial attention to issues of gender and race, albeit in much more experimental fashion. And, like theirs, Hill’s plots ride upon a steady determinist undercurrent against which her protagonists struggle in their search for self, that struggle set against a backdrop of intense social malaise, disease, or increasing chaos.

Edith Wharton wrote in 1934 that "the welter is always there, and the present generation hears close underfoot the growling of the volcano on which ours danced so long; but in our individual lives, though the years are sad, the days have a way of being jubilant. Life is the saddest thing there is, next to death." As Hill reminds us, man is "the only species ever to dare to take extinction into its own hands," and her characters continually face the reality as well as the legacy of racism, sexism, fascism, the profound defilement of the other experienced in both social and psychic life in this "terrible century." Perhaps, for Hill, we are all, like her first major character, Francis Scanlon in Jeremiah 8:20, in some peculiarly individual way "humiliated" and are therefore all quite dangerous. Our desires drive us to an already determined fate, so it is not the endings that offer revelation; instead, it is the journeys we take that matter.

Hill’s elaborations of a few such journeys are notable for their ludic transgression of realist conventions. Overly convoluted plots, extraordinary and deeply conflicted characters, unreliable narrators, inconclusive endings, temporal jump cuts, all these devices call attention repeatedly to the inevitable failure of fiction to determine what might always suffice as the authentic. Ours is, as several characters point out, a time in which caricature has become indistinguishable from reality, the old reality/illusion dichotomy has simply become a bore, and the major value systems of the past have proven bankrupt. Hill nevertheless holds out the tentative hope of understanding these seeming conspiracies of fate as well as the pure joy of individual awakenings. Her novels fold together like many intricate origami works and so offer what she describes in The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer as the necessary makings of a perfect magic rug: "Charms, curses, vindications, manifestations, harmonies, disappearances, conundrums, predictions, illusions, and deceits," all that one might expect not only from that one particularly surreal form of transport but also from the best of experimental fiction. Even the titles transport us to different times and, so, to the possible convergence of parallel worlds. When I mentioned to my colleagues my excitement over the brilliant Henry James’ Midnight Song, they misunderstood, exclaiming that they didn’t know James had written a book entitled Midnight Song. I think Hill would have enjoyed that confusion, and, while if James had written such a novel, it would not easily be classed as experimental, I would suggest that the same story is being written again and again in James and Wharton, in Zoline and Carter and Hill, not so much to get it right but because the endlessly unfolding text of this story offers its own perverse pleasure of self-contemplation, an erotic figuring of self that annihilates the delusion of sufficiency even as it captures the inexplicable pleasuring of characters trapped in seemingly dead-end or deadly dreamscapes.

Hill’s characters are, not surprisingly, tremendously preoccupied with understanding the story in which they are writ and, in particular, what in The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer is called the "prevailing dream," the story around which a person is organized. This dream’s origin is typically loss, and the quest for self-recompense is driven by the desire for love, erotic pleasure, virtually any sort of connection. For instance, the grotesque protagonist of Jeremiah 8:20 who feels himself to be no more than "a liqueous molten mass encased in miles of skin" surreptitiously records the conversations of others, then edits those tapes, splicing in himself—that is, a self created out of whole cloth, one that lives only in pure language. His desperate measures prove only a momentary stay against confusion in a world in which, according to one of his fellow boarders, "there’s a kind of fatigue that’s set in. A fatigue about language." For Scanlon and the radical artists with whom he lives, the metaphors around which we organize our lives no longer work. Worse, they have grown malignant, and, in the face of an increasingly corrupt and inhumane society, there is no recourse to justice except through fantasy. Francis Scanlon’s delusional belief that the Blacks harbor the secret to all mysteries of the interior his hope that should he break the code of "Bird got soul" then he would possess the self to which his dream of the city has led him is played out to a spectacularly violent end.

