It has been a long wait for a new translation of André Breton’s Nadja (1928), the quintessential Surrealist narrative. Breton’s often tortuous and highly idiomatic prose style presents an enormous challenge to translators. Richard Howard’s version, which appeared in 1960, was a valiant attempt, but it suffered from too many errors. Mark Polizzotti, the author of Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (1995) as well as the translator of a number of books by the Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano, has now produced a much more readable and accurate rendering of this classic work (though even he stumbles now and then).
Yet to call Nadja a classic is in a sense to betray it, for the Surrealists despised “classics,” whether in art or politics. Officially founded in 1924 with the publication of the first “Manifesto of Surrealism” (written by Breton) and the launch of the journal La Révolution surréaliste, the Surrealist movement defined itself as a revolutionary enterprise. Its proclaimed intention was not merely to change the ways of art and literature but to transform life itself. Many of its founding members had seen the horrors of World War I up close (Breton and several others had served in the French army) and blamed their fathers’ generation for the carnage. They rejected wholesale the values most prized by their elders—rationality, logic, realism—as well as the institutions that promoted them: the family, the church, the state. “The word ‘freedom’ is the only one that still excites me [m’exalte],” Breton wrote in the first manifesto. (M’exalte can also mean “inspires me” or “transports me.”) He proposed the figures of the child, the madman, and the dreamer as his ideals, for they were the least constrained by “the bars of logic, that most hateful of prisons,” as he put it in Nadja. The Surrealists’ early experiments with “automatic writing”—in which the writer, in a half-dreaming state, allowed words to pour forth independently of any conscious control—were attempts to approximate that kind of freedom in the realm of poetry.
By the time Nadja was published, the Surrealists had expanded their conception of revolution to include the political realm and sought to ally themselves with its most visible proponent, the French Communist Party. The prestige of the PCF among intellectuals between the two world wars was considerable, but the party was always suspicious of the Surrealists, who proclaimed their allegiance not only to Marx but also to Rimbaud. “All of us seek to shift power from the hands of the bourgeoisie to those of the proletariat,” Breton wrote in 1926 in his long theoretical essay “Legitimate Defense.” “Meanwhile, it is nonetheless necessary that the experiments of the inner life continue, and do so, of course, without external or even Marxist control.”1 The party did not like that kind of talk.
For a few years, starting in 1930, the Surrealists were sufficiently eager for collaboration with the Communists to change the name of their journal from The Surrealist Revolution to Surrealism in the Service of the Revolution (SASDLR). But their continued insistence on total artistic freedom and experimentation—not to mention their celebration of “free love” and their disdain for salaried work—eventually proved an insurmountable obstacle. In 1933 they put an end to SASDLR and became the chief contributors to a glossy art journal titled Minotaure, which was aimed at a bourgeois public with a taste for the aesthetic avant-garde, not at subscribers to the Communist Party newspaper L’Humanité. The Surrealists continued to produce political tracts and collective declarations, however, which they published as pamphlets and in various press outlets.2 Breton never gave up on the idea of combining political revolution with the “revolution of the mind,” and his staunchest allies among the Surrealists followed him. Some eventually left the group and joined the party instead.
Nadja belongs to the period of the movement’s greatest energy and innovation, when it still thought of itself as actively pursuing two revolutions, artistic and political. But the book also points to the problems that continue to vex students of Surrealism, notably its relation to progressive politics and to women.
Although some critics still make the mistake of calling Nadja a novel, it is a great deal more, and other, than that. To concentrate only on the odd, in many ways tragic, love between the narrator and Nadja, his object of fascination, is to miss its truly innovative aspects. A mixture of introspective autobiography, political manifesto, treatise on aesthetics, walking tour of Paris, photo album, celebration of the irrational, reflections on how to write about oneself, and, yes, love story, Nadja is a book of parts.
Three parts, to be precise. The first, starting with the sempiternal question of autobiography, “Who am I?,” consists of fifteen segments, most of them no longer than a paragraph, as a way of answering that question. The longest of these lays out the project:
I intend to relate, in the margins of the narrative that I have yet to begin, only the most striking episodes of my life such as I can conceive of it apart from its organic plan, and indeed insofar as it is subject to chance.
