"Hallucinating Foucault" by Patricia Duncker.
"La locura de Foucault" de Patricia Duncker.
Primera lectura: 29-02-2008.
Second read: 19-06-2008 (wow, it's so weird to re-read it so soon! And it still affected me dreadfully. I love this to bits)
Third read: 14.09.2010 (I fall more and more in love with this every time I read it. Serpent's Tail edition)
A young Englishman is writing his thesis, unknown to him the object of his work, French writer Paul Michel, is still alive, although confined in an assylum. Academia is a tool, a way, an excuse for people to delve into their passion. In the case of a thesis, deep enough for it to become an obsession. But it cannot be but a starting point because the constricted space of academia, with its rules and formalities, cannot be enough for something as out of control and so the protagonist soon crosses the line and becomes an active reader, someone ready to answer the message in the books, to answer the cry for help and rescue the hero himself.
"Hallucinating Foucault" is a novel about novels, about reading and what it means to form a connection with someone who's often as far away, physically, as possible, but who comes, intellectually and emotionally, closer than any real person can. Exquisitely handled: the greatest of love stories, that of reader and writer.
Notas: Me faltan las palabras para describir lo mucho que amo este libro, a pesar de la mala traducción(Miguel Martínez-Lage, hace el favor de dedicarte a otra cosa!), a pesar de no entender ni la mitad del francés que sale (¿Cómo es que a nadie se le ocurre poner cosas en castellano en un libro en inglés sin dar traducciones pero el francés está permitido? Tipo, siglo XXI, el francés ya fue, ya no es la lengua de "cultura", ojalá alguien se acordase!).
Homosexuality plays a very important part but mainly it's a novel about love, the reader-writer love that goes beyond silly things like gender. *Spoiler of a kind: I was one of those convinced Paul Michel was a real person and who was disappointed to discover otherwise when I tried to Google his novels halfway through, of course he still remains very real to me!
Essay: "The Love of Writers and Readers: celebrated"
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QUOTES/CITAS:
He was always alone. He seemed to have no family, no past, no connections. It was as if he was the author of himself, a man without kin. PP. 6
She spent all her money on books and all her time reading them. They were all marked with criticisms, responses in the margins, sometimes interlealeafed with whole pages of commentary. She prowled across centuries of writing, leaving her mark wherever she went. PP. 12.
The cats are asleep at the end of my bed and all around me, the thundery silence of L'Escarènere, caught at last in the rising flood of warm air, carrying the sand from the south. The Alps are folded above in the flickering light. And on the desk in the room beneath lies the writing which insists that the only escape is through the absolute destruction of everything you have ever known, loved, cared for, believed in, even the shell of yourself must be discarded with contempt; for freedom costs no less than everything, including your generosity, self-respect, integrity, tenderness - is that really what i wanted to say? It's what I have said. Worse still, I have pointed out the sheer creative joy of this ferocious destructiveness and the liberating wonder of violence. And these are dangerous messages for which I am no longer responsible.
...the craving, the taste, the capacity, the possibility of an absolute sacrifice...without any profit whatsoever, without any ambition. PP.16-17
"Because," said the Germanist, turning her predatory eyes upon me, "if you love someone, you know where they are, what has happened to them. And you put yourself at risk to save them if you can." PP. 24
"The heterosexual press have not hesitated to speculate on the supposed connection between Paul Michel's madness and his homosexuality. But who is Paul Michel? The identity of a writer is always subject for speculation. Writing is a secret art; a hidden, coded practice, often carried out in darkness behind locked doors. The process of making writing is a invisible act. Paul Michel suggested the link between writing and homosexual desire. Fiction, he said, was beautiful, unauthentic and useless, a profoundly unnatural art, designed purely for pleasure. He described the writing of fiction, telling stories, telling lies, as a strange obsession, a compulsive habit. He saw his own homosexuality in similar terms; as a quality that was at once beautiful and useless, the potentially perfect pleasure.
