Taking On Foucault and Fleshing Out Farah: Opportunities for Dialogue and Reflections on Method

For myself, I prefer to utilise the writers I like. The only valid tribute to thought such as Nietzsche's is precisely to use it, to deform it, to make it groan and protest. (Michel Foucault – ‘Prison Talk’, 1980: 53–54) I wrote The Offering for the University of Essex, for my M.A. thesis … on the day I was to submit it I had a conflict, an open, theatrical clash with one of my lecturers, and I used bad language, or she used bad language. And then I walked out and never went back to collect the degree. (Nuruddin Farah – ‘How Can We Talk of Democracy?’, 2002a: 40) University libraries are like madhouses, full of people pursuing wraiths, hunches, obsessions. The person with whom you spend most of your time is the person you're writing about. Some people write about schools, groups of artists, historical trends or political tendencies … but usually one central figure emerges. (Patricia Duncker – Hallucinating Foucault, 1997: 4 –5) ON RARE OCCASIONS, YOU STUMBLE ACROSS A TEXT THAT MAKES YOU smile and wince at the same time. Such was my experience with Patricia Duncker's debut novel. Her anonymous student protagonist obsesses over and finally locates errant author Paul Michel in a provincial French asylum. He subsequently helps him escape, sleeps with him and, various twists of fate later, attends his funeral. Beyond its intrigues of plot and character, Duncker's novel succeeds in representing the problematic, because human, aspect of research. Before his meeting with Paul Michel, her protagonist has only a tepid passion for academic investigation. It is only when researcher and researched collide that he feels his work truly begins to ‘mean’ anything. When the scholar uncovers previously confidential correspondence between his author and namesake Michel Foucault, the analogy between university library and madhouse appears even starker: ‘Paul Michel was a novelist and Foucault was a philosopher, but there were uncanny links between them’ (Duncker 1997: 6).