Hallucinating Foucault

by Patricia Duncker

  I felt the carpet move under my feet.

  “All very fluid in those days,” said the Bank of England, addressing himself to me by way of explanation. “I met her mother two years later and went for a walk on the wild side.”

  “You mean the other side,” she giggled, kissing him. “I’m glad you did. But go on, Jacques. Don’t lose the thread. What happened to Paul Michel? And how do you know about it?”

  “It’s all in his dossier. All the reports. Funny thing is of course nobody really noticed while the revolution was in full swing. He was wild, fairly violent, drunk, talked non-stop. But so did everybody else. He attacked a policeman. That wasn’t unusual. Who didn’t? Your father and I pinned one down under his riot shield and sat on him. We had to run for our lives after that. Do you remember?”

  He looked straight at her father. They exchanged glances and it was then that I realized they were still lovers, twenty-five years later, and that they could lean on their memories, a secure, tried rope across the abyss.

  “I do remember,” said the Bank of England dreamily, rocking his daughter in his arms. Something hissed in the kitchen. They both turned and fled, leaving me to face the doctor alone. He lit another cigarette.

  “Paul Michel was an extraordinary man. All schizophrenics are extraordinary. They are incapable of loving. Did you know that? Of really loving. They aren’t like us. They are usually very perceptive. It’s uncanny. They have a human dimension that is beyond the banality of ordinary human beings. They can’t love you as another person would do. But they can love you with a love that is beyond human love. They have flashes, visions, moments of dramatic clarity, insight. They are incapable of cherishing a grudge or of planning vengeance.”

  Suddenly he looked at me very intently, his eyes widening.

  “Listen,” he said, “I have the sense of my littleness before them. We are of no consequence. Tellement ils sont grands.”

  We sat in silence for a while, listening to the bubbling crashes in the kitchen. He went on, with the same peculiar intensity.

  “They are a people who are excessively egotistical. They are also beyond egotism. They are like animals. They know who doesn’t love them. They are very intuitive. And in that they are always right. They preserve themselves against evil. Instinctively, wonderfully.”

  He paused. “Paul Michel is like that. It was the source of his writing.”

  I stared at the lines on his face.

  “You must remember. I have warned you. They cannot love as we do. You could say to one of them—your mother is dead. And they wouldn’t react. It would mean nothing. Even without the drugs.”

  “Do the drugs change their personalities?” I asked anxiously. Paul Michel now seemed horrifyingly close, an ambiguous, towering, indifferent presence, like a colossus, against whom I weighed nothing.

  “Yes,” said Jacques Martel heavily, “they do. We adapt the dose according to the person and the gravity of their illness. We work out a regular dose. They have an injection once a month. But after ten or fifteen years …”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “Yes. They are transformed. They lose all sexual desire, all sense of themselves.”

  Then he said fiercely, “They sometimes do as he did. They refuse to take the treatment. They prefer their suffering.”

  I took a deep breath.

  “Then he’s still there. Who he is, I mean. But mad.”

  Jacques Martel nodded.

  “He has no legal rights. He has an administrative trustee. The system in France is called ‘la tutelle.’ There’s always a legal representative. Someone who takes care of their property, possessions, money, papers. It is someone who does this voluntarily, a ‘bénévole.’ There’s an association. They are usually people with some sort of status in the community: priests, doctors, retired headmasters. They don’t get paid to do it. Just their expenses.”

  “Would I need his permission? Or hers, it could be, I suppose. To go and see Paul Michel?” I asked suddenly. The moment was electric, but I could not understand why.

  “No. Why should you? He’s not a prisoner. You are going to see him then?” Jacques Martel’s eyes never left my face. “You’ve decided to go?”

  “I’m flying out to Paris on Thursday.”

  He let out his breath quietly.

  “Ah … good,” he said. It was the right answer.

  “Dinner’s ready. It’s delicious.” The Germanist danced in and embraced me. One of her curls caught across my mouth. She kissed me and took back her curl.

