Hallucinating Foucault (2 page)

“Am I so obvious?” We weren’t even going out with each other and yet we were having our first row.

“Telling me. Have-you-got-a-light?” She mimicked my voice contemptuously. “You’ve been using your own cigarette lighter for the past five months.”

“So you’ve been watching me?” I retaliated, trying to get a foothold in the conversation.

“Natch,” she said, sitting down and lighting up, “only five of us in modern languages are smokers and you’re one of them.”

I thought she was going to put her tongue out at me. She looked like a triumphant schoolgirl who’d just won all the marbles.

“Why didn’t you ask me what I do?”

She was on the offensive again. “You don’t know, do you? You think all academic women are blue-stockinged bimbos.”

“Hang on,” I interrupted defensively. The situation had gotten completely out of hand. “Why are you quarrelling with me?”

“I’m not.” She smiled, for the first time, a wonderful boyish grin. “I’m asking you out.”

“You can’t smoke that in here,” snapped the woman from the cash desk, who had come up behind her. “Go outside at once.”

I wolfed my cake and followed her out into the yard. I couldn’t believe my luck.

“So you’d already noticed me?” I demanded, incredulous.

“Yup,” she said peaceably, “have a cig. And you can use your own lighter this time.”

“Look,” she went on, “I live in a two-room flat, so you can’t move in. But I’d like to go to bed with you. So why don’t you come round tonight?”

I dropped my cigarette in a puddle. She grinned some more.

“Chicken,” she hissed, her eyes glittering behind the thick lenses and silver rims. And that was how the affair between us began.

She was a very good linguist. She spoke fluent French. In her year out between public school and Cambridge she had worked as a student language teacher in a lycée outside Aix-en-Provence. She mastered schoolchildren by day and the thugs in a bar at night. She had read every single one of Paul Michel’s books and had opinions,
different opinions from everybody else, about each one of them. I didn’t know if it was because she didn’t want to tread on my toes, but it was quite hard to extract her views in detail. It was clear, however, that she had fairly ferocious ideas of her own. She also had decided ideas about what should happen between us in bed. I thought that this was absolutely wonderful as I didn’t have very much to do. She was writing her thesis on Schiller. I didn’t think that Schiller stood a chance.

At the beginning of an affair lovers usually spend a lot of time in bed. Even when they do manage to get up they’re exhausted; worn out with achievements, victories. But this wasn’t true of the Germanist. At eight o’clock she was up, with her glasses in place, busy making coffee in my kitchen or in hers. I would hear the ferocious sound of the whirling Moulinex, smell the terrible, inevitable fumes of that strong, black, anti-aphrodisiac and know that the working day had begun. She made toast, scoured the sink, packed her bag and set off on her bicycle. Whatever the weather. By nine-thirty she had her head down in the Rare Books Room. As I say, Schiller didn’t stand a chance. I used to turn up at eleven, a little giddy, still reeling with sex. She would raise her head, magnificent and censorious as a schoolmistress, and consent to twenty minutes break for coffee and a cigarette.

I loved her flat. She lived in two rooms, with a kitchen which looked out down the garden and was painted yellow and blue. Her cups were yellow and her plates were blue. She always had fresh flowers on the table. She bleached the surfaces and the sink. Her movements, when she was cooking, were intense and exact. So was her writing. When I finally managed to get up I would find brief notes left on the table.

I kept every single one of these cryptic messages, as if I would one day find the key to decode them.

She used to leave messages for herself above the bathroom mirror. On that first morning when I struggled to the loo feeling like a battered piano, I saw, typed out in large block letters, emphatic, aggressive, Posa’s demand for freedom to King Philip II.

SO GEBEN SIE GEDANKENFREIHEIT
(Give us freedom of thought)

And, like Posa, the Germanist meant it. She wanted freedom in every respect—theologically, politically, sexually. I used to write down the bathroom mirror messages, which were always in German, look up any words I didn’t know and ponder their elliptical meanings.

Her other room was a startling, decadent mass of reds; a scarlet bedspread threaded with gold, an old Turkish carpet which was her father’s gift, a turbulent web of ochre, brown and gold. The lampshades, adorned with hanging tassels of red lace, had escaped from a Regency brothel. She had a huge, empty birdcage, shaped like a bell jar. On her desk was a mass of paper, overrun with her precise and tiny handwriting. It seemed to me that she had enough material for a dozen theses already. I peered at her notes. I could understand nothing. Otherwise, every single surface was coated in books. She spent all her money on books and all her time reading them. They were all marked with criticisms, responses in the margins, sometimes interleafed with whole pages of commentary. She prowled across centuries of writing, leaving her mark wherever she went.

When we had been together for a month or so I took the risk of hunting for the shelf where she kept her copies of all the novels of Paul Michel. Sure enough, there they were, all together, in chronological order, amassed in a privileged position beside her desk. Each
book was filled with as much of her writing as his. She had answered him, in full. There were white paper markers, pages of notes, dates marked on the inside cover, which I realized were the months in which she had read them. Unlike many other commentators on his work she preferred the later texts. She had read
La Fuite
as an undergraduate, as I had, but she had read
Midi
twice and
L’Evadé
three times. I was puzzled and pleased. I found a sheaf of her writing inside the text of Paul Michel’s last novel. These referred me to particular pages, incidents, passages. There was one paragraph that she had almost defaced with her meticulous, savage handwriting. At the bottom of the page she had written in her emphatic tiny block letters,
BEWARE OF FOUCAULT
, as if the philosopher was a particularly savage dog. I had the same edition, so I wrote down the page number. Just beneath I noticed that she had also marked a reference to a passage in one of Foucault’s interviews. I wrote that down too and decided to decipher this particular cryptic message which she had written to herself. She knew perfectly well that I was writing about Paul Michel and Foucault. Never once had she expressed an opinion on this particular relationship. Now I knew she had one, her silence seemed odd, even sinister. But she must have had her reasons for saying nothing. I was prying into her secrets. I guiltily replaced the book on the shelf.