Throughout his years as a militant gay activist Paul Michel always insisted on the controversial view that we are not born comme ça, but choose to be so. This brought him into sharp conflict with the religious association for homosexual rights, David and Jonathan... ...homosexuals cannot therefore be held responsible for what is their natural condition. No one can be blamed. Paul Michel was defiantly against nature. To be unnatural, he argued, was to be civilised, to stake one's claim to an intellectual self-consciousness which was the only foundation for making art... ...He cherished the role of sexual outlaw, monster, pervert. So far as we know he never lived within a stable partnership. He was always alone.
-Page 27-28, Bloomsbury edition.
"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 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 is 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." PP. 37
... When they are in a crisis they can enact a sort of fusion with someone else close to them, love or hate, either way. They may fall in love with you. They may even take you in their arms with a passion - with a tenderness that's startling. Or they're capable of killing you. PP. 43
TODAY'S MALE CHAUVINISTIC PIG IS TOMORROW'S BACON. PP. 45.
Paul Michel was an extraordinary man. All schizophrenics are extraordinary. They are incapable of loving. Did you know that? Of really loving. They aren't like us. They are usually very perceptive. It's uncanny. They have a human dimension that is beyond the banality of ordinary human beings. They can't love you as another person would do. But they can love you with a love that is beyond human love. They have flashes, visions, moments of dramatic clarity, insight. They are incapable of cherishing a grudge or of planning vengeance."
"They are a people who are excessively egotistical. They are also beyond egotism. They are like animals. They know who doesn't love them. They are very intuitive. And in that they are always right.
And he was the first person to comment on my work whose opinion i valued. It’s rare to find another man whose mind works through the same codes, whose work is anonymous, yet as personal and lucid as your own. Especially a contemporary. It’s more usual to find the echo of your own voice in the past. You are always listening, I think, when you write, for the voice which answers. However oblique the reply may be.PP. 47
Cher Maitre,
I was your reader too. HE was not your only reader. You had no right to abandon me. Now you leave me in the same chasm which you faced you lost the reader you loved best of all. You were privileged, spoiled: not every writer knows that his reader is there. Your writing is a hand stretched out in the dark, into an unknowing world. Most writers have no more than that. And yet how can I reproach you? You still wrote for me.
You gave me what every writer gives the reader he loves-trouble and pleasure. There were always two dimensions to our friendship. We knew one another, played together, talked together, ate together. It was painfully hard to leave you. What I miss most are your hands and your voice. SO often we would be watching something else and discussing what we saw. I loved that; your cold gaze upon the world. But the more intimate relationship we had was the one you constructed when you were writing for me. I followed you, across page after page. I wrote back in the margins of your books, on the flyleaf, on the title page. You were never alone, never forgotten, never abandoned. I was here, reading, waiting.
This is my first and last letter to you. But I will never abandon you. I will go on being your reader. I will go on remembering you. I will go on writing within the original shapes you made for me. You said that the love between a writer and a reader is never celebrated, can never be proven to exist. That’s not true. I came back to in you. And when I had found you I never gave you up. Nor will I do so now. You asked me what I feared most. I never feared losing you. Because I will never let you go. You will always have all my attention, all my love. Je te donne ma parole. I give you my word. PP. 170-171
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?
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… 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. PP. 61
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. PP. 62
You taught me to inhabit extremity. You taught me that the frontiers of living, thinking, were the only markets where knowledge could be bought, at a high price. PP. 72
No one should write like that and remain unanswered. PP. 75
“Yes. If you think about it, it’s true. The saints were always visionaries, exiles from their own societies, prophets if you like. They went about denouncing other people, dreaming of another world. As I did. They were often locked up and tortured. As I am. PP. 104-5
Hay amantes que charlan como viejos amigos cuando hacen el amor, se mantienen informados uno al otro como si estuvieran envueltos en la compra de una casa común. Para otros, hacer el amor es el lenguaje mismo; sus cuerpos se articulan en forma de adjetivos y verbos. Para nosotros, todo era conjunción de las mentes y oposición de las estrellas. Sin decir palabra ella me transformaba en un amasijo de sensaciones; me resolvía, como si fuese una sinfonía, en un crescendo de acordes mayores. Pero nunca me dijo cómo se sentía, nunca contó de qué modos me amaba, y tampoco me pidió nunca mi opinión, ni se interesó por ninguno de mis deseos. Se veía a sí misma, y a mí a su lado, desde una distancia terrible, intransigente.
