Hallucinating Foucault

by Patricia Duncker

  “Mmmm,” he nodded. “I take fewer drugs and greater risks. I’d rather go on knowing and seeing the things I do—being mad they call it here, and they’re not wrong—than become a sober acceptable vegetable. Most of the men in my unit feel the same. But it’s a high price to keep paying, day after day.”

  A light spray from the fountain left glistening drops on the hair covering his arms.

  “Try not to go mad, petit,” he said softly.

  “Could I help it?” I asked.

  He laughed.

  “No. Probably not. Some say that it’s an inherited disease. Or a chemical reaction in the brain. The French treat it with strong drugs. But they also fumble about in your childhood for reasons. There are no reasons.”

  “What is it like?” I instantly regretted the question.

  He raised his shoulders helplessly.

  “Ah, well. What’s it like? Do you really want to know?”

  “Don’t answer if you can’t. Or if it would make you feel ill.”

  He laughed, his huge, warm laugh, and looked at me. Then I noticed the real difference between him and all the other patients whose faces I had avoided. It was in his eyes; his strange, glittering eyes were absolutely clear, unhesitating, still steady, ruthless, judging.

  “No. Talking about it won’t make me ill. Or send me into a terrible crisis. It’s a state of fear, of real anguish, extreme terrors. At first I found myself running, rushing, as if I was being chased. You imagine yourself sought after, persecuted. Then you begin to live what you believe in. The most terrifying thing though is the way in which the colors change. I saw the whole world in violets, reds, greens. Nothing was subtle any more; just primary, violent colors. You can’t eat. It is as if there is pain, pain everywhere. You lose track of time. Like entering a tunnel of colors … I put on an act. You know that. You’re right. A born exhibitionist. But when I was mad I wasn’t acting. I couldn’t express myself, except through violence. I felt I had to defend myself. It was as if I was being constantly attacked. And I felt that I had no substance. I was transparent.”

  As Paul Michel talked, looking at me steadily, I held my breath.

  “Just before I went mad for the first time I suffered from crises of anguish, a tormenting anxiety. I was unable to maintain any form of contact with other people. As I am talking to you now. Then I began to hallucinate. I saw tanks on the streets of Paris. Gradually I could no longer distinguish between the delusions and the reality. I was a stranger to myself. I was a stranger in the world.”

  He looked up into the trees. Then he said quietly, “You cannot imagine the horror of dailiness. I found that I had been writing—on my knees, on my hands, on the inside of my right arm. When I saw the writing I knew I was mad.”

  He stood up and walked away from me, down one of the shaded paths. I stared at the changing patterns on the back of his white shirt as he moved under the trees. I left him alone. I waited.

  Eventually he came back to me and stood looking down into my frightened face. He watched my fear for a moment. Then he reached out and cupped my chin in his left hand.

  “Don’t be afraid, petit. It’s past.”

  “I know. You’re not mad. You’re not. Why don’t you leave?”

  I was almost in tears. He laughed, sat down beside me.

  “Where would I go?”

  “But aren’t there—I don’t know—day care centers, or something?”

  “Oh yes, the Centre d’Accueil, and my God, the Hôpital de Jour. Where you can learn English and pottery. Ecoute, petit—I can talk English perfectly well and I don’t give a fuck about pots.”

  We both laughed. Then I said fiercely, “I’ll get you out. Come with me.”

  Paul Michel glimmered for a moment. The same flicker I had already seen which had filled me with terror. But it swept past.

  “For the moment you’ll have to come to me, petit,” he said.

  “I must go and lock myself up again now. Will you come back tomorrow?”

  “Every day,” I said. “As long as it takes.”

  We looked at one another. I didn’t explain. He understood.

