Nothing, Happening Everywhere, All at Once, or Why I’m Hooked on Literary and Photographic Representations of Ordinary Landscapes around Greater Paris

Jean Rolin is one of France’s most prominent arpenteurs, or surveyors, of ordinary French places. Two of his most recent books, “Le Pont de Bezons” (2020) and “La Traversée de Bondoufle” (2022), once again offer meticulous descriptions and nuanced observations of the proximate, sites relatively close to Rolin’s home in Paris that remain, for the most part, off-the-beaten path, occasionally deserted, and unknown or “insufficiently known” to the author (and, as he presumes, to most of his readers). In this talk, I examine Rolin’s démarche, approaching that term as both a way of walking and a course of action. Deambulation, for Rolin, is as much a form of movement as it is a kind of reading. Which perhaps helps to explain why I am moved when I read about Rolin walking. Inquiring further into this response, I propose to mobilize these two itinerant narratives—along with work by photographer Camille Fallet, whose “Greater Paris Landscape Manual” shares some striking affinities—as a laboratory for experimenting with an interpretive method that allows for consideration of my own attachment to these two artists’ reconnaissance missions into distinct swaths of the urban and peri-urban periphery around Greater Paris. Why, I ask, am I so keen on these verbal and visual forays into everyday landscapes in the Île de France, places marked by friches and terrains vagues, chain hotels, parking lots, riverways, roundabouts, and other topographic features that, as even Rolin admits, are “hardly engaging”? Is it simply because I care about the same things as they do? Is it because I appreciate the way Rolin’s texts and Fallet’s photographs invent an idea, and an imaginary, of the territory? Or might these artists’ interest in inventorying the mundane matter to me because it informs how I read and resonates with the way I dwell in the world? Ari Blatt is Professor and Chair of the Department of French at the University of Virginia, where he teaches courses on modern and contemporary French literature and visual culture. He is the author of “Pictures into Words: Images in Contemporary French Fiction” (Nebraska, 2012) and co-editor, with Edward Welch, of “France in Flux: Space, Territory, and Contemporary Culture” (Liverpool, 2019). His most recent book, “The Topographic Imaginary: Attending to Place in Contemporary French Photography” (Liverpool, 2022), is about picturing place. He is currently working on French culture’s fascination for the diagonale du vide, or “empty diagonal,” and has been pondering what it might look like to make the work we do in the humanities less cooly detached and clinical and, instead, more expressly personal.