“I cannot be reached”: Aching desire of text and construction of amorous object
Hailed as the ‘quintessential Surrealist romance’ (Polizzotti 2), Nadja (originally published in 1928) is an experimental novel and a project of identity and self-discovery via the act of associative and non-linear writing. Breton finished the book shortly after a failed affair with a woman named Léona Camile Delacourt who, just like Nadja, was eventually institutionalized in a psychiatric sanitarium.
For many surrealists working in a wide scope of mediums, including literature, theater and cinema, the main focus and means of subjective experience became the issue desire which is intrinsically linked with the rise of psychoanalysis. The emancipation from the rational thought, logic and positivism via the juxtaposition of dreams and reality became the ultimate artistic goal which was supposed to manifest in a social revolutionary upheaval. As the founding father of surrealist ideology, Breton was heavily invested in Freud’s writing and this ultimately ended with a resolute split from Dadaists and Tristan Tzara who condemned any kind of scholastic discipline as a bourgeois means of subordination via the academia. By the time Second Manifesto of Surrealism was published, Breton in his writing has incorporated central themes of love, desire and madness as the crux for the surrealist production. For Breton, love in relation to creativity was the fundamental driving force which ‘corresponds in every particular to the word passionate, that is to say presupposes election in all the rigor of that term, it opens the gates of a world where by definition it can no longer be a question of evil, of a fall, or of sin.’ As the surrealist revolution was supposed to begin on a individual level, Breton envisioned love as ‘the supreme edification of man’ via freed desire. Furthermore, Breton’s approach to desire and love, as for many other surrealists, was directly linked with the idiosyncratic treatment of the female figure as a site of paradoxical, mystical forces – ‘In Surrealism, woman is to be loved and honoured as the great promise, a promise that still exists even after it has been kept.’ Woman ‘bears the sign as the Chosen One, which is there only for a single individual to read (each of us must discover it for himself).’ The valorized idea of the female figure in the surrealist production becomes a lifetime quest whose abandonment for Breton is ‘one of those few unatonable crimes that a man can commit in the course of his life.’
From the very start, André’s desire which leads to falling in love with Nadja is guided by the core surrealist principles already delineated in the first part of the book as well as in Manifestoes of Surrealism:
I have always, beyond belief, hoped to meet, at night and in a woods, a beautiful naked woman or rather, since such a wish once expressed means nothing, I regret, beyond belief, not having met her. Imagining such an encounter is not, after all, so fantastic: it might happen. […] I adore this situation which of all situations is the one where I most likely to have lacked presence of mind.
The lack of presence of mind and the importance of chance and accident becomes the formula for wandering Breton who always seeks self-recognition in the streets of Paris. As the cultural capital of the early 20th century, Paris becomes a resourceful locus for the wandering surrealist. With its cafés, tramways, strolls and shopping arcades, Paris provides ‘the Surrealist flâneurs with aimless, infinite promenades and chance encounters’ which provides the artist with ‘new literary language of erotic and illogical dreamscapes and collages that celebrate urban civilization, explore the unconscious.’ André is being driven by the desire for chances and accidents which are inevitably linked with the erotic desire for the female figure. Dismissing effort and conscious intent, André, the surrealist flâneur, advocates a receptive of form of passivity and even proclaims himself ‘the object’ of ‘things which occasionally happened me, reaching me in unsuspected ways.’
The prefigured desire eventually leads him to encounter Nadja. Right from the start, André is enchanted by her beauty and the mysterious aura she radiates: ‘What was so extraordinary about what was happening in those eyes? What was it they reflected – some obscure distress and at the same time some luminous pride?’ It is important to note that firstly and foremost Nadja for the protagonist is an object of curiosity inclined by the surrealist agenda. The figure of Nadja is ontologically accidental and violent – the parallel runs between the surrealist tenet of observing the real world via automatic, unconscious manner, and Andre meeting Nadja in an arbitrary fashion. The enigmatic and esoteric nature of Nadja unfolds during this short period of their romance during which André gets to observe and marvel at the things she sees. She shares her vision about the burning hand flowing over Seine, predicts the colour of the light in the window in the Place Dauphiné and talks about the reappearing soldier helmet outside the moving train window. The true surrealist perceiver in the novel is not André the protagonist, but Nadja the irrational. The protagonist immediately attaches himself to Nadja via the desire of self-fulfilment as a creator seeking to understand these juxtaposed images. Unlike André, Nadja is fully engaged with these moments, something that for André is left to observe and record for the future reference. In other words, André fails to see what Nadja is seeing and he remedies the failure with the method of telling he knows best – writing. The female in this surrealist narrative becomes the impenetrable enigma, an ultimate experience, the sine qua non for artistic inspiration, thus his love for her grows to be purely poetic and dangerously idealistic.
