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In my review of Madame Bovary,
I stated that the link between reader and text becomes paramount, more so even
than the link between reader and writer: once the writer has done his or her
job and completed the text, their work is done. Patricia Duncker's brilliant Hallucinating
Foucault attempts to present an alternative view, proposing an explicit
connection between reader and writer, fashioned by the text, which acts as some
form of conduit for that passage of intellectual interaction.
Hallucinating Foucault is
a remarkable text, postmodern in the sense that it plays with perceptions of
narrative yet operating within a wholly realist framework. It focuses on a
fictional French author, Paul Michel, and his relationship with the genuine
French philosopher, Michel Foucault. Sanity/insanity, community/isolation,
love/loss, sex/death: these are the binary opposites which this novel explores.
Add the tension between writer and reader and we have an extraordinary novel, a
mere 178 pages which manages to present an astonishing amount of
thought-provoking matter without ever losing the narrative drive one might
expect from a more straightforward thriller.
Given the title of the novel, the
subject matter I describe above should not come as a surprise: Michel Foucault
once said: “Madness, death, sexuality, crime; these are the subjects that
attract most of my attention.” Although he never actually appears in Hallucinating
Foucault, he is nonetheless a principal character in it, and indeed he is
the pivot around which the whole narrative swings. While madness suffuses Hallucinating
Foucault, for Foucault himself it was relative. Indeed, he saw it as a
social construct and thus subject to differing diagnoses according to the
prevailing orthodoxy of the time. We should expect, then, a nuanced analysis of
insanity in any novel bearing his name, and this is indeed what we get in Hallucinating
Foucault.
The unnamed narrator is a postgraduate
student from Cambridge University whose doctoral thesis is on the fiction of
Paul Michel. Initially, he takes the same view as me, that the author is
irrelevant and everything is in the text. For that reason, his PhD subject is
to be a study of the novels, not the novelist. Indeed, when he finally meets
the novelist in person he makes this point to him forcibly, even as his actions
are beginning to give the lie to his words.
Michel, we are told, was
previously susceptible to unprovoked violent outbursts and finally succumbed to
a paranoid schizophrenic breakdown in 1968 whereafter he had been secured in a
variety of mental institutions. As the novel begins, the narrator meets a young
woman, The Germanist, whose doctoral research area is Schiller but who appears
to have a detailed knowledge of Michel, too. Together, the pair grow more
interested in the fate of the mysterious author, and The Germanist persuades
the narrator to travel to France to track him down. Thus begins the main
element of the narrative. What follows is a beautiful and painful meditation on
truth and narrative and love and loss.
Once in France, the narrator
begins in Michel’s archive, where he uncovers a series of letters to Foucault
which seem to indicate some strong relationship between the two. Ultimately,
however, the narrator realises that these letters were never sent. He tracks
Michel down to a mental hospital in Clermont-Ferrand and visits him. After a
tricky start, the two become increasingly close, to the extent that, after a
few weeks, the authorities agree that Michel can be released from the hospital
on licence for two months. They travel to Nice, where they begin a sexual
relationship and the story develops towards its climax.
It gradually becomes a study of alienation
and isolation and disconnection. At one point, discussing loneliness, Michel
tells the narrator of: “the loneliness of seeing a different world from that of
the people around you. Their lives remain remote from yours. You can see the
gulf and they can't. You live among them. They walk on earth. You walk on
glass. They reassure themselves with conformity, with carefully constructed
resemblances. You are masked, aware of your absolute difference.” As such, Michel refuses to conform in any
way. Even his homosexuality must be manifested in the way of an outsider: not
for him the jeans and white tee-shirt uniform of the bar-room gays. He
"didn't give a shit what other people thought", we are told, and he
would promenade on the beach with his arm round the narrator or kiss him as the
mood took him. James Purdy, that old curmudgeon of American letters, would have
been proud of him.
So we have madness, love,
isolation, truth: all of this could become a bit of a mess unless there is
something to hold it together So what does? As I have said, Foucault is the
pivot of the novel and, in particular, one might usefully turn to his approach
to the concept of parrhesia, “frankness” or “free speech”. This was a
central notion in Foucault’s understanding of the mechanics of power and social
inter-relationships. Two forms of parrhesia may be said to exist, and it
is the second which is of particular interest in this novel. The first,
political parrhesia, can be seen in the novel in Foucault’s and Michel’s
participation in the riotous events of 1968, in which they spoke out against
the prevailing culture and for the counter-culture. But it is the second form,
philosophical parrhesia, which dominates the novel. In any analysis of
power, there must be frank discourse. As Edward McGushin explains in his superb
analysis of Foucault:
Ethical/philosophical parrhesia
is a form of discourse that takes place in the context of care of the self.
Ethical parrhesia is poetic in the sense that its purpose is to
transform individuals – both those who speak it and those who listen to it. But
the notion of parrhesia, especially in its philosophical form,
challenges us to rethink the concept of truth.
And this is what we see in the
relationships in this novel – the Germanist and the narrator, the narrator and
Michel, Michel and Foucault and so on. There is truth-telling and there is
concealment. True parrhesia will not allow concealment and so these
relationships, however loving, are compromised. Nonetheless, they are borne of
courage and there is something noble and beautiful about them. Foucault himself
might have approved.
As well as this, the narrative is
a vehicle for an exploration of the bond between writer and reader. For Paul
Michel, that reader is personified by Michel Foucault, to whom he writes those
unsent letters. “You ask me what I fear most,” he says in one of the letters,
and explains that it is “the loss of my reader, the man for whom I write.”
Later, we discover that there was another, equally important and this time
genuine reader, “his English reader”. These are the people to whom Michel
addresses his fiction. The message he relates is difficult. His prose is
described by the narrator as emotionally detached. It contrasts with his true
nature, he chides, which is much more open and friendly: “you’re the most
passionate man I’ve ever met. And you’re nothing like what you write.”
The pellucid nature of his prose
is neatly mirrored by Duncker’s own, the novel being narrated in an unadorned
and unaffected way. What emerges is a love story that transgresses the norms of
society and is all the deeper for that.
In the end, though, I still hold
to my view that the author is irrelevant. Talking of her novel, Duncker says:
“I wanted it to be a love story... to explain the love between readers and
writers. My life has been radically changed through the books I’ve read and I
wanted to describe that.” The second sentence is undeniably true and I can empathise
with it: Tess of the d’Urbervilles, The Tin Drum, One Hundred
Years of Solitude, reading those novels as a teenager changed my life. But
that sentiment doesn’t logically follow from her first sentence: the love is
between readers and texts, not writers. I have no interest in
Hardy, Grass or Marquez; something compelled them to write works of literature
which resonate with me very powerfully, but it is the text, not the impulsion
within the writer that connects with me. In Hallucinating Foucault,
Duncker tries very hard to draw the writer into the narrative. It is
beautifully done. It is indeed a fine love story. It resonates, it will linger
long in the mind. But, in the end, that is the point: Hallucinating Foucault
will linger in my mind. Not Patricia Duncker.