Another North
Oct. 5th, 2005 09:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustSunday afternoon's LitFest event was tea with Jacques Darras, a poet who does not come from Arras but from the nearby city of Amiens. This makes him, as he proudly proclaims, a northerner.
It's a paradox, but it's true. If we set off reasonably early from Durham, and drive south all day, past London and through Kent, the "garden of England", we can catch a ferry which will bring us in time for dinner to the north of France. There is even a département called Nord, North (though the département with which County Durham is twinned is the Somme, which brings with it a whole other set of associations.
With a curious kind of geographical jump-cut, this part of northern France reminds me more of industrial northern England than of any of the intervening territory. The little villages of low brick terraces, the wide muddy fields: much of what I recognise is simply the residue of coal-mining, of course. Reading Zola's Germinal in Durham is a curious experience: so much is familiar.
Jacques Darras boasts of the medieval splendour of his region, of its literary creativity in the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth centuries, producing writers like Adam de la Halle, his own near namesake Jacques d'Amiens (and Jean Bodel, most familiar to me, whom, to my confusion, he didn't mention): he explains its eclipse partly by the blackness of all that coal, partly by the fact that it had been part of Flanders, won for France by siege in 1650, and therefore suppressed, the Picard dialect forbidden. I wonder if there is an element of the traditional northern chip on the shoulder in this? France has a long history of centralisation, rationalism, attempts to stamp out patois and defend the purity of the language.
I look into this distorting mirror, and don't quite recognise my own north: the same elements come out of order, the patterns are repeated but out of scale, it's like but not like.
It's a paradox, but it's true. If we set off reasonably early from Durham, and drive south all day, past London and through Kent, the "garden of England", we can catch a ferry which will bring us in time for dinner to the north of France. There is even a département called Nord, North (though the département with which County Durham is twinned is the Somme, which brings with it a whole other set of associations.
With a curious kind of geographical jump-cut, this part of northern France reminds me more of industrial northern England than of any of the intervening territory. The little villages of low brick terraces, the wide muddy fields: much of what I recognise is simply the residue of coal-mining, of course. Reading Zola's Germinal in Durham is a curious experience: so much is familiar.
Jacques Darras boasts of the medieval splendour of his region, of its literary creativity in the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth centuries, producing writers like Adam de la Halle, his own near namesake Jacques d'Amiens (and Jean Bodel, most familiar to me, whom, to my confusion, he didn't mention): he explains its eclipse partly by the blackness of all that coal, partly by the fact that it had been part of Flanders, won for France by siege in 1650, and therefore suppressed, the Picard dialect forbidden. I wonder if there is an element of the traditional northern chip on the shoulder in this? France has a long history of centralisation, rationalism, attempts to stamp out patois and defend the purity of the language.
I look into this distorting mirror, and don't quite recognise my own north: the same elements come out of order, the patterns are repeated but out of scale, it's like but not like.
