Some novels stay with you. Perhaps because they capture your imagination as a child. Perhaps you recognize something of yourself in them (your struggles, identities, insecurities etc.). Perhaps they speak to you at a particular moment in your life when you are receptive to their message. Whatever the reason, reading Patricia Dunker’s Hallucinating Foucault recently struck me so to the core that I openly wept and experienced that peculiar sensation of loneliness and fulfilment that one gets when one finishes a good novel but is unable to share the experience with anyone else.

The story of a young PhD student who goes in search of the institutionalized author about whom he has been writing his thesis, Dunker’s novel is a seminal exploration of the love that flows between a reader and a writer. While I have myself written about this relationship before, it was regarding the ways in which the assumptions of who the reader is construct the author(ity) of the author in an attempt to deconstruct precisely this and suspend the subjectivity of both author and reader as unknowable and ineffable constructions that should rightly be undermined in order to think otherwise, nothing in my work could match the poetics and passion of the reader/writer relationship in Dunker’s text.

What struck me the most were the ever so poignant moments that emerge when the protagonist finally meets his author, Paul Michel. In some ways he dreams himself Paul Michel’s reader (and says as much) in other ways he has always been writing for Paul Michel to read without knowing him. The novel centres on their relationship and the complex of feeling that this relationship is inflected with given that Paul Michel’s reader- the one for whom he writes- is Michel Foucault. Dunker captures this masterfully:

“The love between writer and a reader is never celebrated. It can never be proved to exist. But he was the man I loved most. He was the reader for whom I wrote.”

Other moments like the pointed “you have to love the one who you write about”- which recalled for me something that Deleuze said in a 1969 interview with Jeanette Colombel,“if you don’t admire something, if you don’t love it, you have no reason to write a word about it.” (Desert Islands, p.144)- made me feel something ineffable but sad, a kind of hollowness that compelled me to consider more carefully my own relationship to reader/writer.

Recently, I’ve been reflecting increasingly on the fact that my life has become a love affair with a group of dead, white, European philosophers. Our interactions are only ever correspondence, they write texts which my heart believes are for me, and I respond, often overcoming some disciplinary irrespons-ability in order to do so, in short essays; love letters to the deceased; messages in bottles thrown irresponsibly into the sea. While it may be a pretentious or pompous confession, it is this perverse experience with Dunker captures beautifully:

“Well — there are two kinds of loneliness, aren’t there? There’s the loneliness of absolute solitude […] But there is another kind of loneliness which is terrible to endure […] And that is the loneliness of seeing a different world from that of the people around you. Their lives remain remote from yours. You can see the gulf and they can’t. You live among them. They walk on earth. You walk on glass. They reassure themselves with conformity, with carefully constructed resemblances. You are masked, aware of your absolute difference.”

To some this may seem a trite exaggeration, at worst a reprehensible blindness to the internal complexity and nuance of one’s fellow man (i.e., those living with to you) and at best an anti-humanist sentiment from an arrogant pseudo-intellectual, at once convinced that he is smarter than everyone else and seduced by the romanticized imagery of the tortured genius/auteur. To me, however, this rings true on many days; the love of the one for whom your write and the assumption that they understand and the experience of having your loneliness abated by that understanding. Perhaps it is a rank over-poeticization and dramatization of what I do, in many ways my work can be understood as the careful practice of writing sincere and open-hearted love letters to someone who will never respond; to someone who is dead and cannot respond and therefore cannot requite my love.

In one sense this is perhaps the shallowest form of love, one that is attached to an “idealized” version of the lover, in this case actively written by the author but in another, it is perhaps the most sincere and open form of love. An author has no secrets from a reader, labours daily for their pleasure, sacrifices for their happiness, develops and builds them through these efforts, works with them in the most intimate relationship of understanding, mutual concern and self-discovery. I am not sure how much of this I actually believe in terms of my critique of subjectivity and its ability to hamper our creativity and act as a scupper to original thought. However, I do know that I feel wounded by quotes like the following, passed by Dunker between an author and his reader:

“My greatest fear is that one day, unexpectedly, suddenly, I will lose you […] You have never asked me who I have loved most. You know already and that is why you have never asked. I have always loved you.”

The spectre of the reader who could have been looms large. For me Dunker’s text is the most passionate and maniac exploration of the interlaced love between reader and author. The author constructs and creates the reader as an image of the one who he loves the most. Love is here not a blind devotion or a corporeal lusting, but rather it is argument, impassioned frustration and repartee; it is courtship and kindness, a stolen memory from a message in a bottle and a dream of something more that will never have been. Here we encounter perhaps my greatest critique of Dunker’s novel: that our perception of love is so implicated in the corporeal, the physical, and the embodied; in short, in fucking; that it was impossible for the novel not to succumb to the reduction of love to these coordinates as the protagonist and Paul Michel have sex near the end of the novel.

Despite this minor concern over the nature of the “consummation” of a love, I cannot speak highly enough of Dunker’s novel, nor can I more strongly recommend reflecting upon the love for the one(s) about whom and for whom you write.