Talk:Nadja (novel)

Never mind, nothing to see here... --carelesshx _talk 20:19, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

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This article was automatically assessed because at least one article was rated and this bot brought all the other ratings up to at least that level. BetacommandBot 07:33, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

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BetacommandBot (talk) 15:23, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Critical

This entry is too short. The relationship of 'Breton' with Nadja is complex, and the reasons for writing the book afterwards have been interpreted in a variety of ways, not least that Breton thought he had to write a book in order to commemorate the woman he himself had killed. In the sense that he forced her to express and think about things she did not want to know in so much detail, leading her to be brought to a psychiatric institution, where she died. Breton had trained in psychiatry, there is no excuse for this oversight and lack of respect for fragile woman's sensitivity. Also, in the third part, Nadja is suddenly no longer of interest to him and he leaves her story to one side. It is admirable that he let so many things perspire through his pitiless self-characterisation, and it is amazing that he gives this to understand, without saying it in a straightforward way (That is surrealism). Many other things about the relationship between the 'Breton' character and Nadja are left unsaid, or partially said. The photographs suggest something, so to speak, 'bodily' going on, but the text is all spiritual. The money question is broached, then not pursued further. Nadja's drawings, he shows the reader, are made without her knowing how to draw, but his photographs were made by Man Ray and are purposefully un-flashy. There is something about art not needing schooling and high technique implied here, but then the implication isn't fully realised because Breton is a very eloquent writer. He claims he is writing a journal, like many surrealists claim they wrote 'automatically', which is far less exciting than they think, in my humble opinion. But none of this could have been done without the extensive training that came before. Whether or not this training is rejected, the training exists, and Nadja's attempts truly without training, that is a whole different story. The 'Breton' character, again, emerges in a bad light, and Breton is known to have been an unkind, exclusive, authoritarian leader of the surrealist group, not unknowingly, as it seems, which makes things even more surreal. Fluttermoth (talk) 09:07, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Summary

The narrator, named André, ruminates on a number of Surrealist principles and ideologies, before ultimately commencing (around a third of the way through the novel) on a narrative account, generally linear, of his brief (10-day) affair with the titular character Nadja (whose is named so “because in Russian it’s the beginning of the word hope, and because it’s only the beginning,” but which might also evoke the Spanish ‘Nadie,’ which means ‘No one’). The narrator becomes obsessed with this woman with whom he, upon a chance encounter while walking through the street, strikes up conversation immediately. He becomes reliant on daily rendezvous, occasionally culminating in romance (a kiss here and there). His true fascination with her, however, is her vision of the world, which is often provoked through a discussion of the work of a number of Surrealist artists, including himself. Her understanding of existence subverts the rigidly authoritarian quotidian (and it is later discovered that she is mad and belongs in a sanitarium). After she begins narrating to the narrator over an account filled with too many details over her past life, she in a sense becomes demystified, and the narrator realizes that he cannot continue the relationship.

In the remaining quarter of the text, he distances himself from her corporeal form and descends into a meandering rumination on her absence, such that one wonders if it is more her absence that inspires him than her presence. (It is, after all, the reification and materialization of her as an ordinary person that he ultimately despises and cannot tolerate to the point of inducing tears.) There is something about the closeness once held between the narrator and Nadja that indicated a depth beyond the limits of conscious rationality, waking logic, and sane operations of the everyday—there is something essentially “mysterious, improbable, unique, bewildering” about her, reinforcing the notion that the propinquity serves only to remind him of her impenetrability and her eventual recession into absence is the fundamental concern of this text, such that she may live freely in his conscious and unconscious, seemingly unbridled, maintaining the paradoxical role as both present and absent. With her past instated onto his own memory and consciousness, the narrator feels awakened to an impenetrability of reality, seeing a particularly ghostly residue peeking from under its thin veil. Thus, he might better put into practice his theory of Surrealism, predicated on the dreaminess of the experience of reality within reality itself. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.138.151.77 (talk) 19:33, 19 March 2010 (UTC)