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  • Missing Letters
  • Brooks Sterritt (bio)
Foucault, In Winter, In the Linnaeus Garden
Michael Joyce
Starcherone Books
www.starcherone.com
184 Pages; Print, $16.00

Michael Joyce’s Foucault, in Winter, in the Linnaeus Garden is a novel containing at least five languages. We’re given smatterings of three: songs in Portuguese, Swedish by way of setting (Uppsala, where Foucault lectured and wrote in 1956), and German terms from the realms of pastry and philosophy. The dominant languages are English and French, so much so that the author refers to them collectively in the preface as “a kind of French-English creole” (a term to which I’ll return). Language, therefore, is central to the novel, particularly the relation between languages as well as the sender and receiver’s relation to said languages. An epistolary novel, Foucault, in Winter…features a number of letters marked “unsent,” whose presence (or absence) dovetails with the issues of language mentioned above. The novel, though entirely fictional, is informed by biographical details such as Foucault’s relationship with Jean Barraqué, familiarity with Foucault’s thought, and critical theory in general.

The experience of reading Foucault, in Winter…is directly influenced by how much French the reader knows. Michael Joyce likens the experience to “scanning across radio frequencies.” To extend the metaphor, for a reader bilingual in English and French, the novel would come in “clear” on all channels. In the preface, Joyce writes: “The French phrases and words here hew closely enough to familiar English ones such that a casual reader, even without much familiarity with French, should have no trouble following the events.” My French is intermediate at best, and I can agree with the latter half of his statement. As far as the French “hew[ing] closely enough to familiar English,” this is largely accurate, but the way it hews varies, with corresponding effects. Obvious cognates such as archange, distance, forêts, spectres, en effet, automne, en termes d’impulsion sadomasochiste, etc., occupy one end of the transparency-opacity spectrum, and would enjoy near-universal recognition for speakers of English. Foreign words and phrases are occasionally restated in English in the text, shifting the content of certain passages from opaque to transparent. Finally, numerous phrases appear with no clarification at all—whether joined to a clause in English, or in isolation. For examples of both forms, consider the following passage.

Riez-vous, mon luminaire? I am. It amuses me to wonder whether you would find me as foolish a figure as le roi Ubu, done up dans mon smoking écossais and ensconced at the head of Forum, my fork a fool’s staff. Yet at his center every man has une baguette d’un fou, n’est-ce pas?

Une baguette ou un fouet, the wand or the whip, c’est pareil.

Before proceeding, I should paraphrase Joyce in stating that any mistakes with French are my own. Regardless of whether one understands riez-vous as “are you laughing?,” the phrases that follow—“It amuses me,” the “foolish figure,” and the “fool’s staff”—provide adequate context, should one decide not to pick up a dictionary. Similarly, translations for baguette and fouet are provided: “wand” and “whip.” Nevertheless, much cannot be gleaned by context alone, in this passage and elsewhere. This is less a mixture or creole than an example of code-switching, the practice of bilingual (or multilingual) speakers shifting between languages during a single exchange. From what I can tell, the English and French of the novel do not alter one another, but rather enact a kind of oscillation between shades of intelligibility throughout.

This oscillation is a key component of the novel’s structure and, in a larger sense, is related to states of absence and presence, linguistic and otherwise. In his work on Raymond Roussel, Death and the Labyrinth (1963), Foucault writes of a “bare linguistic fact: that language speaks only from something essential that is lacking. From this lack is experienced the “play”—in both senses of the word (the limit and the principle simultaneously)— in the fact that the same word can designate two different things and the same sentence repeated...

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