Hallucinating Foucault (7 page)
Read Hallucinating Foucault Online
Authors: Patricia Duncker
I don’t know if it was the heat, the loneliness, the odd sensation of being alone with him in that huge, tourist-infested city, or the peculiar awareness of having been chosen for reasons I did not understand, but that day, for the first time, I heard the writer who was still there, even across the great desert of his insanity, even through the remote serenity of his prose. I heard a voice, perfectly coherent and clear, that whispered terrifying things.
Paul Michel had lived at risk. He had never owned property. He had never had a proper job. He lived in small rooms and high places. He searched through the streets, the cafés, the bars, the gardens of Paris: along the canals, beneath the motorways, by the river, in libraries, galleries, urinals. He moved on, from room to room, a ceaseless, unending stream of different addresses. He owned very few books. He lived out of suitcases. He smoked nearly fifty cigarettes a day. He drove a sequence of very battered cars. When one broke down he threw it away and bought another which was just as decrepit. Every franc he earned was from his writing. He never saved a single centime. He invested in nothing. He had no close friends. He never went home to his parents. He spent all his money in bars and on boys. He occasionally worked the streets himself, agreeing the price, doing exactly what he had been paid for, and then flinging the money back in the face of the man who had paid for sex. He provoked other people deliberately. He got into fights. He started fights. He knifed a friend once, but was let off. He was arrested for being drunk and violent. He spent four nights in prison. He swore at the presenter on television and then threatened one of
the cameramen. He refused invitations to literary soirées at the Elysée. He had nothing whatever to do with women, but he never spoke against them. So far as I could judge he had never loved anybody. But, every summer, he went back to the Midi. He spent the days reading and writing, writing incessantly, draft after draft after draft. He had his books typed at an agency that took in doctoral theses, student dissertations and casual work. He then destroyed all his manuscripts. His prose was ironic, disengaged, detached. He watched the world as if it was a theater in continuous performance, endlessly unfolding, act after act. He was afraid of nothing. He lived at risk.
I had never taken a single risk in my entire life. But now I was doing the most dangerous thing I had ever done. I was listening, and listening carefully, to Paul Michel. Beyond the writing, through the writing, and for the first time, I heard his voice. I was terribly afraid.
On Monday morning, dazed and slightly sunburnt, I presented myself for duty at the Archive. I felt reassured that, after all, nothing could happen to me in a university library. There was no security of any consequence on the door. The concierge gazed at me morosely, listened to my hesitant explanation and waved me away down a limitless green corridor with a mutter about “inscription des étrangers … gauche.” The Archive was temporarily housed in three rooms buried in the remote outbuildings behind the classical symmetry of the university library facing the Panthéon. It had been freshly painted and smelt like a dentist’s office, antiseptic creams and beige. The reading room had new, unmarked pine tables and green table lamps. I could see a young woman surrounded by boxes. Ink and pens were forbidden. The pencil sharpener was attached to the administrative secretary’s desk. She looked at me with suspicious loathing.
“Oui?”
I began to apologize for my existence in hesitant French.
The secretary was of uncertain age and very aggressive, her evil countenance opaque with paint, every feature emphasized in lipstick, eyeliner and face pack, with orange shadows. I caught sight of the red talons ending her fingers, poised over the keyboard.
“Do you have a letter of introduction?” she snapped.
My supervisor had warned me. And in fact I had two: one in elegant, bookish French from my supervisor on Pembroke College notepaper. The other in English from the Modern Languages Faculty office explaining why I needed to use the Archive. The one from the Faculty office had more official stamps and was clearly more credible. But for one awful moment it looked as if both were going to be inadequate. She sat me down to wait, staring at fresh paint and blank walls while she checked out my credentials with her director. I passed the Archive consumer test within five minutes and was soon sitting beside an American, who looked like an advertising executive, peering into the microfiche. Finding my references was easy. Only one box in the catalogue was listed for Paul Michel. And there was only one piece of supplementary information.
Letters to Michel Foucault: philosopher 1926-1984
See FOUCAULT, M.
I filled in the slip and handed it back to the now expressionless painted face.
Immediately there was another obstacle.
“These letters are on reserve,” she said. “I don’t think you can see them.”
“On reserve?”
“Yes. There’s another scholar working on them. These letters are not available for consultation.”
“Is he—or she—working on them now?”
“They are on reserve for publication,” she hissed.
I suddenly turned obstinate.
“But I only want to read them.”
“I’ll have to check.”
She disappeared again. I sat down in a rage. I had come all the way to Paris to read these letters. I glared at the innocent executive American, who had no obvious designs on either Foucault or Paul Michel. Eventually the secretary returned. She chanted a formula.
