# Seven Questions to Jacques Réda

Federico Castigliano

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# Seven Questions to Jacques Réda

*Federico Castigliano*

## Introduction

This interview with Jacques Réda was collected in written form and later appeared in *La Revue littéraire*, Éditions Léo Scheer, Paris (no. 42).

The text is made available again as an important literary and cultural testimony, born from a direct encounter with the author. Since the original issue is no longer easily accessible, it is republished here to ensure preservation and renewed circulation.

Presented in both the original French and in English translation, the interview offers a wider audience the chance to discover Réda's work and highlights the continuing relevance of his relation to the city, to literature, and to flânerie.

**Federico Castigliano:** Monsieur Réda, your work today stands as a reference for anyone studying the urban promenade in the contemporary city. I myself am working on the tradition of flânerie in Paris, which goes back to the early nineteenth century, to the tableaux of the capital and the physiologies that Walter Benjamin gathered under the name of “panoramic literature.” It was in the post-revolutionary city that the figure of the flâneur emerged: at the dawn of modernity he attempts a reading of urban space, which becomes to his eyes a text or a riddle to be deciphered. His freedom of movement and his staged idleness in the throbbing heart of the metropolis make him a paradoxical character. Baudelaire described the flâneur in *The Painter of Modern Life*, establishing a link between flânerie and artistic creation, according to a new aesthetic paradigm that exalts the living and transitory beauty of the modern city. From these founding texts, and through recurring formal solutions – such as the prose poem inaugurated in *Le Spleen de Paris* – one can trace a literary line leading from Baudelaire up to today, passing through Apollinaire and the Surrealists, Follain and Fargue, and more recently Gracq and Perec. For these writers, the exploration of the city remains the starting point of their literary quest, even when it becomes only a pretext for other discoveries. In your view, does there exist a literary tradition of flânerie and, if so, how do you situate yourself within that tradition?

**Jacques Réda:** There is certainly a literary tradition of flânerie, and in France in particular. But I don't know whether I belong to it in fact or by right, and having never thought about the position I might occupy there if the fact were proven, I'm not going to torment myself over it at more than eighty years of age. These classifications are made for newspapers and school manuals. Nothing is more odious to a writer than to be "classified." Classified as Romantic, classified as Classical, classified as flâneur...

F.C.: "The flâneur may be born anywhere; he can only live in Paris," one reads in *Paris ou le Livre des cent-et-un*. It seems that the link between the experience of urban flânerie and that of writing developed with a singular fidelity to Paris. You yourself – originally from Lunéville – have in a
certain sense chosen the capital and its surroundings as the privileged territory of your
“expeditions.” In your view, what are the elements that make Paris the city of flânerie?

J.R.: The first part of the proposition of the *Cent-et-un* seems unquestionable. I suppose there are flâneurs in London and New York, in Moscow, Tokyo, Mexico, Lisbon, Milan, Alexandria. So I don't know if one should fully endorse the second part. The taste for flânerie seems to me an individual disposition that must find a way to satisfy itself even in a small town or across the fields. But if one considers only “urban” flânerie, it is certain that the larger the city, the more profit the flâneur finds there. As for the literary use one can make of flânerie, it is possible that Paris and a whole literary tradition have especially encouraged it. I note, however, that there are plenty of writers who flâner and have only incidentally made it their subject: Follain, for example. Yet it is true that his Paris is exemplary. Paris (and probably not only in France) has exerted a fascination that Follain said he had felt since his provincial childhood. He already loved Paris in advance and longed to know it (I always wonder whether Paris is masculine or feminine). By contrast, I don't think I “chose the capital”: I ended up there by chance, through a chain of circumstances in which, on my part, neither a dream nor any ambition to know Paris and live there weighed in any way. I could just as easily have ended up in Limoges or Brussels, or remained in my Lorraine hole. I may have flânered less in Paris than wanted to explore this city which had become my usual site, and that from the day I could enjoy a minimum of free time, sometimes moreover stolen from all sorts of obligations. The pleasure of discovery was hardly distinguishable from that of knowing a moment of freedom. At bottom, I am of a nature too impatient or sometimes anxious to make a good flâneur. I also lack perseverance and fidelity: I tire quickly and, unlike the true flâneur, I need novelty, which after more than fifty years of true or false flânerie leaves me rather inert before a city where I feel I have little left to discover. It is also no doubt one of the sad effects of age. For all that I am “Parisian,” I have always loved to launch myself blindly into all sorts of cities where I stayed more or less briefly, and in a disposition that a true flâneur would no doubt disapprove of, that is, quickly, as if to surprise their secret meaning unawares. At times with senses on alert, at times in a kind of second state, almost passive, able to merge with them. Where I can say I have truly flânered is along countless little roads of the French countryside, though the elation that continually carried me there seems to me quite different from the vigilant placidity I perhaps wrongly attribute to the flâneur.

