Hallucinating Foucault (4 page)
Read Hallucinating Foucault Online
Authors: Patricia Duncker
“Try to like her a little, Mike,” I reproached him, very encouraged.
“You can’t like women like that. Liking is too negligible an emotion. Anyway, she scares me shitless.”
“Well, sometimes me too,” I admitted.
Mike turned on the TV and we stared at the tiny screen. The news contained nothing but war, famine and disaster. Then the phone rang.
“Hello,” she said, “I’m ringing from London.”
“Oh. So that’s where you were.” I tried to sound cool. “I had wondered.”
“I came home with Dad.”
There was a pause. I didn’t say anything.
“You’re cross with me.” She stated the fact.
“Well, yes, a bit. No, I bloody am. Why’d you just go off without leaving me a message? I haven’t got your dad’s number. I didn’t even know you were there.”
“I came down to find something for you. And I’ve got it. So don’t be cross. I’m coming back tomorrow. I’ll see you then.” She rang off.
Mike looked at me pityingly, and raised his eyebrows.
“Why don’t you find someone more normal?” he suggested.
I did begin to think this was good advice when she arrived in a taxi waving a 1984 copy of
Gai Pied Hebdo
with two naked men on
the cover, one all sunburnt buttocks and the other with his leather trousers undone to the level of his pubic hair.
“Look. I’ve found it,” she cried as if the buttocks were part of the map revealing the location of King Solomon’s Mines.
“What?” I picked up her bag as she scrabbled through a mass of ads for sex aids, health warnings and photographs of jack-off parties.
“This.” And she laid it out on the kitchen table, lighting her first cigarette triumphantly.
The article in question was a large two-page spread about Paul Michel. There were several photographs of him, clearly taken in the late 1970s from the Bernard Pivot interview for
Apostrophes.
He posed before the camera, cigarette in hand, still wearing his leather jacket over a black shirt, looking like a street fighter taking five minutes off from the struggle. Behind him was the river and the tiny model of the Statue of Liberty. He looked as if he was about to leave for America. I stared at his handsome, shut, arrogant face, the artificiality of his frozen gestures, the chill self-confidence with which he had invented himself. Then I looked at the article:
Paul Michel: L’Epreuve d’un écrivain.
“Read it,” she said. “I won’t say anything.”
I looked at her. She returned my glance steadily. Then I realized that this was the glove on the table. This was the obscure challenge, a demand, the first demand she had ever made upon me. I took a deep breath, sat down at the kitchen table and began to read.
PAUL MICHEL
L’Epreuve d’un écrivain
On the night of 30 June 1984 Paul Michel was arrested in the graveyard of Père Lachaise. He was found screaming
and crying, overturning tombstones with a crowbar. The cemetery watchman, M. Jules Lafarge, tried to stop him, whereupon the writer attacked the watchman, fracturing his skull with the crowbar which he subsequently used to break M. Lafarge’s forearm and to inflict multiple injuries on his back and face. Paul Michel, described as incoherent and dangerous by the SAMU officials who eventually managed to control him, was admitted to the psychiatric unit at Sainte-Anne a few days later. He has been diagnosed as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. It was later revealed that the writer had escaped from the restraints placed upon him in the hospital and had slashed his chest several times with a razor stolen from one of the other patients. He is not thought to be in any danger.
The heterosexual press have not hesitated to speculate on the supposed connection between Paul Michel’s madness and his homosexuality. But who is Paul Michel? The identity of a writer is always a subject for speculation. Writing is a secret art; a hidden, coded practice, often carried out in darkness behind locked doors. The process of making writing is an invisible act. Paul Michel suggested this link between writing and homosexual desire.
Fiction, he said, was beautiful, unauthentic and useless, a profoundly unnatural art, designed purely for pleasure. He described the writing of fiction, telling stories, telling lies, as a strange obsession, a compulsive habit. He saw his own homosexuality in similar terms; as a quality that was at once beautiful and useless, the potentially perfect pleasure.
