Hallucinating Foucault by Patricia Duncker
Hallucinating Foucault
by Patricia Duncker
Read the following exserts from Chris Mitchell’s interview with Patricia Duncker about “Hallucinating Foucault” in Spike Magazine:
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 mixture of intimacy, madness and self-discovery. (...)
Some of the novel’s most memorable and disturbing scenes centre around the narrator’s entry in the asylum to find Paul Michel. (...)
Patricia Duncker:
“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 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.”