Hallucinating Foucault (3 page)

I could see no connection whatsoever between the two passages, beyond the obvious fact that Foucault’s sinister list of obsessions
was an excellent summary of all the themes in Paul Michel’s fiction. I read through the entire interview. There was only one other phrase which she had written down, it was not even a complete sentence. It was this:

Now I was utterly baffled and very intrigued. The extremity of this kind of language—“craving,” “absolute sacrifice”—common both to Paul Michel and to Foucault, played no part in the Germanist’s daily intellectual discourse. Even if she talked about her work it was often in terms of form, or of one particular poem, play or letter to Goethe. I realized that I had no sense of her overall project, only a fascinating perspective on her engagement with detail. I had no idea what she was actually doing. On the other hand, she sat me down, almost every evening, and delivered a series of questions worthy of the inquisition. She was much sharper and more aggressive than my doctoral supervisor, who gazed at my pages of typescript with weary indifference.

I became increasingly fascinated by her antipathy to Foucault.

Everybody knew her. All the graduates dreaded her appearance when they were giving papers. She had always read everything and had her own, peculiar, controversial, but well-substantiated views. Even when she stepped outside for a cigarette she still seemed to know what had happened in the seminar. She didn’t have any close friends. And she had always lived alone. I lived with an English graduate called Mike who was working on Shakespeare. He was mightily intimidated by the Germanist and fell preternaturally silent whenever she arrived in our flat. I think it was her glasses. She
had such thick lenses that they magnified her eyes. The result was an owl-like intensity, combined with an uncanny concentration. Somehow, you found yourself reflecting on the fact that owls ate live mammals.

“What on earth do you talk about?” Mike asked incredulously, after she had spent her first night in our flat and vanished at dawn.

“Oh, everything. Her work. My work. She’s got two fathers.”

“I suppose one of them is Zeus,” said Mike.

She was never affectionate. She never used any terms of endearment, never told me that she loved me, and never held my hand. When she took me to bed she kissed me as if there was some distance to be covered and she was intent on getting there without interference.

It was the end of May, exam time for the undergraduates. We were all infected with exam paralysis as well as thesis paranoia. I was playing chess with Mike in our kitchen on the freshly bleached formica table from which the Germanist had eliminated all traces of stickiness, when she bounced in unannounced. This was unheard of. If she intended to come around she rang up in advance and made meticulous arrangements. If I wasn’t there she left messages with Mike, which she recited at dictation speed as if he were an illiterate secretary.

“Get dressed sweetheart and put on your best glad rags. The Bank of England just rang from Saffron Walden. He’ll be arriving in his Merc within the hour.” She danced around the table. “And he’s taking us both out to dinner.”

I had never seen such uncharacteristic bumptiousness. I sat there thinking, she called me sweetheart. Mike was stunned. I thought I might soon need a blood transfusion.

The prospect of meeting your girlfriend’s father, or at least one of her fathers, is very intimidating. I began to panic.

“Should I put on a tie? I haven’t got a tie.”

“Then you can’t wear one,” she said with devastating logic, through a cloud of smoke.

“I could borrow one off Mike.”

“Oh, don’t bother. Father doesn’t care. We’re students. Anyway, none of his boyfriends wear ties.”

“But I’m not his boyfriend. I’m yours.”

“Oh? Are you?” she said scornfully.

“You called me sweetheart,” I accused.

“Did I? Slip of the tongue.”

We stood on the steps of the Fitzwilliam peering down Trumpington Street in the golden evening light. Her father really did drive a sleek black Mercedes, equipped with car phone, CD player and a locking system which responded to a radar device on his car keys. If he pressed the control the car answered, even at long distance, with a hum and a click, a quick flash of the lights all around, and rested, open and waiting. I wondered if it worked around corners.

She didn’t look like her father, but they had the same grin. He was about fifty, grey-haired, clean-shaven, handsome and unnervingly sinister, rather like a CIA agent in a 1960s film. He had all the trimmings, dark suit, pearl cufflinks and expensive French shirt. He got out of the car and stretched out his arms. I’d never seen her so happy. She let out a great shout of uncomplicated joy and he engulfed her in a hug. He even dislodged the glasses.

