The author of this book seeks to link early modern French art and literature, cartography, and the emergence of the self and national identity. A tall order, but a plausible one to those readers familiar with these areas of early Modern culture. We have long been familiar with the novel Renaissance articulations of space rooted in the breaking of it up into measurable quanta and the imaginary leap toward perspective. We are also familiar with the explosive growth of mapping between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. And finally, examinations of the emergence of the self and of national identity during this period have been around for some time. To my knowledge, however, no one has so boldly attempted to focus on cartographic writing--where the writer "tends to 'map out' the discourse of the work" (4)--as the linchpin that holds them all together.
The author launched his quest after being struck by how cartography is a product of the literary and artistic imagination, and this led him to ask the fundamental question at the heart of this book: how are various artistic and literary creations "measured, 'compassed,' or gridded according to procedures" that have much in common with those that "develop[ed] on cartographers' tables or in engravers' workshops" (xi)? Clearly, plotting and perspective are necessary preconditions, but the growth of mapping and cartographic writing in print culture, as textual and gridded representations of reality, also constituted a conscious positioning of the self in them. (To make his case the author employs the important psychoanalytic concept of the perspectival object, the "positioning and mapping of the self in and about the world in its ongoing construction of psychogenesis" [13]). And there is more, for this new relationship between the individual and the representations of space also connected to the emerging sense of national identity. In other words, the production of imaginary space in texts and images, the emergence of the nation, and the fashioning of selfhood were all linked.
The author supports his thesis by close analysis of a handful of specific texts, images, writers, artists, and cartographers. He begins with the painter Jean Fouquet and examines how he links writing and space in his paintings. From there he moves to the collection of tales Les Cent nouvelles nouvelles which, he suggests, "were written with a strongly pictorial consciousness...written in order, literally, to be pictured" (38). Not only do the tales offer "countless pictures of worlds," (48) but, he adds, what they display "is loosely gridded by a latent perspectival and cartographic scheme" (46). The poet Jean Molinet is next, and Conley points out that his discourse is "infused...with pictorial and graphic values" (49). And, like Fouquet, Molinet consciously inscribes his signature--and thus his self--into his artistic creations and thereby begins "the story of the position of the writer and cartographer as author..." (61)
The printer and typographer Geoffrey de Tory is then invoked by the author to carry forward his thesis. De Tory's how-to manual for typographers presents a new design of the printed alphabet by gridding letters upon the common Renaissance model of Vitruvian Man, a clear indication of the new way of thinking in terms of measurable quanta. After de Tory we meet the mapmaker Oronce Finé, and return again to the theme of the developing self. In Finé's work we find an inscription of his signature in his writing as well as a self-portrait on the frontispiece of his most important book, the Protomathesis. In an ingenious analysis of Finé's cordiform map that he produced for King Francis I, Conley discovers that "Finé writes his presence into the map by selecting as its point of projective identification the site of his birth," Briançon (132). According to the Albertian methods Finé employed, "the perspectival object is Briançon...placed at the vanishing point" (131).
Conley's tour through French cartographic writing continues with Rabelais where he plausibly observes that Gargantua and Pantagruel are "verbal projection[s] of a mythic world...erected upon a plan that seeks to expand the imagination of national space," (155) while Maurice Bouguereau's national atlas (begun in the 1590s), Le Théâtre françoys, again plausibly not only had strategic value in matters of warfare, commerce, and taxation, but also was a conscious projection of an emerging French national identity. Not surprisingly, Montaigne's Essais receive a chapter where they are seen as textual travels and his prose as a verbal political geography of the self. Conley's story ends with Descartes' Discours de la méthode where we learn that it was "plotted in a way that displays an emergent self through graphic and diagrammatic means" (279). The cogito (Descartes' signature) becomes a perspectival object, the vanishing point from which projection of quanta into the perceived world originate, and this ties nicely into notions of Cartesian space which can be extended infinitely and measured mathematically. For Conley, this is evidence that cartographic writing was now, by the time of Descartes, fully mapping the self and the world.