The problem of their bypassing desires towards each other and the foreshadowed tragic outcome of their romance becomes more prominent when André gets to know Nadja better. The central quandary of the novel is the paradox of proximity to Nadja that the protagonist experiences – the closer he gets to her, the more extreme alienation he has to undergo.
Who is the real Nadja – the one who told me she had wandered all night long in the Forest of Fontainbleau with an archaeologist who was looking for some stone remains which, certainly, there was plenty of time to find by daylight – but suppose it was this man’s passion! – I mean, is the real Nadja this always inspired and inspiring creature who enjoyed being nowhere but in the streets, the only region of valid experiences for her, in the street, accessible to interrogation from any human being launched upon some great chimera, or (why not admit it) the one who sometimes fell, since, after all, others had felt authorized to speak to her, had been able to see in her only the most wretched of women, and the least protected? Sometimes I reacted with terrible violence against the over-detailed account 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.
This scene portrays the distinctive nature of André’s disposition towards Nadja as he displays jealousy and possessiveness while at the same time distancing himself from Nadja as an autonomous subject, threatening his image of her. The confusion of the ‘real’ Nadja becomes the core issue as she exhibits her own agency which in the scene manifests in spending time with other men and in having her own past, history. The protagonist has so far loved Nadja on the contingency of her staying a kind of arbitrary signifier which acts as form which is ready-to-hand in order to fill an image (the object of surrealist desire manifesting in the fantastical juxtapositions and accidents). With the introduction of other men and her personal history, Nadja ceases to be nobody, a placeholder for André’s notion of beauty and subjective truth. The reality of her being in the world outside of his physical, temporal and aesthetic reach disgusts the protagonist, resulting in ‘the violence against the over-detailed account.’ Ultimately, the desire of André is not to learn about Nadja as a person but to understand her as a poetic sign. This is only possible via a considerate distance which is being obfuscated as Nadja lets him in into her persona and she begins to become demystified. Further in the book, he retrospectively reflects, ‘how many times, unable to endure it any longer, desperate to restore her to a true conception of her worth, I virtually fled from her presence hoping to find her, the next day, as she could be when she herself was not desperately blaming my strictness and seeking forgiveness.’ The paradox – repelling while getting close – arises and the tragedy of learning perturbs the protagonist. His desire is a representative case of love that, based on possessive image and idealism, obscures the subjectivity and authenticity of the beloved.
It can be even taken further and addressed whether André acts morally just by treating Nadja’s irrationality as a productive, esoteric and enriching force rather than a dangerous mental delusion which eventually leads her to being institutionalized. The misrecognition of Nadja’s malady is rooted in the perfectly centered idea that surrealism was in the process of celebrating the encounter with the enigmatic in the everyday and it gave the protagonist a safe distance to eulogize it.
It is also highly ironic how Nadja cryptically hints at the failure of their romance and her own collapse throughout the book but these clues do not seem to reach the protagonist. On October 10, she says: ‘André? André? … You will write a novel about me. I’m sure you will. Don’t say you won’t. Be careful: everything fades, everything vanishes. Something must remain of us…’ Another significant instance occurs when Nadja identifies herself with the figure of Melusina, the Celtic fairy tale character who after numerous metamorphoses was forced to flee. The protagonist fails to read these signs which again refers back to his own prefigured image of her which is illusory.
As a love story, Nadja does not reveal much about Nadja herself. The book bears the title after the beloved and yet the fundamental question framing the whole book is ‘Who am I?’, a question which was supposed to be answered by the desirous quest for the female form. It is crucial at this point to acknowledge the fact that Andre is an author who is writing retrospectively, thinking over his own account of the enigma he sought to possess. The hermeneutic issue of understanding Nadja, which is palpable and prominent during the reading experience, for Andre now stands out as the main problem. There is a dualistic nature to the conundrum that he is struggling with at the moment of writing – how do I address the difficulty of reaching the true essence of Nadja and how do I keep this account valid via a representation, in this case, the text. The ‘reality’ of Nadja, if there was ever one, lies somewhere in the signs, in the mesh of the text itself and André does not seek to explain it to the reader. The initial claim of ‘being interested only in books left ajar like doors’ resonates in the end as the only valid answer. Looking back, André senses that Nadja’s intricacies, spontaneity and madness merged with her history eventually obfuscated his own desire and he leaves the story untouched, ‘leaving everything standing’ as it is.
With all its volatility and signs, Nadja’s irrationality and mysticism reigns as a wholly literary force.