Nadja (Penguin Modern Classics)

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It is based on Breton's actual interactions with a young woman, Nadja, over the course of ten days, and is presumed to be a semi-autobiographical description of his relationship with a mad patient of Pierre Janet. There are many illustrations (44) in this book: photos, drawings, etc. No picture of Nadja here, but the text claims she was beautiful enough to make heads turn and have regular men in her life. This is the 1928 original, without the changes of 1963 reissue. The book was received well, but sales were slow at first. Reading a draft of this text, Andrei Molotiu said I might be “expecting too instrumental a connection between words and images.” For Molotiu, “the relationship between image and text… is more connotative, more like poetry.” He suggested I look for something less “formal,” more affective or general. My sense is that it’s possible to ask about relationships between images and narrative in some detail, without being “mechanical” (as he suggested) or hoping for some single strategy or fixed relationship. In my reading, if the text asks us to attend to subtle choices of verbal images and suggestive, “enigmatic” encounters, and if the text remains nearly silent about the images except to say that they are “inadequate” attempts to capture something special about how the narrator experienced the scenes he conjures, then as readers we are obligated to think at least as carefully about the images and how they work with the text. This doesn’t preclude more general, even holistic, effects of mood or poetic association. Nadja (1927) written by the pricipal founder of Surrealism, Andre Breton (1896-1966) was like that. It is surreal, bizarre, dreamlike but it will make you remember your past love or the first time you felt in love. It is about a man falling in love with a woman amidst the beauty of Paris in the 1920's. The narrative is punctuated with 40 photographs showing the places, people and events related to the short-lived love story. Surreal is a literary genre and this novel is its most popular example. The narrative is linear but vague. While reading it, one can never be sure if Nadja is a real woman, an idea or an illusion. The narrator's feeling is also going in all directions: love, infatuation, curiousity, apathy, indifference, etc. There is a reason for the last two that I would not want to share as I do not want to spoil your fun (in case you want to read this book too).

The second photograph in Nadja is the Manoir d’Ango. The 1928 edition (and the English translation) has a photograph of the courtyard, captioned “The Manoir d’Ango in Varengeville-sur-Mer”; the 1963 edition has the columbarium, captioned “Manoir d’Ango, le colombier.” Nadja, smiling and saying she'll be fine for a couple more minutes. Overjoyed by such an achievement and crying for the foreknowledge of pain. Les pas perdus includes the account of an adventure Breton and Louis Aragon had on a Parisian street when, to absolutely no narrative consequence, they became intrigued by an enigmatic and oddly disorientated woman. This passante, the object of those “cares” and “glances” apparently legitimated, in a patriarchal society, by the sight lines and the sexual-political dynamics of the street, is a Baudelairean passerby who unlike Nadja resists with considerable insouciance the surrealists’ more or less predatory attempts to recruit her to their schemes. Refusing to audition for the part of Nadja the two men are effectively hoping to cast, this anonymous woman ignores or, still more gloriously, remains completely unconscious of them: “Louis Aragon and André Breton,” the piece concludes, “unable to give up the idea of finding the key to the riddle, searched through part of the sixth arrondissement—but in vain.” The differences are illuminating for the kind of attention he paid to photographs and the meanings he hoped they could convey. A study by Konrad Rupp, “Die Rolle der Illustrationen in Bretons ‘Nadja'” (Grin Verlag, 2010) is helpful here.Still never printed in hardcover in the Queen's tongue. Certainly one of humanity's greatest crimes, right behind consigning the first three Grand Funk Railroad records to obscurity in favor of "We're An American Band" and "Some Kind of Wonderful." That's not MY Mark, Mel, and Don!* For this review I only want to note an amazing obtuseness. Nadja is significant in the history of psychoanalysis since it's part of Breton's reading of Freud. But psychologically it is a horror show. In the book the narrator, Breton, is married; he starts seeing Nadja, and it never occurs to him -- as a narrator, or as an author who might consider his book's structure or interest -- to say anything about how he feels about his wife, or vice versa. At one point he writes: Breton’s ‘Nadja’ reads like a blog. Of course in 1928 blogs didn’t exist, so this rather thin tome which unfolds like a collage of mixed media must have erupted on the scene as avant garde vogue. Of surrealism, naturalmente. Andre Breton, writing as Andre Breton, spends the first half of the novel meandering through the streets of Paris, posting photos of his favourite haunts, and namedropping par excellence. Of course, if this is read like a blog, then there no harm in the fact that his famous cronies are named, listed and blown up in width="40" height="100". There is also a soupcon of random musings on theatre, art and literature. Engaging, but nothing that will set the world on fire. Collecting images was probably a fairly easy, haphazard enterprise, and it probably didn’t take him much time. Omissions bothered him a little (p. 152), but not too much. This paints a very different picture from the photographs collected, for example, by Sebald, or other authors more engaged with the visual.

