HALLUCINATING FOUCAULT by PATRICIA DUNCKER

 Reading by Aloy Polintan

Hallucinating Foucault by Patricia Duncker

(Vintage, 1998)

Flash Book Review No. 249: "The Muse must never be domestic. And can never be possessed. The Muse is dangerous, elusive, unaccountable." The interplay of an author's obsession with the Muse and a reader's readiness to assume the role is what turned the austere, romantic novel that is Patricia Duncker's Hallucinating Foucault (1996, Vintage) into a complex dictum on psychology and art. There was the incarcerated novelist Paul Michel, known for "his moods, his sudden withdrawals, his potential violence," and his books that, with all their directness towards abstractions, seduced every reader to investigate more. And there was the staunch investigator, the unnamed Cambridge graduate student, who had discovered in the quite shocking ending of the story that all he had become in this circuity of desire, madness, and liberation was a "Red Cross Knight, sent out to find the soul that was lost." Between the arrival to Paris and the burial of the rebel writer, and between the narrator and the subject, was love beyond social constructs, one that hangs high above our inquiry into verisimilitude. Fascination turned into a beckoning question of how far fiction could go, and this fast-paced metamorphosis is a source of joy. This speed is what we readers deserve, thanks to Duncker—whose other works I look forward to reading next—and her knack for scribbling "every word with measured and devastating certainty," which makes us all believe that we are free to love whoever we dream of loving, despite the violence of our circumstances.