Seers and the Foreseen:

Breton, Jung and the Real Nadja

“The Poet should make himself a seer.” –A. Rimbaud

“. . . Poetry was a crystallization of Breton’s own belief that the words and language
could change the world, that the mind was the seat of any worthwhile revolution, and
that true revolution must first occur in the mind.” –M. Polizzotti

“The revolution for the Surrealists was the victory of desire.” –M. Nadeau

In the early twentieth century, two very different individuals, Surrealist chief Andreé

Breton and analytical psychologist C.G. Jung, engaged in imaginative

experimentation, tapping into their unconscious minds in search of creativity,

freedom from logic and transpersonal psychic discoveries. Both men were very

interested in spiritualism, a carry over from the 19th-century, which was part of their

cultural moment, and continued to play a role in the aftermath of the First World

War. Yet, these pioneering men had very different mindsets and conducted their

investigations in very different ways.

In this article, we will first explore these differences relying on Breton’s words in his

most famous book, Nadja, and on Jung’s mysterious, yet revelatory, Red Book. In both

men’s cases, collaboration with a woman was essential to their creative process. We

will see that both men felt, in some way, that they were prophets of the future. A

major distinguishing feature of their psychic adventures will be their differing

attitudes towards women.

***
 2

Mark Polizzotti points out that Breton, although born on 19 February, 1896, changed

the date to the 18th, wanting to be an Aquarian like his revered poet predecessors,

Rimbaud and Nerval. Yet, on the cosmic scale, his horoscope showed a highly

significant conjunction of Uranus with Saturn, which occurs only every forty-five

years. Serendipitously, his compatriots Louis Aragon and Paul ÉÉ luard shared the

same conjunction, as Breton noted in his Second manifeste du surréalisme (143).

Jungian Rick Tarnas spells out the advantages in exuberant terms:

. . . the planet Uranus is empirically associated with the principle of change,

rebellion, freedom, liberation, reform and revolution, and the unexpected
breakup of structures; with sudden surprises, revelations and awakenings,
lightning-like flashes of insight, the acceleration of thoughts and events; with
births and new beginnings of all kinds; and with intellectual brilliance, cultural
innovation, technological invention, experiment, creativity, and originality . . .
Another set of concerns is with the celestial and the cosmic, with astronomy and
astrology, with science and esoteric knowledge, with space travel and aviation
(93).

Surrealism did revolutionize the poetry and art world of the twentieth century.

Breton believed his movement could break down the duality between the self and

the unconscious, self and other and self and universe by rejecting rationality.

Children, he said, were closest to “la vraie vie” (true life): without adult logic, they

could easily access the unconscious and their own imaginations. Oddly, Breton

remembered his own childhood as “sad, lonely, and bleak,” with a “blandly

ineffectual” father and a “loveless” mother whose strict Catholicism and disregard

for his literary interests instilled in him a sense of revolt (Polizzotti, 2003, 2-3).
 3

With the advent of World War I, Breton was drafted into the French artillery as a

psychiatric medical officer in the military zone, after some brief training. He and his

collaborators-to-be were all profoundly affected by the blood and horror, which

engendered their revolutionary spirit and a need to fight against everything.

Aspiring to be a poet, not a doctor, Breton was more interested in his patients’

language usage than their medical condition when treating what we now call “post-

traumatic stress disorder” (Polizzotti, 2003, 5). Their distant, often illogical, verbal

relationships intrigued him.

Breton had also discovered Freud’s theory of unconscious linkages in dreams, which

he thought might help explain his own notion of “le hasard des rues” (chance street

encounters) that underlies his 1928 work, Nadja. Following Freud, “the mind

[became] a seat of literary and artistic wonders” for the Surrealists (Bauduin, 11).

Yet, Breton seemed to be describing Jung’s theory of synchronicity in Nadja, i.e.

finding deep personal meaning in everyday surprise encounters.

As recounted in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffeé ,

Jung privileged predestination, declaring that “other people are established

inalienably in my memories only if their names were entered in the scrolls of my

destiny from the beginning, so that encountering them was at the same time a kind

of recollection” (5). He was convinced that “the unconscious psyche . . . exists in a

space-time continuum,” based on his own subjective experience (see Owens, 115).
 4

From childhood on, Jung split off a dissociative self who had unusual visions and

seemed to know vastly more than he did. Later, Jung “recognized” Émma, as the

person he would marry on first seeing her when she was only fourteen years old. A

dream the night before his mother’s death foretold her loss. A series of frightening

visions predicted a bloodbath in Éurope before the advent of World War I and others

presaged his break with Freud. A dream gave him permission to sleep with Toni

Wolff, both patient and colleague, who would come to live in his house as a second

wife.

