Jaime Puente

Dr. Garcia

English 3387

Spring 2010

The Muse in Andre Breton's Nadja

French Modernism began in earnest with Charles Baudelaire in the mid-19th century when

he set the stage for the next great age of literary pioneers by discovering the aesthetic benefits of

everyday life in the city. The sights and sounds of a bustling urban environment, no matter how

apparently depraved or unseemly, were the prime moments of artistic inspiration for the father of

modernity, as Baudelaire has been called. It is no wonder that nearly three quarters of a century

later, Andr Breton, himself referred to as the father of surrealism, made the city a central aspect

of the search for beauty that occupied much of his work. The surrealist project that Breton

engages in with his novel Nadja (1928) seeks to redefine beauty according the sporadic and

seemingly disparate experiences of life in the city because they provide the most accessible

points of reference in a world that cannot be described in terms of linear continuity. To illustrate

the randomness of the surrealist aesthetic, Breton relies upon Nadja to be his guide through the

whimsical experiences of life because her madness is what provides him access to these

moments without the fetters of conscious thought. Like Baudelaire, Breton understands

experience as having a jarring effect to a person's psyche, and having the ability to induce

alternative perspectives of reality is a key aspect of the surrealist project. Nadja becomes

indispensable to the artist Breton illustrates in his novel because her madness and fanciful

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attachment to the streets of Paris are the keys to author's own subconscious. Without Nadja, the

artist in the surrealist work is unable to fully capture the essence of the city because he is so

tightly bound to reality as dictated by his socially structured mind.

Having a firm grip on experience, as described by Baudelaire and articulated by literary

deconstructionist Walter Benjamin, is helpful to understanding Breton's project in Nadja because

he relies upon much of the same foundational ideas. In Baudelaire's writing and poetry, what

Walter Benjamin's refers to as shocks of experience are provided courtesy of the crowded

Parisian streets. Benjamin establishes the ability to register those shocks for the purpose of

artistic creation as the central characteristic of what is referred to as a dandy. This character, the

flaneur, or dandy as Baudelaire defines it, absorbs the impact of daily life in the city and

recreates it in his (or her) own mannerisms and behavior. City life bombards the persona with

new and varied experiences, and the crowds that fill the streets, according to Benjamin were the

"agitated veil; through [which] Baudelaire saw Paris" (Benjamin 168). The bustling metropolis,

with its "harmony so providentially maintained amid the turmoil of human freedom," became the

object of study (Baudelaire 10). For the modern artist, such as Baudelaire's dandy, beauty

revealed itself in the countless different moments and events that one experienced by living in

the city. Baudelaire's iconic flaneur is easily recreated in Breton's work through Nadja's

embodiment of the muse because her attachment to the streets of Paris is unmatched by the

writer. Rather than the artist having access to the full shocks of experience as Baudelaire

envisions, the beauty of city life for Breton must be discovered through an intermediary figure.

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 Scholar Marcella Munson discusses the role of the muse in Breton's, and other surrealist

writer's, work in her article "Eclipsing Desire: Masculine Anxiety and the Surrealist Muse," and

she argues that figures, such as Nadja, make the articulation of artist's subjective experience

possible. Unlike Baudelaire's flaneur, the surrealist artist and writer does not see a crowd in the

city as a homogeneous body that reveals "the stigmata which life in a metropolis inflicts upon

love," (Benjamin 169). This aspect of the modern artist is transferred to Nadja, the muse because

as Munson argues, "Breton hunts Nadja as much as he hunts the signal or sign which will

indicate what direction to go in, what event to attend, what interpretation to give," (26). If

experiences are wounds, stigmatas as Benjamin refers to them, then Nadja is a the trace upon

which those stigmatas are connected because the masculine artist is unable to relinquish his grip

on reality.

Thinking in terms of Benjamin's understanding of Baudelaire's modernism, the scars of a

life lived in the darkened crevices of a city are the ones that are made beautiful by the nonchalant

attitude of the dandy's eye, the muse for Breton, which is separate from the unrelenting

dedication of the artist's pen. Munson affirms that "if it is Nadja who has visionary sight it is

Breton who, tracing the streets of Paris, will write the text and place Nadja in it" (26). Baudelaire

envisions the modernist person as someone who is able to take the shocks of the city and re-

purpose them for artistic expression, while in Breton's definition of the surrealist creator, seeing

and doing are kept apart. The work of artistic creation that is Nadja exhibits many of the core

aspects of surrealism that Breton articulated in his 1924 Surrealist Manifesto.

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 The lack of linear space and time progression reflects the importance of dreams that

Breton places on the process of artistic creation. When awake men and women are "above all the

playthings[s] of [their] memory," and escaping from this bondage is central to realizing the

surrealist aesthetic (6). The importance of conscious experience is challenged, and even

Baudelaire's flaneur is brought into question by Breton, because he argues that memories are

mere chronological and spacial connections that anchor a person's identity to specific moments

of time and space. Artistic production of this sort relies on what Breton calls the "phenomen[a]

of interference," because consciousness and its memories are tainted by the repressive elements

of surrounding culture (7). For this reason dreams are given an equal if not more prominent role

in the surrealist's quest for beauty. Breton argues in his manifesto that the key to finding beauty

is in the "depths of our mind," and by its nature the unfettered mind, not bound by linear patterns

of time and space, is where two seemingly opposite experiences can be placed in harmony next

to each other (6). The juxtaposition of experiences becomes, for Breton, the seed of surrealist

expression because as described in Nadja, "the production of dream images always depends on. .

