Nadja is the complete opposite: an almost invisible story told by an overpowering subjectivity, which is shamelessly visible. In the story many things happen, of course, but what is really important is not what can be summarised concretely: the actions of the heroine, the rare coincidences that bring the couple together or separate them, their cryptic conversations, of which we are only given snippets, or the references to places, books, paintings, writers or painters that the astute narrator uses to frame the action. What is important is an other reality, different to the reality that offers a setting for what takes place in the novel, which begins to emerge in a subtle manner, somewhat awry, in certain allusions in the conversations, in Nadja’s drawings that are full of symbols and allegories that are difficult to interpret, and in the sudden premonitions or intuitions of the narrator who, in this way, manages to make us share his certainty that real life, genuine reality is hidden beneath the reality that we live consciously, hidden from us by routine, stupidity, conformity and everything that he undervalues or despises — rationality, social order, public institutions — and that only certain free people, who are outside what Rubén Darío called the ‘thick, municipal common herd’ can have access to. The fascination that Nadja exerts over him, and that he transmits to us, is due precisely to the fact that she appears to be a visitor in our world, someone who comes from (and has not entirely left) another reality, unknown and invisible, that can only be glimpsed in premonitions by people of exceptional sensibility like the narrator, and can only be described through association or metaphor, approximating to notions like the Marvellous and the Fantastic.
This invisible reality, this life of pure poetry, without prose, where is it to be found? What is it like? Does it exist outside the mind or is it pure fantasy? In the prosaic reality of us common mortals (the phrase is from Montaigne), which Surrealism desperately wanted to transform through the magic wand of poetry, Freud had discovered the world of the unconscious and had described the subtle ways in which the phantoms sheltering there influenced behaviour, caused or resolved conflicts and meddled in people’s lives. The discovery of this other dimension of human life influenced, as is well known, in a decisive (but not pious) way the theories and practices of Surrealism, and there is no doubt that without this precedent Nadja (which contains an ambiguous sentence that criticises but also shows respect for psychoanalysis) could not have been written, at least in the way that it was written. But a Freudian reading would give us a truncated, caricaturist version of the novel. For it is not the traumas that brought the heroine to the edge of madness — which a psychiatric reading of Nadja would focus on — that are of interest in her story, but rather the elated justification that the narrator makes for this borderline space, a domain that he considers a superior form of life, an existential realm where human life is more full and more free.
It is, of course, a fiction. A beautiful and seductive fiction that exists only — but this only must be understood as a universe of riches to beguile our sensitivity and fantasy — within the bewitching life of dreams and illusions that are the reality of fiction, that lie that we fashion and in which we believe in order better to endure our real lives.
Borges often said, ‘I am eaten up by literature’. There is nothing pejorative in this remark when Borges makes it. Because what he most loved in life — and perhaps one could say that the only thing that he loved and knew deeply — was literature. But Breton would have considered it an insult if someone had said of Nadja what is now very obvious to us, that it is ‘a book eaten up by literature’. Literature for Breton meant artifice, pose, empty gestures of content, frivolous vanity, conformity to the established order. But what is certain is that while literature can be all those things, it can also be, in outstanding cases like his, daring, novelty, rebellion, an exploration of the most remote recesses of the spirit and an enrichment of real life through fantasy and writing.
This is the operation that Nadja carries out on the real world that it purports to narrate: it transforms it into another world, by bathing it in beautiful poetry. The Paris of its pages is not the boisterous and carefree European city, the capital of artistic avant-gardes, of literary quarrels and inter-war political violence. In the book, thanks to its bewitching rhetoric and its theatrical trappings, its narrative strategy of silences and temporal leaps, of veiled allusions, puzzles, false trails and sudden poetic flourishes, its striking incidents — the terrible spectacle of Les Détraquées, the wonderful story about the amnesiac man — and its constant references to books and paintings that suffuse the story with its own special radiance, Paris has become a fantastic city, where the marvellous is an almost tangible reality and where everything seems to comply in docile fashion to those secret magic laws that only the diviners detect and the poets intuit, and which the narrator superimposes like a cartographer over the real city.
At the end of the story the Hôtel des Grands Hommes, the statue of Etienne Dolet, the coal-yards, the Port de Saint-Denis, the Boulevard theatres, the flea market, the bookshops, the cafés, the shops and the parks have become transformed into landmarks and monuments of a precious, buried world that is eminently subjective, and has mysterious correlations and assonances with people’s lives, a perfect frame within which there can emerge a character so detached from everyday life, so removed from what is called common sense, like Nadja, the woman who enchants the narrator and who orders him at one point in the story: ‘Tu écriras un roman sur moi’ (‘You will write a novel about me’).
The spell was so strong that Breton obeyed and did not limit himself to describing the Nadja that existed, the fleeting Nadja of flesh and blood. In order to tell the story persuasively, he used his fantasy more than his memory, he invented more than he recorded and, like all good novelists, he took every liberty with time, space and words, writing, ‘sans ordre préétabli, et selon le caprice de l’heure qui laisse surnager ce qui surnage’ (‘without any pre-established order, following the whim of the moment which allows things to float on the surface as they will’).22
London, November 1996
La Condition humaine
The Hero, the Buffoon and History
When in November 1996 the French government decided to move the remains of André Malraux to the Pantheon, there was a very harsh critical reaction against his work in the United States and Europe, in contrast to the many events organised in his honour by President Jacques Chirac and his supporters. A critical revision that, in some cases, amounted to a literary lynching. See, for example, the ferocious article in the New York Times — that barometer of political correctness in the Anglo-Saxon world — by a critic as respectable as Simon Leys. If we were to believe him and other critics, then Malraux was an overrated writer, a mediocre novelist and a wordy and boastful essayist with a declamatory style, whose delirious historical and philosophical declarations in his essays were mere verbal fireworks, the conjuring tricks of a charlatan.
I do not agree with this unjust and prejudiced view of Malraux’s work. It is true, he did have a certain propensity to excessive wordiness — a congenital vice of the French literary tradition — and at times, in his essays on art, he could strain after rhetorical effect and fall into tricky obscurity (like many of his colleagues). But there are charlatans and charlatans. Malraux was one to the highest possible degree of rhetorical splendour, brimming over with such intelligence and culture that in his case the vice of wordiness often became a virtue. Even when the tumultuous prose that he wrote said nothing, as is the case in some pages of Les Voix du silence (The Voices of Silence), there was so much beauty in that tangled emptiness of words that it was enchanting. But if as a critic he was sometimes rhetorical, as a novelist he was a model of efficiency and precision. Among his novels is one of the most admirable works of the twentieth century, La Condition humaine (Man’s Fate, 1933).