There is an old saying in French: “Tell me whom you haunt and I will tell you who you are.” As in English, “haunt” in French (hanter) can have two meanings: to frequent, and to linger as a ghost. The adage, argues the father of Surrealism, André Breton, in his 1928 book “Nadja,” thus “says much more than it intends.” We reflect not only the people we associate with most frequently, but also those who turn us into revenants, who draw out the past selves we’ve long thought buried.
For Breton (1896-1966), one of those figures was actually a place. Paris has always been a haunted city. It is not, like New York, a city of progress, but one that compels infinite returns to the past. People have called it a museum of itself. And it is full of flâneurs and loiterers, who, to paraphrase Breton, are doomed to retrace their steps while believing they are moving forward.
Breton’s most renowned literary work, NADJA (New York Review Books, 131 pp., paperback, $16.95), recently reissued in a deft new translation by Mark Polizzotti, was written as a means of processing and paying homage to two forms of encounter that have long destabilized those who have experienced them: encounters, that is, with a great love and with a great city. Nadja was Breton’s love; Paris, his city. In the novel, and in his life, he haunts them both, and they torment him in kind.
Nadja is a greenhorn from the north of France, and the focal point of her seduction, as in so many romances, is her eyes, which reflect “that mix of obscure distress and luminous pride.” Though André, the narrator, is married, this is no serious impediment. He and Nadja meet at cafes, metro stations and shabby hotel rooms. They meet at the corner of Rue Lafayette and Rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière, a stone’s throw from where I am writing this sentence. They stroll past the Sphinx Hôtel, which no longer exists, and take the steps to Breton’s room in the Hôtel des Grands Hommes, which does.
All the while, as their infatuation develops, deepens and then decays, we register uncanny moments that populate not only the narrative, but also our experience reading the book, which is littered with photographs (taken by Man Ray, the official portraitist of Surrealism, and his assistant Jacques-André Boiffard) of places and faces we feel we have seen before — in films, in dreams or in waking life.
Emphasizing the magic in moments of encounter, especially in the form of uncanny coincidence, was core to the Surrealist project. Nearly a century later, “Nadja” still matters because it reminds us that true self-discovery derives not from grand visions or spiritual transformation but from these small interactions with the mundane that hint at the enchantment of an otherwise banal world.
Breton insisted that the people and places of his novel were real, not imagined; one didn’t need fiction to be entranced. In this way, “Nadja” is a precursor to what we now call autofiction; it mines real life for material, and finds in that reality something more profound than what can be imagined by pure invention.
Walter Benjamin called “Nadja” a synthesis between the art novel and the roman à clef. He also described Surrealism’s aim as the “loosening of the self by intoxication,” not with drugs or religion but with “profane illumination,” a sort of epiphany emerging from a brush with something real and material — an object, a scene, a person, a place.
Paris, today as well as in the time of the Surrealists, is a place where such brushes, or rencontres fortuites, are to be had around every corner. André goes to the St.-Ouen flea market “in search of objects you can’t find anywhere else: outmoded, broken, unusable, almost incomprehensible and ultimately perverse.” On your own visit there, you might have in your mind the image of the “soluble fish,” one of Breton’s best-known metaphors for the fluidity of consciousness — only to discover (as I did) a large mirror whose edges had desilvered into the shape of a fish.
Or else, at the Place Maubert, where a simple, two-tiered fountain burbles in the center of a triangular lawn, you might suddenly feel that this is no place for a fountain at all, that something else must have stood here before. Only later do you learn that you were right: The statue of the Renaissance humanist Étienne Dolet (“which has always both attracted me and caused me unbearable malaise,” per André) was there for half a century before the Nazis removed it and melted it down for artillery.
Knowing that beneath the map of Paris exists another map, this one showing the subterranean network linking many moments of profane illumination, you might choose to take as your walking guide not a travel book but “Nadja.” You might consult it the very same way André consults Madame Sacco, a fortuneteller in the 15th Arrondissement, for prophecy.
The story of his lover Nadja will begin to strike you as a ghost story, because, like a ghost, she follows André everywhere, but cannot be found when she is sought after. “No one can reach me,” she says when asked how she can be contacted. The same goes for the narrator’s other love, the city of Paris itself, which, despite his committed advances and passions, eventually “becomes other and pulls away.” The filmmaker Jacques Rivette made a famous film called “Paris Belongs to Us” (1961). “Nadja” affirms exactly the contrary: Paris belongs to no one.
But that is Paris at its best. Only something we may never truly possess can retain its mystery and, therefore, its capacity to surprise us with “sudden parallels” and “petrifying coincidences,” as Breton calls them. André tells us of one Sunday, while walking around Paris with his fellow Surrealist Philippe Soupault, when he developed “a bizarre talent” for predicting exactly where there would be a wood and coal shop, no matter which street they started down. Eight years earlier, he and Soupault had written a book called “The Magnetic Fields”; “WOOD & COAL” were the very last words.
“Nadja” ends with a famous pronouncement: “Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or not at all.” There is a violence, in other words, in the shock of these beautiful encounters, of the chance meeting of incongruous objects. Those who have known Paris, for a few days or a lifetime, know that it is the kind of violence that gives meaning to the everyday, that wakes us, as ghosts, from the slumber of life and into the deeper reality of our dreams.
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