But what is Nadja? The physical Nadja in the novel is a woman dealing intense emotional and psychological problems; she captures the gaze of the narrator and his heart. She becomes his muse, his artistic inspiration. His desire for her is incredible. But does she actually exist? This book is deeply abstract. Breton wrote the manifesto for the surrealist art movement, and some of these ideas are deeply thematic in here.

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Life is random. It has intervals and occurrences that disrupt the flow of your day: it doesn’t follow a perfect construction of organisation. Breton replicates some of these ideas here, but I just don’t think he does it very well. His interludes don’t hold much. There’s an odd bit about cocaine and several autobiographical bits at the start before the novel even gets going. But, again, there’s just not much too them. The real power is with his Nadja. The figure of “pure observation” suggests that illustrations will be “facts,” simply seen, recording places described in the text; as it turns out that means that the illustrations are themselves simply observed, meaning seen in a cursory way, not really pondered. Most of Breton’s photographs are indifferently lit, composed, and framed; some contain people, and some don’t; some show only the shop or café or person described in the text, and others show much more; some bear traces of the time of day or season, others don’t. My general contempt for psychiatry, its rituals and its works, is reason enough for my not yet having dared investigate what has become of Nadja." (p. 141) It would be interesting to see a newer translation of this, or compare the translation to the original text. Perhaps it is the translator's work, or Breton’s himself, but the fluidity of prose is cumbersome. While lengthy sentences can ring like angelic melody with a careful streetlight system of punctuation, Breton’s sentences are overly punctuated and so stop-and-go with sentences within sentences offset with frequent comma usage that it feels like syntactical epilepsy. Breton did express an attempt at recreating the purity of realistic thought processing, but it seems overly clunky in its attempts. This, however, may be from having read authors writing much more recently (Joseph McElroy has a masterful control over stream-of-consciousness that replicates actual consciousness, for example) that have polished a more fluid prose. Reading Nadja for it’s historical value may very well be more rewarding than its poetic value, which is still quite a feat in and of itself. The novel flows a bit too much like a suffocating river, and is a bit bland, yet Breton still works magic on emotion and intellect. It feels strangely surreal, hard to define and obscure. The structure mirrors this idea. This is Breton’s book, and he is going to write it how he wants to. He’s not going to follow any rules; he’s not going to create any sense of structure: he’s just going to produce a random piece of writing that exists because it exists. And he’s going to shove some pictures in it too because why not? This sense of nonchalance matches Nadja’s attitude towards life, and the randomness of the images captures her shifting moods and unpredictability. The book is Nadja, and the woman he meets is also Nadja. She is no longer an individual- a person with a past and a history- but an object, an object of artistic power. She resides in this dreamscape.

