An Errant Eye: Poetry and Topography in Early Modern France (review)

Presented as forming a diptych with The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (University of Minnesota Press, 1996), Tom Conley's latest collection of essays on French Renaissance literature includes six discrete studies focusing on a newly found 'topographical impulse' (p. 16) in printed textual-and-visual forms. The critic investigates conjointly word and image, canonical as well as marginal texts, in works by François Rabelais, Pieter Apien, Gilles Corrozet, Maurice Scève, Pierre de Ronsard, and ichel de Montaigne. Successively analyzed are Pantagruel's mouth (and its cabbage planter) and Epistémon's trip to Hell in Rabelais; the anthropocentrically illustrated Cosmographia that Apien crafted; emblems from Corrozet's Hécatomgraphie and the Holbein-illustrated Simulachres et histories faces de la mor, which feature symbols of the world; space, lettering, and estrangement in Délie and the localized Saulsaye by Scève, illustrated by Bernard Salomon; protean authorial engraving, as well as concern for the New World, in Ronsard's Continuation and his 1559 Meslanges; and Montaigne's use of avian figuration (nomadic swallows and the halcyon) in the Apologie de Raimond Sebond. These works are read as enacting a tension between, or play on, the global and the local, selfhood and alterity, the pictorial and the graphic, the whole and the detail, cosmography/geography and topography. Confronted with contemporary maps by Tory, Finé, or Apien, these exploratory works present a form of creative inquiry akin to topography — within poetry or the poetic use of prose — which surfaces at a time when both the geographical world, formerly Earth-centric, and the political world, problematically Eurocentric, become increasingly unstable and call for proper 'prehension' and good measure. Simply put, Conley's book represents analogical thinking at its best. Such methodology, adopting a mimetic relation to its object, may at times seem like far-fetched, abstract reverie. It does, however, enhance our ability to decompartmentalize knowledge, as early-modern thinkers themselves invite us to do through operative homophonies, similes, and metaphors. Conley's contextualized textual, visual, and editorial analysis also brings forth the always spatialized terminology of cognition, sensory or phenomenological perception, and conceptualization. The chief pleasure that the book affords lies in the beauty of the many ekphrases of printed artefacts it contains. Indeed, minute, exacting descriptions echo the work of the snail's eye chosen as the inaugural emblem. Through these ekphrases, not only does the French literary scholar acquire the rich lexicon of the book historian and art historian — as historiated letters, culs-de-lampes, woodcuts, cornices, maps, grotesques, frontispieces, armillary spheres, and anatomical plates are dissected — but the historian enters the live fabric of the language mapped out by Geoffroy Tory and others, as the critic's Latinate style, replete with Gallicisms, emphasizes mimetically the structural wordplay and the taste for puzzles, allusions, and amphibologies precisely examined in the works. Showing respectful engagement with scholars while offering purposefully brief endnotes, this truly interdisciplinary study will enable humanities scholars from multiple disciplines to saunter through the expansive, portentous, and playful territory of sixteenth-century French poetry with 'a tactile eye' (p. 201).