  “Come and eat,” she said.

  The table was laid out in red and white, like a gladiator’s feast.

  She came down to Heathrow on the tube to wave me off. I sat next to her, a little quiet and sad, clutching my bags. My parents had asked to meet her. She refused point-blank, without giving a reason. All her affection, which had bubbled so encouragingly and unexpectedly during the past weeks, appeared to evaporate. She was tense, preoccupied, alert. I watched her disengaging a trolley from the long line of attached metal L-shapes, which stretched before the automatic doors like a fence across the prairie, with a sharp flick of her boot. We wandered aimlessly across the concourse, gazing up at the turning panels. My flight was on the board, but had not been called. She stacked my bags deftly on to the conveyor belt at the check in. It was then that I noticed how strong she was. The narrow shoulders and light build that made her look so fragile beneath the black jacket and jeans were illusory. I stared at her, seeing a stranger all over again. The owl eyes turned upon me.

  “I’m going to buy you an orange juice,” she said. “It’s hot. Fresh orange is better than chemicals.”

  And away she strode.

  Just as the flight was called she turned to me and took my hand.

  “It’s only two months,” I said, “two and a bit.” But I said this to comfort myself. I was by now quite convinced that she wouldn’t have cared if I never came back. “I’ll write. Will you?”

  “Yes, of course I’ll write to you. Good luck. And don’t lose sight of what you have gone out to do. Promise me that.”

  She hovered like a giant, white-faced bird, her eyes magnified, golden.

  “I promise.”

  She kissed me once, not on my lips, but on my neck, just below my ear. A long shiver went through me, as if I had been scratched. Then she took my arm and marched me away through the shining window frame of the metal detectors. As I passed the threshold into Departures I had one last glimpse of her, unsmiling, watching. She didn’t wave. She simply watched me go. I sat down on a plastic chair and cried silently, like a bereaved child, for the next twenty minutes.

  Paris

  My memories of those first days in Paris are like a sequence of postmodern photographs. I see the patterned metal grilles around the base of the trees on the boulevards. I see the axes of the city unfolding in one long glimmering line of bobbed trees and massive symmetrical buildings. I smell the water rushing in the gutters, hear the rhythmical swish of the plastic brooms, shaped like witches’ sticks, as the street cleaners pass in luminous green. The streets stank of Gauloises and urine. I lived on pizza slices and Coca Cola. I trod in dog shit and fag ends.

  My room was on the fifth floor of a student residence in the eleventh arrondissement. It had cracked cream walls and a stained basin. The vomit green lino had been carefully tortured with cigarette burns. It smelled of musty trainers and bleach. I amassed all my books, papers and courage and then went out to waste good money on a poster and a pot plant as suicide preventatives. There was an American summer school from Texas installed at the other end of the corridor. They divided into two sexes, but looked like clones, for they were all massive, blonde, sunburnt and cheerful.

  On Sunday morning I walked straight through the Marais peering into the windows of incredibly expensive antique shops and came out on the rue de Rivoli. I watched the sun making long straight lines on grey stone, the waiters in floor-length white aprons sweeping out the b
ars and taking the chairs down from the tables. Some of the shops were open, shirts and cheap jewelry stretched out on the pavements. I picked my way past a mass of empty birdcages. In the window a flotilla of tropical fish in an illuminated tank circulated miserably, suspended in long flights of bubbles. They stared stupidly out through thick glass. I stared back, equally trapped and wretched. I had no idea where I was going. The traffic gathered heat and force. By ten o’clock it was already nearly thirty degrees under the awnings.