“The letters in question have been purchased for publication by Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. You may read the manuscripts, but photography, photocopying or reproduction of any passage therefrom is forbidden. You will be required to sign an undertaking to that effect. In addition you must make a detailed declaration concerning your reasons for wishing to read these manuscripts and the use you intend to make of the information contained therein. All publication, including précis, abstract or detailed commentary in any form whatsoever is forbidden. This declaration will be forwarded along with your name, status and institutional address to the holders of the copyright. This declaration will have legal force.”
I nodded, astounded.
“Go into the reading room and choose a seat.”
I sharpened my pencils very, very carefully while she stood over me, taking all the time in the world. Then I bowed with obnoxious politeness. I had turned love-fifteen into fifteen-all.
The box was large, brown, stapled at the corners. It was marked with the same tide and reference numbers that I had seen on the microfiche. I opened the box, my fingers tingling.
Each letter was inside a sealed, transparent plastic sheath, but it was possible to open them and touch the writing itself. The earliest letters dated from May 1980 and the last one was written on 20
June 1984. They had been written at regular intervals of a month to six weeks. I peered at the handwriting—large, rapid and frequently illegible. Paul Michel had written on A4 sheets of typing paper which had rarely been folded. Some letters had no creases in the paper. There were no accompanying envelopes either. Someone had ordered the letters and each one had a number and a stamp signifying that it was in the care of the University of Paris VII Literary Archive, but that it belonged ultimately to the state. There was no typed index, no list of contents and no accompanying summaries. I had his writing before me, unmediated, raw, obscure. I shook my head carefully and tried to read.
I could understand nothing.
Each letter was carefully dated with the day, the year. Sometimes there was a Paris place name, St Germain, rue de la Roquette, rue de Poitou, Bastille, but rarely any number or precise address. I felt that I had begun listening to a private conversation and that I was hearing only one side of the encounter. At first it was all meaningless, an intimacy that retained all its secrets. The letters were all about the same length, four to six sides of A4. They were extraordinarily difficult to decipher. At first I could only make out two or three words a line, then slowly, slowly Paul Michel began to speak again. But this time he was not speaking to me.
15 June 1980
Cher Maître,
Thank you for your generous comments about
Midi.
Yes, it was a more personal book and therefore won’t win any prizes. Somewhere or other I am grateful for that. Those whom our literary establishment wish to stifle they smother with the Prix Goncourt. It was like a cushion over my face. I have returned to my own chosen path. I
was also surprised and pleased that you noticed the episode with the boy on the beach. I knew I was taking a risk. The public becomes hysterical at the slightest hint of what could be read as pedophilia. Their worst fears realized: all the French beaches inhabited by predatory homosexuals bearing down on little boys and corrupting their innocence. The heterosexuals get away with it—think of Colette. But only one review described the incident as disgusting. And as for the Americans—well, that’s what they expect from the French. I haven’t had to cut a word for the translation. Perhaps I should have punished my narrator by murdering him as Thomas Mann does with Aschenbach. Just to bolster up their petty bourgeois morals. Did I tell you that it was based on a real incident? I will recount the whole story another time; it was unforgettable, bizarre. Nothing I have written is autobiographical. Or at least not strictly so, but of course every word is shot through with my preoccupations, my concerns. Sometimes a figure, a face, a voice, a landscape will make a shape in my mind, will begin to inhabit my memory, demanding to be given a new form in writing. That is how it was with the child on the beach.
I have never needed to search for a Muse. The Muse is usually a piece of narcissistic nonsense in female form. Or at least that’s what most men’s poetry reveals. I would rather a democratic version of the Muse, a comrade, a friend, a traveling companion, shoulder to shoulder, someone to share the cost of this long, painful journey. Thus the Muse functions as collaborator, sometimes as antagonist, the one who is like you, the other, over against you. Am I being too idealistic?
For me the Muse is the other voice. Through the clamoring voices every writer is forced to endure there is always a final resolution into two voices; the passionate cry laden with the hopeless force of its own idealism—that is the voice of fire, air—and the other voice. This is the voice that is written down with the left hand—earth, water, realism, sense, practicality. So that there are always two voices, the safe voice and the dangerous one. The one that takes the risks and the one that counts the cost. The believer talking to the atheist, cynicism addressing love. But the writer and the Muse should be able to change places, speak in both voices so that the text shifts, melts, changes hands. The voices are not owned. They are indifferent to who speaks. They are the source of writing. And yes, of course the reader is the Muse.