Throughout his years as a militant gay activist Paul Michel always insisted on the controversial view that we
are not born comme ça, but choose to be so. This brought him into sharp conflict with the religious association for homosexual rights,
David and Jonathan,
who have always argued for tolerance, comprehension and the extension of civil liberties to lesbians and gay men on the grounds that homosexuality is the result of an innate biological determinism. The politically convenient aspect of this theory is of course the fact that homosexuals cannot therefore be held responsible for what is their natural condition. No one can be blamed. Paul Michel was defiantly against nature. To be unnatural, he argued, was to be civilized, to stake one’s claim to an intellectual self-consciousness which was the only foundation for making art. He relished the improbable, bizarre aspects of gay life; he frequented the leather bars, the drag shows, the baths, the roughest cruising grounds. He resisted every tendency within the community which argued for an extension of bourgeois privilege to lesbians and gays and was perversely opposed to the Partenairiat scheme which would have accorded social security, tenancy and pension rights to established gay couples. He was contemptuously dismissive of the efforts of the parliamentary socialist group, Gaies pour les libertés. He cherished the role of sexual outlaw, monster, pervert. So far as we know he never lived within a stable partnership. He was always alone.
Out of this eerie mixture of defiant difference and sincere commitment to the collective struggle of the gay community in our efforts to win recognition and the right to exist, comes Paul Michel’s writing, classical, detached, austere. This is a writing which refuses the decadent excess
of his sexual life and his political extremism. His most recent novel,
L’Evadé,
is a haunting story of flight and pursuit, a terrifying tale of adventure and escape, the sufferings of his unnamed narrator are as gripping and as poignant as those of Jean Valjean. Yet this text is also a psychic journey to the edge of experience, a modern parable of exploration through the dark labyrinth of the soul. His work was of that uncanny quality which ensured recognition from a usually hostile literary establishment. He was their scandal, their exception, their prodigal son. Paul Michel used his fame and the frequent opportunities he had to hold court in public to promote his version of homosexuality, but with ambiguous results. He was often deliberately antagonistic to sympathetic would-be supporters; he took up extremely provocative political positions, presenting gay men as a subversive vanguard in the struggle to undermine the bourgeois state. His public discourse was that of a man at war, against society certainly, and, we suspect, against himself.
One of the clearest influences upon his work was that of the philosopher, Michel Foucault. Paul Michel insists that the two writers never met. We think that this is improbable given that during the student unrest of 1971 the two of them were recorded on film, crouched side by side, flinging roof tiles at the police from the top of one of the besieged university buildings at Vincennes. Foucault’s only known comment on the work of Paul Michel was published in this review (October 1983), where he described the novelist as “beautiful, excessive and infuriating.” Foucault pointed out the elegance and restraint of the writing as opposed to the peculiarly lurid exaggerations
of Paul Michel’s political statements. When asked to comment further on this apparent contradiction, Foucault was typically enigmatic. “What contradiction? Excess is essential to the production of austerity. Paul Michel is dedicated to his profession. That’s all.”
Nevertheless, the two writers explored similar themes: death, sexuality, crime, madness, an irony now all too evident as we contemplate the recent tragic death of Michel Foucault and the terrible fate of Paul Michel. Paul Michel last appeared in public at the ceremony held in the courtyard of the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière as Foucault’s body was removed on its last journey south to Poitiers where he was buried. The ceremony was attended by many of Foucault’s famous colleagues and friends. Paul Michel read from the philosopher’s work, including the following passage from Foucault’s Preface to
La Volonté de Savoir,
which struck us to be of particular significance.
There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks and perceive differently than one sees is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all.
People will say, perhaps, that these games with oneself need only go on behind the scenes; that they are, at best, part of those labors of preparation that efface themselves when they have had their effects. But what, then, is philosophy today—philosophical activity, I mean—if not the critical labor of thought upon itself? And if it does not consist, in place of legitimating what one already knows, in undertaking to know how, and up to what limit, it would be possible to think differently?
For this perilous enterprise, the revolutionary project of thinking differently, was at the core of Foucault’s philosophy and the fiction of Paul Michel.
