Hallucinating Foucault

I had no idea what to expect going into Hallucinating Foucault.  I’ve never read anything Foucault wrote and I generally know very little about him.  I don’t think these facts impacted upon my enjoyment of the book too much.  I could sort of tell that there was a layer to the book that was just out of reach, maybe an odd reference here and there, but generally all the pertinent bits are explained by Patricia Duncker for us slightly ignorant types.  At least I think they are.  It could be that there’s some whole other meaning to the book that’s only apparent to those with an intimate knowledge of Foucault.  If so I’m happy in my ignorance, it’s still a pretty good book.

Hallucinating Foucault is a tale of obsession and the line where that blurs to love.  The unnamed protagonist is a scholar writing his doctoral dissertation on fictional author Paul Michel.  At the behest of his equally anonymous Schiller obsessed girlfriend, he moves from studying the books to studying the man.  All this leads to the protagonist breaking Michel out of a mental institute and embarking upon an Autumn-Spring love affair.  All the while both Michel and Duncker are obsessing about the relationship between author and reader.

In a nutshell, this is a story about the importance of the reader to the writer and vice versa.  Paul Michel obsesses over Foucault and his work just as the protagonist obsesses over Michel himself.  It’s a cyclical tale.  Or rather it’s a tale of evolution.  While Michel only imagines a relationship with Foucault the man, the narrator seeks him out and lives that relationship.  Michel’s obsession with Foucault as his reader also contributes to his madness.  When his reader dies, believing that there is no-one to listen any longer Michel has a psychotic break- going on a rampage through the Pere Lachaise cemetery.  Once Foucault died, ‘there was no-one to listen and [Michel’s] language vanished along with [his] reader.’  Maybe these themes aren’t universal to authors and Michel was mad to begin with, but it kind of makes you wonder just who Duncker’s writing for.

Of course, Michel isn’t the only mad and obsessed figure in the book.  I’m unwilling to give away what is actually quite a clever twist, but it’s safe to say that every character has their own passion driving them and the narrative.  And as Michel remarks, ‘madness and passion have always been interchangeable.’ 

This is more than just a clever book about clever people getting a bit too into the things they’re reading.  It’s funny.  In fiction, lunatics out of their asylums always leave brilliant anecdotes.  And it’s sad.  After all, it is a story centred around doomed love.  The whole affair leaves you with a sense that the characters are even more lonely at the end than they were when the story began.  The narrator is a man to whom things happen surrounded by people who make things happen.  Both his girlfriend and Michel leave him for their other loves, his girlfriend for the intellectual life studying and translating Schiller.  Michel leaves him for Foucault.

My next book on the list is Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries.  I’ve also finally retrieved my actual book copy of the 1,001 list from my parents’ house, so now the next book selection process is set to be much more enjoyable for me.  Of course, if anyone has any suggestions, I’m open to those too.