With all the respect in the world for a poet and a movement that I discovered as an adolescent — thanks to a surrealist poet, César Moro — that I read with fervour and which has surely been an influence on my formation as a writer (although at first glance it would not appear so), I would have to say that I think that the passage of time has deconstructed surrealism both historically and culturally in the sense that would have upset André Breton the most. That is to say that it has become a quintessentially literary movement whose verbal stridency, provocative spectacles, word play, defence of magic and unreason, pursuit of verbal automatism and contempt for the ‘literary’, now appear undramatic, domesticated and non-belligerent, without the slightest power to transform customs, morality or history, quaint displays by a group of artists and poets whose chief merit lay in their ability to stir up trouble in the intellectual field, shaking it out of its academic inertia and introducing new forms, new techniques and new themes — a different use of word and image — in the visual arts and in literature.
Today Breton’s ideas seem closer to poetry than to philosophy, and what we admire in them, apart from their casuistic intricacy and luxuriant verbosity, is the moral attitude that underpins them, that coherence between speech, writing and action that Breton demanded in his followers with the same severity and fanaticism that he applied to himself. This coherence is doubtless admirable; the same cannot be said of the intransigence shown to those who did not subscribe to the changing orthodoxy of the movement and were excommunicated as traitors or as sacrilegious or were struck down as Pharisees.
All this agitation and violence, the dictates and the cutting remarks, have remained in the past. What is there left? For me, apart from a rich collection of anecdotes, a storm in a glass of water, a beautiful utopia, never achieved and unachievable — to change life and to enthrone total human freedom through the subtle weapons of poetry — there are some beautiful poems — the best of them the ‘Ode à Charles Fourier’ — an anthology of black humour, a very partisan but absorbing essay dedicated to Le Surréalisme et la Peinture, and, above all, a delicate, highly original novel about love: Nadja.
Although definitions often confuse more than they illuminate, I will define the novel provisionally as that branch of fiction that sets out to construct, with imagination and words, a fictitious reality, a world apart that, although taking inspiration from reality and the real world, does not reflect them, but rather supplants and denies them. The originality of every fiction lies — although this might seem a tautology — in its being fictive, that is to say, in not resembling the world in which we live, but rather in freeing itself from this world and showing us a world that does not exist and, precisely because it does not exist, it is something we dream about and desire.
If that is a fiction, then Nadja is the best illustration there can be. The story that it tells is not of this world, even though it pretends to be so, as happens in all good novels whose powers of persuasion always have us taking as objective truth what is mere illusion, and even though the world that it describes — yes, that it describes, although in every novel description is synonymous with invention — seems, through a number of very precise references, to be Paris in the twenties, with a handful of streets, squares, statues, parks, woods and cafés recreated as a backdrop to the action and even illustrated with beautiful photographs.
The story could not be simpler. The narrator, who tells the story as a protagonist within it, casually meets in a café the female character Nadja, a strange, dreamy woman who seems to inhabit a private world of fantasy and dread, on the border between reason and madness, who from the first moment captivates him completely. An intimate relationship grows up between them that we might describe as sentimental rather than erotic or sexual, on the basis of planned or casual (the narrator would like us to call them magical) meetings which, in the few months that they last — from October to December 1926 — open for the narrator the doors to a mysterious and unpredictable world of great spiritual richness, not governed by physical laws or rational schema, but rather by those obscure, fascinating and indefinable forces that we allude to — that the narrator alludes to frequently — when we speak of the marvellous, of magic, or of poetry. The relationship ends as strangely as it began, and the last we hear about Nadja is that she is in a mental asylum, because she is considered mad, something that embitters and exasperates the narrator who hates psychiatry and asylums and who sees what society calls madness — at least in the case of Nadja — as an extreme form of rebellion, a heroic way of exercising freedom.
This is, of course, a profoundly romantic story due to its poetic nature, its extreme antisocial individualism and its tragic ending, and one could also consider the mention of Victor Hugo and Juliette Drouet in the first pages of the novel as an auspicious, premonitory indication of what will happen later. What distinguishes Nadja from those extreme stories of impossible love and couples torn apart by an implacable Fate that the romantic sensibility favoured, is not the plot but rather Breton’s elegant, coruscating prose, with its labyrinthine pace and its unusual metaphors, and still more the originality of his structure, the daring way in which he organises his chronology and the different planes of reality from which the story is narrated.
Of course it is important to point out that that the main character in the story — the hero, in romantic terminology — is not the eponymous Nadja but the person who evokes her and tells her story, that overwhelming presence who is never away from the reader’s eyes or mind for one second: the narrator. Visible or invisible, a witness or a protagonist who narrates from inside the narrative, or an all-powerful God the Father at whose commands the action develops, the narrator is always the most important character in any fiction and is always an invention, a fiction, even in those mendacious cases like Nadja, where the author of the novel declares that he is hiding under the skin of the narrator. This is never possible. Between the author and narrator of a novel there is always the unbridgeable gap that separates objective reality from fantasy, words from deeds and the mortal being of flesh and blood from the verbal simulacrum.
Whether they know it or not, whether they do it deliberately or through simple intuition, authors of novels always invent the narrator, even though they might add their own name or include episodes of their biography. The narrator invented by Breton to tell the story of Nadja, whom he passed off as himself, has clear romantic affiliations in his monumental self-worship, that narcissism that drives him all the time that he is narrating to display himself in the centre of the action, to refract himself through the action, and the action through himself, so that the story of Nadja is, in truth, the story of Nadja filtered through the narrator, reflected in the distorting mirror of his exquisite personality. The narrator of Nadja, like the narrator of Les Misérables or The Three Musketeers, reveals himself as he reveals the story. It is not, therefore, surprising that from these first pages, he confesses his scant interest in Flaubert who, we remember, was opposed to narrative subjectivity and demanded that the novel had the semblance of impersonality, that is to say that it pretended to be a self-sufficient story (in reality told by invisible narrators).