Jung’s Red Book, begun in 1913, but not published until 2009, began as an attempt to

work through personal issues in trying times, with Wolff’s collaborative support. He

described this inner journey with voices and visions as much more “vivid and

colorful” than his outer experiences (Jung, 1961/1989, ix). Éven more surprisingly,

elsewhere he claimed his inner guru, Philemon, who had manifested in 1914, was

the same Master who had come to “Buddha, Mani, Christ, Mahomet” (see Owens,

106).

Dr. Sonu Shamdasani (2009) classified Breton’s and Jung’s psychic explorations as

part of their cultural moment, citing Breton and Soupault’s use of works by

psychologists Frederick Myers, Theé odore Flournoy, and Pierre Janet, who studied

trance mediumship, telepathy, and clairvoyance. Breton had a great interest in

spiritualism and read parapsychological journals, referenced in his 1933 essay “The

Automatic Message” (Bauduin, 26). But he never had voices or visions. Breton
 5

needed a medium to reach beyond the confines of his own, probably left-dominant,

mind. Jung, on the other hand, with his likely enhanced right mind, used a

dissociative method called “active imagination.”

Jung worked in collaboration with Toni Wolff, with whom he was connected in

analysis, as lovers, and through shared dream states. For Breton, women were muses

and lovers, not intellectual partners, even though women “creators in their own

right” did exist in the Surrealist movement, including Leonora Carrington, Valentine

Hugo, Meret Oppenheim, Dora Maar and Leonor Fini (Polizzotti, 1995/1997, fn.

524).

There were many differences between Breton’s and Jung’s rendering of their mental

explorations. In Nadja, Breton wrote an account of a short period in his life,

peppered with black and white photographs rather than verbal descriptions. Jung

recorded his imaginary encounters using medieval calligraphy, in both Latin and

German, resembling a sacred text. His autonomously produced imagery, as

important as the text, spilled out in “allow” mode, but was meticulously rendered in

brightly colored Tibetan-style mandalas.

Meanwhile, the Surrealists made cut-and-paste or automatic poems, disjointed or

blindly conjoined drawings, called cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse), or enigmatic

paintings with incongruous or illogical imagery. They were opening their heads, not

fitting pieces together, and rejected religion. From a neuroscientific perspective,

 6

breaking down their poetry and art into discrete parts lacking a cohesive whole

might indicate a left-hemispheric takeover (see McGilchrist, 414). But perhaps this

piecemeal approach to art freed the right hemisphere to navigate space, finding

meaningful coincidences in the outside world.

Jung remained in place, extracting deep personal meaning from his unconscious,

justifying his extramarital love life, while discovering his “soul,” i.e. his inner

feminine or “anima,” driven by a desire for wholeness. He distinguished the “spirit of

the time” from the “spirit of the depths” in The Red Book, seemingly dividing his

mind along a horizontal axis, left versus right, logic versus emotion, and language

versus imagery. Jungian psychotherapist Maria Helena Mandacarué Guerra sees The

Red Book as the “expression of someone in love, of a poet, in whose consciousness

transformed by love metaphors flourish (26).” Jung did not need to fight logic like a

Surrealist. A right-enhanced mind, I would say, could confirm Guerra’s analysis, that

Jung was naturally open to “the logic of the heart, of images and of metaphors (29).”

Yet, the need for ‘masculine’ logic to be tempered by ‘feminine’ Éros fueled both

men’s systems of thought. Éach of Breton’s books followed a new love affair. If not

for Toni Wolff, Jung’s Red Book might not have been written. Their relationship

ended when she did not share his new interest in alchemy.

Breton’s Collaborators
 7

In 1916, Breton befriended Jacques Vacheé , a soldier who was truly mentally ill.

Breton considered this chance meeting one of the most important influences in his

life. Profoundly affected when Vacheé died from an opium overdose, possibly a

suicide, Breton believed his treasured friend had been replaced or even reincarnated

in Tristan Tzara, founder of the earlier Dada movement. Breton’s attraction to a

mind naturally capable of surmounting the wall of logic, may have prefaced his later

attraction to Nadja.

In 1918, the Surrealist group formed and their first work, Les Champs magnétiques

(The Magnetic Fields), a collaborative effort between Andreé Breton and Philippe

Soupault, was published and presented as a scientific experiment. 1 Using

unconventional images, their authorial voices were intertwined and barely

distinguishable in the inspirational and intuitive style of the work.

Typical of collaborative ventures I wrote about in my book, In Their Right Minds: The

Lives and Shared Practices of Poetic Geniuses, the two Surrealists felt they were

obeying ‘une dictée magique’ (a magical dictation) as described in their next book,

Les Pas perdus (The Lost Steps, 1924). Sentences came to them so fast that they had

to resort to abbreviations to get them down, much as James Merrill and David

Jackson had reported about their Ouija board sessions. For Breton and Soupault, a

chapter ended at day’s end. The duo felt the words had come to them from a

universal consciousness, revealing secrets of the cosmos they were specially elected

1
Breton visited Freud in Vienna, but the psychoanalyst was not interested in his work. See Polizzotti’s
foreword in The Lost Steps, his translation of Les Pas perdus.
 8

to write down. The words were tumbling out of ‘la bouche d’ombre’, the same

Shadow’s Mouth that had ‘spoken’ to Victor Hugo in collaboration with his family

and friends through the talking tables, beginning in 1853. Hugo, whom Breton

admired, believed that ‘All is One’ in the universe, love is all you need, and man is

multiple, containing numerous souls within a single body.

