Negentropy and surrealism. A reading of Nadja, by Andre Breton

Abstract

Nadja, written by the French author Andre Breton, holds the position of having implemented the aesthetics and semantics proposals of the Surrealist Manifestos, especially the 1924’s, which is a kind of foundation document of the movement. The inspired Breton’s peroration, in the artistic plan, states itself against descriptive and stilted novels, which are based on the idea of illusion of representation, and, on the social plan, challenges the perception of reality as an suprasensible truth by the idea of work and progress, excluding the crazy person from the social enviroment and locking him up in a real Kafkaesque hell, materially and conceptually. In a kind of otherness, Nadja’s protagonist, a Nietszche reader, will be a flaneur, widely aware; it will be up to him to decide whether and how the free association, the childlike simplicity, and the coherency in the madness should be (re)considered. These ideas are the determinants of a new perception of the world to Breton, and even more loyal to the earth than the metanarratives of the West. As opposed to the utensil men, described by Sartre in Aminadab (1947) as those who give themselves up to a tedious/utilitarian life, Breton’s protagonist represents what can be classified as a counterpoint, through the moral of resistance, giving Surrealism the nonentropic job of Modernism as a kind of last breath.