Nadja

In this slender, elliptical, eccentric and poetic book, Andre Breton distills the essence of surrealism and in the process offers what is perhaps the best and most concise single-volume description of what the surrealist movement is/was about. Ostensibly about a feverishly intense ten-day affair with an enigmatic woman he meets while crossing a Paris street one afternoon, *Nadja* is really about a way of living life, which is what, primarily, surrealism is really about. In this sense, *Nadja* is also a call to arms against the deadening conventions of consensual reality, of reasonable commonsense, and of a life wasted in pursuit of the menial and in the shelter of the mediocre. What is unique about Breton's approach in *Nadja* is its cool, clinical approach to recording the most fantastic mental delirium; its attempt to ground the highest poetic flights of the soul in the precise language of science. The result is a unique stylistic hybrid of stream-of-conscious automatism and psychiatric monograph. As if Nadja were a ghost, Breton attempts to record her haunting of him over the brief span of their acquaintance, faithfully recording what endures in his memory as singularly significant of her elusive mystery: the places they visited, the conversations they shared, the drawings she made, the latter of which--along with interpretation--are among the photographs included with the text. Nadja, the woman, is the surrealistic muse par excellence--troubled, inspired, destitute, probably mad...and ultimately unknowable. She appears about a third of the way through the book and effectively disappears with a third of it still to go. But her effect on Breton is profound--if inconclusive. The book itself is the result of this effect and a consequent attitude of open-endedness to life, to art, to love, to beauty. A remarkable text, dense and not always easy of comprehension despite the ultra, even hallucinogenic, lucidity of its prose, *Nadja* will certainly inspire those capable of inspiration; it is one of those books that open a door in your imprisoned mind and don't so much invite you to walk through as force you to decide if you're going to close and lock it again, perhaps this time once and for all.

It is necessary to rebel against a life of pretense to understand what makes you a unique and valid person. Andre Breton writes that he "haunts" other people because they only know his ghostly shadows, the artificial roles he plays as a social man. He seeks to surprise himself in his banal interactions with people by opening himself to experiences that reveal his unconscious mind. Breton was influenced by Freud's focus on the subconscious, but rejected psychoanalysis because it sought to interpret unconscious mental content and therefore neutralize spontaneous emotional content. In "Nadja," a surrealist novel published in Paris in 1928, the narrator walks the Parisian streets at random seeking unexpected cues to positive unconscious processes, not focusing on negative aspects as do psychoanalysts. These processes are idiosyncratic and the only events that distinguish and validate the person. They are repressed and must be sought actively. The narrator by chance meets an eccentric woman who seems to be connected more than most people to the unconscious artistic mind. He takes advantage of Nadja, observing and encouraging her mental exploration in order to understand his own mind. The narrator takes advantage of the reader in the same way, exposing his hidden mental structures. Breton thanks the reader directly for allowing him to write the insightful novel, since it could not be done without the reader's complicity. "Nadja," Russian for the very fleeting beginning of hope, is considered the seminal novel of a relatively brief surrealist literature period in the first half of the 20th Century. Black and white photographs illustrate the cues Breton describes that open the unconscious minds of Nadja and the reader. Reading Breton's novel is a very interesting experience.

This was my second reading of Nadja. The first time, I read it looking for fiction inspired by cities. I expected, and found, a story about Paris. The narrator's mad desire for Nadja who is herself quite mad is punctuated by the thoroughly plain unpeopled photographs of the city. Breton's descriptions of the city's streets are luminous and they play off the fuzzy, gaussian blur of the pictures. What's the connection between these two worlds: the literary and the graphic? The connection is loose, suggestive, less than allegorical. Its tone was urban, urbane too but it would be hard to say just why these two realities were in the same novel. In fact, that loose connection defined for many people the idea of the surreal. On this second reading-maybe thirty years later-the madness predominates. The narrator's passion is there, raw and a trifle obscene (but fun). So is the narrator's wife who seems to exist in a moral vacuum away from Nadja and her lover. Nadja, of course, is still mad, but now her madness seems less adventuresome and creative and more forced and quite sad. The pictures too seem to point to a poverty of spirit. ( I realize that we are seeing the photographs in translation too: a translation to an offset printed page. Perhaps the originals have a different feel.) I think that perhaps the shock of the connection between crazed and creative has worn off a bit. We are also forced to remember that these ultra-cool surrealists presided over a scene that slipped quickly into nazism and concentration camps. Breton is still brilliant on the page, the suggested connections-the things left unsaid still beg us to fill them in. But we are older now and this story seems more sad than audacious-like the blueprint for a kind of world that just didn't work out. Lynn Hoffman, author of bang BANG: A Novel

