Who goes there? Is it Only Me? Is it Myself?

I enjoyed the second half of Nadja a great deal more than I did the first. The pictures of Nadja's artwork were much more intriguing than previous visuals, as they were open to more interpretation, and in their abstraction held  more of an mysterious, unknown quality, rather than simply "here is a picture of this person/place." I also liked the list of his favorite quotes from Nadja on pages 115 and 116. Reading all the quotes strung together out of context, it struck me as very much like a collage. In many cases, there's no direct meaning to gain from the quotes, yet the juxtaposition of the seemingly superfluous ("Pink is better than black, but the two harmonize.") with the seemingly profound ("Before the mystery. Man of stone, understand me.") instigates a vast spectrum of emotions all at once.

I thought our other readings were interesting as well. Once I accepted that "N" was basically nonsensical, I was able to appreciate the play with language, especially in the first paragraph under "Animal Gospel," with its constant repetitions, and "Gospel Incompletely," which just sounded beautiful to me. "Daily News" was a bit too disjointed for my taste, but I liked how the layout of many of the poems enabled you to read them in a variety of ways. There were also some very powerful phrases created with those few choice words that I really loved, such as "the years were a casket."

It's a mad, mad, mad world!

So, I like the concept of madness and insanity from the manifesto, and it got me thinking about how the concept of collage is a kind of madness too. Think of a normal piece of fiction as "sane" in that it is tied together, normalized and is the author's entire idea (input and revision from editors notwithstanding). Then look at the collage fictions, especially the more visual works that have done as exercises for the past few weeks.

I know when I see the insane depicted in film or comics, the writing on their walls is disjointed and unnerving, and it's the same kind of look we attempt to create as we try to place our readers in an uncomfortable and uncanny sense of the world. Of course, i'm talking about popular culture here in terms of madness, and I am not trying to say that we as writers are mad. (Though we may be, as the world of the literary has shit pay)

But isn't the collage going against the sense of "logic"? The collage doesn't have to be surreal in terms of Breton, but it almost seems illogical in terms of normal fiction; taking pieces from other works to tell our story, and not the original author, or really some times not even to tell a story at all.

Still, it sure is fun to be crazy.

A single flow of thought

The title of this post is basically the conclusion I got from both Nadja and the Manifesto, though oddly enough from a very different perspective for each piece. The novel felt more like a notebook acting as a journal for things to be jotted down at a moments' notice, though at the same time it felt carefully crafted to blur the line of one 'scene' flowing into the other. I still can't decide whether I welcome the disruption of the reading process that the pictures posed or not, because they take you 'out of the flow' while on the other hand sometimes providing welcome pauses. Certainly the visual illustration is interesting.
The most striking thing that came to light for me while reading the novel was the character of the 'woman' that was weaved into the narrative like an underlying layer that surfaced in all these different incarnations, but was very obviously a composit of the same person. I can't really pinpoint what it was in the writing, but it felt to me that any mention of this woman - who I assume is supposed to be Nadja - stood out stylistically, much like a narrated relief. It is certainly an intriguing concept to explore further while reading on.
I very much recognized the style in the Manifesto as well and the attempt at the same continuous flow of thought poured out into the page (that Brenton actually conceptualized in the Manifesto itself) but I think that a strictly non-fictional and reflective text might not be the as well a vehicle for this kind of approach because I found it a lot more inaccessible than Nadja, which you could let wash over you without really losing anything of narrative even though not every single word held the same importance and some paragraphs were rather fleeting, but for a kind of text like the Manifesto is supposed to be - from my perspective - the effect is more confounding than enlightening.

Choice and the Real: I read the manifesto upside down.

The first thing which I feel must be addressed, is this dear letter. This question of whether or not it is enough for something to be chosen as a different object... To that I can only reply that "chosen" art seems to have far less of a ring to it, save that of the hammer which I wish it would turn back on itself with such fervor.

That being said, it is strange... this relationship of the Surreal, and the chosen. On the one hand, the Surrealist must choose to show us something outside of reality, or at least, outside of the box in which we assume reality is so nicely placed. As this manifesto seems to say of the kind of writing it finds less than stellar... "I refuse to go into the room". Such, if the writer is to be believed, is a necessity of the mind which finds banal repititons of the everyday detail of language to be sickening, and even immoral in art.
Here we seem to find a(nother?) critic of the novel... one who finds it far too gritty, detail oriented, and raw... even in its own invention.

