L'Inconscient graphique: Essai sur l'ecriture de la Renaissance (Marot, Ronsard, Rabelais, Montaigne) (review)

This book was published by Cambridge University Press in 1992 under the title The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern French Writing. The translation has been extensively edited, and its presuppositions somewhat clarified. The unconscious, for Conley, “c’est ce qui préfère dire non à tout ce qui revendique une véracité ou une efficacité quelconque” (“The unconscious represents that which chooses to say ‘no’ to anything claiming whatever truth value or effectiveness of any sort” [11].) The introduction goes on to situate his approach in relation to Frederic Jameson’s “political unconscious” and Rosalind Krauss’s “optical unconscious.”

The body of the book consists of six chapters, each devoted to a single text, or a small group of texts, by one of the canonical writers of the French Renaissance: Marot, Rabelais, Ronsard (2), and Montaigne (2). The technique throughout involves detaching letters or groups of letters from the signifying entity of the word in which they are embedded, and connecting them with similar letters, or combinations of letters elsewhere in the text under scrutiny through some similarity, whether visual or oral; meaning emerges from these configurations of letters through the shape of the letters themselves or through puns and paronomasia. The work of analysis goes continually back and forth between the visual and the audible, and the field of analysis is very much the whole field of the reader’s vision. Consequently, as Conley tells us, it is important to use sixteenth-century editions to tease out the message of the “graphic unconscious.” He quotes from modern editions, but when focussing on the graphic possibilities of sixteenth-century printing and type design, he refers to sixteenth-century editions or facsimiles. Unfortunately, every copy of such old books is different, and access to such works is so limited as to make this kind of reading a very elitist exercise (20, 237–38).

Connecting the reader’s field of vision with the choice of edition raises other questions, too. For example, in his second chapter on Ronsard, Conley’s analysis draws the Roman numeral “XC,” intended to situate the poem in the sequence of the recueil, into the sonnet following, and it is metamorphosed into “qui c’est,” the question that Conley sees obsessively repeated throughout the sonnet itself (148), that is, the question implicit in the last line: “s’elle est fille ou garçon” (137ff.). The problems here are numerous: first, the sonnet is numbered differently in subsequent editions, such as the one followed in the new Pléïade where it is sonnet 94. Then, there is the question of what Conley elsewhere (90 n42) calls “translinguistic reading”: a modern reader, pronouncing X in standard French (iks), will miss the equivocation chi/qui that is essential to the play Conley is uncovering here, but emerges only when pronounced in what is supposedly Greek. While the modern French pronunciation of X was set by the seventeenth century, it could still be pronounced “ieu” in the fifteenth century, as we see in Pierre Fabri’s “Rondeau en rebus lettrique, et sa solution” (1521). In the end, if Ronsard did oversee the later editions where the position of the sonnet was changed, we may ask how to apportion the shares of the author’s intention and the reader’s invention in Conley’s reading. And why this reading rather than some other? After all, as Conley asserts (135), there is a “possibilité quasi infinie de combinaisons” (“the possible combinations are almost infinite”) of letters that can be extracted from a text like one of Ronsard’s sonnets.

All reading along these lines is, then, ultimately subjective, and Conley’s readings in this book come to terms with that fact in a very stimulating way that few critics and historians have been willing to explore. What is the hypothetical audience for a given reading? Is it relatively numerous, as...