Paul Michel’s courage has never been disputed. Whatever we feel concerning the provocative extremity of his behavior and the ways in which he chose to shape his life, it is undeniable that he was never afraid to put himself at risk. Extremity is not necessarily madness. But the forms which madness takes are never without significance. What then is the significance of his behavior in the graveyard? A writer plays many parts, becomes many people in the course of his creative life. The part which Paul Michel is playing now cannot have been chosen. We are in danger of losing one of our finest writers to the white prison walls of a psychiatric unit, to the very institutional forces that both he and Foucault have put so radically in question.
Christian Gonnard
I put down the copy of
Gai Pied Hebdo
and stared at her.
“Do you think he was really that violent?” she asked, her face blank, speculative, watching me.
“You don’t imagine fractured skulls or gaping razor slashes across your chest.”
“What will you do?” Her cigarette hung in mid-air. I suddenly realized that if I gave the wrong answer she would abandon me then and there. But the sinister fact was that I already knew the right answer. The words were forming—practical, mad—waiting to be spoken.
“I’ll go to Paris,” I said. “My father promised that he’d fund a Paris trip to look at the letters. They’re deposited either in the Centre
Michel Foucault or in the university Library Archive. I’ll find out where Paul Michel is. After all, we know he’s not dead, but we can’t be sure he’s still in Sainte-Anne.”
Her cigarette had not moved. I took a deep breath and snatched up the gage she had flung down in my path. It was as if the formica buckled on the kitchen table.
“If I can—if he’s well enough—I’ll get him out.”
She stubbed out the butt with murderous intensity and looked up at me. I was shaking.
“I love you,” she said.
I collapsed onto the table with my head in my hands. She got up at once. By the time I had summoned the courage to raise my head she had gone. The outer door banged behind her. Mike was standing beside me, his face all anxiety and concern.
“Are you all right?” He put his arm around my shoulders. “Shall I make some tea? She’s gone.”
“I know,” I gulped.
“Was it dreadful?”
“Yes.”
“Did she break it off?” He turned on the tap and ran a fountain of cold water down the kettle’s spout.
“No. Or at least I don’t know. She may have done. She told me she loved me.”
Mike dropped the kettle in the sink.
It was June. The exams were over and the undergraduates were recovering from their hangovers. All the courtyards in Cambridge sprouted large cream tents and duckboards, an elegant parody of the First World War landscapes. I asked the Germanist if she had ever been to a May ball. She simply stared at me with undisguised contempt. So I sold the tickets and wrote to my father asking for the
money to go to Paris. He replied warmly, mentioning vast sums. They loved telling their friends that their son was studying at Cambridge and realized that such boasts never came cheaply.
The tiny, white stone city on the edge of the Fens had seemed intensely romantic when I first came up as an undergraduate. It was like Gawain’s castle, a shimmering mass of pinnacles, an intimate world of friendships on staircases. I loved the smell of the libraries, the river weeds, the cut grass in summer. But staying on as a graduate changed my images of the city. A new geography emerged, one based on our flat off Mill Road, the supermarket, the local junk store, run by an enormous family, that sold kitchen rolls, plastic buckets and washing-up brushes at Third World prices. I noticed the wind, that slicing white wind, which comes straight from the Urals, for the first time. I began to stare at the waste paper blowing across Parker’s Piece. I got depressed in the evenings. Maybe the first year of a research project is always a tunnel of disillusionment. Once freed from the appalling task of thinking through eight or ten weekly sides of not very original, turgid prose I had imagined that the gates of scholarship would roll open before me, as if I had just acquired an extensive country estate. No one ever pointed out that research would be a dull, confusing, depressing, endless chore. I had no sense of direction. My supervisor would occasionally suggest that I read such and such a book, article or unpublished thesis. The other theses were the most devastating experience I have ever had. It is no small task to convert unique, extraordinary passions into pages of reductive, repetitive commentary. The worst one I read was a comparative study of Paul Michel and Virginia Woolf.