  And so it began, a bizarre rhythm which took on a hallucinatory quality. Day after day, I flung open the shutters to see the volcanoes of the Auvergne shimmering with heat, the sky an aggressive,uncracking cobalt blue, becoming white as the day turned. I drew my eyes away from the silent, pustular domes to rest on the military ranks of china creatures. Day after day, I took the bus down to Sainte-Marie and spent all my time with Paul Michel. Sometimes we talked without stopping for hour after hour, sometimes we sat in silence and smoked. I bought him sandwiches, chewing gum, cans of beer and Coca Cola, chocolate bars, cakes from the patisserie around the corner, interminable packets of cigarettes. All the grant money I had been given to study his writing was spent on him. I made him walk in the sunlight.

  “You’ve got to get your strength back,” I insisted.

  Already I was planning the break.

  And I retold Paul Michel every night, to the fascinated audience of Monsieur and Madame Louet. She had gone out and bought a book about schizophrenia and had discovered that there were 500,000 diagnosed in France alone.

  “It could happen to anyone at any time,” she said, glowering knowingly at her husband.

  Pascale Vaury monitored my presence, watchful, but without interfering. I never went upstairs to the locked ward again. I had permission to stay with him all day. We always walked in the gardens. The dragon now firmly associated me with Paul Michel’s insolence and increasing energy. She paid me the compliment of hating me too. When a week or so had passed I brought her flowers purely for the pleasure of witnessing her fury when she thanked me.

  Sometimes we talked about writing.

  “I make the same demands of people and fictional texts, petit—that they should be open-ended, carry within them the possibility of being and of changing whoever it is they encounter. Then it will work—the dynamic that there must always be—between the writer and the reader. Then you don’t have to bother asking is it beautiful, is it hideous?”

  “But that’s not true of what you’ve written,” I interrupted.

  “Think of what people say of you. They talk about your austerity, your classicism. You’re nowhere to be found in your texts. There’s just this cold, abstract, faceless voice. Even when you’re talking about things that other people think are—well—shocking.”

  “And you don’t find them shocking, petit?” He looked at me ironically, from an immense distance.

  “No. Well, maybe a bit. But nothing like as shocking—now I know you—as that cold, cold perfection that you get in your writing—that absolute detachment.”

  “So I should be as I write, eh?”

  “No, no.” I was beside myself. I felt that we were touching the sand at the bottom of the river. “I don’t mean that. It’s just that if you think that fiction should be open-ended you’d have to produce rough surfaces, not these smooth perfect monuments you write. They’re beautiful, beautiful. I love them. You know I do. I’ve spent years reading and re-reading them. But they’re not open-ended. They’re not. They’re shut texts.”

  He looked down.

  “And you feel the wind of cold. Is that it, petit?”

  “Yes. Yes I do. That’s not the problem, just a fact. There’s a chill in that beauty, that cynicism, that detachment. A terrifying indifference. Ruthlessness, almost.”

  He looked at me intently. I felt that I had said too much. Yet now that I knew him I could not believe that he had written those books.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t want to sound critical. It’s just that you’re the most passionate man I’ve ever met. And you’re nothing like what you write.”

  “Maybe,” he said, throwing his cigarette away into the sand, “maybe when you care, terribly, painfully, about the shape of the world, and you desire nothing but absolute, radical change, you protect yourself with abstraction, distance. Maybe the remoteness of my te
xts is the measure of my personal involvement? Maybe that chill you describe is a necessary illusion?”

  We sat silent for a while, then walked around the fountain.

  Once we talked about loneliness.

  “It’s one of your main themes,” I said, sounding like the judge who now had his prisoner locked firmly into a solid dock of geraniums, “but you never talk about it directly. Except in L’Evadé and that’s the only book where you use first person narrative. Ever.”

  I avoided pointing out that this was the last thing that he had written, apart from the writing on the wall. He looked down at the sand beneath his shoes.

  “Are you asking me if I am a lonely man, petit? Or are you asking me to tell you some more about my writing?”

