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中文Initially an essayist and poet, André Breton’s initial foray into novel writing came in the form of Nadja. Excerpts were first published in the literary magazine “Littérature” in 1926, with full publication in 1928. Despite an earlier scorn by the author for this particular literary genre the novel was actually rated much more highly than his poetry. Breton is internationally considered to be the principle figure in the creation of the Surrealist movement and Nadja conforms quite clearly to his vision of Surrealism through its ‘âme errante’ heroine. He established the movement as a progression from Dadaism and it began to gain momentum steadily from around 1920 onwards. The defining moment was probably the publication of the first Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, as this consolidated the movement’s theories and Breton’s position as leader.
Breton’s purpose was to create a new way of thinking that discarded the structures of traditional literature; he felt these structures to be extraordinarily limiting and this “lead Breton himself to create, in Nadja, a new novel, one which ignores the ‘moments nuls’ to evoke only the ‘moments privilégiés”. Mary Ann Caws specifies how Breton “remained faithful to an image […] of Surrealism as a total and permanent revolt against accepted judgements and habits.” Literature should not dwell on the past or box itself in with conformity but rather should be a means of transferring to paper, present moments and actions, the more inconsequential the better. For Breton Surrealism was a “crystallization of his notion of life, which galvanized abstract thought into living experience and promulgated personal adventure through language” and “pure psychic automatism, by which an attempt is made to express, either verbally, in writing or in any other manner, the true functioning of thought”.
The novel loosely narrates a period of ten days in Breton’s life between October 4 and 12, 1926 during which time he gets to know Nadja, a patient of Breton’s close friend Pierre Janet who is given to be of unsound mind. A young woman with a real name of Leona, she informs Breton however that she has assumed the name Nadja from the beginning of the Russian word for hope, “et parce que ce n’en est que le commencement,” she adds with an air of mystery (p.75).
Although named after its eponymous heroine, she does not in fact appear in the novel until a third of the way in, and disappears toward the end “J’avais, depuis assez longtemps, cessé de m’entendre avec Nadja” (p.157), transforming the novel into ore of a search for Breton’s self-identity than hers and therein lies the most important function of Nadja in this surrealist adventure, that of aid and mediator. It is unanimously agreed that Nadja is an adventure for Breton, but one that he is only able to experience because of Nadja as she is the catalyst and the initiator. Lynes refers on several occasions to Breton’s ‘ascesis’, labelling it the result of a “spiritual journey” through which he “attains the intuition of the only kind of ‘eternity’ – not of ‘another’ world but of this world – in which modern man can still believe.” According to Lynes it is only in retrospect that Breton and likewise the readers are able to realise the “full meaning of the adventure which seems to end with the disappearance of Nadja […].” This is true, although it was only as a result of Nadja that Breton was able to experience in the first place the adventure whose meaning he realises retrospectively.
Breton’s scorn for the ‘novel’ has been mentioned briefly above and it would be expected that in such a case the author would reject this particular genre. However, when Nadja prophesies “Tu écricras un romain sur moi. Je t’assure. Ne dis pas non” (p.117) she is not wrong. Nadja overwhelmed Breton with her fascinating eyes, her wandering freedom and her oblivion to normality and although he grew bored of her towards the end of their adventure “Il est impatientant de la voir lire les menus {…}. Je m’ennui” (p.122) the impression she left on him was everlasting, so much so that he felt compelled to record it. Nevertheless, Breton still did not aim directly for ‘novel’ as we know the genre to be:
“the récit was not, in the author’s intentions, a novel at all, if by this term one means a fiction; it was rather the means to explore a series of moving personal experiences, with the hope of arriving at some answer to the question of his own destiny.”