The narrative he has “yet to begin” will come many pages later, but it cannot exist without the “margins,” and here Breton launches into a discussion of the importance of chance events in life. These range from the merely disconcerting, like the discovery of “sudden parallels” between apparently unrelated experiences, to the downright terrifying: “Certain coincidences that surpass our understanding…and that most often allow us to resume rational activity only if we heed our instinct for self-preservation.” He calls the former “slippage-facts” and the latter “precipice-facts.” Although he does not use the word, his descriptions correspond to Freud’s concept of the uncanny—the familiar becoming strange.
Interestingly, Breton compares precipice-facts to Surrealist texts, those products of automatic writing over which the writer has no control. We know from various accounts that some of the Surrealists’ experiments in that area, such as writing under hypnosis, came to a panicked end. The challenge was to harness the energy of the irrational but not to let it carry you over the precipice.
“Do not expect from me an exact account of what I’ve had the opportunity to experience in this domain,” Breton warns the reader. He will merely provide a few examples, “recalling [them] without undue effort.” He even identifies the moment of writing: August 1927, in the Manoir d’Ango, a manor house turned hostel in Normandy. From there flows a series of free associations linked to people and places in Paris, where Breton and his friends loved to wander. One favorite place was the flea market, where he went in search of “outmoded, broken, unusable, almost incomprehensible” objects; another was the bustling area of the grands boulevards between the Opéra and the Gare du Nord. He also describes, at great length, a play he once saw in a theater that no longer exists, which had made him “really descend into the lower depths of the mind.” The Deranged featured two women, the headmistress of a girls’ school and her drug-addicted lover, who murder a young pupil (offstage) as part of a sado-erotic ritual. Breton, who was enthralled by these two “superb beasts of prey,” writes that he no longer recalls the play’s ending but hopes that they escaped punishment. He is especially taken with the character of the addict, Solange, played by an actress whose photo he reproduces on a neighboring page.
Does this mean that Breton was in favor of drug addiction and sadistic murder? No, only that he was fascinated by the spectacle of female madness, as performed on the stage. In fact, the two women in the play are arrested and diagnosed. We know this because Breton published the script years later in another Surrealist magazine.3 In Nadja, he chose to forget that ending.
He concludes the first part by circling back toward the opening question of who he is. He hopes that the preceding examples will have shown the reader “the uselessness, or at least the grave inadequacy, of any supposedly rigorous self-reckoning…that demands sustained concentration.” The revelation of our life’s meaning, which will most likely be the product of pure chance, is “not to be earned by work” (his italics).
Breton’s rejection of the “moral value of work” may make one wonder just how serious his commitment to the working class was. In January 1927 he actually joined the Communist Party, but he soon realized that he couldn’t possibly do the kinds of assignments they gave him, like writing a report on the coal-mining industry in Italy. Still, if we take as his point that work is often mind-numbing, a grim necessity of life, then he is right to deny that it has any redeeming quality. Better to face the bitter truth, or as he puts it: “I prefer, once again, to walk in darkness rather than believe I’m walking in daylight.” (Here, incidentally, Polizzotti stumbles. He translates the sentence as “I’d prefer, once again, to walk in darkness while believing I’m walking in daylight,” which completely undermines Breton’s meaning. Richard Howard’s version, while a bit awkward, is more faithful: “I prefer, once again, walking by night to believing myself a man who walks by daylight.”)
Two questions arise at this point. If Breton hated work, what did he and his wife (he was married at the time to Simone Kahn Breton, from a German Jewish family) live on? And is it not work to write and publish a beautiful poem or a fine prose narrative like Nadja? Unlike some other members of the Surrealist group, Breton had no family wealth to rely on, but he had worked for years as an art adviser to the millionaire collector Jacques Doucet and had also collected artworks on his own. After he lost his job, he and Simone lived frugally, occasionally selling a painting to make ends meet. Eventually he earned enough from his writings.
As for the question of whether writing was work, Breton would probably have said no, as long as it was done “without undue effort.” He wrote the first two parts of Nadja in just two weeks, but he did so while alone and doing almost nothing else. And in Paris he spent every morning at his desk before heading out in search of revelatory encounters. Toward the end of Nadja, he states that he admires “any man” (Polizzotti writes “anyone,” but Breton wrote “tout homme” and I think he did mean “any man”) who “has time to prepare something like a book,” which implies that he is not such a man. The portrait of him two pages later very much resembles an author photo, however, and Nadja was certainly a book he prepared and that the prestigious firm Gallimard published, to immediate literary recognition. But Breton was adept at not recognizing things that didn’t align with his ideas.
