Ahnungen an der Peripherie. Fülle und Leere in Jacques Rédas Les Ruines de Paris
Jacques Réda’s collection of prose poems Les Ruines de Paris (1977) can be related to a long tradition of literary works about the French capital evoking its transformation, setting out the contradictions between new industrial and still remaining older areas. These are also the urban topographies where the lonely stroller explores the ‚ruins of Paris‘, discovering less known streets and indeterminate wastelands on the edge of a rapidly changing city. However, precisely these strange zones produce often a vague feeling of epiphanies for the observer, the periphery thus acquires its own suggestive aura as it already did in surrealist writers like Aragon and Leiris, but also in the early Borges. Putting it in a more theoretical way in Les cinq points cardinaux (2003), Réda distinguishes between the different ways places may appear to an attentive mind, finding a sort of transcendental surplus in the specific atmosphere of the outskirts. Our essay shows this aesthetic fascination as a medium of poetic energy in Les Ruines de Paris, linking it to a historical moment after modernism when intuition and imminence have become supplements of plenitude.
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