  I crossed into a white block of sun, passed a battered builder’s hoarding and found myself facing the glittering black triangles of the Pyramids in the courtyard of the Louvre. The gravel was swept carefully clean of rubbish. Tourists peered down into the galleries below. The new entrance had not been completed when I had last been in Paris. I stared at the sinister pointed shapes. As I stood before the largest of the triangles the shape began to make sense, hardened into the form of my promise to her. I was facing a prism that remained masked and simply reflected rather than refracted the light. I found myself at the base point of two interlocking triangles. It was then that I had the peculiar sensation that something was being shown to me, explained, but that I had as yet no way of breaking into the code, no means of understanding the blank, flat surfaces. It was like seeing a new language written down for the first time. I stood watching a sign that would not yield up its meaning. I remember this because it had seemed uncanny at the time.

  I turned away and walked down to the quays.

  Two tramps were sitting on the steps, clutching one full bottle of red wine between them and talking very seriously. As I picked my way past them they let out a series of muffled grunts. I turned and looked into their faces. One of them, despite his red, troubled forehead, was clearly a young man; he was not much older than I was. They stared back. I walked away down the warm stones, peering into the grey water, searching for an empty patch of shade. High above me the traffic soared past. Finally, I found a corner on the island, looking out towards the Pont des Arts, now reopened, repainted, rebuilt. Just out of range, as I cowered inside the shadow of swaying green, the sun turned the paving stones into a thick wash of savage white light. I sat down to read Paul Michel.

  I don’t know if it was the heat, the loneliness, the odd sensation of being alone with him in that huge, tourist-infested city, or the peculiar awareness of having been chosen for reasons I did not understand, but that day, for the first time, I heard the writer who was still there, even across the great desert of his insanity, even through the remote serenity of his prose. I heard a voice, perfectly coherent and clear, that whispered terrifying things.

  Paul Michel had lived at risk. He had never owned property. He had never had a proper job. He lived in small rooms and high places. He searched through the streets, the cafés, the bars, the gardens of Paris: along the canals, beneath the motorways, by the river, in libraries, galleries, urinals. He moved on, from room to room, a ceaseless, unending stream of different addresses. He owned very few books. He lived out of suitcases. He smoked nearly fifty cigarettes a day. He drove a sequence of very battered cars. When one broke down he threw it away and bought another which was just as decrepit. Every franc he earned was from his writing. He never saved a single centime. He invested in nothing. He had no close friends. He never went home to his parents. He spent all his money in bars and on boys. He occasionally worked the streets himself, agreeing the price, doing exactly what he had been paid for, and then flinging the money back in the face of the man who had paid for sex. He provoked other people deliberately. He got into fights. He started fights. He knifed a friend once, but was let off. He was arrested for being drunk and violent. He spent four nights in prison. He swore at the presenter on television and then threatened one of the cameramen. He refused invitations to literary soirées at the Elysée. He had nothing whatever to do with women, but he never spoke against them. So far as I could judge he had never loved anybody. But, every summer, he went back to the Midi. He spent the days reading and writing, writing incessantly, draft after draft after draft. He had his books typed at an agency that took in doctoral theses, student dissertations and casual work. He then destroyed all his manuscripts. His prose was ironic, disengaged, detached. He watched the world as if it was a theater in continuous performance, endlessly unfolding, act after act. He was afraid of nothing. He lived at risk.

  I had never taken a single risk in my entire life. But now I was doing the most dangerous thing I had ever done. I was listening, and listening carefully, to Paul Michel. Beyond the writing, through the writing, and for the first time, I heard his voice. I was terribly afraid.

  On Monday morning, dazed and slightly sunburnt, I presented myself for duty at the Archive. I felt reassured that, after all, nothing could happen to me in a university library. There was no security of any consequence on the door. The concierge gazed at me morosely, listened to my hesitant explanation and waved me away down a limitless green corridor with a mutter about “inscription des étrangers … gauche.” The Archive was temporarily housed in three rooms buried in the remote outbuildings behind the classical symmetry of the university library facing the Panthéon. It had been freshly painted and smelt like a dentist’s office, antiseptic creams and beige. The reading room had new, unmarked pine tables and green table lamps. I could see a young woman surrounded by boxes. Ink and pens were forbidden. The pencil sharpener was attached to the administrative secretary’s desk. She looked at me with suspicious loathing.

