Nathaniel Popkin

André Breton, 1928
English translation by Richard Howard, 1960
A series of surrealist maps, etc., including one on extinction

“It is not for me to ponder what is happening to ‘the shape of the city,’ even of the true city distracted and abstracted from the one I live in by the force of an element which is to my mind what air is supposed to be to life,” writes André Breton toward the end of Nadja. But of course he has spent 153 pages to that point attempting to do just so, for it is Paris as the force of life that Breton is pursuing under the guise of Nadja.

Nadja as a figment of Breton’s surrealist imagination is the uncontrollable city as a mentally ill nymph of the street, a “free genius, something like one of those spirits of the air.” Indeed, she is a woman happiest in the street, self-invented, self-ascribed, herself a way of thinking.

Attempting to form a normal relationship, Breton pursues her through the Place Dauphin, the Rue du Faubourg Poissonière, the Palais du Justice, and all the way he leaves us the evidence in photographs, drawings, portraits. But like any great city, Nadja is hard to hold, dominate, understand. No man can. Her own reality—rhythm, time (“Time is a tease,” she says), place—is so immense it creates its own particular meaning. This is the Paris from which surrealism grew, a Paris that enveloped and altered ways of being. Pursue her—doesn’t everyone who loves cities? But don’t try to take her home.

Nadja—Paris—like some women and most cities—is dangerous and demanding. Breton recounts an encounter. She wants him to give up everything—

I had not been granted the realization, until today, of all that in Nadja’s attitude toward me derives from the application of a more or less conscious principle of total subversion, of which I will give only this example: one evening, when I was driving a car along the road from Versailles to Paris, the woman sitting beside me (who was Nadja, but who might have been anyone else, after all or even someone else) pressed her foot down on the accelerator, tried to cover my eyes with her hands in the oblivion of an interminable kiss, desiring to extinguish us, doubtless forever, save to each other, so that we should collide at full speed with the splendid trees along the road. What a test of life, indeed!

Breton refutes her reckless claim. He emerges, but does he?

It would be as if I were to try to stop the course of the world, by virtue of some illusory power passion has over it. Or to deny that “each man hopes and believes he is better than the world which is his, but the man who is better merely expresses this same world better than the others.”

This world—where time is a tease, where all is self-invented—does it falter, or is it real as a woman, “so delicate she scarcely seemed to touch the ground as she walked.”—NRP