The collaborative effort of Breton and Soupault was the beginning of “l’écriture

automatique,” the automatic writing method often used by spirit mediums, in which

the unconscious speaks or writes without premeditation. Also known as “la pensée

parlée,” or spoken thought, it used a free association of ideas or images. This method

led to another means of accessing dissociative knowledge: “l’époque des sommeils,” a

hypnotic sleep that produced unfiltered speech proffering revelations and

prophecies. Robert Desnos, the specialist in the method, said in La Révolution

surréaliste: “Prophecy is within the grasp of everyone, just like memory and, for my

part, I see no difference between the past and the future. The sole tense of the Verb

is the indicative present (March 1926, 20).” 2

The “sleeps,” however, devolved into a dangerous method. As Bauduin (2014)

reports:

Crevel prophesied that all those present would get tuberculosis and die. To
general dismay, some of the participants became ill in the next few days. Desnos
proved more and more difficult to wake up and even required the aid of a hastily
summoned doctor on one occasion. On another, apparently still entranced, he
2
Desnos was part of the French resistance and sent to a Czech concentration camp. In his last
Surrealist act, he saved a truckload of inmates heading for the gas chamber by reading palms and
predicting long life for all. The confused Nazi guards returned Desnos and all the others to the
barracks. Sadly, he died of typhus shortly after liberation.
 9

tried to stab ÉÉ luard with a penknife after the latter had resorted to emptying a
jug of water over him to awaken him. When, at a certain point, Breton discovered
several members of the group in a side room preparing to hang themselves on
Crevel’s instigation, it became clear that things were getting out of hand. He put
an end to the sessions (36).

Despite these setbacks, the movement was in a constant state of becoming, as the

dilapidated walls of logic, religion and family crumbled, allowing newly minted

individuals to follow the dictates of their liberated unconscious:

Le surreé alisme ouvre les portes du reê ve aà tous ceux pour qui la nuit est avare. Le
surreé alisme est le Carrefour des enchantements du sommeil, de l’alcool, du
tabac, de l’eé ther, de l’opium, de la cocaïïne, de la morphine, mais il est aussi le
briseur des chaïênes, nous ne dormons pas, nous ne buvons pas, nous ne fumons
pas, nous ne prisons pas, nous ne nous piquons pas et nous reê vons, et la rapiditeé
des aiguilles des lampes introduit dans nos cerveaux la merveilleuse eé ponge
deé fleurie de l’or.3

[Surrealism opens the door of the dream world to those who are greedy for the
night. Surrealism exists at the intersection of the enchantment of sleep, alcohol,
tobacco, ether, opium, cocaine, morphine, but it is also breaks chains, we do not
sleep, we do not drink, we do not smoke, we do not take drugs, and we dream,
and the rapidity of the needles of lamps introduce into our brains the marvelous
sponge sprinkled in gold (my translation).

In 1924, Breton officially announced his new movement in his Manifeste du

Surréalisme:

SURRÉÉ ALISMÉ, n.m. Automatisme psychique pur par lequel on se propose

d’exprimer, soit verbalement, soit par eé crit, soit de toute autre manieà re, le
fonctionnement reé el de la penseé e. Dicteé e de la penseé e, en l’absence de tout
controê le exerceé par la raison, en dehors de toute preé occupation estheé tique ou
morale.

SURRÉALISM, masculine noun. Pure psychic automatism by which one can

express verbally, or in writing, or by any other method, the real functioning of

3
Preface to la Révolution surréaliste, 1, (1/12/1924).
 10

thought. That is, the dictation of thought, absent from any control exercised by
reason, outside of any esthetic or moral preoccupation (my translation).

I. Surrealism, Self and the Collaborating Other

Following his own definition, Breton believed he must cease to be who he thought he

was in order to understand his “real” self, i.e. the “phantom” living in his

unconscious, buried deep beneath social conventions. The Surrealist revolution took

many forms. The adherents did not value work; in fact, it was forbidden. Together,

they abandoned their studies, dedicating their lives to a search for their true selves

via signs from their unconscious minds.

