Nadja - Andre Breton

 NADJA - ANDRE BRETON

Andre Breton, founder of the Surrealist movement and he of the famous credo 'Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all' as declared in his novel Nadja. You only live once apparently so why not have a read of it whilst here? In for a penny in for a pound, as they say. Half-way through, however, and I'm thinking 'Hang on a minute, this is near-unreadable, a near-incomprehensible exercise in tortured English' though inadvertently it's also an insight into the way Breton's mind works. It's all over the place and not particularly pretty. Scant attention is paid to such things as 'Does any of this make any sense?' or 'Is this the way to compose a sentence?' and is instead a kind of literary free-form jazz.

'How can I make myself understood?' Breton asks. Well, by trying to not be deliberately misunderstood would be a start and I say that with some qualification as someone who has read James Joyce, William Burroughs and Kathy Acker - writers who are not particularly renowned for being 'easy'. Writers who could be said to have committed crimes against the English language but in doing so still conveyed meaning and brilliance. I speak as someone who has read Paul Auster whose writing can be so boring as to test the patience of the most determined of readers. Not that I'm saying Nadja is boring or even experimental, it's just that it's so willfully obtuse to the point of being impenetrable. 

From what I can gather the book is autobiographical and is about a writer (Breton) meeting a young girl (called Nadja) in Paris and becoming besotted with her. What is unclear is the nature of the relationship between the two and whether the girl is just out to make a bit of money from the writer by her playing up to his expectations and desires, or is it the writer seducing the girl for his own ends through his artistic credentials and the money in his wallet?

It doesn't much matter in the end because during the course of their relationship they both come across as being just as pretentious as each other. It's telling, however, that in the end the girl vanishes and having been told by his friends 'She's mad, you know' the writer thinks maybe she's been committed to an asylum but he's too scared to investigate further, so writes a book instead: Nadja.

'There is no use being alive if one must work,' Breton writes and therein is the pivot on which Breton's elitism and privilege turns, adopting a position of splendid isolation where he freely ponders and pontificates to his heart's content without having to worry about if anything makes sense because to him the senselessness is the sense. Hence the notion of 'petrifying coincidence' and Surrealist thought. Everything, including the lives of others and such notions as 'communication' is rendered therefore as just so much grist to the mill. The problem being, unfortunately, that there is nothing tangible in the end to hold onto and all his words are nothing but grains of sand falling through fingers.

John Serpico