  “Oui?”

  I began to apologize for my existence in hesitant French.

  The secretary was of uncertain age and very aggressive, her evil countenance opaque with paint, every feature emphasized in lipstick, eyeliner and face pack, with orange shadows. I caught sight of the red talons ending her fingers, poised over the keyboard.

  “Do you have a letter of introduction?” she snapped.

  My supervisor had warned me. And in fact I had two: one in elegant, bookish French from my supervisor on Pembroke College notepaper. The other in English from the Modern Languages Faculty office explaining why I needed to use the Archive. The one from the Faculty office had more official stamps and was clearly more credible. But for one awful moment it looked as if both were going to be inadequate. She sat me down to wait, staring at fresh paint and blank walls while she checked out my credentials with her director. I passed the Archive consumer test within five minutes and was soon sitting beside an American, who looked like an advertising executive, peering into the microfiche. Finding my references was easy. Only one box in the catalogue was listed for Paul Michel. And there was only one piece of supplementary information.

  Letters to Michel Foucault: philosopher 1926-1984

  See FOUCAULT, M.

  I filled in the slip and handed it back to the now expressionless painted face.

  Immediately there was another obstacle.

  “These letters are on reserve,” she said. “I don’t think you can see them.”

  “On reserve?”

  “Yes. There’s another scholar working on them. These letters are not available for consultation.”

  “Is he—or she—working on them now?”

  “They are on reserve for publication,” she hissed.

  I suddenly turned obstinate.

  “But I only want to read them.”

  “I’ll have to check.”

  She disappeared again. I sat down in a rage. I had come all the way to Paris to read these letters. I glared at the innocent executive American, who had no obvious designs on either Foucault or Paul Michel. Eventually the secretary returned. She chanted a formula.

  “The letters in question have been purchased for publication by Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. You may read the manuscripts, but photography, photocopying or reproduction of any passage therefrom is forbidden. You will be required to sign an undertaking to that effect. In addition you must make a detailed declaration concerning your reasons for wishing to read these manuscri
pts and the use you intend to make of the information contained therein. All publication, including précis, abstract or detailed commentary in any form whatsoever is forbidden. This declaration will be forwarded along with your name, status and institutional address to the holders of the copyright. This declaration will have legal force.”

  I nodded, astounded.

  “Go into the reading room and choose a seat.”

  I sharpened my pencils very, very carefully while she stood over me, taking all the time in the world. Then I bowed with obnoxious politeness. I had turned love-fifteen into fifteen-all.

  The box was large, brown, stapled at the corners. It was marked with the same tide and reference numbers that I had seen on the microfiche. I opened the box, my fingers tingling.

  Each letter was inside a sealed, transparent plastic sheath, but it was possible to open them and touch the writing itself. The earliest letters dated from May 1980 and the last one was written on 20 June 1984. They had been written at regular intervals of a month to six weeks. I peered at the handwriting—large, rapid and frequently illegible. Paul Michel had written on A4 sheets of typing paper which had rarely been folded. Some letters had no creases in the paper. There were no accompanying envelopes either. Someone had ordered the letters and each one had a number and a stamp signifying that it was in the care of the University of Paris VII Literary Archive, but that it belonged ultimately to the state. There was no typed index, no list of contents and no accompanying summaries. I had his writing before me, unmediated, raw, obscure. I shook my head carefully and tried to read.

  I could understand nothing.

  Each letter was carefully dated with the day, the year. Sometimes there was a Paris place name, St Germain, rue de la Roquette, rue de Poitou, Bastille, but rarely any number or precise address. I felt that I had begun listening to a private conversation and that I was hearing only one side of the encounter. At first it was all meaningless, an intimacy that retained all its secrets. The letters were all about the same length, four to six sides of A4. They were extraordinarily difficult to decipher. At first I could only make out two or three words a line, then slowly, slowly Paul Michel began to speak again. But this time he was not speaking to me.