  I realized that the two, which I had always held in my mind, distinct and apart, were now no longer separate. Paul Michel and the hidden drama lived in his texts were utterly and terribly fused. And this process was not of his making, but mine. He was the end of my quest, my goal, my grail. He had himself become the book. Now I was asking the book to yield up all its secrets.

  “I don’t know,” I said, hesitating. He realized at once that I had taken refuge in the truth. We grinned at each other, all the awkwardness of the moment dissolving in complicity.

  “You’re an honest little bastard,” he smiled.

  “Well—there are two kinds of loneliness, aren’t there? There’s the loneliness of absolute solitude—the physical fact of living alone, working alone, as I have always done. This need not be painful. For many writers it’s necessary. Others need a female staff of family servants to type their bloody books and keep their egos afloat. Being alone for most of the day means that you listen to different rhythms, which are not determined by other people. I think it’s better so. But there is another kind of loneliness which is terrible to endure.”

  He paused.

  “And that is 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. That’s why I always lived in the bars—les lieux de drague—simply to be among the others who were like me.”

  “But doesn’t the—um—gay scene end up with people all trying to be like each other too?”

  I had only been to a gay bar once. Mike and I had stumbled inside by mistake, thinking that it was an ordinary pub. Everyone stared at us. We appeared to be the only people not wearing white T-shirts and jeans. Mike panicked when he realized what had happened and the stares were becoming pointed and amused. We drank our beers with terrified rapidity and fled, avoiding a mass of fixed and interested glares.

  Paul Michel smiled ironically.

  “Tout à fait, petit. And they were always angry with me for embracing the hostility of difference. For insisting on perversity.”

  “But,” I couldn’t resist, “if it’s so awful and difficult why not try to become a group? Be accepted?”

  He glittered at me for a moment, then said, “I would rather be mad.”

  I gave up.

  “I don’t understand you.”

  We sat silent for a long time. I felt that I had touched the impenetrable hieroglyphic on the wall. Paul Michel would let me come no further into his secret world.

  But there was something extraordinarily generous in him. I realized that he was incapable of being offended or of holding a grudge. Whenever I was put out, puzzled, locked away from him, he would immediately come towards me. When I prevaricated, he was direct. If I half spoke a thought he would finish my sentence. It was I who was sensitive, prickly, easily hurt. He knew things about me even when I had not explained myself. He always answered my real questions, the genuine demands, with uncanny intuition. He had a breadth of understanding, a tolerance behind his abrasiveness, which disarmed me completely. I began to understand what Jacques Martel had said: that in the recesses of his madness there was a grandeur, a simplicity of spirit that was incapable of lies, petty resentments or insignificant jealousies. He dealt in primary emotions, essential things. Paul Michel lived on the edge of his own sanity, day after day. It was this that made him so uncanny, and so dangerous. He would always be capable of killing me. Or himself.

  Our days in the asylum gardens took on a sinister beauty. We sat in bright light and green shade, listening to the fountains, feet shuffling in the sand, and far away, the distant sounds of emergency sirens. Time became incalculable—and of no significance.

  “You know, I’m glad we’re always outdoors,” I said. “I’ve never seen a photograph of you taken indoors.”

  He looked up at the height of the walls surrounding us.

  “You’re perceptive sometimes, petit, without knowing that you are. I suffer terribly from claustrophobia. And I seem to have spent my life behind bars and in tiny servants’ rooms. When I dream it is of the oceans, the deserts, endless spaces. All the nightmares of my books take place within enclosed spaces. Even La Maison d’Eté. All the family are there with the shutters closed against the heat, ready to cut each other’s throats.”

  “Could we go out, then? For a day, I mean. Could you get permission?”

  “Why don’t you ask Pascale Vaury?” said Paul Michel, without looking up.

  I couldn’t tell if he really wanted to go out of the asylum or if he would merely come to please me. His tone indicated nothing but careful indifference. As I left the hospital that evening I made an appointment to see Dr Vaury.

