Hallucinating Foucault

Cover

Title Page

Cambridge

Paris

Clermont

The Midi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Copyright

About the Publisher

T
he dream unfolds like this. I am facing a mass of hot, grey rocks, overhung by huge wedges of concrete, shaped like coffins. As I look to my left I see the glittering, undulating sea, the light catching each crest. The sea is empty. It is high summer, but there is no one there. There are no boats, no windsurfers, no parachute gliders, no swimmers, no families, no dogs. The colored pennants in the little beach café are all aloft, full in the wind. The spray touches the barrels which support the planks of the café floor, boards pale as driftwood, smooth beneath my feet. But there is no one there. The tables are deserted. The bar is empty. The glasses are packed away. There is no one there. I feel the sun on my back. My eyes narrow to the glare.

And then I see that I am not alone. There are two of them, a man and a boy. They are squatting over the rock pools at the edge of the sea. Here where the waves rise with the tide the pools are left, full of tiny transparent crabs, green maidenhair, shellfish, old cans, fresh sand. They do not move. They are peering with terrible concentration into the pool. The boy’s hand is still in the warm shallows. He is trying to catch something. The man’s cigarette is motionless in his hand, the ash poised. He is concentrating hard, willing the child to succeed. They do not see me. I do not move. I feel the sun on my back. I smell the sea, the white light bursts in glory about them.

Then—and this is the only movement I ever see—the child has found what he sought, he is drawing it out of the pool. I cannot see
what he has found. I see nothing, only his hand rising, the fall of his curls as he turns to the man, smiling, triumphant. And I see in the man’s warm glance, the complicity of lovers, the friendship of many years, the enterprise of a life shared, work undertaken together, meetings in restaurants, in public places, an intimacy achieved, the promise of a thousand things we can give to each other when there is love, honesty and confidence between us. I do not know whose memory I have entered. This is not written in any of the books.

I begin screaming. I am shaking, hysterical, distraught. In the dream I reach out towards them, to clamp that moment back into time, to halt the corruption of change, to lock them forever into the acknowledged joy of companionship and affection, across the gulf in their lives and in mine. That glance between them gleams, frozen forever on the hot, drenched rocks. I am awake, sweating, crying, consumed by the horror of what I am unable to prevent.

Sometimes I lose my grasp on what happened in the summer of 1993. I have only these evil, recurring dreams.

I took my first degree at Cambridge. I studied French and German. In my last year I specialized in modern French, linguistics and literature. I also took a paper in modern French history. I ought to tell you that because it explains why I got so involved in the whole affair. It was already my chief interest, my intellectual passion if you like. It doesn’t explain why it all became so personal. Or maybe it does. You see, when I decided to go on with my studies and to do a doctorate I was making a real commitment, not just to my writing, but to his. Writing a thesis is a lonely obsessive activity. You live inside your head, nowhere else. University libraries are like madhouses, full of people pursuing wraiths, hunches, obsessions. The person with whom you spend most of your time is the person you’re writing about. Some people write about schools, groups of artists, historical
trends or political tendencies. There were graduates doing that in my year, but usually one central figure emerges. In my case it was Paul Michel.

Everyone has heard of Paul Michel, with a little prompting. He wrote five novels and one collection of short stories between 1968 and 1983. His first novel,
La Fuite,
translated into English under the title
Escape
in 1970, was a set text on the modern French novel course when I was an undergraduate. He won the Prix Goncourt in 1976 with
La Maison d’Eté,
which all the critics say is his most perfect book. I wouldn’t disagree. Technically, it is; and it’s a book that deals with classic themes, the family, inheritance, the weight of the past. It reads like a book written by a man of seventy who has passed his life in peace and meditation. But Paul Michel wasn’t like that. He was the wild boy of his generation. He made news. He was inside the Sorbonne in 1968, throwing Molotov cocktails at the CRS. He was arrested on suspicion of terrorism in 1970. And there was talk of intervention from the Elysée to have him released. Some people say he may have been a member of Action Directe. But I don’t think he was. Although his public political statements were sufficiently extreme. Somehow he was never interviewed in studios or apartments as writers usually are, with their shelves of books and African statuettes behind them. I can’t think of any images of him taken indoors. He is always outside, in cafés, in the street, leaning against cars, riding pillion on a motorbike, gazing at a landscape of white rock, scrub bush and umbrella pines. He was more than good-looking. He was beautiful. And he was homosexual.