There were precursors in the French literary tradition. The 19th-century French

poet Rimbaud famously said, “Je est un autre,” the ungrammatical “I is another,” or

“someone else.” He sought his real objective self through a systematic derangement

of all the senses.4 Similarly, Baudelaire, in his poem, “Correspondances,” had said “les

parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent (scents, colors and sounds

correspond).” Breton praised Rimbaud as well as the novelist Flaubert for what

sounded like synaesthesia. Flaubert reportedly wanted to give the impression of the

color yellow in Salammbô and the color of moldiness in corners where there are

wood lice in Madame Bovary. The evocation of colors in unusual ways in typical with

4
Rimbaud believed he was a born poet. He may well have had atypical lateralization favoring poetic
language. But traumatic childhood experience may have also played a role. He was sent to the
countryside to be nursed shortly after birth. His military father only returned home once a year and
disappeared when Rimbaud was only six. Rimbaud’s mother physically abused him and his brother.
‘Le Bateau ivre’ (The Drunken Boat) was a cry for the absent father (Robb, 2000). Dissociative others
may arise in the absence of secure parental attachment, fueling poetry (Platt, 2007).
 11

synaesthesia and tends to come more naturally to people with atypically lateralized

brains (Rogowska, 2015).

But space and time were also part of Breton’s method. He believed he could sink

roots into the universal cosmos and find a ghost-like presence, a truly unknown

other, with a unique message for the world. In Nadja, he saw himself as condemned

to retrace the footsteps of his future self, while learning only a meager portion of

what he had forgotten in the transit of time. Was this a poetic insight or a bolder

claim?5 Breton insisted that a grand awakening could only occur through

unconscious processes in a world that provided fortuitous, unexpected clues.

Breton felt strongly that Surrealism must remain a collective, collaborative

movement whose adherents expressed their individual essences through writing or

painting. Giorgio de Chirico could only paint surprised by the chance arrangement of

painted objects. Only the unusual could produce poetry, which was the optimal form

of writing in search of the self. Breton seemed to know this intuitively; however,

poetry is right-hemispheric language, relying on emotion, sound and sight

impressions, using prosodic expression and comparative imagery (see Kane, 2004).

For the most part, Breton was transparent about himself, divulging what he

considered the most marvelous events of his daily life, all considered to be signals

5
At the 2016 Science of Consciousness Conference in Tucson, AZ, time and consciousness melded
into one overarching theme. The brain’s most important function was said to be its ability to predict
the future, which might explain the precognitive powers in people especially predisposed to detect it.
 12

from the self transmitted via the unconscious. He believed that all men were capable

of tapping into this underlying force, depending on their degree of liberation from

the dictatorship of conscious logic. As a side note, the 20 th-century Surrealists may

have appeared mentally ill, even when they were not. In the 19th century, great poets

and writers often were ill, specifically, bipolar with psychotic features, treated using

harsh methods in mental asylums, including bloodletting with leeches (see Murat,

2001).

Finding the Marvelous in the Mundane

Nadja (1928/1964), alternately called a novel or a memoir, was not written as an

automatic text; rather, it enumerates, without any pre-established order, the

“marvelous” events of Breton’s life that proved (in his mind) the superiority of the

surreal. The following rather banal events occur in Nadja:

(1) In the balcony, during the intermission of Apollinaire’s Couleur du Temps (Color

of Time), Paul ÉÉ luard approached Breton, who was seated with Picasso, mistaking

him for a friend he thought had been killed in the war. Later, introduced to ÉÉ luard in

writing through a mutual friend, they began to correspond. Meeting in person while

ÉÉ luard was on furlough, they deemed their initial encounter predestination. Breton’s

other “marvelous” encounters included Benjamin Peé ret, Philippe Soupault, Robert

Desnos, Jacques Vacheé et Louis Aragon. Breton attributed these meetings to

magnetic force fields and mental chemistry in the collaborative Surrealist adventure.
 13

(2) Walking with Philippe Soupault, Breton predicted without fail when they would

encounter shops selling “Bois-Charbon” (wood-coal). A hallucinatory image of a log

presumably guided the way. While returning home, Breton heard a tune playing on a

carousel’s “cheval de bois” [wooden horse], feeling he was the log. Later, at home, he

was frightened by statue of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

The recurrent sounds and sights beyond the original trigger, along with Breton’s

emotional reaction to them, suggest a possible right-hemispheric connection.

Breton’s visual and emotional hypersensitivities were also evident when a statue of

Renaissance scholar and printer Étienne Dolet made him uneasy. Dolet’s

condemnation by the theological faculty of the Sorbonne and burning at the stake

may have activated Breton’s sympathetic dis-ease in this instance. 6

(3) A woman from Nantes recommends to Breton and the Surrealist circle Benjamin

Peé ret, who wanted to embark on a literary career in Paris.7 Breton remembers that

Rimbaud had come from Nantes. He also met Jacques Vacheé there during the war. In

the 1964 edition of Nadja, Breton speaks of Rimbaud as though he had taken

possession of him in a sort of mystical reincarnation, allowing the Surrealist to see

the city of Nantes through his poet predecessor’s eyes. Peé ret’s acceptance seemed

preordained. These vague sensations and associative recollections, while possibly

indicating a right-hemispheric proclivity, are no match for Jung’s startling

precognitions and dreams.