“How long can you stay?” she demanded, without introducing me.

“Just tonight.” He kissed her on both cheeks, like the French do. Then turned to me.

“Now, my girl, let me take a look at this young man who has captivated my daughter.”

I suddenly felt oily, coated in dandruff and spots, but I was delighted
to hear this statement. I was under the impression that the Germanist didn’t have any passions. She certainly hadn’t appeared amenable to captivation. He shook my hand, then suddenly gave me a hug too. I was very taken aback and very pleased.

“If she doesn’t give you a good time, boy, cruise on down to us in London.” He delivered his pick-up line with the same broad, mischievous grin she had lavished upon me.

“Give over, Dad. I saw him first,” she giggled and poked her father in the ribs. I changed color several times with embarrassment.

All my ideas about the Bank of England underwent a sudden and rapid transformation. The evening, depending upon your morals, went downhill from there. I now understood where my Germanist’s absolute sense of license and liberty came from. She was her father’s daughter.

He took us to Brown’s, and there amidst the pot-planted splendor of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid he proceeded to eat like a student. We all had mushroom and Guinness pie. He ordered extra chips. She couldn’t finish her baked potato and sour cream. He changed plates and ate the lot. He took a look at the wine list, shook his head sadly, and ordered two bottles of house red. He suggested that I put some extra cream on my Tarte Tatin, called for some more without waiting for a reply and then added a little to his own ice cream and apple pie. He was clearly fearless in the face of cholesterol.

She was transformed from the intense, abrasive graduate into a merry child. She chatted, giggled, told stories, wolfed chips, demanded news of her father’s last boyfriend, who appeared to be the same age as she was. She was even irreverent about Schiller. He drew her out, encouraged her, teased her unmercifully and begged her to let him pay for contact lenses. He asked, with a wicked grin, if I was any good in bed, urged her to have driving lessons and choose
a car. He ticked her off for smoking; then smoked half of my cigarettes. He was like a passing king, arbitrary, generous, dispensing largesse.

When we reached the cappuccinos he turned his strange grey eyes upon me and asked about Paul Michel.

“All I’ve read is
La Maison d’Eté,
the one which carried off the Goncourt. I suppose that gives me a false impression of his work.

My daughter tells me that it’s his most conventional novel.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “in some ways it is. I still prefer
La Fuite,
which talks about his childhood. And, well …” I hesitated.

“Growing up gay in rural France,” said the Bank of England, grinning. “Being homosexual isn’t a taboo subject at this table. Poor lad, it must have warped him for life. He had a touch of the James Deans though, didn’t he? A brutal butch version of homosexuality and we all end up doomed, damned and gorgeous. What’s happened to him? I know that he was locked up in an institution for a bit. Not dead of AIDS, I hope.”

“No,” I said, “not as far as I know. He had a complete nervous breakdown of some kind in 1984. And he hasn’t written anything since.”

Suddenly I became aware of the Germanist. Midnight had struck, the pumpkin was gone and the magic was dissolved. She was glaring at me with her lenses alight, shining with fury.

“Then you don’t know? You’re studying his work and you don’t know what they’ve done to him?”

“What do you mean?” I demanded, very startled.

“He’s in the madhouse. Sainte-Anne in Paris. He’s been there nine years. They’re killing him with their drugs, day after day.”

I stared at her.

“Calm down darling,” said her father peacefully, looking around for the bill, “I didn’t know that he was still in there.”

“But you aren’t writing a thesis on Paul Michel.” She was a column of accusation. I thought that she was going to hit me.

Her father leaned over and kissed her cheek, something I would never have dared to do, and said sweetly, “You make scenes at your lover in front of the restaurant, my dear, never at the table. It’s not the done thing.”

The Germanist melted slightly, glared at me once more, then stormed off to the loo. Her father turned back to me.