He was outspokenly homosexual, I suppose. Reading through all the interviews he ever gave I noticed that he insisted on his sexuality with an aggression which was characteristic of the period. But there was no other name ever associated with his. He never had a lifetime partner as some gay writers do. He was always alone. He
seemed to have no family, no past, no connections. It was as if he was the author of himself, a man without kin. Some critics pointed out, patronizingly I always thought, that homosexuality was only one theme among many in his work and he could not be considered merely as a gay writer. But I did think it was central. I still do. His perspectives on the family, society, heterosexual love, war, politics, desire, were always those of an outsider, a man who has invested nothing and who therefore has nothing whatever to lose.

And I had one other clue around which to build my image of Paul Michel. In a late interview with an American review, the
New York Times Review of Books,
I think, when
Midi
was published in English, he was asked which other writer had influenced him most. And he answered without hesitation, Foucault. But he would make no further comment.

Of course, Paul Michel was a novelist and Foucault was a philosopher, but there were uncanny links between them. They were both preoccupied with marginal, muted voices. They were both captivated by the grotesque, the bizarre, the demonic. Paul Michel took his concept of transgression straight from Foucault. But stylistically they were poles apart. Foucault’s huge, dense, Baroque narratives, alive with detail, were like paintings by Hieronymous Bosch. There was an image, a conventional subject, a shape present in the picture, but the texture became vivid with extraordinary, surreal, disturbing effects as eyes became radishes, carrots, as earthly delights became fantasies of torture with eggshells, bolts and ropes. Paul Michel wrote with the clarity and simplicity of a writer who lived in a world of precise weights and absolute colors, a world where each object deserved to be counted, desired and loved. He saw the world whole, but from an oblique angle. He rejected nothing. He was accused of being atheist, unscrupulous, a man without values. His more perceptive—and hostile—critics saw him as a
writer who faced each event with the stoic indifference of an accepted destiny, whose political commitment was no more than an existential gesture, a man without morals or faith.

It was certainly true that his political life and his writing life seemed to be divided by a crevasse. He was personally involved in the radical left, but his writing addressed classical traditions, with what could be described as an olympian elitism. The elegance of his prose was stamped with the high-handedness of indifference. His life was engaged with the times, his writing was that of an aristocrat who has owned land for centuries, who knows that his peasants are loyal and that nothing will ever change. It was a mysterious contradiction. It was not true of Foucault; and if I had to choose between them as my comrade on the barricades I would have chosen Foucault. He was the idealist; Paul Michel was the cynic.

But writing and politics have very little to do with each other anyway in the English tradition. Or at least they haven’t since the demise of Winstanley and John Milton. I didn’t want to become mired in agonized liberalism. I read all of E. M. Forster in my last year at school. He had a dreadful effect upon me. I think that’s why I became so involved with the French.

I was going out with a Germanist when I began my research on Paul Michel. She was an intense-looking woman, a bit older than I was. I first saw her going into the Rare Books Room of the University Library. She had a mass of curly brown hair and wore tiny, round, thin-rimmed glasses. She was bony and quick in her movements, skinny as a boy, oddly dated in her manners, like a mid-nineteenth-century heroine. I thought she looked fascinating. So I transported myself and all my books to the Rare Books Room.

She smoked. And that was how I got to know her. Very few of the graduates smoked, and there was a sort of prison yard next to the tea room in which the smokers walked round and round, consuming
our poisons. I waited until she had finished her tea and set off round the yard. Then I followed her at a safe distance. When she had her cigarette well alight and was marching purposefully towards the magnolia I caught up with her and asked for a light. I know it’s a pick-up line that must have been used by Neanderthal man, but women writing theses never usually notice that you’re trying to pick them up. Ask them to tell you about their work and they’ll usually do just that. For hours, without let or hindrance. So I didn’t ask her what she was doing. I asked her how long she’d been doing it. Two years, she said. And she didn’t volunteer any further information. I asked her where she lived. Maid’s Causeway, she said. And in so final a tone I didn’t feel I could go on and ask for the number. So I thanked her for the light and pushed off, feeling as crestfallen as if she’d bitten me.

Next day she walked straight up to me in the tea room and came out with an accusation that certainly didn’t sound like a pick-up line.

“Why do you sit in the Rare Books Room if you’re working on Paul Michel? You don’t have to order any rare books.”

I kept my wits about me.

“How do you know that I’m working on Paul Michel?”

“I went through your books while you were having a piss.”

I was flabbergasted. She admitted to spying on me. And she was still standing there, with her curly hair in her eyes, waiting for an answer. I was so frightened of her that I told the truth.

“I work there so that I can look at you.”

“I thought so,” she cried vindictively.