The Shape of a City by Julien Gracq

Author:Julien Gracq [Gracq, Julien]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781885586391
Publisher: Turtle Point Press
Published: 2020-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

* “I had not yet taken more than twenty steps while following the man who carried my suitcase when I realized that I was in a great city” (Stendhal, Souvenirs of a Tourist).

LOOKING AT MAPS OF A

city’s agglomeration will confirm that the relationship of an estuary port with its river is rarely comparable to the axis of a geometric figure. Rouen and Bordeaux are not really firmly planted on the two river-banks from which they rose. Bordeaux’s crescent, whose inside curb follows the winding river, holds within its arc an urban agglomeration shaped like a shriveled up kidney, a sparsely developed annex located on the right bank which only stretches its tentacles along a starburst of roads. In Rouen, the river draws a rigid line of separation between the heart of the city and the outlying communities of Sotteville, a line cutting off the beautiful neighborhoods along the north bank from the south side’s industrial commons, warehouses, polluting factories, and workers’ suburbs. During the war, after I had stepped off the bus at the terminal on the Seine’s south side and walked across the bridge, or while waiting, in the little smoke-filled station on the left bank in Saint-Sever, for that strange night train to Caen (a freight train with only one, unlit passenger car), I had the acute feeling of either leaving or re-entering a zone whose buildings are reserved for servants’ entries and staircases. Nantes is no exception to the rule; worse yet, as already mentioned, the city in the past has never completely succeeded in leaving its mark on the south bank—at least not up to the time when, approximately thirty years ago, suburban housing developments began to take over neighboring rural zones. Furthermore, while crossing the city from upstream to downstream, there is a complete change of character in the river and its embankments; the Loire, which used to reach up into the city’s heart with two of its northern eddies, found itself excluded, rejected by the landfills. There has not been, there could never be a divorce, but in a certain sense—a very sensitive point for those who knew Nantes “before” and “after”—a legal separation has taken place between the city and its river.

Sixty years ago, one would approach Nantes upstream from across vast stretches of vacant land: a continuation of the submersible prées (but much larger in size), those periodically inundated, unfenced terrains in the Loire Valley west of Angers, such as the prée of Anetz, used as a makeshift airfield by a Messerschmitt squadron in 1944; or the one at Rochefort where, on the rocky elevation point next to the road, a small monument commemorates several of aviation’s pioneers, René Gasnier among them, who made his debut here during the first years of the century. There once flowed an untouched, pristine river with nary a fisherman or a boat among these vast, empty grasslands fond of veiling themselves in wintry mists; land unprotected by dikes which sometimes would break up into islands, like the Héron or Beaulieu Island (in those times still quite deserted on the east side).

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