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Interview [published September 2003]
Patricia Duncker: Insanity Clause
Chris Mitchell gets philosophical with Patricia Duncker about her
novel Hallucinating Foucault
“Madness, death, sexuality, crime; these are the subjects
that attract most of my attention.” So said the late
French philosopher Michel Foucault, one of the century’s
most audacious intellectuals, who died of AIDS
in 1984. Only Foucault’s books remain as a reminder
of his existence – but, as Patricia Duncker’s stunning
debut novel Hallucinating Foucault shows, the impact
of reading on people’s lives can be both terrifying and
self-transforming.
Originally published by the independent Serpent’s
Tail last year, Hallucinating Foucault proved such a
success that Picador recently bought the rights to the
novel and reissued it. Such success might seem strange,
given that few people outside of ivory towers have even
heard of Foucault, but Duncker’s novel isn’t some dry
academic text that needs to be painstakingly deciphered.
Hallucinating Foucault tells the story of Paul Michel,
a celebrated French novelist who is so distraught at
Foucault’s death that he becomes insane. The novel’s
narrator is an English student studying Michel’s work
who sets out to rescue the writer, so bringing the author’s
words and the author’s world together in a dangerous
BUY Patricia Duncker books online from and
mixture of intimacy, madness and self-discovery.
“I wanted it to be a love story,” Patricia Duncker
reveals, “to explain the love between readers and
writers. My life has been radically changed through
the books I’ve read and I wanted to describe that.”
However, Duncker was fully aware of the need to
avoid alienating her audience. “I think your first duty
as a writer is to your reader and you must keep them
turning the page. What is the point otherwise?” As a
result, Hallucinating Foucault has the feel of a cerebral
thriller, combining the love story between Paul Michel
and the narrator with the mystery of Paul Michel and
Foucault’s relationship.
In blending the fictional character of Paul Michel
with the memory of the real-life Michel Foucault,
Duncker has created a novel which refuses simply to
remain a story. It crosses over into real life – so much
so that for some people, Paul Michel is now more
real than Foucault ever was: “Most of the people who
have read Hallucinating Foucault have never heard
of Foucault. Some of them thought Paul Michel was
real – one or two even tried to get hold of his novels.
205
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