  Back in her cold clean room with the black couch lurking in the corner I suddenly felt too young, too irresponsible an amateur for this particular game. Her keys fell silent as she sat down. She was the mistress of the labyrinth and I was the servant of the Minotaur.

  “You wanted to see me?” She gave nothing away.

  “Yes. I wondered—that is—it’s just that Paul Michel seems so much—well, not better—I wouldn’t know—he’s never seemed disturbed to me—or at least not really. I wondered if I could take him out for the day. I’d bring him back of course.”

  Pascale Vaury laughed out loud.

  “Paul Michel isn’t let out,” she smiled at me. “He gets out.”

  I looked blank. I didn’t understand.

  “Listen,” she said, “he has a disease which stabilizes, gets calmer over time. But there are dangers even when he seems reasonable enough. You’ve done wonders for him. I won’t deny that. I wasn’t at all convinced when you first came. I didn’t think you’d stick it out. Neither did he. But you did. He’s attached to you.”

  She picked up her pencil again and then her tone changed completely.

  “I’m not at all convinced that what you are doing will be good for him in the end. If you hadn’t asked to see me when you did, I would have insisted on seeing you. You’ve been here all day every day for over two weeks. Most people are afraid of Paul Michel. Even some of the nurses are cautious when they deal with him. He can be very dangerous. Now he seems transformed. Oh yes, the humor, the energy is all there and gaining strength. But his aggression appears to have melted away. And it’s that which I find sinister. We haven’t altered his drugs. You’ve come here, courting him like a lover. What is going to happen to him when you go? Have you thought about that?”

  I blushed uncontrollably at the implications of what she had said. I saw that my hands were shaking. But I held my ground.

  “Would it have been better if I hadn’t come? And he’d stayed here—violent, frustrated, locked up? Is that what you want for him?”

  “The man is ill. He’s not a prisoner. He is sick. And answer my question. Have you considered what will happen when you go? What—after all this attention and devotion—his life will be like? You’re not going to spend your life in a chambre d’hôte at Clermont-Ferrand.”

  All the questions that I had never asked rose before me. But by the
n I was no longer rational either. For years my life had already been dominated by Paul Michel. I was simply forcing my commitment towards the last point on the map. I went on the offensive.

  “It’s not your aim to keep your patients locked up forever. It can’t be. If he’s sick, you want him cured. You’ve said I’ve made a difference. Even I can see the difference in him. How can he leave here if he has no one to support him? And nowhere to go? Let me take him out with me. For a day. Then a month maybe? On holiday. Anywhere. When did he last have a holiday? This is the chance. I’m his chance. Are you going to refuse him that chance?”

  She gazed at me despairingly.

  “I would need some kind of guarantee on your part, you realize that. He would have to be registered with the clinic or the Hôpital de Jour wherever you went. And with the police. There is a mass of paperwork involved to get him out. It could take a long time. I have to apply for his release through the Préfecture. He has to go before the medical advisory committee. And they must be in complete agreement. He cannot simply walk out of here. There are many things that must be done.”

  “Then do it.” I was almost rude to her. “Do it. Let him go.”

  She bit back something that she was about to say. I pressed home my unexpected advantage.

  “And let me take him out for the day. Tomorrow. We won’t leave Clermont. We’ll just go out for a walk. And to eat. Do you need a letter from the Ministry for that?”

  Pascale Vaury got up, unsmiling.

  “All right. Go and see Paul Michel. I’m making no promises, so don’t raise his hopes. I’ll see what I can do.”

  I thanked her with arctic formality and fled away down the airless cream corridors, hunting for the right doors.

  As I started for home that day I found that she had left a message for me in administration, which was handed over, very grudgingly, by the dragon. There were two terse lines, written in English on the hospital notepaper.

  It will take 48 hours to get a day release order for Paul Michel. You can take him out on Saturday. I will tell him. Vaury.