I stood in the middle of her room, mystified. Then I scoured her entire flat for Foucault, but could not find any of his books. He had clearly been banned.

She seemed to be present in her rooms even when she was not there; she smell of her cigarettes, the cumulative effect of the incense she burned, the can of oil she kept on the window sill for her bike chain, the muddy gloves she used for gardening. I liked to sit there, trying to piece her together, as if she were a puzzle to be solved. For she didn’t quite add up. On the one hand she operated
with quite terrifying directness. Never before had I been told to take my trousers off while the woman watched. But on the other hand there were sides to her that were fragile, cryptic, hidden. If I touched her when she had not expected me to do so she shrank back, shaking. There were times when she was writing and I would see her covering the page briskly, then she would pause, staring into space, frozen, unmoving, for over twenty minutes, the pen perched like a bird against her cheek. I did not dare to disturb her or ask where she had been. She was like a military zone, some of it mined.

One day I came down to her flat to find her because she wasn’t in the library and there she was, writing in bed, her face wet with tears. I took her in my arms and kissed her. She let me do that once, then pushed me away. I looked down at her writing and saw that it was a letter addressed to
“Mein Geliebter…
“—she had written pages and pages in German. I nearly had a brain hemorrhage with jealousy.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I shouted.

“Writing a love letter to Schiller.”

“A what?”

“You heard.”

“Are you serious?”

“Absolutely. It helps me to get a grip on him. To think clearly. If you’re not in love with the subject of your thesis it’ll all be very dry stuff, you know. Aren’t you in love with Paul Michel?”

“No. Or at least I don’t think so.”

“Can’t see why not. He’s very good-looking. And he likes boys.”

“I’m in love with you,” I said.

“Don’t be such an idiot,” she snapped, leaping out of bed and scattering her passion for Schiller all over her Turkish rug. I tried not to treat Schiller as a serious rival, but he was. She spent more time with him than she did with me.

I come from a fairly ordinary middle-class family. My dad’s a physicist and my mother’s a GP. They met at college. I’ve got one sister who’s six years younger than me. We were brought up like two only children really. I liked her and we used to play together, but we had our own friends, our own lives. The Germanist, however, came from not one broken home, but two. For a while I couldn’t quite get my mind around her family circumstances. She had two fathers and her mother had apparently disappeared.

“I know it sounds weird,” she said, “having two dads. But I always have had. They don’t live far apart. One’s in West End Lane, the other one’s up the hill in Well Walk. I don’t know if they had joint custody or what. I’ve always halved my holidays between them. My first father, if you see what I mean, the one who gave me the rug, works in the Bank of England. I don’t know what he does. I have to wait for security to let him out at lunchtime and they won’t let me in at all. I did ask him once, you know, what he spends his days doing, and he said, negotiating with other banks, but so gloomily I don’t think he likes it much. Or it could have been a bad day on the Stock Exchange. Mother ran off with my second father when I was two and took me with her. I liked my second father a lot. He made me a huge kite with a dragon on it. He’s a painter, sells masses now, and teaches studio in an art college. It was Wimbledon, now it’s Harrow, or is it Middlesex? Anyway, he does vast frescoes with his students, gigantic, all along barren walls in inner city slums. Mother didn’t stay long with him either. She pushed off within a year and left me behind this time.”

“No, I’ve no idea where she went, or who with. Nor has anyone. I’ve never seen her since. She must have done well though. She sent me eighteen thousand pounds when I was eighteen. A thousand for each year.”

“What? You’re making that up.”

“No joke. I own the flat in Maid’s Causeway outright. It was £27,000. The Bank of England made up the rest. Why do you think I never bitch about rent? I’ve had it since my second year at King’s. But Mother’s obviously not interested in me particularly, nor my dads. They never hear from her.”

“Haven’t they remarried?”

“She wasn’t married to either of them. Martin, that’s the painter, had a girlfriend who lived with us for a couple of years, now he’s got one who doesn’t. And the Bank of England is homosexual. He has lots of boys. They’re usually great. They all love cooking. So does Dad. We eat like lords.”

I sat with my mouth open.

“Your dad’s gay?”

“Yup. Like Paul Michel.”

“Is that why you’ve read all his books so carefully?”

“I read everything carefully,” she snapped witheringly.

She said nothing for a while. Then she said, “My dad’s read some of Paul Michel. He reads French. It’s interesting having nothing but fathers. Different if you’re a man. Paul Michel was always searching for his Oedipal ogre.”

“Who’s that?”

“Foucault.”

And that was the first time she’d mentioned his name. I couldn’t ask any pointed questions without revealing that I’d been digging about in her shelves. Besides, she got up to go back to the Rare Books Room, thereby indicating that the conversation was decisively over.

That night she went to a film at the German Society which I’d already seen, so I stayed home and looked up the offending passage in
L’Evadé.
This is what Paul Michel had written.

It was an important message, disturbing if taken out of context, but there were other things in
L’Evadé
which contradicted this savage despair. It took me over an hour in the library to find the interview with Foucault because it dated from 1978, but was published posthumously in
L’Express,
13th July 1984, and consisted of Foucault denouncing his own work,
Les Mots et les choses.