Nadja (Penguin Modern Classics)

Product Information

The idea of the character Nadja, this ideal, is elusive; yet, for a moment the narrator seems to capture her love. She is the embodiment of the surrealist artist movement, an entity that defies convention; she has her own reasons, but they are beyond the conceptions of others. She is an altogether different creature with her strange visions, her air of eccentricity, rapid changes in mood and, perhaps one might term them, delusions. The love the narrator harbours her is nothing short of pure; he sees this being, this woman of undefinable constructs, and is enamoured. A final word on Nadja herself. Who was the troubled and ultimately tragic woman who became the subject of one of Surrealism’s most enduring books? In Mark Polizzotti’s Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (1995), Nadja was revealed to English-speaking readers as Léona Camile Ghislaine D. — despite his exhaustive efforts (it’s a huge book) he had found it impossible to discover her last name. She was born near Lille in 1902. She’d had a baby as a teenager and left her daughter with her parents to go to Paris, where she lived a precarious existence. In Nadja (1928), André Breton’s great surrealist novel, his autobiographical narrator at one point describes bringing a pile of books to a bar where he has made an arrangement to meet Nadja herself, who is fast becoming the object of his strange, not to say obsessive libidinal and spiritual investments. This pile of books includes a copy of Les pas perdus (1924), The Lost Steps, Breton’s first collection of essays, which he no doubt brings, along with the first Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), in an attempt both to educate her and aggrandize himself. “Lost steps?” Nadja exclaims on seeing its title. “But there’s no such thing!” 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. Garrison, Jim. 1999. John Dewey, Jacques Derrida, and the metaphysics of presence. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 35: 346–372.

Nadja, originally published in France in 1928, is the first and perhaps best Surrealist romance ever written, a book which defined that movement's attitude toward everyday life. The passage on the Manoir is immediately followed by a mention of the statue of Etienne Dolet in the Place Maubert, which “has always fascinated me and induced unbearable discomfort (“un insupportable malaise”).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. 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) 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.

Breton, André. 1969. Manifestoes of surrealism. Trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 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.

To the extent that it is rewarding to ask what Breton thought was photographable—what could, or should be photographed—it is interesting to consider things that are not photographed in the book.