Hallucinating Foucault (5 page)

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 the 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. My Germanist was unsympathetic.

“You should skim read stuff like that,” she snapped, “and photocopy the bibliography.”

“But it looked so scholarly,” I wailed.

“You’re as naïve as Dorothea.”

“Who’s Dorothea?”

“Read
Middlemarch.”
The reply came back like a round from her machine gun.

And so the project of a doctorate diminished in grandeur before me. So too did the vain little city and its tortuous, complacent or resentful inhabitants. Cambridge became a market town of provincial proportions with an indifferent theater, too few cinemas and too many booming, middle-class voices.

But another change had begun. I had accepted the Germanist’s challenge, obscure, imprecise, inarticulate; and she stood like an image of the wind at the harbor’s rim, where the calm water touched the quaking sea. She was sending me forth on an adventure. I was not going to write a mean-spirited, critical little study of a great
writer. I was not going to sit in the Rare Books Room counting angels and swallowing camels. I was going on a voyage, beyond the damp beach of footnotes and appendices. I reread Paul Michel’s work, breathless with excitement. I pinned a huge poster to the kitchen wall, so that his face, steady, unsmiling, remote, dominated our cooking. Mike thought I was mad. He blamed the Germanist. But she was the huge swell beneath me, the extraordinary energy itself, for all my undertakings. She became gender, more manageable. She began to listen to my complaints for a few more minutes than she usually did before biting my head off. I once found her gazing at me, reflectively, peacefully, as if I were a painting she had just completed.

I chose that minute to ask her about Foucault. She had too savage a manner for pretence, so I dared the question that had haunted me for months. What, in her opinion, was the importance of Foucault for a man like Paul Michel? I tried to sound casual, indifferent. She lit another cigarette and settled herself down into her red room.

“I suggested that he was like a father, didn’t I? I’ve thought about that. It’s true in some ways. There is almost twenty years difference between them. For Paul Michel, Foucault was the most important radical thinker of his times. He belonged to the generation who rejected Sartre. They were against the values of godless liberal humanism. They were more extreme. But the Oedipal model doesn’t really work, does it? Paul Michel never envied Foucault; he was never the ogre to be envied and slain. He was the beloved, the unseen reader to be courted. I think that Paul Michel wrote every book for Foucault. For him and against him.”

I stared at her. She had pondered on the central questions of my enquiry. She had followed me, step for step.

“Every writer has a Muse,” said the Germanist slowly, “no matter how anti-Romantic they are. For the irredeemably boring, the Muse is a woman they’ve cooked up in their heads, propped up like
a voodoo doll on a pedestal and then persecuted with illusions, obsessions and fantasies. Paul Michel wasn’t like that. He wanted someone real; someone who challenged him, but whose passions were the same. He fell in love with Foucault. It is absolutely essential to fall in love with your Muse. For most writers the beloved reader and the Muse are the same person. They should be.”

She paused.

“In the case of Paul Michel this necessary love proved to be a dangerous affair.”

“Why?”

“He’s in an asylum, isn’t he?”

I didn’t understand her and my face must have registered the fact.

“Don’t be so dense. Foucault was dead. For Paul Michel it was the end of writing. His reader was dead. That’s why he attacked the gravestones. To dig his writing back up, out of the grave. Why bother to exist if your reader is dead? He had nothing to lose.”

I whistled incredulously.

“How do you know all that? You’ve made it all up.”

She looked at me steadily.

“Have I? Go to Paris. Find Paul Michel and ask him.”

There was a heat wave at the beginning of July. The boys selling ice cream and cold drinks became millionaires. I bought my ticket for Paris and booked myself into one of the student residences near the Porte d’Orléans. On the first Sunday morning of July the temperature was over thirty degrees in the garden by ten o’clock in the morning. I had stayed over at her flat and we lay comatose on the floor of her room, drinking iced orange juice and gazing at the papers. I told her when I was leaving. I would be gone for two months at least. She simply nodded and went on reading the reviews.

