The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Hallucinating Foucault by Patricia Duncker
Graham Fraser

Patricia Duncker. Hallucinating Foucault. Ecco, 1997. 175 pp. $21.00.

Patricia Duncker’s first novel explores the relationship between readers and writers as a love affair, as the unnamed narrator, who seeks to rescue a mad, homosexual French novelist from institutionalized obscurity, finds his intellectual passion for the writer becoming increasingly romantic and, ultimately, sexual. The book is a literary mystery which begins in Cambridge, travels to Paris, then to a French asylum and concludes with a long hot summer of love and doom in the Midi. In a sense, however, the book never really leaves the academy. Pursuing the reclusive object of his desire, the narrating doctoral student indulges in the fetishes of research, fondling his author’s manuscripts and literary love letters to Michel Foucault with even more fascination than he displayed during his voyeuristic peeping into his girlfriend’s research notes. Of all the passions explored in this novel, Duncker, herself an academic, writes most convincingly on the titillating trappings of scholarship.
Indeed, the erotics of reading and writing are so clearly brought out in the novel that at first one imagines that Roland Barthes—rather than Foucault—might have been a better choice to preside over the text. However, the ghost of Foucault—severe, transgressive, momumental—implicitly raises the ominous issue of the disappearance or death of the author. The passion shared by the reader-narrator and the French novelist (and the earlier passion the novelist shared with Foucault in their reciprocal reader-writer relationship) challenges Foucault’s own theory of authorship: far from allowing the author to recede into oblivion behind his writings, Duncker insists, the reader must love the writer at least as passionately as his texts. And when the death of the author, the Foucauldian (and Bathesian) doom that hangs, unspoken, over this text, comes to pass, its tragedy lies in sundering these lovers, leaving one to grieve alone. [Graham Fraser]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Hallucinating Foucault by Patricia Duncker Graham Fraser Patricia Duncker. Hallucinating Foucault. Ecco, 1997. 175 pp. $21.00. Patricia Duncker’s first novel explores the relationship between readers and writers as a love affair, as the unnamed narrator, who seeks to rescue a mad, homosexual French novelist from institutionalized obscurity, finds his intellectual passion for the writer becoming increasingly romantic and, ultimately, sexual. The book is a literary mystery which begins in Cambridge, travels to Paris, then to a French asylum and concludes with a long hot summer of love and doom in the Midi. In a sense, however, the book never really leaves the academy. Pursuing the reclusive object of his desire, the narrating doctoral student indulges in the fetishes of research, fondling his author’s manuscripts and literary love letters to Michel Foucault with even more fascination than he displayed during his voyeuristic peeping into his girlfriend’s research notes. Of all the passions explored in this novel, Duncker, herself an academic, writes most convincingly on the titillating trappings of scholarship. Indeed, the erotics of reading and writing are so clearly brought out in the novel that at first one imagines that Roland Barthes—rather than Foucault—might have been a better choice to preside over the text. However, the ghost of Foucault—severe, transgressive, momumental—implicitly raises the ominous issue of the disappearance or death of the author. The passion shared by the reader-narrator and the French novelist (and the earlier passion the novelist shared with Foucault in their reciprocal reader-writer relationship) challenges Foucault’s own theory of authorship: far from allowing the author to recede into oblivion behind his writings, Duncker insists, the reader must love the writer at least as passionately as his texts. And when the death of the author, the Foucauldian (and Bathesian) doom that hangs, unspoken, over this text, comes to pass, its tragedy lies in sundering these lovers, leaving one to grieve alone. [Graham Fraser]

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