So far so good. There are elements of this book that I find plausible, and in some cases quite enlightening. Unfortunately, Conley's prose and word choice are so off-putting that one must wonder who he had in mind as his target audience. I suspect that few readers (and fewer students) will know the meanings of "scumble," "scansion," "equipollent," "graticules," "intercalated," "hemistitch," "micturition," "amphiboly," "etymons," and "deixis," to list just few of the arcane words that litter this text. And what is one to make of prose like this? About the 50th tale of Les Cent nouvelles nouvelles he draws this conclusion about its significance: "If the poetics of Les Cent nouvelles nouvelles can be sought in the praxis of its narration, its method is concretized in the rapport of diegesis, spatial placement, and numbers and in its play on calculation. The combinations foster growth, with addition and multiplication being valorized over subtraction and division. Because of its setting in the middle of the entire volume, the tale draws what might be an originary meridian on which is placed a vanishing point" (43).
A more serious shortcoming, however, is the frequent over-determined and often overwrought interpretation of evidence that Conley invokes to support his arguments. For example, Conley offers this piece of iconographic deciphering of the allegorical figure of Geographia on the title page of Maurice Bouguereau's Le Théâtre françoys: "The darkened eyelids depict a woman who looks in two directions at once, casting a medusa's stare toward the viewer at the same time that she looks down at the map on the booklike tablet that extends from her midsection...Geographia, her body covered, draws attention to the omnipotent power of her gaze. Geographia looks down and outward at once, to the world and to the future, it seems, to predict the course of history--if not to control it--by the means at her disposal. It is implied that the king [Henry IV], the foremost recipient of the atlas, should follow Geographia's mystical counsel by using the new art to gain control of his nation" (210-211). The image is reproduced in Conley's text, and I, for one, do not see the gaze to which he refers. Moreover, I find highly questionable (and unprovable) Conley's imputation that this deciphered meaning was Bouguereau's conscious intention. Equally problematic is Conley's implication that the king would understand this intended message from the figure of Geographia. One can only wonder if Henry paid any heed to the images on the title page (there is no evidence one way or the other), and it beggars the imagination that he would have interpreted Geographia the way Conley does. My hunch is that Henry saw the atlas as the practical guide that it was, a visual diagram of the perimeters of his realm that might be useful for strategic military purposes.
Elsewhere Conley observes that, like Finé's Briançon, Bouguereau "celebrates the author's native Tourraine...[and] the Loire becomes [his] perspectival object" (238). Plausible enough, but it seems gratuitous and self-serving to the author's thesis to add that the Loire "is represented as a nourishing mother of rivers to which the author owes his identity" (238) and that "it blends into a great, wide trunk likened to the single Loy, Roy, and Foy of the French nation" (243).
Another example of over-determined and overwrought argumentation concerns Montaigne. Part of Conley's objective is to prove that Montaigne's Essais reflect the "beginnings in the conception of the self as a conquering agent that is armed with schematic reason," (278) and he focuses in part on the essay "Des coches" to make his case. Here Conley isolates the use of the letter 'o' in the essay (and its title), and argues that it is a multivalent sign of, among other things, "the origin of mechanical printing; the figure of European weapons aimed at those looking directly at armed European conquerors readying to kill them; the circle of Time and Saturn; [and] a Ptolemaic conception of the world surrounded by concentric spheres. Discursively, the O of the chariot wheels evokes the open mouth of subjects aghast at the view of extravagant public display or at the impact of a projectile as it splatters into their bodies. The figure ramifies into reflections on economy, by which the O signifies the shape of golden coins; Spanish plunder; mercantilism; and deficit spending" (270). Multivalent indeed!
In sum, this is a difficult, challenging and problematic book. It is sprinkled with keen insights drawn from deep research and familiarity with the images and texts under analysis, but too often its argument is hampered by unconvincing interpretations cast in head-scratching prose.