(Pág 56) PP. 38 Serpent's Tail edition.)
But when I was mad I wasn’t acting. I couldn’t express myself, except through violence. PP. 108
“I make the same demands of people and fictional texts, petit - that they should be open-ended, carry within them the possibility of being and of changing whoever it is they encounter. Then it will work- the dynamic that there must always be - between the writer and the reader. Then you don’t have to bother asking is it beautiful, is it hideous?”
“I don’t mean that. It’s just that if you think that fiction should be open-ended you’d have to produce rough surfaces, not these smooth perfect monuments you write. They’re beautiful, beautiful. I love them. You know I do. I’ve spent years Reading and re-readinng them. But they not open-ended. They are shut texts. PP. 111-112
-Lo lamento. No quiero parecer crítico. Es sólo que eres el hombre más apasionado que haya tratado en mi vida. Y no te pareces en nada a lo que escribes.
-Puede ser -tirando el cigarrillo a la arena- puede ser que cuando a uno le importa, cuando le importa de un modo terrible, doloroso, la forma del mundo, y cuando no desea otra cosa que un cambio radical y absoluto, uno se proteja mediante la abstracción, el distanciamiento. ¿Podría ser que lo lejano de mis textos fuera la medida de mi implicación personal? ¿No será que ese algo helador que tú describes sea una ilusión necesaria?
I’m sorry. I don’t want to sound critical. It’s just that you are the most passionate man I’ve known. You are nothing like what you write. [this bit needs to be checked against the book]
“Maybe,” he said, throwing his cigarette away into the sand, “maybe when you care, terribly, painfully, about the shape of the world, and you desire nothing but absolute, radical change, you protect yourself with abstraction, distance. Maybe the remoteness of my texts is the measure of my personal involvement? Maybe that chill you describe is a necessary illusion?”
(Pág 141) Serpent’s tail 112
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…es que hay dos clases de soledad, ¿no? Está por un lado la soledad, la soledad absoluta, el hecho físico de vivir solo, de trabajar solo, como he hecho siempre. Eso no tiene por qué resultar doloroso. Para muchos escritores es incluso necesario. Otros necesitan un báculo femenino en que apoyarse, una especie de criada de familia que les mecanografíe sus malditos libros, que les mantenga el ego a flote. Estar solo durante la mayor parte del día significa que escuchas ritmos diferentes, ritmos que no vienen determinados por otras personas. Creo que es mejor así. Pero hay en cambio otra suerte de soledad que es terrible de soportar.
…-Y es la soledad que entraña ver un mundo distinto del que ven las personas que te rodean. Sus vidas se hallan lejísimos de la tuya. Tú ves dónde está el abismo que os separa, ellos no. Vives entre ellos. Ellos caminan sobre la tierra, tú caminas sobre cristal. Ellos se apaciguan con la conformidad, con semejanzas cuidadosamente erigidas. Tú permaneces enmascarado, consciente de su absoluta diferencia. Por eso he vivido siempre en los bares, les lieux de drague; sencillamente, para encontrarme entre otros que eran iguales que yo.
-Ya, pero, ¿no termina el, ejem, el ambiente gay lleno de gente que procura ser exactamente igual a todos los demás?
….Y siempre estaban enojados conmigo, porque yo optaba por la hostilidad de la diferencia, por insistir en la perversión.
