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One reviewer in Manchester said the book was all old
hat to him because his mother had produced a thesis on
Paul Michel!”
Some of the novel’s most memorable and disturbing
scenes centre around the narrator’s entry in the asylum
to find Paul Michel. “I have a friend in France who’s
worked with schizophrenics for the last 30 years,”
Duncker says. “She’s seen the different ways that
schizophrenia has been perceived during that time –
because even now, no one really understands it, no one
knows where it comes from. She holds an open clinic,
so I visited her there with some trepidation and it was
absolutely incredible. You always think that people
who are off their heads are going to be just a little bit
eccentric, but these people were absolutely mad – raving!
But there was such a sense of community there; it
was harrowing but quite beautiful, in a way.
“Paul Michel knows he’s mad and that’s common –
mad people are completely aware that they’re raving,
that they slide between sanity and insanity. I wanted
BUY Patricia Duncker books online from and
the madness in Hallucinating Foucault to do justice
to what I’d seen. It’s incredibly difficult to represent
people who are living in a different time zone from you
with respect and generosity – because you don’t want
to present them as curiosities or freaks, which is what
Foucault also strove to challenge in his work.”
The love between reader and writer is evident
from Duncker’s enthusiasm when she talks about the
French philosopher: “Foucault once said, ‘I wrote all
my books to make boys fall in love with me.’ And I
think there’s an element to that in all writing – books
are messages in bottles. There was something about
Foucault – his vanity, his shaved head, his looming
presence – that indicated that he desperately
wanted to be a writer rather than a philosopher. So
the character of Paul Michel is the embodiment of
some of Foucault’s unfulfilled desires. It’s my present
to Foucault, in a way. I made the character of Paul
Michel as handsome as James Dean and in love with
him – what more could he want?!” �
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