6
See https://www.britannica.com/biography/Étienne-Dolet.
7
The woman was Peé ret’s mother (in Polizzotti, 1995/1997, 149).
 14

(4) Breton recounts “l’époque des sommeils” (the era of sleeps) in which Robert

Desnos could fall asleep, while speaking from his unconscious mind or seemingly

channeling someone else. He “borrowed” the personality of the artist Marcel

Duchamp, even though he had never met him. Breton insisted that Desnos was an

oracle when speaking in this dissociative state of consciousness. 8

(5) Breton had an inexplicable attraction to the boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle,

apparently only a vague intuition, “knowing” that some day something marvelous

would happen there.

(6) Les Détraquées, a play in which two female instructors kill one of the most

beautiful and gifted students in their school each year enthralled Breton. Thirty

years later, Breton learned that a neurologist who had been an intern in medicine

with him had been consulted on the play’s premise. In a dream the night of the play,

Breton reproduced some of the same images he had seen, believing, in a Freudian

way, they were beyond the notions of good and evil.

Acceptable violence may, in part, explain Breton’s admiration for his predecessor

poet, Lautreé amont. Born in war-torn Uruguay, Lautreé amont’s mother died shortly

after his birth. War, riots and plague riddled his short life. Not surprisingly,

Lautreé amont’s two published works, Les Chants de Maldoror (The Songs of

8
Aragon described the Desnos phenomenon in “Une vague de reê ves,” Commerce, automne 1924.
 15

Maldoror) and Poésies were grim, the former accenting evil to the point of sadism.

Lautreé amont’s concept of poetry as a breakdown of logic, religion, and all received

notions of the good, while celebrating the virile male to the point of sadism, must

have been music to the ears of Breton and the Surrealists. 9

In general, the 19th century witnessed a bizarre attraction to sadism and Satanism.

Breton himself said that J.-K. Huysmans’s Là-bas (Down There), which he was

reading at the time he wrote Nadja, seemed to have been written just for him. In fact,

Huysmans’s book extolled Satanism, as practiced by renegade priests, and expressed

a blatant disregard for women.

(7) In a flea market on the outskirts of Paris, Breton and a friend spotted a complete

edition of Rimbaud’s works. An unknown woman, Fanny Besnos, who would later

become a member of the group, mentioned her love of Shelley, Nietzsche and,

notably, Rimbaud. She also criticized Louis Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (The Peasant

of Paris), not realizing she was speaking to the chief Surrealist at that moment.

Breton then formulates his theory of “le hasard objectif” as a natural tie existing

between a personal subjective and a universal automatism which allows a man’s

unconscious to unite with the unconscious of a city; and, in so doing, evokes occult

forces. Instead of letting one’s hand wander on a piece of paper to see what poetic

words or images appeared, the Surrealist poet wandered the streets in search of

9
David Gascoyne (1935/2003), an Énglish convert to Surrealism, believed that Lautreé amont had
written his poetry “more or less automatically” as well (31).
 16

powerful meetings of the collective with the personal unconscious. He meets a

woman who called herself Nadja—the beginning of the word “hope” in Russian—a

muse who would, for a short time, open more doors of perception than he could

have ever imagined alone.

Encountering Nadja

In his book, Breton said that Nadja’s proud strut, mysterious smile and curious eye

makeup attracted him. The two strangers believed destiny had brought them

together through the power of their unconscious minds (thus resembling the

collaborative adventures of Yeats and his wife, Georgie, James Merrill and David

Jackson, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. The enchanted Breton listened intently to

Nadja’s words, only speaking when she mentioned brave working folk. He then

launched into a tirade on the meaninglessness of work, which only alienates and

devalues life. Unlike war heroes, true heroes (the Surrealists), would lead others to

break their mental chains in a Trotskyite permanent revolution.

Nadja seemed to have occult powers. Her hallucinations and premonitions proved

true as she and Breton strolled the streets of Paris. The married man and his new

muse seemed to meld minds in a joint destiny. Nadja “saw” Breton’s quest writ large:

he was progressing towards a star and would write a book about them: “Andreé ?

Andreé ? . . . You will write a novel about me. I’m sure you will. Don’t say you won’t. Be

careful: everything fades, everything vanishes. Something must remain of us . . .

(Nadja, Howard trans., 100).”

 17

During their short time together, Nadja reigned supreme as an enlightening force.

Breton believed he had entered her mind and saw through her eyes. Astonished by

her power of attraction, he asked, “Qui êtes-vous? (Who are you?).” She replied: “Je

suis l’âme errante. (I am the wandering soul).” For a while, they were in the zone

where the unconscious reveals its mysteries. Having described himself as a dog

seated at the feet of Nadja, his “génie libre” (free genius), Breton nonetheless

concluded she was too advanced on her surreal route, as she would even forget to

eat or sleep.