F.C.: You often describe your flâneries as furtive acts, and in some cases you define yourself as a “heretic,” even a “bandit.” In what way can flânerie be the transgression of a prohibition?

J.R.: What the flâneur, peacefully, transgresses is the law of useful activity, of productivity. From this point of view, the pure flâneur (the one who does not write) even has a superiority over the writer-flâneur, who may end up flânering only in order to evoke his flânerie. To become a professional flâneur is a danger that I have sometimes felt looming for myself – insofar, of course, as I am a flâneur.

F.C.: The deep relation between urban and literary milieux is inscribed even in the etymology of the word “text,” from the Latin *textus* meaning “fabric,” “weave,” “interlacing.” In a passage of *La liberté des rues*, you speak of the city as a “palimpsest where nothing would be completely erased, where each new draft, born of the previous one, would retain traces – increasingly rare, but all the more telling – of all the successive states.” So would the steps of the flâneur be guided and determined a priori by the visible and invisible text of the city?
**J.R.:** One can see things that way, and I drew some consequences in a text that supposes the existence of a kind of central “office” determining the circulation of people in the city (including flâneurs) – who, in return, guarantee the existence of this city by the perception they have of it. It’s a fancy. But the phenomenon of the palimpsest is obvious, in all the places built or unbuilt on the planet. Gracq, geographer and geologist as well as walker, was wonderfully attentive to it.

**F.C.:** The exaltation of the spectacle of the city, and thus the interest in the phenomenological world, seems to suggest, in some cases, the flâneur’s desire to disappear into the crowd or into the landscape he observes. Benjamin describes the great city as the drug of the solitary, as the extreme, the most impenetrable labyrinth in which the walker gets lost. The Baudelairean flâneur is an “I insatiable for the non-I” who wants to “marry the crowd,” and this has been a common element among several contemporary authors. For you as well, is the exploration of the city an opposite movement to the search for interiority?

**J.R.:** It's possible. Your question exhausts the answer I could give it. One does not simply disappear into the crowd but into that part of the “whole” that any site exposes. Of course not completely: that would be to die. Nothing prevents one from considering individual death as a “return to order” in the raw real that has no interiority. Or of God, if one is mystical. I don't go that far. I have only sketched the outlines of a sort of metaphysics in which certain aspects of theology and physics have shed light for me.

**F.C.:** In your texts one sometimes sees – I am thinking, for example, of the prose poems in *Les Ruines de Paris* or, among the more recent works, certain passages of *Châteaux des courants d'air* and *Ponts flottants* – a true transfiguration or reinvention of the urban landscape. This is an element of rupture compared to other experiences of writer-flâneurs who aim at a quasi-photographic reproduction of reality. Do you see a relation between the use of the prose poem and a practice of anti-realist writing? What poetics, what idea of literature is at the origin of this transfiguration?

**J.R.:** That is a bit of a classroom question. One never sees reality as it is, and one describes it as it is still less. Even with a photographic device. Is that “anti-realist”? I have no precise idea of literature. I don’t believe it is a means. It has its end in itself. And, in itself, it signifies no less and perhaps not differently than a city or a landscape. Each writer is for me a territory where one can walk, flâner, discover and rediscover. A few are for me inexhaustible, and that is a very great comfort as I gradually lose the taste for spreading myself in space, even urban space.

**F.C.:** The phenomena linked to what is called globalization and multiculturalism have made Paris a “global city.” Yet behind the flamboyant shopfronts of commerce, and of a metropolis that wants to be an anthology of all possibilities, lurks the specter of the generic city, increasingly characterized by what the anthropologist Marc Augé defined as “non-places.” Can flânerie still be an enriching, or even inspiring, experience in today’s city?

**J.R.:** I find this notion of enrichment a bit... capitalist. One should not seek to enrich oneself, but to be available. These matters of “globalization” and “multiculturalism” belong to sociological studies, most interesting but not my concern. I write prose – or verse – where necessarily are reflected moving figures of the world around me, and I certainly do not reject
them, but I must integrate them into the language I have built for myself. If the writer is a walker – sometimes a genuine and inimitable walker as Cingria was – he is first of all the walker and the site of his own language. That is perhaps why the world devoted to enrichment (whether by commerce or by what is today called “culture”) no longer takes much interest in him.

Originally published in *La Revue littéraire*, no. 42

## References

Castigliano, F. (2012). Jacques Réda tra le rovine di Parigi. *Studi Francesi*, 168 (LVI | III), 523–535.
https://journals.openedition.org/studifrancesi/3616

Castigliano, F. (2010). Le divertissement du texte. *Poétique*, 4, 461–476.
https://doi.org/10.3917/poeti.164.0461

Castigliano, F. (2010). Sept questions à Jacques Réda. *La Revue littéraire*, 42, 13–18.