For Breton, the founding figure of Surrealism himself, Nadja “lives Surrealism” and her function is to illustrate the very essence of living a surrealist life. Nadja’s unidentifiable grip on reality turns her life in to a wash of dream and hallucinatory like states; she has no sense of time or obligation; her altered, ethereal presence “incarnates the very essence of Surrealism”. She is young, beautiful and more fascinating than the women Breton has experienced, simply because she is less tied down by society and human restrictions. This can be seen in the novel when Nadja answers Breton’s question of “Who are you?” with « Je suis l’âme errante » (p. 82). “Nadja is so wonderfully free from all regard for appearance that she scorns reason and law alike,” comments Simone de Beauvoir and Breton’s first impressions upon meeting her “Curieusement fardée, comme quelqu’un qui, ayant commencé par les yeux, n’a pas eu le temps de finir” compound this (p.72). Nadja embodies a surrealist muse, for which role she is perfect and as a woman with no sense of reality, she has none of the female needs that could turn her into the kind of mother or wife figure who might “squelch” a man’s freedom, that being greatly feared by the Surrealists.
Despite being married at the time of the novel and his encounter with the young mad woman, Breton saw in Nadja a possibility of an adventure that was more specifically a romantic one:
“she emancipated the poet from his bonds at the very moment when he might be settling down to a conventional domesticity. She freed his imagination for the free union.”
Nadja is indeed often classed as a surrealist romance and this certainly gives some clues to another of the young woman’s functions. It could be said that Nadja ‘est une initiatrice à amour’ for Breton. Although he is unable to love her she forces him to recognise and understand love; the incident in a car on the way from Versailles to Paris revealed for Breton “what a mutual recognition of love might have entailed”. His later love for a woman, alluded to mysteriously and metaphorically in the third and concluding part of the novel, is greater understood by Breton simply because of his retrospective realisations after meeting Nadja:
“Breton, at the end of the spiritual itinerary which informs the book, is the man who, through all the experiences therein invoked, has discovered his destiny in love.”
The theme of insanity is a common one in Breton’s literature – one only has to see the title of L’amour fou to see this – and Nadja is definitely seen as mad by readers and critics alike, as well as Breton. Balakian describes Nadja’s state of mind as having “let down the barriers between the rational and the irrational” and indeed at the end of the novel the heroine is incarcerated for apparent insanity. For this reason, it can be said that another of Nadja’s functions is to show the impossibility of living on the edge of reality: “A la suite d’excentricités auxquelles elle s’était, paraît-il, livrée dans les couloirs de son hotel, elle avait dû être internee à l’asile de Vaucluse” (p.159). It is apparent from the start of Breton and Nadja’s chance encounter in rue Lafayette on the 4th of October that Nadja is unlike most people: “Elle va la tête en haute, contrairement à tous les autres passants” (p.72). As much as Breton admires her detachment from reality, the matter of fact manner in which he recounts both their first meeting and later her internment seem to indicate how much he expected the outcome along: “One senses, in spite of – or perhaps because of – the deliberately neutral tone that this is the prelude to something out of the ordinary.” It is as if through Nadja he is showing that living a truly surrealist life is not viable and one must always maintain elements of restraint in order to avoid a fate such as Nadja’s.
A further purpose of Nadja’s is implicit in the fact that Caws considers one of the archetypal elements of Surrealism to be mysticism. For the Surrealists, woman was an ‘other worldly’ being who was “a mediator between men and the world, opening his eyes to its wonders”. Aspley echoes Beauvoir in their confirmation that Breton conflates nature and poetry with woman, with de Beauvoir referring to his vision of woman as a “mediatress” and “the key”, that is to say a go between for the world or a state of mind and anything else of a more mystical dimension. Nadja’s function therefore is to allow Breton a glimpse of the ‘other side’ whether that means the world of insanity of a world of total Surrealism and freedom from the structured thought of human life that he could not normally fully experience himself. The novel creates a vision of Surrealism by creating an atmosphere of the mystical and mysterious through random occurrences and peculiar conversations with the young woman. For example, as Nadja and Breton stroll along the Seine, she has a vision in the water, «Cette main, cette main sur la Seine, pourquoi cette main qui flambe sur l’eau? » (p. 98), which she then ponders on aloud for a while. Not only that but she has an air of mystery around herself as well, slightly unkempt and wild with extraordinary eyes “Que s’y mire-t-il à la fois obscurément de détresse et lumineusement d’orgueil?” (p.73).