I think that all I would keep of the common version of the Muse is the inevitability of distance and separation, which is the spark that fuels desire. The Muse must never be domestic. And can never be possessed. The Muse is dangerous, elusive, unaccountable. The writing then becomes the wager of a gambling man, the words flung down on one color, win or lose, for the reader to take up. We are all gamblers. We write for our lives. If, in my life or in my writing, there was anyone who could be described as my Muse, ironically enough, it would be you. But I suspect you would rather be acknowledged as my master than as my Muse. You are my reader, my beloved reader. I know of no other person who has more absolute a power to constrain me, or to set me free.
Bien à vous,
Paul Michel.
10 July 1981
Cher Maître,
You ask me what I am writing. Well, you would be the only person in whom I would confide my work in progress. I sometimes feel that my writing is the perverse and guilty secret, the real secret, the taboo subject about which I never speak until suddenly, behold, another book appears, like a magician’s trick. I make no secret of what I am, but I hide what I write.
There were darker themes in
Midi,
darker than those in
The Summer House,
which was, after all, simply the anatomy of a family and through them, a perspective on France. And France rather than Paris. You and I live in Paris. I sometimes feel we know very little about France. We only know what we can remember. I drew on your memories as well as my own to make that book. You have been too discreet to comment. Well, now I am working with more dangerous, obscure material. The provisional title is
L’Evadé,
and I wasted a morning worrying about my American translators who seem to have such difficulty with my titles and my tense systems. There are occasions when I wish I spoke no English at all and therefore did not have to quibble with their idiocies.
You take the matter of history, I take the raw substance of feeling. Out of both we make shapes, and those shapes are the monsters of the mind. We articulate our fears, like children in the dark, giving them names in order to tame them. And yes,
L’Evadé is
the story of a prisoner, a prisoner on the run, a guilty man who has not served his sentence, who seeks the freedom we all seek, whatever
crimes we have committed. No one is ever innocent. I wanted to write a story of ambiguous liberation. To make the break does not mean that we ever necessarily escape.
And my methods? You asked about my methods. There are no secrets here. Like you, I read. I read continuously. I check my details, my dates, my facts. I do the spadework, the necessary research. But that is only the beginning, the preparation of the ground, the writing itself is work of another order. You will laugh when I tell you that the nearest comparison I can make is with the compulsory mass we were forced to hear every morning when I was being educated by the monks. Those frost-covered mornings, when leaving a warm bed, especially if it had been shared, was torture. Plodding in line around the cloisters, fumbling through our woolen gloves for the place in the psalms, kneeling in the gaunt, dark church, seeing our breath whiten the air. Sometimes, even here in these bare rooms, when I blow on my hands in the mornings, I remember those days. I can even remember the watchfulness of the monks when I glanced up to catch the eye of whichever one of the older boys I was trying to charm. The smell of old incense and white wax clinging to the choir stalls, the obscure and fumbling desire we felt for one another, and above that, the mass. Kyrie, gloria, credo, sanctus, benedictus, agnus dei. I had all the concentration of a fox in season when I was thirteen. The restlessness was brittle in my bones. Yet every day, as I sit down to write, the striped blanket across my shoulders, I sink back into that time. The mind floats with the shape of the mass, opening like a fan before me. I sink into the
cold, empty space which it creates; I lean there on my left hand. I begin to write.
Out of memory and desire I make shapes. I reach back to those long freezing days in the classrooms, the gold above us in the autumn, biting our scarves as we ran along the edges of the paths, scattering the leaves. I touch the pleasure of sensation in that loss of innocence, the escape from banality into a vortex of desire and pain, our first loves, the first embrace of the forbidden tree and the joy of our escape from Eden. There is nothing so poignant or so treacherous as a boy’s love.
Even then, I saw the darkness I see now. But it was like a shadow in the corner of my eye, a sudden movement as a lizard vanishes behind the shutters. But in the last years I have felt the darkness, gaining ground, widening like a stain across the day. And I have watched the darkness coming with complete serenity. The door stands always open, to let the darkness in. Out of this knowledge too, I will make my writing. And I have nothing to fear.
There is another shape too, which returns. One night, walking alone in the Midi, in a town I hardly knew, I was searching, yes, I suppose I was, looking for the men leaning against their cars in the dark, watching for the glow of cigarettes in the doorways, I passed the church. And I heard the scream of an owl rising in the dark. I looked up. He suddenly took off from the lime trees above me, floodlit from beneath, a great white owl, his belly bleached white in the darkness, his huge white wings outstretched, crying in the night, flinging himself away into the darkness. And as I followed his flight into the
dark, the night appeared to be a solid substance, matter to be written. I cannot believe that I have anything to fear.
Bien à vous,
Paul Michel.
