Introduction: Nadja

One day in October 1926, André Breton was walking the streets of Paris. He encountered a woman:

Compelled by those extraordinary eyes, Breton accosted this woman whom he would call Nadja. They started a brief affair. Breton was fascinated by her. Through her, he felt close to the marvellous, that quintessential yet so ephemeral something Surrealism was always after. After several weeks her glamour faded, however, and the affair ended badly. Less than a year later, the person upon whom the character of Nadja was based, Leona Delcourt (1902-1941), was institutionalised in a mental hospital, while Breton, for his part, had published Nadja, a semi-documentary pseudo-autobiographical novel that appears to document their affair.

Nadja is a complex book; here I will briefly recap selected elements from the story of the affair (only one part of the novel's multi-layered narrative). Around a third of the way into the novel the narrator, André, meets Nadja for the first time. During the second meeting on the next day, Nadja states that she ‘sees’ André's home, seeing ‒ correctly, the author assures us ‒ that his wife is a brunette and has two pets. On their third encounter, Nadja tells André of the powers he has over her, of making her think and do what he wants. When they have dinner, she seems to see a crowd of dead people and, subsequently, predicts that a red light will come on behind a certain window. Almost immediately, it does. During a late-night walk, Nadja is petrified by an iron grille in the wall.