The intense social critique of post-Kennedy era America found in this first novel finds an ironic fruition in The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer, a scathing novel of the future in which sexism is universal and the state controlled by the inhuman. Here Hill reinvokes racial difference in the ghostly character of Rastus who because he is Black is faster than the speed of light and so can help this novel’s seeker, Amanda Jaworski, America’s greatest woman astronaut, overcome the literalized metaphors of a monkey on her back and a trip down Memory Lane. Amanda journeys to the ends and beginnings of this universe for the sake of the irrational, the non-linear, the now of love, to create a new structure of feeling. The similarity of her quest and that of the experimental writer is highly ironic:

Less love and she would never have the stamina, much less the chutzpah for this trip. There was no question about it, she knew it: she would wind up having to make her own trajectory, go into uncharted territory, disappoint everyone on earth, go completely up against the expectations, ruin her reputation, and generally bring disapproval, hatred, and anger all around. Well, that was that.

Ambiguity is the engine propelling Let’s Fall in Love, the inviting title of which enjoins us to rapture while the opening scenes introduce us to a father’s incestuous longing for his daughter, a murder, and a rape. The sensibility of the surreal, the irrational, and the perverse permeates the novel and makes much of it an elaborate joke. Men in bowler hats who seem to have stepped directly out of Magritte paintings mysteriously appear and disappear, and a mysterious nude descends a staircase in scenes that tantalize us with the possibility of meaning that is never fully realized. The opening quotes of the book pair lyrics by Fats Waller on love with Goethe’s pronouncement that "all that happens is symbol, and as it perfectly represents itself, it points to the rest." The violence of the collision of symbols as they point to whatever is the rest constitutes the action of the book in which Inspector Avian Braine, famous for his brilliant associative thinking, tries to solve a series of murders, and Anna Kleibourg-Quim, the most expensive prostitute in the world, famous for her erotic expertise, searches for her father. These dual quests for agency and origin are, of course, stimulating, but we have already been apprised by Hill’s early work—as well as through Anna’s work on a pornographic novel—that the thrust of every strong narrative drive is not necessarily direct and that the release promised in (dis)closure is only temporary. And, while violence may give birth to beauty or truth, any will to power over another is always profoundly suspect, even that comprising the relationship of parent to child or lover to beloved.

All of Hill’s experimental novels interrogate the relationship between violence, the erotic, and the self in so far as the pornographic and the violent refuse moderation and require the most intense self-exposure. But the novels offer more than simply an intellectual disquisition on the power of the erotic: Hill’s own writing has an erotic fever that is contagious. The texts are replete with highly sensual scenes of lovemaking, eating, watching, dreaming, moments when appetite overcomes inborn humiliation or self-limitation and the self lets go, "tipping and luxuriating in the long slow fall of endless pleasure." This confluence of forces—violence, sex, and selfevolution—is most concentrated in Henry James’ Midnight Song, Hill’s latest work. Here, someone is killing the women of Vienna, men prey upon the vulnerable, Freud exorcizes the childhood traumas of Henry James and a countess with golden eyes, and an old woman prophecies the burning of the Jews. In this City of Dreams, on the hinge of the century, on the threshold of unspeakable horrors, it makes absolute sense that Cecily would crave the salvation of fictional being, the chance to "come alive through those long, sinuous, labyrinthine exposures of the heart" she finds in James’s work. The weight of memory, cultural and personal, the memories of which we are sure and the memories which we live with only a glimmer of consciousness, the weight of these transfixes the characters, and the erotics of longing and death seem beyond understanding.

Freud insists that remembering the basic truth of our continual loss will set us free. Nietzsche, whose spectre haunts Hill’s last novel, writes that "we have art, in order not to die of the truth." Edith Wharton, in turn, argues that art and love will save us. Hill also suggests that the erotic, no matter how perverse, may prove crucial in any one individual’s coming-to-consciousness. Repeatedly in Hill’s work, intense erotic pleasure saves characters from a living death, for it entails a momentary decentering of one’s self in one’s prevailing dream and so a possible forgiving of those who have made that dream one’s nightmare reality.

We still dance, then, on the edge of the abyss. Even if it is our Totentanz, Hill’s work intimates, there is still time to retrace our steps, refigure the patterns, and imagine something better for both the dancer and the dance.