Eli Putterman

One of André Bréton’s primary goals in Nadja is portraying the difficulty of conveying meaning through language. (Perhaps unfortunately for the reader, the means by which he accomplishes this is through language itself, which leads one to recall the famous Modernist understatement, “The ease of the reader’s experience is not our primary concern.”) The disconnect between signified and signifier, between innate sensory perception and verbal depiction is emphasized in Nadja through grammatically and conceptually convoluted sentences that Bréton is often forced into in order to accurately translate his thoughts onto paper. In contrast, the photographs accompanying the text offer a shortcut past the torrent of verbiage.

Apparently plot and narrative were also low on the list of Surrealist novelistic priorities, for Nadja is told as a series of disconnected episodes without an immediately clear chronology connecting them. The central story begins fifty pages into the novel and ends some fifteen pages before the final words, the remainder (and quite a bit of the middle as well) being occupied by the author’s dense and difficult Surrealist ruminations. But a plot can nevertheless be extracted: boy meets girl, boy hits it off with girl, boy and girl have many intense philosophical discussions punctuated by intrusions of reality, girl goes crazy. The boy is the narrator, the girl the eponymous Nadja, whose name is derived from the Russian word for hope – but only the beginning.

Nadja is the only recurring fixture in the sea of arbitrariness that passes for a narrative, the only measure of coherence in a roiling mass of human experience. But while some utterly random elements of the plot, such as the hotel where the narrator stayed in Paris, are presented to the reader in photographs, Nadja herself remains unseen. This omission is itself the most significant structural element of the novel.

Unlike the concrete objects (and people) the author encounters throughout the course of the novel, which are susceptible to observation within the normal framework of human perception, Nadja cannot be transmitted through a photograph. Language that artificial constraint on expression against which the Surrealists railed, is the only medium through which the concept of Nadja can be conveyed. Bréton faces a dilemma in portraying Nadja: the direct signification of a photograph is unable to capture true transcendence, but neither can the artificial construct of human language. He is forced, therefore, into circumlocution and indirection, and his final epiphany, in which he recognizes Nadja as the embodiment of the Surrealist ideal, imagination without constraint or inhibition, is as densely worded as the rest of the novel. He becomes free to perceive reality without glasses; we, the readers, remain, alas, stuck with Bréton’s literary conceits.