The role women played for the Surrealists, albeit an important and respected one, seemed almost certainly objective. First and foremost, and never more so than for Breton, woman was seen as a sexual being and a source of inspiration which was clearly manifest in the surrealist literature of the time. Balakian speaks of Breton’s “pronounced virility” and the way in which he idealized the women he loved, of which there were many. For him they were a “miracle of creation” and objects of desire and fun that should always be portrayed and seen that way, apart from his own mother whom he considered to be overly dour and for that reason could not respect her. By the end of Nadja Breton no longer views the heroine in the same light because of his boredom with her. However, it is undeniable that Nadja works as a representation of Breton’s quintessential surrealist woman, both because of her free nature and attitude, and also because of her looks and the way she inspires Breton to think.
A final purpose of Nadja is to highlight the importance of the city, particularly Paris, to Breton and to Surrealism. Breton warmed slowly to the city which was to remain his home until his death in 1966; his first impressions were of streets filled with a “melancholy emptiness of the canvases of Chirico” and it is not until he started reading the Symbolist poets that his impressions and imagination were fuelled. From then on, however, through the medium of exploratory, random walks Breton learned to love Paris and all the chance opportunities, characters and insights into daily life that this particular city threw out:
Aleatory ambulation was a surrealist activity parallel with automatic writing. The self-revelation inherent in the chance meeting of words corresponded with the chance encounters of persons and objects in aleatory, nondirected walks through the streets of Paris; they would throw light on the nature of objective chance and create the daily miracles that contribute to the understanding of the latent magic of life.”
Of course, there is no better example of these “aleatory ambulations” than Nadja, a novel which makes countless references to walking the streets of Paris: “Nous voici, au hasard de nos pas, rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière” (p.81), stopping in cafés: “Nous convenons de nous revoir le lendemain au bar qui fait l’angle de la rue Lafayette” (p.82) and promenading by the Seine, all while getting to know one of the random characters thrown up by the city in the way that enchants Breton so greatly. Chance encounters are one of the greatest pleasures and most significant experiences that the city streets provide for Breton and an illustration of their importance is the very moment when Breton happens upon Nadja purely by chance in rue Lafayette. The fact that Nadja is “une âme errante” who wanders the streets of Paris “sans aucun but” (p.73) makes her ideal; her purpose is to abet Breton’s ‘aleatory ambulation’ and inspire him along the way.
As the founder of Surrealism, Breton’s Nadja is a seminal text in showcasing the author’s surrealist ideologies. Nadja herself personifies the carefree, unregimented spirit who flows freely from the conscious to the unconscious “J’ai pris, du premie au dernier jour, Nadja pour un génie libre, quelque chose comme un de ces esprits de l’air que certaines pratiques de magie” (p.130) and Breton makes full use of her character to illustrate his ideologies. Paris, for example, is Breton’s watching ground, his playground, his theatre; it is his inspiration, the embodiment of Surrealism in its disorder and the chance occurrences it occasions. For Breton, Nadja and Paris are nearly one and the same thing, from the point of view of their catalystic effect on the author and the way they mediate him seeing things he would normally be blind to such as the train travellers who Nadja quietly observes every evening at 7 o’clock. Although Breton naturally wandered the streets of Paris, wandering with Nadja allowed him a significantly different insight into the city, Surrealism, insanity and women. As a Surrealist, Breton’s vision of woman is aesthetic and spiritual. He idealizes her and uses her as a source of inspiration, a muse for daily life and his literature. In personifying Surrealism in her entire make-up, by living and breathing Surrealism, Nadja functions as muse and mediator. Most importantly, however, is the way Nadja aids him, knowingly, on his quest. In reference to her retrospectively prophetic words “A vous entendre parler, je sentais que rien ne vous en empêcherait : rien, pas meme moi…” (p.81), Lynes comments that “here the title character envisions the realization which will come to the hero after she has disappeared and recognises her own role in his quests”. Through Nadja he is able to reach something of a solution to the “Quis suis-je?” he proposes at the very start of the novel, which is what fully defines his and Nadja’s adventure. Her function is to provide Breton with an answer, which she clearly does, at least to a certain extent, as Breton is later able to conclude in the novel in the third part, long after their original meetings. Nadja is a superlative example of Surrealist literature and Breton is most definitely the leader in the field. As Caws says: “Breton, and Surrealism as he conceived it and guided it, stand out as unique examples of total involvement and complete passion.” Nadja makes for an enchanting yet haunting character who is difficult to forget.