30 September 1981
Cher Maître,
How odd that your memory of the cold during mass should be so similar. Our schooldays are a nightmare shared. My most intense memories date from my childhood. I expect that is a universal phenomenon. We lived in a large flat in the rue Montgaillard in Toulouse. My mother used to stretch the washing line across the street on a pulley system attached to her neighbor’s window. And they shared the line. I remember her calling, Anne-Marie, Anne-Marie, out of the window whenever she was ready to use the line. The rents of those flats in the narrow street are colossal now.
I was an only child and spent most of the day helping my mother, handing her clothes pegs, folding the sheets and heating the flat iron on the stove. We had wood delivered once a week and I carried the logs one by one up the dark tiled staircase to the cupboard in the kitchen where my mother kept her woodstore. She lived like a countrywoman in the middle of the city. She kept tomato plants and sweet peas on the balcony, their scent dominated the stifling summer nights. I remember the sound of dirty water, dishwater, washing water, being flung down from the flats into the street, the shutters banging in the night, families quarreling behind locked doors.
My father was often away from home doing repair work on the railways. He came back late in the evening, dirty and tired, and was forbidden to kiss me until he had washed. She was fanatically clean. She scrubbed everything; the kitchen, the pots, the sheets, the stairs, father, me. I remember the smell of that rough, unscented soap, when my father opened his arms, scoured until the skin was red and the hairs still damp, and called—alors vien, petit mec. And I remember how I flinched when he kissed me.
My father was alien territory, to be traversed with caution, but I knew every scent and curve of my mother’s body. During the hot days if we were still staying in the city, she slept in the afternoons and I slept beside her, curled against the shiny texture and white lace bodice of her slip. She smelled of lavender and nail polish. I used to gaze, fascinated, at the strange convex curves of her painted toenails as if they were the single sign of a pair of invisible shoes. Sometimes she slept on her back with her arms folded, like a dead crusader. I crouched against her, feeling like an aborted fetus, not daring to indicate that I still lived. When I did my homework she would be cooking, leaning over my books, correcting my verbs, my maps, my dates, my maths while she pulverized vegetables, plaited pastry or watched the sauce rise with terrible concentration. She bargained in markets, dressed up to visit neighbors, posed as a glamorous and daring woman when she smoked cigarettes. She adored the cinema. My father earned good money, so they often went out. I was deposited with Anne-Marie, who would give me striped boiled sweets and tell me terrifying stories.
My mother came from the vineyards of Gaillac. Her father owned his vines. They lived simply, but they were not poor people. When the war in Algeria was over her father was among the first to accept the pieds-noirs who went to live there and who brought their knowledge from the lost vineyards in Africa. Gaillac was known for white wines. It was the arrival of these incomers that transformed the wine production in the area. We went out to stay on the hot soft slopes during the summer months. I remember the house with its narrow brickwork and perfect row of lozenge windows under the receding dogtooth of the corniche, beneath the gutterless eaves which dripped onto the gravel in regular fluted torrents during the thunderstorms.
My grandmother talked all the time in a soft undertone, to her ducks, her cats, her chickens, her indifferent dogs, her husband and her grandson. She seemed to be whispering secret instructions which no one understood. The villagers called her “la pauvre vieille” and said that she had always been that way, since the early years of her marriage. And they said that she had been beautiful, proud, and had liked her own way, but that when she had married Jean-Baptiste Michel she had made her bargain and slammed the door shut on her own happiness. He was a man who did not know the meaning of compromise or forgiveness.
There was a night when she ran all the way back to her parents’ house, blood covering the front of her blouse, without her coat, terrified and screaming. Jean-Baptiste Michel came to fetch her in the morning, and she went back without protest, abject and defeated. After
that she began murmuring to her animals. No one provoked Jean-Baptiste Michel without suffering the consequences.
The only person who was capable of stopping him was my mother. She was his only child. In her own way I suppose that she loved him. She stood between him and my whispering grandmother. I see her head raised from her vegetables in warning at the sound of his step. I see her wringing his shirts into coils, plucked from the aluminum tub, with concentrated care. I see her watching him at mealtimes, anticipating his demands. I see her reaching for her purse to give him money as he leaves the house. She always fed me before he came home so that I did not irritate him or dribble and jabber at the table. And sometimes he watches her carefully and she meets his glance as if there is an understanding between them. I hear her voice, low and rhythmic as a drum, reading aloud in the evenings. His broad back bends to hear her, his face is in shadow. He is huge, monstrous. I am watching Ariadne and the Minotaur.
She began to suffer from tiredness, a lassitude that sapped her energy in the mornings. I saw the rings beneath her eyes darkening and deepening. She no longer went out to Gaillac on the weekends. Anne-Marie came to help her get me off to school and to give her a hand with the housework. Jean-Baptiste Michel refused to hear anyone suggest that she was ill.