Patricia Duncker

Patricia Duncker attended school in England and, after a period spent working in Germany, she read English at Newnham College, Cambridge.

She studied for a D.Phil. in English and German Romanticism at St Hugh's College, Oxford.

From 1993-2002, she taught Literature at the University of Abe Ystwyth, and from 2002-2006, has been Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, teaching the MA in Prose Fiction.

In January 2007, she moved to the University of Manchester where she is Professor of Modern Literature.

Interview with Patricia Duncker

Patricia Duncker was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1951. She attended school in England and, after a period spent working in Germany, she read English at Newnham College, Cambridge. She studied for a D.Phil. in English and German Romanticism at St Hugh's College, Oxford. She is Reader in English at the University of Wales, Abe Ystwyth, where she teaches Creative Writing, Contemporary Fiction and Nineteenth-Century Literature, and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.

With Hallucinating Foucault (1996), her first novel, she won the Dillon’s First Fiction Award and the McKittrick Prize. She also wrote the novels "Monsieur Shoshanna’s Lemon Tree", "James Miranda Barry", "The Deadly Space Between" and a collection of short stories, "Seven Tales of Sex and Death"

The novel

Set at Cambridge University, where an unnamed young scholar is writing his thesis on the fictional French author Paul Michel, and mainly in France, the narrative centers on the student’s obsessive search for his subject, Hallucinating Foucault is a profound, rich and fascinating novel about the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault. But it is also a mystery story and an intellectual exploration of various themes, like writing and reading, the relationship between writer and reader, madness and literary inspiration.

Lidia Goldoni - Paul Michel did not exist, but Michel Foucault did. So, have you created your character working on the French philosopher’s life?

Patricia Duncker - Yes, Paul Michel was Foucault’s real name. My writer is a ghostly double, a shadow image of the philosopher. I created him as a gift to Foucault. In the year I wrote the novel I was very inspired by two biographies of Foucault.

And in one of them, James Miller’s The Passion of Michel Foucault- I read that Foucault had feared that he was not a handsome man, and had always longed to be a writer, an imaginative writer rather than an academic philosopher. So I created a novelist who was wonderfully handsome and in love with Foucault. That was my gift, to fulfil his dream.

Is there anything else in his life or in his works that attracts you?

I admire his courage immensely. I believe he was a very daring thinker. And I am immensely interested in his links to German philosophy, especially Nietzsche and Heidegger. Both these philosophers were considerable poets - they were writers as well as thinkers, concerned with the theatre and drama of language. I think Foucault’s longing to be a writer - a real writer- was linked to this passion for the German tradition. Poetry and philosophy are sisters in my view.

The letters written to Michel Foucault by Paul Michel are so rich in meanings: could they be considered a “clue” to the whole text?

The fact that they were written at all does in some sense link them to the enterprise that is at the heart of the novel. The question is - were they ever written to be sent? Was Paul Michel simply imagining this special connection to Foucault? I rather think he was. The connection never existed. It was a fantasy that nourished his writing life.

And in that I myself was transformed into a Doppelganger for Paul Michel. When I was writing the novel I overdosed on Foucault’s work and the story of his life. I became quite obsessed with him. Then one night at around two in the morning I SAW MICHEL FOUCAULT CLIMBING OUT OF MY FRIDGE. I realized that I had been working too hard, as I had begun Hallucinating Foucault. So I gave up and went to bed.

Why do you never name the young English student and the Germanist?

I don’t write realist fiction. How can you signal that to the reader without denying them the pleasures of imagining the tale as real? We have no difficulty imagining the fairy tales, which are not realist fiction either, but tales. I write tales. Not giving my characters names was a deliberate attempt to indicate that the characters are defined by role, by their actions, rather than private identities.

Think of fairy tales: the characters are generic, The King, The Prince, The Fairy Godmother, The Miller’s Son. Then where there is a name mentioned: Rumpelstiltskin, Cinderella, The Marquis of Carabaos, Bluebeard - the weight falls on that name. Thus Paul Michel becomes crucial. I am very passionate about telling stories. I see myself as a story - teller, my meanings are buried in the patterns of my stories.

I have also read your “The Deadly Space Between” and, like in this novel, the scene moves from England to France: it seems that you really like this country and that you know it well…

I have lived and worked in France and Germany and speak both languages. It is a great gift to be able to read and speak another language, an enormous freedom. Language and landscape are very closely bound to each other. So, for me, a country, its literature and its languages overlap and inform one another.

