Reading 1001 discussion

Read 2017; Hallucinating Foucault by Patricia Duncker published in 1996 was her debut novel. It is the story of a postgraduate students quest from Cambridge to psychiatric hospital to the shores of southern France to rescue the author of his thesis. It is the story of the love between the writer and the reader.

The author of the book is called Paul Michel which happens to be the name of Michel Foucault. Paul-Michel Foucault is a famous French philosopher whose thories address power and knowledge. Foucault died in 1984 of complications of HIV/AIDs. The writer Paul Michel quit writing after the death of his "reader" Michel Foucault.

The book was published in 1996 and addressed issues of homosexuality, madness, and touched on AIDS/HIV. The originality is the part about addressing the love affair between writer and reader but this is not a new thought. It has been covered in other books like If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. The plot was mostly connected but the connecting of Paul Michel and Michel Foucault, the Germanist, the doctor, etc was all a little loose. The characters wer mostly well developed, the setting and scenes were descriptive with a lot of comments about smells especially of the asylum smelling of urine and excrement. It was readable. A short book and I finished it in a couple of days of reading. It won a prise in England and it is on the 1001 Books list. The book addressed issues of homosexuality such as a choice or born that way. The prose was mostly good with some foul language and sexual content. Sexual content is not overly descriptive but it is present.

This is beautifully written with storylines that entwine to trap the reader. While our narrator may think he is on a quest to save Paul Michel he is actually being used to fulfil the promises made by someone else.

The book explores love, sex homo and heterosexual, attitudes to sex and most importantly the relationship between writer and reader. Does a writer need to know there is someone who will read their works before they are able to write them? Does a Reader need to understand or relate to a Writer to be able to appreciate their work? Can you totally discount the writer if you are only exploring their works?

The unnamed narrator is a Cambridge graduate student researching the work of a (fictional) French author, Paul Michel, who published a small number of prize-winning novels before succumbing to mental illness that has caused him to be 'imprisoned' in a mental hospital. With the support of his girlfriend and her father, the MC goes to France to interview the writer and perhaps bring about his release.

This is a novel of overarching obsessive love, which seems to the lover to be its own justification, but is used by others (including the object of that love) for their own purposes. You don’t need to know anything about the work of Michel Foucault to read this book (I didn't), but I imagine it might add an extra layer.

I greatly enjoyed this tale of obsessive searching and obsessive love between the brilliant writer and the consumed reader. I found the juxtaposition of Foucault's idealistic structures in which he views society as power struggles and the coldly violent Paul Michel who often epitomizes individual choices of behavior, to be rather brilliant. I thought the idea of a writer having to have a reader that could truly understand him but not be totally aligned philosophically with him, was really well done. The characters are extremely well drawn, Paul Michel in particular. Further, we have a nice little plot twist at the end that casts our view of the narrator into a different mode.
The nature of the sexual attractions both heterosexual and homosexual in this book were layered with an obsession for reading which is not something that you often find in a book.
I suspect the author was not an authority on mental illness nor its treatment at the time in France. I am not sure that that matters particularly. It didn't to me. There are many illustrations of internal agitations and traumas that could be representative of mental illness or simply the intellectual struggles of any outsider. I particularly liked this one:

"And that is the loneliness of seeing a different world from that of the people around you. Their lives remain remote from yours. You can see the gulf and they can't. You live among them. They walk on earth. You walk on glass."

I was unfamiliar with Foucault the philosopher, actually confusing him with Foucault, the physicist, of pendulum fame and Julian Barnes' book. However, that did not deter me from thoroughly enjoying a book that I started and finished on the same day! It is an intriguing introduction to the idea that an author requires a reader and their potential relationship. The unnamed narrator is studying the fictitious Paul Michel and in reading his work becomes deeply besotted by him. Paul Michel is, himself, deeply besotted by Michel Foucault, the real French philosopher, whose full name is, by no co-incidence Paul-Michel Foucault. In discovering that Paul Michel is now in a psychiatric hospital, he is encouraged by his girlfriend, identified only as the Germanist, to seek him out with idea that he might be able to facilitate his release. This sounds deadly dull and possibly too intellectual for the average reader, but it turns out to be a thoroughly enjoyable and thought provoking novel which has another couple of themes in the nature of sexuality and the possible connection between creativity and madness. It is an intriguing work.