Jandy’s Anthology

Hallucinating Foucault

by Patricia Duncker

selections

the narrator is discussing his studies at Cambridge University:

The tine, white stone city on the edge of the Fens had seemed intensely romantic when I first came up as an undergarduate. 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 Parket’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 My supervisor would occasionally suggest that I read such and such a book, article or unpublished thesis.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.

The producer of this thesis was a graduate from Oxford. He argued that both Paul Michel and Virginia Woolf were essential Romantics, that their method was Romantic, that their epiphanies were revelatory moments of being. He maintained that their preoccupations with inner landscapes represented a disillusionment with politics and a Romantic affirmation of the inward life of the soul. He ground out page after page and acres of footnotes, citations, cross-references, all remorselessly proving his hypothesis. Paul Michel read English. But he never claimed to have read Virginia Woolf. My first moment of radical doubt came when I realized that, during the years when both writers were supposedly writhing with reclusive egotism and fanning the fires of their tortured souls, Virginia Woolf was lecturing on socialism to a women’s cooperative guild and Paul Michel was part of a revolutionary Maoist cell. But the Oxford wizard wrote remorselessly on about their lack of political commitment. This was a world without inconvenient contradictions. I read every word of this thesis and emerged in need of therapy.

from a letter from Paul Michel (fictional writer) to Michel Foucault (philosopher, influential in literary theory):

You ask me what I fear most. You know already or you would not ask. It is the loss of my reader, the man for whom I write. My greatest fear is that one day, unexpectedly, suddenly, I will lose you. We never see one another and we never speak directly, yet through the writing our intimacy is complete. My relationship with you is intense because it is addressed every day, through all my working hours. I sit down, wrapped in my blanket, my papers incoherent on the table before me. I clear a space to write, for you, to you, against you. You are the measure of my abilities. I reach for your exactitude, your ambition, your folly. You are the tide mark on the bridge, the level to reach. You are the faced who always avoids my glance, the man who is just leaving the bar. I search for you through the spirals of all my sentences. I throw out whole pages of manuscript because I cannot find you in them. I search for you in small details, in the shapes of my verbs, the quality of my phrase. When I can write no more because I am too tired, my head aches, my left arm is cramped with tension, and I am left irresolute, I get up, go out, drink, cruise the streets. […] I repent nothing but the frustration of being unable to reach you. You are the glove that I find on the floor, the daily challenge I take up. You are the reader for whom I write.

Filed under: 20th-century, Britain, fiction on December 27th, 2006