Portraits de villes: Marches et cartes. La Représentation urbaine dans les discours contemporains (review)

Garric’s comparative and interdisciplinary study, adapted from his doctoral thesis, sums up its 500-page argument in a single line: ‘Représenter la ville dans quelque discours que ce soit consiste à associer une carte et un parcours autour du nom de cette ville’ (p. 545). This formula, which Garric claims should be the prolegomenon to future studies of the city in literature, presents itself as an alternative to theories of the city that figure it as a system of signs to be interpreted. Starting from Michel de Certeau’s opposition of the city-space as laid out on a map and as experienced on the ground, Garric develops complementary epistemologies of ‘carte’ and ‘parcours’ through which the city may be conceived. The defining characteristics of the map are its impersonal, synchronic organization of space, divided by streets and bounded by city limits, to be apprehended by the viewer in its totality. The walk, on the other hand, is defined by the personal, the fragmentary and change through time. Garric’s principal interest is to see how representations of the city articulate these paired conceptions, and how they adapt to the contemporary reality of urban sprawl and the unbounded city. He begins in the visual arts, examining engravings of city panoramas (reproduced in the text) as a form of compromise between the schematics of the map and the experience of the city. From there he moves into literary representation, looking at the genre of city portraits in travel-writing, with examples from Michel Butor, Julien Gracq and a number of other European and American writers. Here he draws connections between parcours and narrative, and between carte and description, and examines how the portrait of the city can reflexively come to represent the writer himself. The study next explores monographs in the human sciences, which, he argues, dodge the issue of dual epistemologies by avoiding representation as far as possible in their documented references. Lastly, Garric examines representations of the city in the novel, looking in detail at the work of three writers, the American William Kennedy, the Spanish Juan Goytisolo and the French François Bon. The Bon section is particularly interesting for its discussion of the ‘crise de l’urbanisme’: in Bon’s concrete jungles, the totalized understanding of the carte is no more possible than is the proper experience of the parcours for those trapped in the banlieue, where high concrete walls and uniform architecture destroy the sense of movement. Garric’s book is not without flaws: his argument can be fastidious and repetitive, and there are some errors (references to the ‘American’ academic, ‘Charles’ Prendergast, for instance). There is also a lack of context around the texts he selects for close reading: his analysis of Bon’s novels is illuminating, but no other French fiction is mentioned, and even the Bon section is limited to three of his texts. Nevertheless, the book is a bold and original piece of critical theory, offering a useful new intellectual framework through which to understand representations of the city.