Nadja is a curiosity. The name of Breton is like a beacon of modernism, but his novel feels strangely flat, lacking texture or surprise. It recounts in a semi-autobiographical fashion (auto-ficción) the poet’s affair with a woman who he meets by chance, with whom he is briefly infatuated, but whose increasingly erratic behaviour eventually leads her to the asylum. Breton narrates their affair in a neutral tone, eschewing any romanticism, which is all very well except for the fact that it helps to depict him in an increasingly unsympathetic light. He is attracted to Nadja, but as she fails to conform to his idea of how a partner should behave in an unlikely affair, he loses interest in her. As she heads towards some kind of psychosis, he distances himself altogether. Towards the end of the novel he writes: “Yet I never supposed she could lose or might already have lost the gift of that instinct for self-preservation which permits my friends and myself, for instance to behave ourselves when a flag goes past, confining ourselves to not saluting it; so we do not side with whatever we feel sympathetic to on every occasion, nor permit ourselves the unparalleled joy of committing some splendid sacrilege, etc….” The net effect, surprisingly, is to make Nadja appear a more intriguing personality than the poet himself. As though, in choosing to write about someone who fascinated him but ultimately bored then escaped him, he is seeking to appropriate her uniqueness whilst, through the act of writing, exercising control over their relationship in a manner he never could when they were together. There are untold subtexts here regarding the (exploitative) relationship between poets and their muses.
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