We are extraordinarily lucky to live in Europe, a continent with such a rich dark past, and vast differences in cultures and understanding. The English novelists I most admire - Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot - both travelled in Europe and drew on that experience in their writing. I am thinking of the boarding school in Brussels in Brontë’s writing and the gambling rooms in Baden Baden at the beginning of Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. Elizabeth Barrett Browning made her home in Florence and is buried there. Like all these writers I am a traveler, and very romantic about Europe.

Do you think the passion that you describe between reader and writer can really exist - in the past or in modern times?

Reading is a very intimate, silent thing to do. Many readers use the book and the company they find there to leave the world, cut themselves off, be private. A great many people choose to read in bed. Some even go to bed to read.

This wasn’t always the case.

Many novels, especially eighteenth and nineteenth century novels, are written to be read aloud. So is poetry. Writing always had a public dimension of performance, which is attached to reading. I write all my books for my voice and to be read aloud. I never publish anything that I haven’t read out aloud. I think that we often get very possessive about books and feel that we are the special reader - the reader that really understands the book.

I feel this about a lot of poetry that I love. And some of Shakespeare’s plays. I often think that I understand exactly what the writer is saying, in a deeper and more intimate way than any other reader could do. This is of course a bit mad.

Another reader might see something completely different or know something about the historical context that I don’t know. But it is part of the illusion of reading. Reading is an intensely creative activity. You imagine the book. That’s why so many readers are terribly disappointed when they see the film of their beloved book and it is other than they had imagined.

Sometimes, between the writer and the reader, there is a critic - or people like that - who gives personal counsels, an advice that can be followed or not, but that can have many consequences. What do you think about it?

I read critical, philosophical and historical writing AS WRITING. I read analytical texts slightly differently from literary texts, I may read more swiftly, but on the whole I don’t make any great distinctions. Some critical writing has opened great doors to me, revealed writers I had forgotten or never read, and made them speak to me again.

I remember reading many books about Shakespeare when I was a student that illuminated the plays, recreated the characters and the historical circumstances of the plays so that they still live, speak, shimmer before me. I love the idea of a critic giving ‘personal counsel’ - it is a beautiful, unusual phrase, because it suggests two readers sharing the experience of reading rather than delivering judgements on quality.

I love to talk to other readers, to argue with them, to hear what they have to say. Very often my students are my other readers, my other critics. Sometimes you disagree too violently to continue. But sometimes the other reader becomes the other writer- that is, the open door.

Do you think every Writer needs his - or her - Reader? When you write, do you imagine a particular reader?

The ‘reader’ in Hallucinating Foucault is a conceit. And there isn’t just one sort of reader in that novel. There are at least three kinds of reader. The unnamed student narrator is the detached, cool, analytical reader, the academic reader. The Germanist is the argumentative, personal, committed reader who writes back, scrawls in the margins and takes the text to heart.

Paul Michel is the maddest reader, because he imagines that he is the only intended reader, the real reader for whom the text is written, and the only one with the key to its meanings. But the text itself creates the reader it desires, if it is written with power and conviction you will have a great deal of trouble struggling to become the resisting reader, the reader who refuses to be trapped by the text. No writer should ever forget the reader.

We should ask ourselves - where is the reader now in the text? How much do they know? How quickly should they be reading? If you are a good writer you should be able to control the pace at which the reader peruses the text. You need to ask yourself how you are giving them the information they need to understand the book. Who should they be watching? What do I need to tell them? I like to think that I am a generous reader.

A book has to be very bad indeed for me to give up. Yet I now give up more and more often than I used to do, as so many modern books are badly written, and apparently not edited at all. A good reader deserves a good writer. Life is too short to sit reading bad writing. A good reader is unshakeable, catholic, bountiful - full of Chaucer’s gentilesse. I think there’s an Italian word for that.

The English word is very rich and contains the idea of kindness, but also honor and generosity. I try hard to be a good reader. Do I expect my readers to read as much as I do? Well, I think you should never patronize your reader. The reader is an honored guest in your text. They may have more - or different - knowledge from you as the writer.

I try to write ‘rich text’, not simple text. I try to create writing that is utterly contemporary, but dense with the echoes of writing from the past. I borrow characters from other writers. Henrietta Stackpole, the journalist from the novels of Henry James, who is an important character in The Portrait of a Lady, appeared in my second novel James Miranda Barry.

In my fourth novel Miss Webster and Cheri, George Eliot’s narrator makes a special guest appearance. I invited her to host the book. I said that reading can be a very intimate, private experience. But all writing has an element of public performance, and like Virginia Woolf, I think you should get dressed in your best clothes to welcome your reader into your book. After all, you want them to stay, settle down and remain beside you.

Imagine that you have your Reader and you meet him - or her: is there anything you would ask?

What would I say to my reader?