Fireworks

The novelist, with a few deft strokes, begins to construct a world. Recall the lines from Dostoevsky:

The small room into which the young man was shown was covered with yellow wallpaper: there were geraniums in the windows, which were covered with muslin curtains; the setting sun cast a harsh light over the entire setting…. There was nothing special about the room. The furniture, of yellow wood, was all very old. A sofa with a tall back turned down, an oval table opposite the sofa, a dressing table and a mirror set against the pierglass, some chairs along the walls, two or three etchings of no value portraying some German girls with birds in their hands – such were the furnishings. (Crime and Punishment)

Quoting these lines in the first Surrealist Manifesto, Breton complains:

I am in no mood to admit that the mind is interested in occupying itself with such matters, even fleetingly. It may be argued that this school-boy description has its place, and that at this juncture of the book the author has his reasons for burdening me. Nevertheless he is wasting his time, for I refuse to go into his room.

Breton refuses, but others have been tempted. We relate the words we read to our own experience, rendering them concrete. It seems churlish to claim that this concretion is a sham: after all, this is just a novel, and we know, as readers, how a novel works. But then Breton wants art to be more than a matter of entertainment or even edification. This is why he claims the descriptions in the novel are vacuous: ‘they are nothing but so many superimposed images taken from some stock catalogue, which the author utilizes more and more whenever he chooses; he seizes the opportunity to slip me his postcards, he tries to make me agree with him about the clichés’.

Clichés? But it is this accumulation of details which permits the versimilitude of the novel – it becomes tangible, concrete, we accompany the characters in the journeys across St. Petersberg. And doesn’t Breton provide us with details about Paris in his Nadja? Ah, but these details form a secret network; they are signs and indications of a meeting to come; his whole book centres itself around an encounter which we are to understand was quite real. The language of Nadja becomes a system of indications; the descriptions of this text are magnetised by an encounter which makes them more than clichés, and the text itself more than an attempt to provide a simulacrum of reality.

The surreal is surreal in the book Nadja, in this mesh of text. And the surreal is more than real, or it is the more-than-real in the real, the surfeit of experience to which the novel cannot answer. Then the text Nadja is not a representation of an event, but it is also an event as it gives itself to be experienced. To read, now, is not only to be referred to the time and place at which Breton encountered Nadja, but to the relay of words and signs and indications which comprise this text, pointing to one another, celebrating one another and elevating themselves into a sky like a blazing constellation.

The sky of Nadja is not the sky of the novel, or even art. The surrealist would overcome art through art; it is experience that matters – just as it is this experience that the novel fails. You could say that the novel subordinates itself to the reduplication of the world and the demands of the world, and the work of the surrealist to the shattering of the world. But doesn’t this mean, too, the shattering of language? Perhaps; but it cannot be a question of leaving language behind: Breton writes that language was given to human beings so that we could make surrealist use of it. Exit the servility of language, then, through the surrealist redeployment of language; exit the art of culture and edification through surrealist art. But where does it lead, this exodus? Reading the novel, we concretize what we read by relating back to our experience. If the novel reflects our world, then we travel, in the novel, through our world. But with the surrealist work? What concretizes itself then in our reading? There is nothing in the surrealist we can relate to for as long as we do not relinquish our servility. And if that servility is destroyed? Then the world will come alive with fireworks.