ABSTRACT
By the authorial 'preconscious' in texts I mean traces of ambivalent thoughts and feelings that occasionally rise to awareness only to be suppressed. Such mental contents differ from those of a 'political unconscious', repressed, unwelcome notions never brought to light, or at best, permanently buried through the operation of a Sartrean 'bad faith'. The repressed manifests itself through parapraxes—doing and saying things one doesn't intend—and through dreams. The absurdities are guides to meaning. The suppressed is deliberately expressed, but deflected. For example, to write 'Babylon' instead of 'imperial Rome' in Revelation allows the author to evade censorship. For the axiological shifts of irony (e.g. 'that's good' means 'that's bad'), suppression substitutes an ontological disguise, an alias. Suppression can be inferred from an author's social and historical context: the line of Han d'Islande/the French monarchy, perpetuated by a single son (legitimate heir) in each generation, will die out.