On the other hand, it would seem that choice is immediately subjugated in the next few sentences. His concern fro Freud, and his dream interpretations, seems to imply that a world in which we have no (conscious) choice in, but is distinct from this imagined "real", is far more important to us than the original real... precisely because it juxtaposes, and possibly frames.

I have a question, also, on the basis of the following quotation:
"It seems that every act is it's own justification, at least for the person capable of committing it, that it is endowed with a radiant power which the slightest gloss is sure to diminish."

My question, if I might deign to ask one, is this.... how much of Surrealism is the Mother... Brother... Child, of this hypermediation we now bear witness to? How much the enemy? For on the one hand, it seems that the surrealist tendency to rely on the Choice of the matter is what is so very much a cause of this media malady... but at the same time he seems to predict the symptom... the seeming deadness of something once it has been copypasta-d. Does my question even matter? Especially in this class, where it seems that so much of what we do is to ignore the presumption of this deadness, and in so doing... find new life.

Incurable Mania

For the most part, I wasn't particularly moved by the "Manifesto of Surrealism." It seemed like Breton was simply trying to universalize his own opinion by making a bunch of generalizations, generalizations that I don't think always hold true for everyone, such as "Children set off each day without  worry in the world. Everything is near at hand, the worst material conditions are fine," "The mind of the man who dreams is fully satisfied by what happens to him," and "At an early age children are weaned on the marvelous, and later on they fail to retain a sufficient virginity of mind to thoroughly enjoy fairy tales," (4, 13, 15). These statements all sounded nice when I read them, but then when I paused to think about what they actually implied, I found myself unconvinced.

That being said, I really did enjoy his advocacy for mystery on pages 9 and 10, beginning with "Our brains are dulled by the incurable mania of wanting to make the unknown known, classifiable. The desire for analysis wins out over the sentiments." This was something I could relate to, in our formulaic, 5-steps-to-the-perfect-life society. We have a seemingly innate resistance to the idea that something could be unknowable, incomprehensible. Which is why leaving the reader with unanswered questions is such a powerful technique.

However, I don't believe that "rationality/logic" and "surrealism" should be viewed as polar opposites. In fact, I don't think you can even completely separate them. And why try? Why go from one extreme to the other? Everyone's minds process their thoughts and experiences differently. That's what makes life so interesting.

Don't I Love Her? When I Am Near Her...

I'm not too sure what to think of Nadja  just yet... only that I like it, and especially appreciate Breton's use of pictures throughout to help illustrate the telling of the story, particularly where Nadja's character is concerned. ("because in Russian it's the beginning of the word hope, and because it's only the beginning...") I'm obviously drawn to the surrealistic elements of the work and whether or not (at this point, at least) we know what the reality of Andre's world really is.

The pictures throughout, though, are what really intrigues me. We could, as an audience, do well in understanding the work without them, I suppose, but I think their importance lies in the fact that it does give us a visual representation of Andre's tale. They obviously tie in closely with the narrative, but I think it would also be pretty cool if they were "out of order," in a sense, or without captions, so that their meaning or their reasons for being included in the narrative could be left up to us to determine. I guess the pictures do serve as a sort of literal reality for us as we're reading, which I think is juxtaposed pretty nicely with the surrealist text. 

Dreams... and Nadja, too.

The Surrealist Manifesto, though I resisted due to the title “Manifesto”, actually intrigued me, particularly in the way it talked about the integration of dreams and how they influenced writing and how they can be interpreted. I think at one point it even said that dreams could even be taken to mean more than reality or something of the sort? I could have misinterpreted that or read it wrong, I’m not sure, but all of the talk of dreams was fun for me to read because I have always been fascinated by dreams and what they mean and blah, blah, blah. On page 12, about half of the way down, it says, “Why should I not expect from the sign of the dream more than I expect from a degree of consciousness which is daily more acute?” It all just really made me think, I suppose.

Like Jess, I started to read Nadja like something from the Nonfiction class. And then I would take a step back and remind myself. And then I would get reading again, and the same thing would happen. The beginning for me was a little messy and all over the place, until we actually met Nadja and then looking back I understood the beginning more and I appreciated the set up in a different way. At first just trying to wade through all of these thoughts and concepts was a little like, “huh?” for me, but once it was over and I stopped to think about it and process it, it was more interesting, and then applying it to his interactions with Nadja made it a little easier to comprehend.