“Will you miss me?” I sounded more importunate and desperate than I had intended.

“Yes,” she said, without looking up.

I sat, biting back my reply. She turned to stare at me. I had never commented on her unexpected declaration. Neither had she.

Some lovers chat like old friends when they are making love, keep each other informed, as if they were engaged upon a common house purchase. For others making love is their language; their bodies articulate themselves into adjectives and verbs. For us it was the conjunction of the mind and opposition of the stars. She transformed me, wordlessly, into a mass of sensations, resolved me, like a symphony, into a crescendo of major chords. But she never told me how she felt, never counted the ways in which she loved me, nor did she ever ask my opinion or ever enquire after any of my desires. She watched herself, and me, from a terrible, uncompromising distance.

“What’s the matter?” she asked crisply.

“Nothing. Just … well, I shall miss you dreadfully.”

“That’s good,” she glittered, paused. Then she said, “Listen, you have something very important to do. Nothing must distract you. I’ve made some arrangements. You are flying out on Thursday. Right … well, we’ll go down to London tomorrow night. We’ll stay with my father. There’s a friend of his you’d find helpful. Someone you must meet.”

I felt like a spy, receiving orders for an operation abroad. I felt panic-stricken.

“How am I going to find Paul Michel? It’s mad, all this.”

“We start with the article. The Paris telephone directories are all in the university catalogue room. We’ll ring up the hospital tomorrow.”

The Catalogue Room was a huge, ornate, oblong structure like a 1930s mausoleum. It was a mass of still, fetid air, smelling of fingered
books and carpet cleaner. I thought that the directories might be on microfiche, but they weren’t. There they stood, row upon row of massive, yellow doorstops, buried in the French section, containing all the public numbers. We looked up Sainte-Anne under “H” and found an entire page of numbers listing every service, but not the Psychiatric Service. We wrote down the central reception number. The directories let out an evil thump as we shoved them back into place. The Germanist tugged on my arm.

“Come downstairs,” she hissed.

We packed ourselves into the telephone box at the bottom of the stairs. She produced a dozen £1 coins. I had a terrible sense of vertigo. She tapped out 010.33.1.45.65.80.00 without looking at the torn slip of paper, and without hesitating over the code, as if it were a number she already knew. She passed the phone to me just in time to hear an even French voice declaring that I had reached the hospital exchange. I asked for the Psychiatric Service. “Ne quittez pas,” she said. The box swallowed down one coin while I was waiting. The Germanist, her ear pressed against the receiver, calmly poured in another piece of gold. Another woman’s voice came on the line. I plunged in. I asked for “l’écrivain Paul Michel.”

“C’est qui à l’appareil?” The voice was suspicious.

“I’m a student,” I confessed, “I’m writing a thesis on Paul Michel.” The Germanist kicked me in the thigh.

“Don’t give everything away,” she hissed.

“I’m very sorry,” snapped the French voice. “I’m unable to answer any questions whatsoever. Please refer all your enquiries to his legal representative.”

“Who is that?” I asked pathetically.

She rang off.

The Germanist was jubilant. I couldn’t understand her triumphant dance.

“We know all we need to know,” she said. “He’s there. If he wasn’t she’d have said so. And they don’t let anyone speak to him.

All you have to do is get inside.”

“Well, that mightn’t be easy. What if they won’t let me?”

“Now you have to find out who his legal representative is. And you have to ring up his dad. What’s his father’s name?”

“Michel. What else? He lives in Toulouse.”

But there were three pages of Michels in the Toulouse directory.

“Never mind,” she said, “you’ll find it easier on the spot.”

I wasn’t so sure.

We rang her father from Liverpool Street. I could hear his voice, coming through loud and clear, as if he were a ventriloquist.

“Take a taxi, sweetheart. I’ll give you £10 when you get here.”

“Nonsense, Dad. We’ll get the tube.”

“You adore slumming it, don’t you my love? Suit yourselves. The Chablis is in the cooler and I’m cooking up a storm for my favorite girl. Come on home. I hope your heart still belongs to Daddy.”

