Book 792: Hallucinating Foucault – Patricia Duncker

I forgot how beautiful this novel is. That’s not surprising considering it’s been over a decade since I read it and I’m honestly not sure if this is my original copy or if I picked up a new one in the past few years. [Can now confirm this is my original – I brought it to Boston in December 2012.]

I remember when I first read this. I had spent a semester studying the history of sexuality in America and we read many passages from Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality and I was obsessed. Between it and the other readings we read that term, a whole new world around sexuality, gender identity, and philosophy had opened up to me. So, more than likely I typed Foucault into Amazon and this came up and I purchased it.

Hallucinating Foucault is the story of an unnamed graduate student is studying the writings of Paul Michel, a French writer. As he researches, he discovers that Paul Michel and Michel Foucault are doing a call and response with their published works. This is confirmed when the graduate student travels to France to read Paul Michel’s letters to Foucault which were never sent.

You ask what I fear most. Not the loss of my power to write. Not that. Composers fear deafness, yet the greatest of them heard his music with the drums of his nerves, the beat in the blood. My writing is a craft, like carpentry, coffin-building, making jewellery, constructing walls. You cannot forget how it is done. You can easily see when it is done well. You can adjust, remake, rebuild what is fragile, slipshod, unstable. (73)

And the fact that Foucault only appears on the page in memories is fascinating. He’s the titular character, he’s the biggest and most important relationship Paul Michel has, and his overall presence haunts the novel.

The unnamed protagonist was a fascinating character and I’m sure an entire thesis could be written on the evolution of his sexuality throughout (and off) the pages of the novel. Although none of this is ever explicitly stated, but he reads as straight for the first half of the novel because of his interactions and dating with the Germanist (another unnamed character), but he does as she says he will and he falls in love with Paul Michel and they do have a physical relationship, at the graduate student’s initiation. And the pain and suffering the graduate student goes through and Duncker puts on the page is heart-wrenching. So, whether he’s bisexual or gay-for-you or something else, his sexuality was definitely interesting and I found it so the first time I read it and even more so this time.

In contrast, you have “the Germanist” his female love interest for the first part of the novel who plays a much bigger role than imagined the further along you get in the novel.

There were times when she was writing and I would see her covering the page briskly, then she would pause, staring into space, frozen, unmoving, for over twenty minutes, the pen perched like a bird against her cheek. I did not dare to disturb her or ask where she had been. She was like a military zone, some of it mined. (12)

Ultimately, she feels like the architect of the novel. She knows everyone and connects all the dots and people necessary to fulfill a promise and to bring closure to everyone, even if it does come at what feels like the expense of the unnamed graduate student’s emotions/well-being. I recall being shocked when Paul Michel connected the dots for the graduate student and the reader and even though I knew it was coming this time, it still gave me that little thrill.

The novel only has one direction to go and it circles it slowly the closer you get to the end of it. If there’s one scene that is overdone it’s the thunderstorm that precedes the final actions of the novel. I’m sure it’s there to mimic Paul Michel’s bipolarity and struggling grasp on sanity and I’m equally sure it’s there to foretell the emotional upheaval that is rapidly approaching for the graduate student, but after how peaceful and delicate the novel has been to this point it feels like Duncker brought a hammer to a knitting party.

Recommendation: This is an incredibly beautiful novel. I found myself searching online for Paul Michel because I kept forgetting he was fictional and the way Duncker described his work and the graduate student’s reverence made me desperate to read his work. So much is packed into such a compact novel from the richly drawn characters to the beautifully described settings from Cambridge to le Midi that every page is full to the brim. I really should seek out more work by Duncker to see how she changed as a writer after this debut.

Opening Line: “The dream unfolds like this.”

Closing Line: “I always wake shivering, wretched, alone.” (Whited out to avoid spoilers, highlight to read.)

Additional Quotes from Hallucinating Foucault
“Fiction, he said, was beautiful, unauthentic, and useless, a profoundly unnatural art, designed purely for pleasure. He described the writing of fiction, telling stories, telling lies, as a strange obsession, a compulsive habit. He saw his own homosexuality in similar terms; as a quality that was at once beautiful and useless, the potentially perfect pleasure.” (27)

“You ask me what I fear most. Not my own death, certainly not that. For me, my death will simply be the door closing softly on the sounds that trouble, obsess and persecute my sleep. I never court death, as you do. You see death as your dancing partner, the other with his arms around you. Your death is the other you wait for, seek out, whose violence is the resolution of your desire. But I will not learn my death from you. You revel in a facile dream of darkness and blood. It is a romantic flirtation with violence, the well-brought-up doctor’s son dabbling in the sewers, before going home to turn it all into a Baroque polemic which will make him famous. I choose the sum, light, life. And yes, of course, we both live on the edge. You taught me to inhabit extremity. You taught me that the frontiers of living, thinking, were the only markets  where knowledge could be bought, at a high price. You taught me to stand at the edge of the crowd gathered around the gaming tables, to see clearly, both the players and the wheel. Cher maître, you accuse me of being without morals, scruples, inhibitions, regrets. Who but my master could have taught me to be so? I have learned my being from you.” (73)

“All writers are, somewhere or other, mad. Not les grands fous, like Rimbaud, but mad, yes, mad. Because we do not believe in the stability of reality. We know that it can fragment like a sheet of glass or a car’s windscreen. But we also know that reality can be invented, recorded, constructed, remade. Writing is, in itself, an act of violence perpetrated against reality. Don’t you think, petit? We do it, leave it written there, and slip away unseen . . .” (125)

“I sat, soaking wet, much cooler, drinking espresso and smoking, under a plane tree. Paul Michel was relaxed, at home. He clearly loved travelling. I realised that he had cut himself loose from every harbour. He had no house, no flat, no room. There was no empty space with all his possessions, cowering behind him, somewhere in the city. He had no addresses. He lived in the present tense. I began to wonder if he preferred it that way. We dozed in shady grass for most of the afternoon. When six o’clock passed we drove on south, always south. The little car was s symphony of rattles.” (140)

“It’s rare to find another man whose mind works through the same codes, whose work is as anonymous, yet as personal and lucid as your own. Especially a contemporary. It’s more usual to find the echo of your own voice in the past. You are always listening, I think, when you write, for the voice which answers. However oblique the reply may be.” (154)

“The moment of reversal, of revelation if you like, came that night on the steps of the hotel. The child was waiting for me, perched on the balustrade beside a huge palm tree in a Roman urn. He was on the lookout, alert and tense as a cat. But I saw him first, and noticed the brushed curls, washed with gold, the cheekbones pink with sunburn and freckles, the long arms curled around the knees. His ambiguity suddenly broke over me with the full force of the sea against the great rocks. I had not mistaken the nature of the child. But I had certainly been deceived in her sex. She swung down from the solitary ledge and rushed into my arms.” (164)