Write a critical review of Andre Breton's 'Nadja' (1928) and how it sheds light on his vision of surrealism, woman and the city of Paris.

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Write a critical review of Andre Breton's 'Nadja' (1928) and how it sheds light on his vision of surrealism, woman and the city of Paris.

Effective literary criticism usually requires an understanding of the particular genre under consideration. Immediately Breton's Nadja confronts and confuses: 'The first thing is, this is not a novel. The second: it's not strictly factual either.'1 Lacking the literary 'automatism' of Champs des magnétiques, the prose poetry of Baudelaire, or the narrative description of Emile Zola, Nadja defies categorization. Faced with such uncertainty the critical reviewer is already on his guard. Surrealist followers add little to his confidence, asserting 'the reticence of critics and professors regarding this work, their palpable helplessness as they try, without success, to handle it with their usual methods of explication and analysis.'2 At the risk of further ridicule this critical review will advance a few tentative observations. Breton appears to have created his own rubric, substituting traditional narrative and description, with his own surrealist techniques for creating structure, imagery and myth. Understanding how Breton evokes his vision of surrealism, through the pages of Nadja, is the first step in analyzing this technique. Discussing this maelstrom of ideas, the inevitable focus