as soon as people see breton's name on a book, they immediately feel indignation and privately exclaim, "the dictator of surrealism!" what they don't seem to realize is that, despite being a flawed and somewhat ambivalent man, he probably had more passion in his pinky than they do in their entire body. "nadja" is simply one more delightful proof of breton's genius and his infallible flair for the surreal, the mysterious, the mystical, and everything that is profoundly divergent. in this tale of intrigue and obsession he travels the streets of paris with a ghostly, clearly insane young woman who calls herself nadja, which is the russian word for hope. the most captivating parts of the novel are the bizarre and surreal conversations he has with her. even though he found her incredibly fascinating and almost an ethereal enigma, things start to turn sour between them and breton grows bored with her. at the end of the novel, nadja is put into an asylum after the police are called because of her incessant screaming and apparently incoherent behavior, some of which suggested that she was living in a world of hallucinations and irrational fears. we do know that nadja was a real woman and not by means some fictitious creation of breton's, and we also know that she came to a somewhat unfortunate end. it may be true that breton's behavior and attitude of indifference and deliberate ignorance about her truly wretched fate (she died of cancer, insane and completely alone) is indeed nothing to admire, but those who put too much emphasis on this admittedly accurate fact forget that while he may in a sense have betrayed her, he also made a truly admirable effort to make the world see nadja and those like her as no one has seen them before, and immortalized her in a book that is absolutely unforgettable and breathtakingly beautiful. breton was a profoundly hopeful and truly revolutionary figure who exhorted humanity, even while the second world war raged and reaped it's devastating results universally on all of mankind, to recognize the miraculous and wondrous nature of our very existence, however 'absurd' or meaningless some felt it to be after the horrendous events of the twentieth century. it is true that he occasionally goes over the top with his optimism, but his iron will and determination to fight 'miserabilism', the philosophical justification of human misery, at all costs can only call forth our admiration. his exaltation of the imagination as the highest of human faculties and the sole organ of man that will allow him to attain felicity seems to be verified by direct, concrete experience of life. as we grow older and we come to realize that sensual pleasure is a big part of life but essentially empty and hollow, our inner lives (hopefully) become more vivid and we end up spending more and more time there. breton knows this and wants us to cultivate it to the highest degree possible. don't be fooled by the 'anti breton' rhetoric and take a dismissive

Nadja has far more to offer than just a simple love story. Superficially it is an account of Breton's wandering through the streets of 1920s Paris with his eponymous mad heroine. Paris becomes a magical, fluid reality, peopled with sphinxes and shaped by extraordinary events and coincidences. But dig deeper and you will find a rewarding, if sometimes complex, commentary on time, space, memory and the city. Bearing in mind Breton's interest in psychoanalysis and Marxist revolution (in Nadja he even tells us of his purchase of Trotsky's latest work from the Humanite bookstore), the novel may be read as a conscious subversion of bourgeois conventions. Everything in Nadja, from the narrative to the intriguing photographs supplied by various surrealist photographers such as J.A. Boiffard, intervenes to challenge and disrupt conventional reality and the status quo. It seems to me that Nadja is all about the creation of alternative realities, a sur-reality. Some would call this Breton's form of escapism from the harsh realities of post-world-war Paris in the era of high capitalism, but Breton's surreal Paris always carries the promise of revolution and change. Nadja is a work that can be enjoyed on so many levels, and is definitely worth re-reading.