Loss and yearning in the groves of academia

HAMBIDGE POKES AND PRAISES

Loss and yearning in the groves of academia

JOAN HAMBIDGE looks at novels about academic life and finds them pulsating with life, rather than tedium.

I

Apparently, no colleague wanted to share a sandwich with David Lodge in the tea room, for fear that they might end up in another novel.

Lodge, theorist and author, understood the stresses of academia. Jealousy and competition. Speaking with a forked tongue. Backstabbing. Also about those who start theses and don't finish them, who are regarded with suspicion.

Changing Places (1975) is probably one of the most delightful satires ever about two academics who swap homes during a sabbatical. The subtitle: A tale of two campuses ...

Euphoria and Rummidge. Morris Zapp and Philip Swallow. Zapp from the US finds the British academic system backward. The various spouses are also “traded in" and rumour has it that Morris Zapp is based on the esteemed Stanley Fish, who wrote Is there a text in this class? (1980). And the so-called “reader response theory" where the focus is on the reader's reaction rather than seeing the text as the final truth.


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II

Sometimes novels about academia are very gloomy. In Mary McCarthy's classic 1952 novel, The Groves of Academe, there's even a murder being committed. (In academia, we find character assassination instead.) Robert Bernard wrote a study on this in 1970: Deadly Meeting Murder in the Groves of Academe.

Atque inter silvas academi quaerere verum or the eternal search for truth in the groves of academia ...

A novel that has been read widely is called Hallucinating Foucault (Cox & Wyman, 1996) by Patricia Duncker.

The blurb on the back reads: “The love between a writer and a reader is never celebrated. It cannot be proven to exist.”

It tells the story of one Paul Michel, a writer slightly off his rocker, and a reader in search of him. Archives, libraries, madhouses down to the labyrinth of memory.

And the title? Of course, it refers to Michel Foucault, that French theorist, historian, philosopher, political activist and controversial figure who takes a stand against homophobia, racism and prejudice in his texts. The history of sexuality in, among others, his book Herculin Barbin are insightful. Madness and Civilization in 1961.

Behind every mask is another mask, writes Didier Eribon. Jean Baudrillard called his book Oublier Foucault (1977). However, one cannot erase him.

For our purposes, the view of Foucault and Roland Barthes regarding the complex relationship between writer and reader is pertinent. That the writer should be seen as the product of the writing process. The whole issue of power relations and social constructs also comes to the fore in this. The writer (the I, the human being) is an outgrowth of power relations within a community. A construct, then.

Patricia Duncker, the actual author, confesses it is a fictional book.

Finally, she places the life course of one of her main characters, Paul Michel, opposite Michel Foucault. Obviously, she knows a lot about Foucault, such as the reference to his first suicide attempt in 1948, and his eventual death on 26 June 1984, from AIDS in Paris. Opposite this is the character Paul Michel, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1984 and died in a car accident on 30 September 1993.

III

Duncker's novel exploits the familiar premise of a researcher who wants to meet his object-of-investigation. He remains anonymous. A young girl, his beloved, travels with him. They met in Cambridge.

Her father is gay.

The protagonist leaves for Paris to meet Michel after reading his letters to Foucault in a library.

Michel is in an institution in Clermont-Ferrand. His encounter with the protagonist leads to fights in a bar and yet he receives two months of asylum because the visits have reportedly improved his condition. They leave for Nice, and meet Alain Legras and his wife. The protagonist and Michel become lovers.

Writing seems impossible for Michel, because Foucault, his ideal reader, is dead. An affair with Foucault has taken place and because of this, their connection is not viable.

The only solution is for the protagonist to complete his study about him. Michel commits suicide – a car accident under the influence of alcohol and drugs.

And the anonymous protagonist becomes the authority on Michel's work. The young girl, an expert on Schiller's work, was left behind at the funeral.

Their relationship also ends.

IV 

There are incredible moments (and quotes) in this novel that stays with one. Like Paul Michel smashing headstones with a crowbar in a cemetery and Michel's view that fiction is a useless industry. Though pretty, it remains a fabrication merely for pleasure.

Letters navigate the narrative that does not leave one untouched.

“Writing is, in itself, an act of violence perpetrated against reality.”

“Madness is an abundance of existence.”

If you know Foucault, some of the remarks also resonate differently.

Madness as theatre, “as spectacle”.

Foucault's visit to the Death Valley in the California desert is also evoked, and his hallucinations there. Of course, an experiment with LSD with Simeon Wade.

But one can read and enjoy this stunning novel just as a story. It also asks important questions about archives and a writer's right to use a famous philosopher's life.

Duncker does this with style and judgment.

♦ VWB ♦


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