Nadja and Breton
To behave irrationally, amorally, and therefore purely, was one of the ideals of early surrealism. No one was so adapted to living an authentic surrealist life as the madman, saluted on many occasions by the surrealists as the guardian of man's integrity. Associating this heroic figure with that of woman, equally prized as a source of revelation, André Breton and Louis Aragon joined in 1928 to do homage to the female patients of Charcot who had been victims of hysteria, now seen as a glorious and magical state of vision. Already in 1920, Breton had anticipated the doctrine of amour fou when he wrote 'On peut aimer plus qu'aucune autre une femme insensée.' It is therefore not surprising that Breton should have been immediately attracted when he first met a mentally disturbed girl calling herself Nadja on the Place Lafayette on the 4th October 1926. At once concerning himself with the girl to the apparent exclusion of all other preoccupations, Breton embarked on a relationship of a more than casual significance [which he related in the book Nadja].
What was it about Nadja that attracted Breton? He tells us that he was intrigued at first by her exaggerated eye-shadow, which is obviously intended to stress that she is different from other people. Breton soon gets to know in what way she is original. Nadja lives thoughtlessly, even amorally, delighting in an irresponsible way of life devoted to caprice and a certain frivolity (légèreté), which Breton begins to think might be nothing less than an unmistakable sign of true liberty. (p. 185)
Breton sees in Nadja a source of revelation …, a fairy around whom there is always an aura of magic. She is a perfect catalyst for his surrealist sensibility, and therefore the type of woman he likes most. He compares her to Mélusine, who symbolizes the Romantic ideal of woman as intermediary between man and the secret forces of life, about which he was to write at length in Arcane 17…. She impresses him as a kind of ideal surrealist woman…. (p. 186)
Behind the enigmatic marvels offered by the sibyl, behind the delightful tricks of the fairy, there looms at last the plain fact that Nadja is going mad. Breton may have realized as much at a fairly early stage…. [Was] Nadja more than an object of passionless curiosity to Breton? Was he involved in the development of her madness? Could he have helped her; did he let her down? Should he have intervened when she was put in the asylum? Finally, are his actions defensible on conventional, or again on surrealist terms? (p. 187)
[Breton] is a dispassionate observer who later writes up his observations with solemn pretentions to clinical objectivity. Breton is far from falling in love with Nadja in the manner prescribed in L'Amour fou or in Arcane 17, where he employs the language of mediumism in speaking of 'l'entrée en transe' inseparable from total commitment to love. Faced with what ought to have been an irresistible combination of madness and beauty, he remains detached, his curiosity being almost scientific. Without losing his lucidity, he humours Nadja in her surrealist utterances: he copies down what she dictates…. [So] intent was he on noting down her statements as a kind of objective poetry, that he failed to realize their significance as pathetic appeals from a subjective being. (p. 190)
In the course of the book Breton asks himself whether Nadja is lovable, and concludes frankly that what attracts him is less her person than that which she reveals to him…. He is interested in her for what she can teach him about the nature of surreality; she is only the medium, without attraction per se. Furthermore he cannot, as it were, fall in love with an oracle, if it is agreed that the woman one falls in love with must cease to be an enigma….
Breton may finally have resisted Nadja's erotic attraction because sexual advances would have compromised the validity of the oracle. One senses here a slightly monkish tendency to see carnal renunciation as a guarantee of spiritual revelation….
[Nadja] represented surrealism itself, that with which Breton 'coincided,' rather than the 'Other' whom he could adore. (p. 191)
The point at which Breton began to feel ill at ease, the point after which it became impossible for things to come out right, must have been when he found his curiosity for Nadja's eccentricity turning into horror of madness. Certain episodes related in Nadja show that Breton is prone to panic when experiences outstrip him…. It would seem that Breton cannot entirely subdue an irrational fear caused by certain manifestations of the surreal—even when his conscious mind, intent on gathering documentation for his book, tells him he should delight in them. In the company of Nadja, one senses Breton's instinctive recoil from the possible contagion of madness. The situation is ambivalent in that he is both horrified and fascinated, a bourgeois in what is curiously an irrational response to madness, a surrealist in the way he might rationalize the experience…. The balance of attraction and repulsion is a strange one, and it says much for the complexity of Breton that such ambiguities could co-exist within his mind. (p. 195)
[Finally] the fact of her madness became an inescapable cause of rupture, and one can hardly admire Breton for his pompous statement that it his contempt for psychiatric pomp which prevents him from finding out what has happened to Nadja…. (p. 196)
Breton's ultimate defence—and his use of the word défense constitutes a recognition of our right to think in terms of an accusation—is that there is no possibility of drawing a demarcation line between sanity and lunacy…. Demarcation line there may not be for a strict surrealist, but Breton on his own admission posits a norm of sanity, 'unsens acceptable de la réalité.' This very phrase might have been ridiculed by the surrealist group had it been used by a member of the sinister psychiatric profession, seen as a kind of mind-police. Used by Breton, it betrays a reluctance to pursue the 'inacceptable' view of reality, which at any other time would count as a good definition of surreality.
The contradictions in Breton's plea are so many reflections of what I feel to be an antagonism within his own personality. He is on the one hand a free-thinking surrealist, at the orders of inspiration alone, and on the other a hesitant puritan, still bound by the prejudices of a bourgeois background…. Somewhere along the path that Nadja follows, from non-conformity through eccentricity to madness, something reactionary in Breton's character, some psychological defence-mechanism perhaps, makes him opt for security of mind and so equate himself with normality—that normality which surrealism had sworn always to challenge. Our judgment of Breton need therefore not be that he failed Nadja as a lover, but that he failed himself as a surrealist. (pp. 196-97)
There is a sense in which the failure to achieve a profound relationship of trust with Nadja coincides with the failure to achieve a unified work. Nadja starts well, gathering momentum with the hors d'oeuvre of the first part, a selection of surrealist anecdotes which serve to whet the reader's appetite for things surreal. It becomes more purposeful and coherent as Breton goes on to tell about Nadja. The diary form provides excitement, conveying an effect of immediacy and the sense of everything being possible. But when Nadja fades from view, the book loses this dramatic intensity, and becomes weighed down by Breton's explanations as to why the surrealist experience did not work out. Both relationship and story peter out into a shapeless monologue whose mood ranges from the petulant to the hermetic. This sad epilogue affects the whole account, seen in retrospect, and, with the 'clinical' objectivity aimed at and to some extent achieved by the author, produces an impression of emptiness.
Yet somehow this emptiness is not the final impression. I do not think we need feel completely disillusioned about surrealism by the end of the book. Despite our disappointment in Breton's moral abandonment of Nadja, we at least recognize his intellectual honesty in writing about her. Perhaps he did so to atone in some way, or to fulfill a request of Nadja, who once asked him to write a novel about her…. I feel that something still survives of the adventure, so that the emptiness is not vacancy but expectancy—the sense of marvellous possibilities, of opportunities to interrogate life and disclose new meanings in the humdrum big-city environment. Fragile though the relationship was between Nadja and Breton, something can still move us in Breton's recollection of its illuminating force…. Curiously ambiguous though we have seen Breton's attitude to be, the surrealist message still comes through. For even though we witness Breton's unfortunate dissociation from the message, the lasting charm of the book surely shows that we respond less to the hesitations of the reporter than to the manifestations of surrealist genius that in spite of himself he transmits. (pp. 197-98)
Roger Cardinal, "Nadja and Breton," in University of Toronto Quarterly (© University of Toronto Press 1972; reprinted by permission of University of Toronto Press), Vol. XLI, No. 3, Spring, 1972, pp. 185-99.
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