This brings us at last to his encounter with the woman at the center of the book, which was a life-changing event, if for no other reason than that it led to the book itself. It was also close to being one of those precipice-facts that he described in the beginning. The second and longest part recounts the story.
On the afternoon of October 4, 1926, while out on one of his wanderings near the Opéra, after he had stopped in the Humanité bookstore to buy Trotsky’s latest work (the following year Trotsky would become persona non grata to official Communists), he noticed a young, slight, poorly dressed woman walking toward him, head held high. Her proud bearing stood out so strikingly among the crowd of workers heading home (“It was not yet these folks who would wage the Revolution,” Breton remarks) that he immediately struck up a conversation with her. Her “dazzling” eyes reminded him of the actress who had played Solange in The Deranged.
Over drinks in a café, Nadja (a name she had chosen) tells Breton that she is from the northern city of Lille, which she had left a few years earlier after a failed love affair with a student. Her life in Paris is somewhat precarious, but she hasn’t told her parents that. When she mentions that she likes to sit in the métro among workers, who seem like decent people, Breton launches into a tirade that echoes his earlier comments. He refuses any interest in workers, he tells her, if they do not revolt. Freedom is the only thing that matters to him. Nadja listens, taking it all in. Then, in the street once more, she tells him that she sees a great future for him, a star toward which he is heading and that he will reach: “It’s like the heart of a heartless flower.” At this, Breton writes, “I am very moved.” They agree to see each other again, and he promises to bring her some of his books, even though he “strongly” advises her against reading them: “Life is other than what one writes.”
Over the next eight days, Breton and Nadja see each other every day but one. She tells him a few details of her life, such as her earlier involvement with two men, one of whom she calls her “Special Friend.” He talks about her with his wife and friends and takes long rambling walks with her through nighttime Paris. Her intuitive insights into the works he has given her enchant him, as if she were a native-born Surrealist, and he marvels at her uncanny ability to foresee certain events or to project herself into figures from the past—such as Marie-Antoinette awaiting execution in the Conciergerie.
But he becomes aware quite soon that she is in a fragile mental state (one night she sees a flaming hand on the Seine, then taunts him, “You think I’m very sick, don’t you?”) and in desperate need of money, which he gives her. He begins to worry about what he ought to do, since he knows she needs care and he is not in love with her. She, on the other hand, becomes more and more enamored of him and sees him as a kind of god. Perhaps to keep his attention, she begins to draw symbolic pictures that she interprets for him and engages in long soliloquies, but he is starting to get bored. On the night of October 12, after hours of wandering, they end up taking the train to the suburb of Saint-Germain-en-Laye and spend the night in a hotel.
Here the day-by-day account ends, as Breton takes his distance and begins to analyze. Who was the “true Nadja,” he asks himself. Was she the “always inspired and inspiring creature” seeking experience in the street or “the poorest and most vulnerable of women”—a streetwalker, in sum? As if to chase that thought away, he reproduces some of her spontaneous utterances, which resemble lines of Surrealist poetry, and several of her drawings, which prove that she is not ordinary. But he bristles that she pays no heed to things that matter to him, like punctuality or not behaving inappropriately in public.
Then comes the shocker: “A few months ago, they came to tell me Nadja had gone mad.” After engaging in “eccentricities” in her hotel, she had been interned in an insane asylum. This provokes a screed against asylums on Breton’s part, after which he asks himself more questions. Did he perhaps contribute to her madness by encouraging her to pursue freedom at all costs, to the point of “passing her head, then her arm, through the bars of logic, that most hateful of prisons”? It had not occurred to him that
she might lose or had already lost that minimal common sense which dictates that, all things considered, my friends and I stand up when a flag goes past, for instance, merely refraining from saluting it.
He had read her letters “the same way [he] read all sorts of surrealist texts,” not as cries of distress.
Breton and his friends knew when to pull back from the precipice. Nadja had thrown herself over it.
After this, the very short third part feels almost like an anticlimax, but it tells us a lot. Breton wrote it in December 1927, by which time Nadja was a distant memory. He had been planning to end the book with a theoretical reflection on beauty, but in the meantime he had met a woman (identified here only as “You”) with whom he had fallen in love and to whom these pages are addressed. Breton presents her as the long-awaited being who had been announced by several “premonitory” figures, among them Nadja. “All I know is that this replacement of persons stops with you, because nothing can replace you,” he rhapsodizes.