Note, in relation to the book’s veracity: the discussion about Nadja’s actual life is outside the text. Critics who are interested in the picture Breton paints can read Nadja’s letters online. Within the text’s logic, the narrator is reliable. In that respect it does not matter whether Boiffard went around Paris photographing places Breton had actually spent time with the real Nadja, or places where Breton had invented scenes involving the narrator, who is named André, and the character named Nadja.) In the remaining quarter of the text, André distances himself from her corporeal form and descends into a meandering rumination on her absence, so much so that one wonders if her absence offers him greater inspiration than does her presence. It is, after all, the reification and materialization of Nadja as an ordinary person that André ultimately despises and cannot tolerate to the point of inducing tears. There is something about the closeness once felt between the narrator and Nadja that indicated a depth beyond the limits of conscious rationality, waking logic, and sane operations of the everyday. There is something essentially “mysterious, improbable, unique, bewildering” about her; this reinforces the notion that their propinquity serves only to remind André of Nadja's impenetrability. Her eventual recession into absence is the fundamental concern of this text, an absence that permits Nadja to live freely in André's conscious and unconscious, seemingly unbridled, maintaining her paradoxical role as both present and absent. With Nadja's past fixed within his own memory and consciousness, the narrator is awakened to the impenetrability of reality and perceives a particularly ghostly residue peeking from under its thin veil. Thus, he might better put into practice his theory of Surrealism, predicated on the dreaminess of the experience of reality within reality itself. Still, he appears to have had mixed feelings about the photographs in Nadja, describing the images soon after publication as “dreary and disillusioning,” while nevertheless dedicating a copy to Boiffard with the encomium (perhaps it was faint praise) that his were “the most beautiful photographs in this book.”

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Breton says “I am concerned, I say, with facts which may belong to pure observation, but which on each occasion present all the appearances of a signal, without our being able to say precisely which signal, and of what” (“présentent chaque fois toutes les apparances d’un signal, sans qu’on puisse dire au juste de quel signal,” Gallimard edition p. 20, Howard translation p. 19). When it comes to interpreting the illustrations, that remark asks to be read in two ways, one attending to the expression “pure observation,” and the other to the idea of a signal. Faucheux called Breton and asked him whether he still possessed any letters from Nadja. It was an inspired line of inquiry because Breton had kept many of her messages (these can be seen online at Breton’s archive and French Wikipedia has extensive quotations). In his monograph, Faucheux recalls: “He entrusted me with a paper cutting by Nadja, one of her last letters, the one in which she wrote about the Hotel Terminus: ‘I cannot come tonight.’ I photographed these documents to look convincing. Readers could not be insensitive to the authenticity of the document. The signal was there.” On the front cover (top), the designer showed one of Nadja’s hand-drawn paper cuttings described by Breton in the text and shown in the book. Can you say ‘Emperors new clothes’? The ruminations above are necessary to justify the mundane story of a married middle aged man embarking in an adulterous affair with a vulnerable younger woman who happens to be enthralled by his intellect and success as an author. These are two kinds of “signal” or enigma: produced enigma, which supports the Surrealist philosophy, and documented enigma, which supports Breton’s desire not to understand. The two work in different directions. When he takes pleasure in the bronze cast of a glove (p. 57) or substitutes a Surrealist artwork for something bought in a flea market (p. 54), he is producing enigma. When he reproduces part of a painting he does not understand (p. 95), he is working privately, documenting the inexplicable, adding to his store of enigmatic objects, events, and places. The places Nadja and he met, which account for most of the photographs in the book, are examples of both, but they can only work in the book as produced enigma. The narrative is told in the first person and is divided into three parts. The first part is a factual explanation of Breton’s position and beliefs, an introduction to the purpose of his writing and to the principles of surrealism in general. Here, Breton relates his new direction in art and life but only “the most decisive episodes” of it, and only those parts that are “at the mercy of chance . . . temporarily escaping my control, admitting me to an almost forbidden world of sudden parallels, petrifying coincidences, and reflexes peculiar to each individual . . . flashes of light that would make you see, really see.” He conceives that this world will reveal itself to him (and to any other observer who, like himself, undertakes the same challenge) through a series of “signals” ( signaux) that he well relate but not altogether decipher. Finally, he explains that as he will be on foot, he names his point of departure as “the Hôtel des Grandes Hommes,” for which we are also given the first in the series of photos and drawings that appear throughout the novel. The fact of naming and seeing (hotels, theaters, apartments, streets, people) allows the reader both literally and metaphorically to follow his footsteps through Paris and thus into the new world of surrealism.