. [the] role which certain powerful impressions are made to play, [and are,] in no way

contaminable by morality, [they are] actually experienced 'beyond good and evil' in the dream"

(Breton 51). Locked away in the recesses of a person's mind, dreams hold the messages

imprinted through the shocks of experience that Baudelaire, and so too Breton, found in the

streets of Paris.

Gaining access to the mind as Breton so desires can be done through the use of dreams, but

one drawback to that is the obvious requirement of being asleep. While dreams are useful to the

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surrealist project, they are, as we noted earlier, lost to memory when awake. Nadja answers this

problem for Breton because as his muse she makes the "reflective apprehension of [his]

masculine subjectivity possible" (Munson 20). In Breton's novel the artist is on a quest to

"descend into what is truly the mind's lower depths, where it is no longer a question of the night's

falling and rising again," yet he is unable to fully do so because he is awake more often than not

(Breton 40). The writer in Nadja is unable to find his masculine subjectivity because of his

mind's reliance on the so-called objective consciousness of experience, and Breton is left to

wander the paths of his mind as best he can. It is not until he meets Nadja that his experiences

begin to lose their fettered nature.

Nadja's appearance in Breton's text is used as an entry to the depths of his mind, and serves

as his jumping off point for a deeper understanding of himself. Nadja's presence as a muse is

especially helpful to his project because she proposes freedom through the "perpetual

unfettering," or more precisely she carries him along a "marvelous series of steps" that are

unfettered (69). It is important to note that Nadja begins to take on a slightly unstable character,

and Breton is sure to include her quip of being directed to a hospital away from town. The

madness that Nadja begins to exhibit is critical to her role as a muse because it provides the

unfettered access to mind that Breton is searching for. Thoughts, images, and desires spring out

of Nadja like jets of water spraying from a fountain, and provide Breton's surrealist creator with

the subjective experiences he craves because as Munson says, "it is nevertheless she who

mediates the poet's access to the outside world through her open eyes" (29). The importance of

Nadja's eyes are not lost on the reader of Breton's work because they are what initially attracts

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him to her, eyes are central themes to her work reproduces in the novel, and most importantly it

is through his muse's eyes that the writer is able to know himself.

The gift of sight is a primary method of experience; however, it is not enough of a

reference to produce a work of surrealist beauty because it relies to heavily on the conscious

interpretation of events. Nadja, however, is "so pure, so free of any earthly tie, and cares so little,

but so marvelously, for life" that she is able to absorb the sights and sounds without the same

mediation that binds Breton (Breton 90). Because of this the artist latches onto the whimsical

eccentricities of his muse in order to access his own marvelous freedom. Nadja is indispensable

to Breton's project because she makes possible what he says is a "pursuit of what [he does] not

know, but pursuit, in order to set working all the artifices of intellectual seduction" (108). Breton

follows Nadja through her ventures among the streets that intrigued Baudelaire because she

provided him the most readily available avenue to explore the limits of his own perception. In

fact the artist recognizes the importance of his muse saying that, "from the first day to the last,"

he has taken her "for a free genius, something like one of those spirits of the air which certain

magical practices momentarily permit us to entertain but which we can never overcome" (111).

Nadja is the catalyst for Breton's surrealist tome because her ability to access the random and

fleeting moments of city life, however inconsequential, are translated by his pen onto his pages.

Her fanciful attitude and way of experiencing life opened doors for the artistic expression of

Breton's own experiences. The shocks of city life that Baudelaire catalogued in The Painter of

Modern Life are the traces of the imagination that Breton seeks to access through his muse.

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 Surrealism, for Breton, is the aesthetic dedication to accessing and representing experience

in a way that is free from the inhibitions of consciousness. His work Nadja is an exercise in this

process, but when examined in the context of Baudelaire's modernist perspective the shocks of

the city that provided the father of modernism the most ample forms of inspiration become only

scratches on the surface of possibility. The depths of the mind, and the dreams that are its

messengers, are what provide the most potent forms of artistic innovation, but because human

activity is restricted to the realm of the conscious mind, full access to the imagination is

prohibited. Breton's work, Nadja, is an attempt to accomplish this goal, to express that which is

unfettered by using the fettered tools of consciousness. It becomes clear, as Marcella Munson

argues, that Breton's surrealist activity is reliant upon a muse to provide that unfettered access.

Nadja becomes the premier doorway through which Breton accesses his own innermost thoughts

and experiences because she occupies the space of the subjective other. Nadja, an insane woman,

finds herself more at home in the undesirable spaces of Paris, and Breton's artist seizes upon

these elements of her identity to use in his own work. Unable to fully cast aside the chains of

social repressions, Breton uses his muse as a bridge between his objective self and the darkest

crevices of his mind.

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 Works Cited

Baudelaire, Charles. "Crowds." Paris Spleen. New York: 1947. 20.

..- "The Painter of Modern Life." The Painter of Modern Life and other Essays. New York:

2001. 1- 41.

Benjamin, Walter, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire." Illuminations. New York: 1969. 155-200.

Breton, Andr. Nadja. New York: Grove Press, 1960. Print.

..- The Surrealist Manifesto. tcf.ua.edu. University of Alabama. Web. Feb 2010.

Munson, Marcella. "Eclipsing Desire: Masculine Anxiety and the Surrealist Muse," French

Forum 29.2 (2004): 19-33. Print.