On one occasion, Nadja put her hands over Breton’s eyes and her foot on the

accelerator of his car, heading for a stand of trees. Resisting her impulse, Breton

concluded that this “amour fou” (mad love) was real “madness.” After one night of

physical intimacy, he decided he could only witness this love, but not return it.

Indeed, Nadja was soon interned in an asylum for aberrant behavior in her

apartment building, claiming to hear men on the roof and disturbing her neighbors.

Breton at first maintained that Nadja had been elected to pass through the barriers

of logical constraints. By collaborating in her naturally surreal perspective, he had

hoped to find his own true self. Yet, he also claimed, naively, that for Nadja there was

little difference between the inside and the outside of an asylum (158). Then he

asserted that asylums make their internees insane (161) and doesn’t understand
 18

why a human being should be deprived of freedom (164). Despite these

reservations, he abandoned her.

Consciousness and the Brain

Breton was convinced that paradise existed here on Éarth inside the human mind.

Indeed, modern research shows that synchronization of the cerebral hemispheres

can lead to a blissful sense of being without bodily borders, immersed in the All,

with visions of light. However, there is no evidence that Breton experienced an

epiphany of this sort. Rather, his words suggest a philosophical invasion of

dissociative selves: Who exists inside of me? Is it myself alone? Could other beings

inhabit me? Is my true self an unknown phantom?

Updating his early, but prescient, twentieth-century notion of the self with modern

consciousness research, we see that Breton was nonetheless on to something: that

is, the immense reach of the unconscious mind, which need not be couched in

mystical terms:

Que la grande inconscience vive et sonore qui m’inspire mes seuls actes probants
dispose aà tout jamais de tout ce qui est moi. Je m’oê te aà plaisir toute chance de lui
reprendre ce qu’ici aà nouveau je lui donne. Je ne veux encore une fois reconnaïêtre
qu’elle, je veux ne compter que sur elle et presque aà loisir parcourir ses jeteé es
immenses, fixant moi-meê me un point brillant que je sais eê tre dans mon œil et qui
m’eé pargne de me heurter aà ses ballots de nuit (180).

May the great living and echoing unconsciousness which inspires my only
conclusive acts in any sense I always believe in, dispose forever of all that is in
myself. I gladly renounce the possibility of taking back what here, again, I bestow
upon it. Once more I want to recognize and rely on it alone and virtually at my
leisure wander along its immense piers, staring at some shining dot I know is in
 19

my own eye and which saves me all collision with its night freight (trans. Howard
155).

Breton privileged unconscious over conscious experience in a Freudian and

sometimes Jungian way; but modern neuroscience shows the working brain as much

more complex. French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene contends that, “a staggering

amount of unconscious processing occurs beneath the surface of our conscious mind

(Dehaene, 13).” Imaging methods have become so precise that neuroscientists can

now show exactly where global unconscious processing crosses over into conscious

thought. What does pass into the conscious mind is la crème de la crème of what the

unconscious proposes to it. Dehaene says, “Unsurprisingly, it turns out that our

attentional spotlight is operated by armies of unconscious workers that silently sift

through piles of rubble before one of them hits gold and alerts us of its finding (75).”

Unconscious processing also explains how mathematicians and scientists get sudden

answers to tricky conundrums when stepping onto a bus or shaving or how poets

receive a fully formed poem.

Unlike Freud and Jung, Dehaene sees consciousness as a “tipping point” in an

“avalanche” of neuronal activity, not a hidden source needing to be revealed. “The

frontal regions of the brain are being informed of sensory inputs in a bottom-up

manner, but these regions also send massive projections in the converse direction,

top-down, and to many distributed areas (140).” The end result is a cerebral web of

synchronized areas. Only activation of the prefrontal cortex (top) and the parietal

cortex (bottom) in long-distant loops creates conscious experience. Furthermore,

 20

Christof Koch has shown that if the brain stem is damaged, consciousness flees (54);

yet, “removing much of the front of the cortex causes no apparent major deficit”

(58).

By avoiding external work and dedicating themselves to art, poetry, and free love,

Breton and his Surrealist coterie were in a privileged position to perceive the

“marvelous” through the eyes of a woman, even if her second sight came from

trauma, as we will see (137).

***

Near the end of Nadja, Breton suddenly changes his tone as he extolls the woman he

now loved, addressing her in the French familiar, “tu.” He had met Suzanne Muzard

at the Cafeé Cyrano, where he had read the first two parts of Nadja to his Surrealist

friends. Breton and Muzard, who was at the time the mistress of a fellow Surrealist,

Émmanuel Berl, had a coup de foudre réciproque (reciprocal love at first sight). The

lovers left immediately for two weeks in the south of France. Upon their return,

Breton added part three to Nadja, proclaiming Muzard’s genius and his love,

concluding that successive substitutions of inspiring women would stop with her.

