DISCLAIMER: This will probably only be interesting for those of you who have read André Breton’s Surrealist “novel” Nadja –
Breton’s Nadja is made up of a number of elements that mark it out as distinct from mainstream novelistic narration. Composed of: a contemplative ‘preface’ where a number of anecdotes of coincidence are recounted and reflected upon; the story of Breton’s various encounters with a woman called Nadja; photographs that relate to this story and to other parts of the text; drawings and other ‘evidence’ related to the text; and a final afterword — Nadja doesn’t add up to a novel. Maurice Blanchot suggests that the main text of Nadja should be seen as a récit, a tale that tells of a singular and exceptional event.
[...]
If, for Blanchot, the novel deals in the everyday, it does so in a way that evades the everyday. On the other hand the tale is the everyday when the everyday is exceptional or marvellous. In its refusal to exercise the rhetorical tropes of the novel and persuade us we are entering a ‘world’, Nadja offers us the marvellous everyday stripped of description. Here places are actual. [...] The ambivalent representation of Nadja’s relationship to the everyday is exemplary of the Surrealist conception of everyday life: she is seen as having escaped the everydayness of the everyday, at the same time as being in danger of falling back into its routines. The gendering of the everyday is made vivid by a femininity out of control; at the same time, another feminine everydayness threatens to engulf Nadja in the domestic.
(Ben Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, 51-52)
April 25, 2007 at 1:07 pm |
Nadja is one of the weirdest books I have ever read…I agree with Blanchot about Nadja escaping everyday life and falling back into it but i don’t really get the part when he says it should be taken as a récit. What is this singular event?
April 25, 2007 at 7:51 pm |
I know what you mean — I don’t know either what he would define as the singular event. Maybe it is simply Breton’s having met Nadja, as she made everything ordinary seem extraordinary to him. Or maybe he’s saying that the whole story is not a story so much as an experience. I guess I’d have to go back and read the Blanchot in full to be able to answer.
April 25, 2007 at 8:00 pm |
Silly me, I totally skipped the part where Blanchot defines the récit…
“Something has happened, something which someone has experienced who tells about it afterwards, in the same way that Ulysses needed to experience the event and survive it in order to become Homer, who told about it. Of course the tale (récit) is usually about an exceptional event, one which eludes the form of everyday time and the world of the usual sort of truth, perhaps any truth. This is why it so insistently rejects everything which could connect it with the frivolity of a fiction (the novel, on the other hand, contains only what is believable and familiar and yet is very anxious to pass for fiction). [...] The tale is not the narration of an event, but that event itself, the approach to that event, the place where that event is made to happen.”
If I’m understanding that last bit at all, it seems he is saying that it is not an external event that is being recounted, but that the event is the text itself, the place where the ephemeral is given meaning. I might be way off there.
May 28, 2007 at 10:54 pm |
No,no that’s it and I think Nadja is the event, the ephemeral, marvellous event. Maybe Blanchot calls it a tale because Nadja represents chance, coincidence, unconventionality, transience. Notions of the Surrealist outlook towards life.
It’s odd because the more I think about the book and things come back to me the more confused I get! Scary!
“..she is seen as having escaped the everydayness of the everyday, at the same time as being in danger of falling back into its routines.” I think she did fall back..this part in Blanchot’s text just kept coming back to me…i think this happens to everyone…