He does say a few words about beauty in the end, however. His new love is like beauty itself, neither static like the Baudelairean “dream of stone” nor dynamic like a runaway horse. Rather, beauty is like a train constantly “lurching from the Gare de Lyon” but never leaving—or perhaps, I freely associate, like a man teetering on the edge of a precipice but taking care not to fall in. Breton calls this kind of beauty a “saccade,” a jolt or shock or convulsion that may be akin to death (or to orgasm) but only by analogy. “Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or not at all,” he declares in the often-quoted final sentence.
What does all of this tell us about Surrealism and women, politics, and art? As a start, we must note that the “You” of Nadja, Suzanne Muzard, did not last very long in Breton’s life. At least two other “mad loves”—that is what he called these revelations, amour fou—followed, each of which received its own book. (You can read about them in Polizzotti’s biography.) But it’s too easy to wax ironic about Breton’s blind spots and self-deceptions, as well as about the “all-male club” that was the Surrealist group in its early days. Women too often functioned as “inspirers” and muses, leading men to self-discovery while remaining silent. Yetthe liberatory and revolutionary message of Surrealism resonated among women artists and writers who were welcomed into the group in the 1930s and later. Leonora Carrington, Lee Miller, Leonor Fini, Méret Oppenheim, Dorothea Tanning, and many others got their start in Surrealist exhibitions and publications. Some developed fully as artists only after leaving the group, but their early welcome was crucial.4
Nadja, unfortunately, was not one of them. For many years her identity remained such a closely guarded secret that some critics claimed Breton had invented her. We now know that she was a young woman named Léona-Camille-Ghislaine Delcourt, born in 1902 (when they met, she was twenty-four and he was thirty), who died in an insane asylum near Lille in 1941 at age thirty-nine. At the auction of Breton’s estate in 2003, after the death of his third wife (he died in 1966), one lot consisted of twenty-seven letters written by Delcourt, signed Nadja; they are now at the Jacques Doucet Library in Paris and are available online. Many are undated, written on stationery from various hotels and cafés, but Breton kept scrupulous records and wrote the dates in pencil on the envelopes.
The letters show a woman in deep distress, at times homeless, aware of the significant class difference between her and Breton, alternating between reproaches at his indifference and effusive declarations of admiration and love. Occasionally, they are heartrending—and poetic. “It’s raining again, my room is dark, my heart in an abyss, my sanity is dying,” she writes at the end of an undated letter (without an envelope), probably in November 1926. But the letter started with a nonpoetic plea for help: Could Breton help her out again with money, or better still by getting her a job with one of his friends? “Rest assured, I will be discreet.” We don’t know what Breton replied, if anything, but more letters from her followed, and he did see her a number of times before her internment in March 1927.
Can we blame him for not doing more, for never visiting her in the asylum near Paris where she was first taken? We can. But we can also draw a broader lesson from this failure. On the very first day they met, when she asked him to bring her some of his books, he sought to discourage her from reading them, he tells us: “Life is other than what one writes.” Did he actually say that to her, or is it an aside? The editor of his Complete Works reports that he added the sentence on the proofs, so it may have occurred to him only while writing. Later he says that he read Nadja’s letters as Surrealist texts, although it is obvious to anyone reading them today that they are “life,” not “what one writes.” But if life is other than what one writes, then what do we make of the Surrealist calls for “a new way of living,” for a social and political revolution as well as a new kind of poetry and art? Was it all just words?
Some have claimed that Surrealism died when it moved from the street into the salon and became simply one more artistic style. Yet it inspired artists and poets all over the world, some of whom created actual revolutions. The African and Martinican poets—Léopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and others—who led anticolonial struggles after the war were in Paris in the 1930s. One of the journals they founded was titled Legitimate Defense, after Breton’s essay. Legitimate Defense was mainly Martinican but was followed almost immediately by another journal in which Senghor participated. (Breton met Césaire in Martinique on his way to the US in 1941 and became a friend and supporter of the poet and his cause.) The Whitney Museum’s recent exhibition “Sixties Surreal” argued convincingly for the continuity between historical Surrealism and the “psychosexual, fantastical, and revolutionary tendencies” (as the curators put it) of American art during those years. The Surrealists’ leading idea, that life must be reinvented to create a freer world and that art should be a part of that effort, lives on.