This experience brings to mind the 19th-century French writer, Geé rard Nerval, whose

own redeeming female figure took the form of his mistress, then the Virgin Mary and

then the Goddess Isis. But Nerval was experiencing an actual bout of mental illness,

not amour fou. Nerval famously walked a lobster on a leash and was found naked in

the streets of Paris experiencing grandiose voices and visions, as described in his
 21

book Aurélia. He was interned in the asylum of Dr Blanche, where the French writer

Guy de Maupassant, had also been interned. Mental illness, in an atypically

lateralized brain, may well open the mind to poetry, confirming Kay Redfield

Jamison’s hypothesis in Touched with Fire, an idea supported by Nobel prize-winning

neuroscientist Éric R. Kandel (2012).

The final line of Nadja, “la beauté sera convulsive on ne sera pas” (Beauty will be

convulsive or will not be at all), is enigmatic. It could refer to successive (surreal)

women, the eternal bearers of fresh infusions of the marvelous; a type of beauty that

is truly beyond the pail, like Suzanne Muzard’s; or a Keatsian “fresh perfection” of

truth and beauty. In Manifestes du surréalisme, Breton said, “il n’y a que le

merveilleux qui soit beau (24).” (Only the marvelous is beautiful.) But his search was

tenuous as only fragments of messages from the unconscious—signs from the self—

pointed towards his true identity. The marvelous, he claimed, would continue to

announce itself through petites saccades (little jolts), leading one day to a volcanic

eruption—the total recuperation of the forces that exist in “man,” freed from the

oppressive forces of society and the shackles of his own mind. For the Surrealists, a

revolution of the mind seemed linked to a revolution in the loins.

Karin Cope (2012) claimed that the actual message at the end of Nadja refers to

Frances Wilson Grayson, whose plane went missing in bad weather over Nova

Scotia. She had planned to be the first woman pilot to cross the Atlantic. On 26

December 1927 she radioed “Something Wrong.” Grayson had left a written
 22

statement with a reporter in case she did not survive her attempt at flight. In it she

said, “Who am I? Sometimes I wonder. Am I a little nobody? Or am I a great dynamic

force—powerful—in that I have a God-given birthright and have all the power there

is if only I will understand and use it?” As Cope says, this sounds very much like

Breton himself, which is perhaps why he cited it.

***

What are we to take away from Nadja, as recounted by Breton? His first books had

been anti-literary automatic texts or recounted dreams, including Mont de Piété

(Pawn Shop), Les Champs magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields) and Clair de terre

(Éarthlight). Éach extolled a refusal of logic and a revolt against society. In Les Pas

perdus (The Lost Steps), the predilection for chance street encounters was already

evident, before he encountered Nadja, as well as the call for revolution. His poems,

“Partez sur les routes” (Depart on the roads) and “Lâchez tout” (Let go of everything),

recalled his extolled predecessor Rimbaud’s search for liberty by taking off on long

fugues. In Le Manifeste du surréalisme, Breton had already denounced the useless

and cumbersome descriptions in Romanesque literature, saying it was better to

insert a picture, as he did in Nadja.

His notion that personal knowledge rooted in the universal cosmos pre-exists us was

also expressed in his Manifeste du surréalisme. Jung also had hypothesized that his

mediumistic cousin must have gotten information she could not have known

otherwise from the space-time continuum (1977, 125, fn.15). Breton denounced the

internment of the mentally ill, who were both victims of their own imaginations and
 23

capable of revealing secrets from the beyond, if not medicated, restrained and

deprived of liberty. They and we will remain inside our schizophrenic fighting boxes,

unless released by revolution. But true love, already touted as the only resource for

reconciling man with life in L’introduction au discours sur le peu de réalité

(Introduction to the Discourse on the Paucity of Reality), was not possible, in his

estimation, under a bourgeois regime.

The Real Nadja

Thanks to Dutch writer Hester Albach, pursuing clues in France, we now know much

more about the real woman portrayed in Nadja. The Dutch version has been

translated into French, but not yet into Énglish. As Philippe Noble, editor of Léona,

Héroïne du surréalisme (2009) says, Albach reconstructs the person Leé ona while

deconstructing Breton’s Nadja.

Following the leads in Nadja, Albach sought traces of the real Nadja in present-day

Paris, including the hotel in which the young woman had lived. Albach also

discovered that letters extending months past the nine days Leé ona and Breton had

spent together were found in his personal library after his death in 1966. At police

headquarters in Paris, a record existed of Leé ona’s arrest, not for transporting

cocaine from Amsterdam to Paris as mentioned in Nadja (she was released by the

judge in this case), but for psychotic behavior in her apartment building, screaming

that men were on the roof. As we saw, this breakdown led to her internment in a

mental institution, which Breton mentions near the end of Nadja.

