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)
Posted by situationniste 
