Hallucinating Foucault Read Online Free Page B

an autobiographical writer.”
    “But his experiences—the ones he sought out for himself as well as the things that just happened—must be relevant.”
    “I think that’s a trap. You can’t interpret writing in terms of a life. It’s too simple. Writing has its own rules.”
    The Germanist had reappeared like a magical apparition and pitched in on my side. “He’s right, Dad. It’d be as if I explained away all Schiller’s work in terms of his economic situation and the jobs Goethe got for him.”
    “But he couldn’t have written anything if Goethe hadn’t bailed him out. You’ve said that yourself.”
    “Yes. It’s true. But it’s still not the most important thing about his writing.”
    “Then,” said her father emphatically, “why is it so important to know that Paul Michel is barking mad in some asylum in Paris?”
    “Because,” said the Germanist, turning her predatory eyes upon me, “if you love someone, you know where they are, what has happened to them. And you put yourself at risk to save them if you can.”
    It was as if she had flung a glove down on the table between us. I had a sudden awful vision of her searching for Schiller in the cobbled streets of Weimar with a vial of penicillin and saving him from the last, gasping stages of consumption.
    We left her father in her flat, openly reading all her cryptic messages and peering into her files of notes.
    “I try to get through the book lists she sends me,” he said confidingly as she disappeared into the airing cupboard in search of towels, “but I don’t have much time for reading. I got very stuck in Foucault.”
    “She told you to read Foucault?”
    “She seems to think Foucault is as essential as Schiller,” he confessed, shaking his head. “Can’t think where she gets it all from. Her mother certainly wasn’t an intellectual. Or not that I ever noticed.”
    The combination of the vanishing mother and the ubiquitous Foucault proved too much for me. I cycled home behind her in silence.
    It was drizzling when we reached my house. All the lights were out. She sat cross-legged on my bed with raindrops in her curls and running down her glasses. She looked as if she was crying. We gazed ruefully at one another.
    “Did you like my dad?” she asked, childish, insecure.
    “I thought he was wonderful,” I replied, quite sincerely. She smiled. Then she took off her glasses, peered at me dubiously and apologized for her accusations.
    “I’m sorry I was sharp,” she said.
    I kissed her very carefully, just in case she decided to bite me, and reached for the buttons on her shirt. I think that was the first time I made love to her rather than the other way around. She had such a hard, bony body, all ribs and hips. That night she felt brittle, fragile under my hands. I never felt that she gave herself up to me; it was more a question of giving in. Like a defeated revolutionary she abandoned her sexual barricade. Something broke within her, gently, quietly, reluctantly, and she buried her face in the hollow between my shoulder and my ear, unresisting. I was very alarmed by her unusual gentleness and talked to her quietly about nothing in particular until she fell asleep in my arms.
    When I awoke next morning she had already gone, leaving an uncompromisingly Oedipal message on the kitchen table,
    Gone back to Father
    with which there was no arguing.
    She wasn’t in the library for three days after that. She had a sequence of unwritten rules about when it was permissible for me to ring or to call round. As the rules were never stated I only knew when I had breached them and she either sulked or told me to go before I had even half finished my grudging mug of coffee. I held out for one day, then rang her up. The Ansaphone told me that she was categorically unavailable and didn’t suggest that I leave a message.
    I said, “It’s me. Where are you?” And left it at that. She didn’t ring back.
    I risked the telephone again on the