Philosophical Notes on Nadja

I finished Nadja by André Breton yesterday and am somewhat still digesting it. It is pretty out there in literary style, but it was not nearly as difficult in reading Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar. But there were stylistic similarities - the most notable of which were the various asides that the main characters had when you weren't sure if they were speaking or using interior monologue. I wish I had read Nadja first because I think that it would have helped me read Hopscotch. But, I'll read a couple more Surrealist novels before I reread Hopscotch and hopefully that will make the hopscotching reading of Hopscotch a little easier. But, that is neither here nor there.

Philosophical Concepts:

"What I must have ceased to be in order to be who I am" (Breton, 11). This idea of renunciation or to put it in economic terms, the opportunity cost of becoming who you are by ceasing who you were was just a fascinating thought for me.

"I strive, in relation to other men, to discover the nature, if not the necessity, of my difference from them" (Breton, 13). In this we see Breton struggling to discover once again who he is, by comparing himself to others to see who he is by negation. He is not the other by necessity.

The slope facts and the cliff facts that Breton references on page 20 is interesting to think about. Here he has a hierarchy of facts, some of which only he can be the witness of and others he flatters himself that he possesses the full details. But, some of those facts deny a person rational acknowledgement and it is only by "our very instinct of self-preservation to enable us to do so" (Breton, 20). Breton seems to state that some facts are so inescapable, so brute and thus, so horrifying that we can only escape them through a matter of self-preservation.

Breton has some interesting views on the moral value of work. "I am forced to accept the notion of work as a material necessity, and in this regard I strongly favor its better, that is its fairer, division. I admit life's grim obligations make it a necessity, but never that I should believe in its value, revere my own or that of other men" (Breton, 59-60). To Breton, work is a means to an end, a necessary evil. The only good that can come from work is the material gains that come from it, not the character that it can provide.

"But it's so easy to return slowly toward the Rue Lafayette, the Rue du Faubourg Poissoniere - to begin by going back to the very spot where we were" (Breton, 74). Interestingly, after leaving Nadja at her door where he discovers that she is at the extreme limit of the surrealist aspiration, he questions what now? So he goes back to where he was; to begin again anew. I'm not sure if this is to repeat the cycle, or if it is an act of cowardice.

"Unless you have been inside a sanitarium you do not know that madmen are made there, just as criminals are made in our reformatories. Is there anything more detestable than these systems of so-called social conservation which, for a peccadillo, some initial and exterior rejection of respectability or common sense, hurl an individual among others whose association can only be harmful to him and, above all, systematically deprive him of relations with everyone whose moral or practical sense is more firmly established than his own?" (Breton, 139). This is such a scathing rebuke of Breton's societal surroundings about prisons and mental health professionals. Madmen are made in the madhouse. Criminals are made in the prison system. And, what's worse, its done systematically. It's not an accident. The system is tragically flawed and will always produce those results. In spite of Breton writing in 1928 France, the same still stands here in 21st century. The criminals are hardened in their reforming prisons. Criminals are made in the prison system.

"The most absolute sense of love or revolution...involved the negation of everything else" (Breton, 153). This is a very true thing. Love and revolution require total commitment to the cause. That said, I find the surrealist touch here a bit interesting. There seems to be an equating going on between love and revolution as if they are one in the same.

"But that is the way of the world, isn't it, the outer world, that is - a matter of sleep-walking" (154). Again the surrealist applies the opposite of reality. The outer world is the sleep-walking world. Does this mean that the inner world, the world of sleep and dreams is the world of awareness?

The Hegel quote in the end is interesting: "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" (Breton, 159).