“Leave off, sexy,” she giggled.

He teased her with every insinuating cliché ever written. She gleamed like a wet stone under the wash of his love. They were like boxers, sparring partners, dancing, daring, testing one another’s reach. I leaned against the phone box, nursing a jealous erection.

Going up in the lift at Hampstead she braced her back against the antique grille and shut her eyes. Her face looked suddenly white, fragile, childlike. I gazed at her pale skin, her scrawny body and her bare arms, now reddening from the July heat.

“You all right?” I put my chin on her shoulder.

“Yes. But I’ve left my womb at the bottom of the shaft,” she said.

I drew back, startled, and peered at the only other occupant of the lift, a young black man on clanking roller skates with a green baseball cap pulled on backwards. His Walkman thumped gently in the hollow space. He was staring at her fixedly. As the lift arrived she opened her eyes with a snap. And behind her glasses, her eyes, vast, grey-blue, accusing, settled on the black man. The lift disgorged us into the street. She smiled, her huge, uninhibited grin. He smiled back and they slapped hands like comrades in the ghetto, boys in the hood. He roller-skated away down the hill.

“Did you know him?”

“No.”

I gave up.

The house was all verticals: high windows, perpendicular bookcases, a vertiginous staircase with a steep, curving banister, an elongated umbrella stand framing a tall, Gothic mirror. She let us in with her own key and shouted up the staircase. I had the impression that her voice rose up and up into the fragrant heights. The smell was bay leaves, cinnamon and red wine, winter smells in a summer season.

The Bank of England swung down the staircase like an extra on the set of
Billy Budd
and caught us both up, one in each arm.

“Mes enfants,” he cried, and kissed whatever was in reach.

“You handsome young rogue,” he laughed and patted my cheek. “I’m as crazy about you as she is. Come on upstairs. Jacques is here and can’t wait to discuss diseases. That’s his thing, you know,” he said confidingly to me, “madmen and murderers. Well, whatever turns you on. I’m very liberal.”

The kitchen and living room took up all the second floor and was the same blend of warm reds as her bed-sitting room. A gigantic African tapestry hung on one wall. There was a colossal musical engine in one corner which looked as if it had been stolen from Jean-Michel
Jarre, with speakers like vertical black tombstones. Mercifully, it wasn’t in operation. Coiled up on the caramel sofa, amid a mass of red and orange cushions, was the tallest man I had ever seen. He uncoiled to well over two meters and then stooped to shake hands.

“How do you do? I am Jacques Martel.”

His hair was grey, but his age was unguessable. His face narrowed to a point like that of a weasel, and as he smiled two long lines appeared on either side of a sinister, professional grimace. His breath smelled of alcohol and cigarettes. He stood so close to me that I noticed his teeth. They were all slightly sharpened into points, suggesting the jaws of a shark.

He kissed the Germanist and said mildly, “Alors, ma fille … Comment vas-tu?”

Then he sat down again to stare at me. I stared back, uneasy and intrigued, wondering where to put my hands. The Bank of England organized us all into cut crystal glasses, whiskey and peanuts, then dragged his daughter off to cheer him on amid his spices and soufflés. Two huge double doors opened onto the kitchen and I could hear her saying, “I’ve got no idea, Dad. What does it say in Delia Smith? Why not let me do the vinaigrette?” The predatory coil on the sofa completed his stare and began to ask questions. His English was faultless and without any trace of an accent. I found this most peculiar as French intonation almost always betrays native speakers.

“So … I’m told that you are working on Paul Michel? He was a tragic case. I’ve met him. Several times, in fact. I never treated him. But one of my colleagues was responsible for him in the initial stages. The affair caused a scandal at the time. It was widely discussed. And there was a fair amount of protest from his friends at
Gai Pied Hebdo.
One of the editors argued that we were trying to
cure him of his homosexuality. That was nonsense. Really. He was barking mad. A typical example of the disease in some ways.”