-Pero - dije sin poder resistirme- si es tan horroroso, tan difícil, ¿Por qué no intentar convertirse en un grupo, por qué no buscar la aceptación?
Se iluminó un instante.
-Antes loco a solas que cuerdo con todos.
(Pág 142-144) Serpent’s tail 112-114
Time became incalculable - and of no significance. PP.115
He was neither grateful nor pleased to have walked free from his prison. What I had achieved was of no significance. The walls were within him. PP. 119.
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‘All writers are, somewhere or other, mad. Not les grands fous like Rimbaud, but mad, yes, mad. Because we do not believe in the stability of reality. We know that it can fragment, like a sheet of glass or a car’s windscreen. But we also know that reality can be invented, recordered, constructed, remade. Writing is, in itself, an act of violence perpetrated against reality. Don’t you think, petit? We do it, leave it written there and slip away unseen…
Madness and passion have always been interchangeable. Throughout the entire western literary tradition. Madness is a abundance of existence. Madness is a way of asking difficult questions. What did he mean, the powerless tyrant King? O Fool, I shall go mad.
Maybe madness is the excess of possibility, petit. And writing is about reducing possibility to one idea, one book, one sentence, one word. Madness is a form of self-expression. It is the opposite of creativity. You cannot make anything that can be separated from yourself if you are mad. And yet, look at Rimbaud-and your wonderful Christopher Smart. But don’t harbour any romantic ideas about what it means to be mad. My language was my protection, my guarantee against madness and when there was no one to listen my language vanished along with my reader.
-Todos los escritores, de un modo u otro, están locos. No son les grands fous, como Rimbaud, pero sí están locos. Y es que no creemos en la estabilidad de la realidad. Sabemos que se puede fragmentar, como una lámina de cristal o el parabrisas de un coche. Pero también sabemos que la realidad se puede inventar, reordenar, construir, rehacer. Escribir es, en sí mismo, un acto de violencia que se perpetra contra la realidad. ¿No estás de acuerdo, petit? Eso es lo que hacemos, dejarlo ahí escrito y largarnos sin que nadie nos vea.
...Nunca escaparé esta cárcel de historias inagotables, interminables...
-La locura y la pasión han sido siempre intercambiables. Lo han sido a lo largo de toda la tradición literaria occidental. La locura es una hiperabundancia de la existencia. La locura es una manera de formular preguntas difíciles. ¿Qué quiso decir el rey tirano y sin poder ninguno? Oh, bufón, me he de volver loco.
-Tal vez la locura sea el exceso de la posibilidad, petit. Y escribir consiste en reducir la posibilidad a una sola idea, un libro, una frase, una palabra. La locura es una forma de expresión del yo. Es todo lo contrario a la creatividad. No es posible construir algo que pueda separarse de uno cuando uno está loco. Y, sin embargo, fíjate en Rimbaud, o en vuestro maravilloso Christopher Smart. Pero no albergues ideas románticas sobre el significado de la locura. Mi lenguaje era mi protección, mi garantía contra la locura, y cuando ya no hubo nadie que me escuchara mi lenguaje se esfumó a la vez que mi lector.
Pág 155-156, Serpent’s Tail 124-25
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He gave me all his attention, Attention is a kind of passion. PP. 139
He took pleasure in things that no one else would ever hav noticed. As we walked up the endless stone steps to the bar in the square he suddenly leaned against a battered door and began laughing and laughing. I followed his glance and saw some music inscribed on glazed tiles besides a pink corridor. PP. 145
“Listen, petit,” he said gently, “you are twenty-two and very much in love. I¡m forty-six and a certified lunatic. You are much more likely to be insane than I am.” PP. 149
The decision we made, to write to and for each other, was intimate and terrible. It was a secret that could never be shared. It was a strange hidden gesture of mutual consent.
The love between writer and a reader is never celebrated. It can never be proved to exist. But he was the man I loved most. He was the reader for whom I wrote.
That’s what my writing was. Messages in bottles.
PP.152-156
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