Nadja

 

book by André Breton

annotation by Carrol Sun Yang

The first line of Breton’s French surrealist work written in 1928 inquires:

Who Am I?

The philosophical thrust of this book is thereby established and I am propelled into this semi-autobiographical novella that operates in the form of a drawn out fit of dreamlike passion and then a waking obsession over the title character Nadja. Breton’s rapturous and sometimes tangential ramblings, albeit linear and spanning ten chronologically ordered days, are intersected by images of Surrealist artworks, quotations by prominent figures in the Surrealist movement, Nadja’s symbolic scribbles on napkins and architectural landmarks (places he narrates in the story, such as café’s he frequents and various other pedestrian locales).  All of the imagery serves the writing by grounding it in a certain reality, a travelogue or possible nonfiction, by refusing to let the airy, phantom texts disorient the reader to the point of misunderstanding. There is a fine balance struck between the poetic language of capriciousness and the sensible speeches of lucidity.

Nadja is a woman who is met by the author, by chance or fate, walking alone on a sidewalk with no apparent destination. She promptly shows herself to be a little “mad” in the sense that her waking life and dream life are blended and this confused state is noted somewhat tenderly by the narrator. We detect her unconventionality (freedom) through her spectacularly absurd but somehow touching, in a childlike way, speeches and dialogue with Breton. The following fanciful transaction occurs between Nadja (or rather she to herself) and narrator in a cab, she invents:

Close your eyes and say something. Anything, a number, a name. Like this (she closes her eyes): Two, two what? Two women. What do they look like? Wearing black. Where are they? In a park… And then, what are they doing? Try it, it’s so easy, why don’t you want to play? You know, that’s how I talk to myself when I’m alone, I tell myself all kinds of stories. And not only silly stories: actually, I live this way altogether.

There is a sense that she is precious to Breton precisely because she is unhinged and able to access a secret world that only she is able to fully inhabit, a place where Breton wishes to gain entry but of course cannot fully, as he establishes early on in the text that his interests are stoked by absurd stimulation/ childish play. He also suggests and perhaps hopes that Nadja will “need him” indefinitely as she is bound like an invalid to her condition, her madness, the condition of the surreal:

When I am near her I am nearer things which are near her. In her condition, she is always going to need me, one way or another, and suddenly. It would be hateful to refuse whatever she asks of me, one way or another, for she is so pure, so free of any earthly tie, and cares so little, but so marvelously, for life.

His already questionable love for Nadja, as it is based on his perception of her as a darling-magical-cripple in some sense, falters when she progressively reveals to him, what he alone fears are too many remnants of her past. By unveiling herself as not solely his “creature” or “specter” but someone who was part of others lives, she inadvertently alienates herself from the mercurial cocoon that the narrator has spun around them. She bursts his figment of her. She bursts his figment of them. He bursts. In essence, she becomes too common to adore:

I reacted with terrible violence against the over-detailed account of she gave me of certain scenes of her past life, concerning which I decided, probably quite superficially, that her dignity could not have survived entirely intact.

 Upon cutting off ties with Nadja, the narrator promptly begins to pine for her with a fiery obsession, as one would over a newly dead lover. Nadja a ghost. Nadja his concoction. Nadja the abstraction with her “fits of abstraction” who he could not live without as much as he could not live with the flesh and blood reality of her.

When he learns that his beloved was eventually committed to a sanitarium, the platform is set for Breton to offer sociopolitical commentary, which he does quite succinctly, a departure from the more esoteric language that inhabits the preceding text:

Unless you have been inside a sanitarium you do not know that madmen are made there, just as criminals are made in our reformatories. Is there anything more detestable than these systems of so-called social conservation which, for a peccadillo, some initial and exterior rejection of respectability or common sense, hurl an individual among others whose association can only be harmful to him and, above all, systematically deprive him of relations with everyone whose moral or practical sense is more firmly established than his own?

In my reading, this opinion is what drives the book. Breton elevates Nadja, the mad one, to the level of a beautiful, genius, mystical specimen of unfortunate internment. In writing her, he releases her from certain captivity while simultaneously keeping her in bondage to his memory. He champions her flights. There is a section in the book where we see Nadja asking that Breton write her into a book. He does not fail her.

The closing sentence summarizes the structure of the book and the nature of madness and longing:

Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.

What I take away from Nadja is a way to communicate the confluence of mammalian love and human madness, both visually and textually. How love and madness are always initially conjoined. The initial convulsions of an adult “crush” are hormonal and spiritual. A crush is based in fact and fiction. Exposed to dissection. Open to portent. Joyful in it’s high frivol. Obsessive until it’s inevitable death. Precisely the way Breton manages it.

I am also noting the beginning and ending lines of books. In “Nadja” the first line seems to be answered in part by the closing line. (I think that is one possible method I may employ in my own pieces as a jumpstart/ shortcut to creating a basic framework around the “filling”).

In “Nadja” Breton never seems to be able to answer with any solidity the question of who he is except to suggest that who he is, is related to who he haunts or who haunts him. He attempts to understand himself in relation to other men/women/objects in the world. These beings by virtue of purely existing (within his view) are also not-existing (already dead) and in that they become something. They become his/ him. This model which I am able to tease out of his writing appears to be somewhat based on Surrealist engagement with the Hegelian Dialectic. Those people/objects which Breton writes about are ultimately arranged in changeable and mysterious patterns and the only way to know who he, Breton is, is by looking at the ways in which he arranges them in his own mind. Simply, I would say that he is what he writes. That what he writes of and how he writes are convulsive, he haunts with his words and his words haunt back, objects in the world haunt him and he hunts them, in that animal purity is the great beauty that insists on itself and in a way gives answer to who we all are. The haunters/ haunted and the hunters/ hunted.