Hallucinating Foucault

by Patricia Duncker

  “Who are all these people?” she demanded.

  But it was the Germanist who replied. She materialized on the other side of Madame Michel.

  “They’re his readers,” she said.

  Madame Michel glared at the mass with undisguised mistrust. Her erring nephew had earned a lot of good money and bad publicity. She was neither fooled nor convinced.

  We flew back to London from Toulouse on the following day. I had missed one week of full term. The Germanist had simply said that I was ill so everyone sympathized with my shattered state, which was attributed to viral flu and food poisoning.

  In the weeks that followed I told the Germanist everything. I needed to talk. But there was one passage in the story that I never told: Paul Michel’s encounter with the boy on the beach. I never told his story because it was her secret, the secret pact she had with him. But I read and reread her letter to Paul Michel. I now understood the code. The letter could have been written by either one of us. She had kept her word. It was now up to me to keep mine.

  I wrote my thesis much along the lines I had originally planned. I did not include a biographical section. I never even told my supervisor that I had known Paul Michel. I gave nothing away in my acknowledgements. That summer was like a paving stone torn out of my life, a blank square. I told my parents, of course. They were a little shocked that I had got so closely involved with someone who was clearly unstable and whom they had never met. Once again, they asked to meet the Germanist. I begged her to come home with me.She refused, and told me, with unnecessary aggression, never to ask her again.

  In the years that followed I held a Junior Research Fellowship at my old college and won the Foucault Travel Prize. I spent the money traveling in America. Eventually I got a job in the French department at one of the London colleges. And I used to lecture on Paul Michel. The Germanist went to work in the Goethe-Schiller Archive in Weimar. We wrote to each other for a year or so. Then I lost touch. Sometimes I see the tides of articles she’s published in the Year’s Work in German Studies. Someone once told me that she was writing a biography of Schiller and bringing out a new edition of the Goethe-Schiller Briefwechsel. No doubt I shall buy a copy when it appears in the catalogues.

  I try not to think about him. I simply work on the texts. But there is an evil dream which comes back to me, which recurs again and again. The detail of my dream has a hallucinatory intensity, which I cannot shake off. It is winter and the maize fields have been cut. All that is left are the rough lines of yellow, brittle stalks, thick and difficult to negotiate. I am stumbling across a huge, desolate field where the remains of the crop are burning. It is bitterly cold. The fires across the stubble burn unevenly, some patches are simply smoking black ashes, some are untouched, rigid with frost, but elsewhere the wind carries the flame on down the row, through the crackling dry ranks of trampled, discarded corn. Far away at the rim of the field I see a long line of bare poplars and the sky behind, a pale, luminous, chill cream. Then through the smoke and the scattered fires I see Paul Michel standing, watching me. He does not move. It is bitterly cold. He is not wearing a coat or gloves, his shirt is open at the throat. He stands amid the fires, watching me. He neither moves nor speaks. It is bitterly cold. I never saw him in winter. I knew him for a single season. I stumble on towards him and I never come closer. Then I see that there is someone else present in the field. The shape of a man, a long way off, behind Paul Michel, glimmers through the smoke of the stubble fires. I cannot make him out. I do not know who he is. The scene freezes before me like a painting I can never enter, a scene whose meaning remains unreachable, obscure.

  I always wake shivering, wretched, alone.

  Paul MICHEL

  b 15 June 1947

  Toulouse

  Educated Collège St Bénédict

  1966–70 Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Studied painting and sculpture

  1968 La Fuite trans. UK/USA Escape 1970

  1974 Ne demande pas: roman trans. UK/USA Don’t Ask

  1976 La Maison d’Eté. Prix Goncourt. trans. UK The Summer House

  1980 Midi: roman: trans. same title.

  1983 L’Evadé: roman trans. USA The Prisoner Escapes

  Diagnosed schizophrenic: sectioned Hôpital Ste-Anne, Paris. June 1984

  Michel FOUCAULT

  b. 15 October 1926

  Poitiers

  Educated Collège St Stanislaus

  1946 Ecole Normale Supérieure

  1948 First suicide attempt

  1961 Madness and Civilization

  1966 The Order of Things

  1969 Archaeology of Knowledge

  1975 Discipline and Punishment

  1976 A History of Sexuality

  Killed in a road accident, Nice. 30 September 1993

  Buried Gaillac

  1984 The Care of the Self, The Uses of Pleasure

  Died of AIDS, Paris. 26 June 1984

  Buried Poitiers

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book is a work of fiction and is therefore closely based on the lives of a good many real people whom I have had the pleasure of knowing. I would like to thank the staff and patients at Sainte-Marie in Clermont-Ferrand, the real Pascal Vaury for his time and expertise, everyone at Villa Saint-Benoît, Berre-Les Alpes, including Baloo, the guardian of the gateway. I could never have written a word without the constant support, practical care and boundless generosity of Nicole Thouvenot, Jacqueline Martel and S J.D. to whom this book is dedicated, as always, with all my love.

  Patricia Duncker

  —France, 1995

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Patricia Duncker was born in the West Indies. She teaches writing, literature, and feminist theory at the University of Wales and lives for part of the year in France. Hallucinating Foucault is her first novel.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  Copyright

  Copyright © 1996 by Patricia Duncker

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition © OCTOBER 2010 ISBN: 978-0-062-02854-9

  THE ECCO PRESS

  100 West Broad Street

  Hopewell, New Jersey 08525

  Published simultaneously in Canada by

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd., Ontario

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Duncker, Patricia, 1951–

  Hallucinating Foucault / Patricia Duncker.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-88001-499-7

  I. Title.

  PR6054.U477H35 1997

  823′.914—dc20 96-35092

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  FIRST EDITION

  About the Publisher

  Australia

  HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.

  25 Ryde Road (PO Box 321)

  Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au

  Canada

  HarperCollins Canada

  2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor

  Toronto, ON, M4W 1A8, Canada

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.ca

  New Zealand

  HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited

  P.O. Box 1

  Auckland, New Zealand

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.nz

  United Kingdom

  HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

  77-85 Fulham Palace Road

  London, W6 8JB, UK

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.ukr />
  United States

  HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  10 East 53rd Street

  New York, NY 10022

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com