“I didn’t know that he’d been sectioned for good and all. That’s a pity. Just being gay used to be enough to get you locked up, but I’d have thought things were more enlightened now. Might be worth investigating.”

He helped himself to another of my cigarettes and then said, smiling, “If I were you I’d find out if the family had a hand in it. Families usually take it upon themselves to bump off their homos—dykes and gays—if they can do it with impunity.”

I felt the need to defend myself.

“I’m not writing about his life. I’m studying his fiction.”

“How can you separate the two?”

“Apart from
La Fuite
he’s not an autobiographical writer.”

“But his experiences—the ones he sought out for himself as well as the things that just happened—must be relevant.”

“I think that’s a trap. You can’t interpret writing in terms of a life. It’s too simple. Writing has its own rules.”

The Germanist had reappeared like a magical apparition and pitched in on my side. “He’s right, Dad. It’d be as if I explained away all Schiller’s work in terms of his economic situation and the jobs Goethe got for him.”

“But he couldn’t have written anything if Goethe hadn’t bailed him out. You’ve said that yourself.”

“Yes. It’s true. But it’s still not the most important thing about his writing.”

“Then,” said her father emphatically, “why is it so important to know that Paul Michel is barking mad in some asylum in Paris?”

“Because,” said the Germanist, turning her predatory eyes upon me, “if you love someone, you know where they are, what has happened to them. And you put yourself at risk to save them if you can.”

It was as if she had flung a glove down on the table between us. I had a sudden awful vision of her searching for Schiller in the cobbled streets of Weimar with a vial of penicillin and saving him from the last, gasping stages of consumption.

We left her father in her flat, openly reading all her cryptic messages and peering into her files of notes.

“I try to get through the book lists she sends me,” he said confidingly as she disappeared into the airing cupboard in search of towels, “but I don’t have much time for reading. I got very stuck in Foucault.”

“She told you to read Foucault?”

“She seems to think Foucault is as essential as Schiller,” he confessed, shaking his head. “Can’t think where she gets it all from. Her mother certainly wasn’t an intellectual. Or not that I ever noticed.”

The combination of the vanishing mother and the ubiquitous Foucault proved too much for me. I cycled home behind her in silence.

It was drizzling when we reached my house. All the lights were out. She sat cross-legged on my bed with raindrops in her curls and running down her glasses. She looked as if she was crying. We gazed ruefully at one another.

“Did you like my dad?” she asked, childish, insecure.

“I thought he was wonderful,” I replied, quite sincerely. She smiled. Then she took off her glasses, peered at me dubiously and apologized for her accusations.

“I’m sorry I was sharp,” she said.

I kissed her very carefully, just in case she decided to bite me, and reached for the buttons on her shirt. I think that was the first time I made love to her rather than the other way around. She had such a hard, bony body, all ribs and hips. That night she felt brittle, fragile under my hands. I never felt that she gave herself up to me; it was more a question of giving in. Like a defeated revolutionary she abandoned her sexual barricade. Something broke within her, gently, quietly, reluctantly, and she buried her face in the hollow between my shoulder and my ear, unresisting. I was very alarmed by her unusual gentleness and talked to her quietly about nothing in particular until she fell asleep in my arms.

When I awoke next morning she had already gone, leaving an uncompromisingly Oedipal message on the kitchen table,

with which there was no arguing.

She wasn’t in the library for three days after that. She had a sequence of unwritten rules about when it was permissible for me to ring or to call round. As the rules were never stated I only knew when I had breached them and she either sulked or told me to go before I had even half finished my grudging mug of coffee. I held out for one day, then rang her up. The Ansaphone told me that she was categorically unavailable and didn’t suggest that I leave a message.

I said, “It’s me. Where are you?” And left it at that. She didn’t ring back.

I risked the telephone again on the morning of the third day. The message on the machine hadn’t changed. I sat in the kitchen and gloomed at Mike.

“I think she’s left me.”

“Don’t be so stupid,” he said tardy. “If she was giving you the push she’d be the first one to come around and tell you. She’d never pass up the opportunity.”