 24

Albach went to the Bar le Dauphin, now a restaurant in Paris called Bis Repetita.

Here, she found the same floor pattern in place that had frightened Nadja in the

book’s account. With solid evidence of Leé ona’s reality, Albach visited the graveyard

where inmates of the Bailleul asylum, including Leé ona, were buried during the

occupation of France. When she called a florist’s number found on a tag where

flowers had been laid on the gravesite, Leé ona’s granddaughter answered and

excitedly invited the researcher to meet with her, divulging the information below.

Leé ona Delcourt’s paternal grandmother had a business dying textiles, allowing the

family to live comfortably. Her mother was a practicing Catholic; her father had an

aesthetic predisposition and encouraged his daughters’ educations, inculcating in

them an artistic sensibility. Yet, he was emotionally unstable and would beat them

for no particular reason and without warning. Her sensitive sister had literally

dropped dead from shock when the family learned (erroneously) that their father

had died in a bombing of his military unit. Leé ona was only 13 years old at the time.

The family had no food, and she was subject to anxiety attacks.

Furthermore, after a brief liaison with a British soldier and an unwed pregnancy at

16, Leé ona was forced to leave her newborn daughter with her parents in Lille. She

was set adrift in Paris at the mercy of an older man her parents had chosen to be her

protector. Given all of these traumas, a mental breakdown with uncanny intrusions

into consciousness was understandable. Now in Paris, sometimes lacking funds to

 25

pay her rent or even eat, Leé ona placed herself totally in Breton’s hands, playing the

part he called for—an occult muse.

For a short while, Breton was intrigued and even sold a painting so that he could

give Leé ona needed funds to survive. He also lent her two books to read, Les Champs

magnétiques and Les Pas perdus. As she lacked a secure sense of self, it is not

surprising that she saw herself in his characters. Maurice Nadeau, in Histoire du

Surréalisme (1964), claimed Nadja was ‘always, naturally in what the spiritualists

call a clairvoyant state, in a constant, perfect state of availability (120).” This

“availability” may be attributed to a genetic predisposition as well as to the many

traumas she had suffered.

As reported in Nadja, the real Leé ona continued to surprise Breton with her uncanny

ability to predict events. She pointed to a window, saying it would suddenly turn red,

and it did. Terrified by events that had occurred during the French Revolution at this

same venue, she saw a “blue wind” passing through the trees and heard a voice say

to her, not for the first time, “You will die.” The clairvoyance, her identification with

the distant past, the synaesthetic “blue wind” and the negatory hallucinatory voice

all suggest an enhanced right-hemisphere. She pointed to water in a fountain jetting

up and returning to the pond around it, saying to Breton: “Those are your thoughts

and mine,” which similarly jet up, fall down, then come back up stronger. Breton was

stunned she had somehow described an illustration in a book he had just seen that
 26

preceded idealist philosopher George Berkeley’s third dialogue between Hylas and

Philonous. She also described Breton’s wife and a pet in a clairvoyant way.

The Eyes Have It

The role of eyes, seeing and being seen, becomes increasing clear in the story of

Leé ona and Breton. Breton was attracted to her alluring eyes, and through his eyes

she became a “seer” whose natural inclinations could propel him onto the surreal

path his future had dictated. Not just a “seer”, she was also an artist, communicating

her thoughts in words and drawings sent to Breton via the post. “You can never see

this star like I saw it. You don’t understand: it is like the heart of a heartless flower,”

she wrote. Hearts and flowers, hearts with the face of flowers, eyes within the faces

of flowers, and mermaids were trademark images in Leé ona’s very feminine

drawings. To her, Breton was a savior, a king, and she was his queen. To him, she was

an automatist, not an artist, with a direct hotline to the surreal.

Breton’s mediumship connection

Consulting mediums through the Society for Psychical Research in Éngland and in

France was seen as a way to communicate with lost loved ones and get advice about

the future in the aftermath of war (Platt 2009). Breton admitted visiting a voyante

(seer) named Mme Sacco, who said he would be interested in a woman named

Heé leà ne. In short order, he did become very interested in Heé leà ne Smith, the famous

Swiss medium studied by Flournoy. Smith had constructed reincarnation fantasies in

which Flournoy was both her son and her lover. Knowing he was interested in
 27

foreign languages, she used automatic handwriting and drawing to construct a

“Martian” language and landscape for him. The Surrealists’ use of automatisms may,

in fact, be attributed to this medium’s influence. In her reincarnation fantasies,

Heé leà ne Smith claimed a spirit control, Leé opold, was actually Cagliostro, an Italian

clairvoyant adventurer who had been Marie Antoinette’s lover.

Breton, Heé leà ne Smith, Leé ona, and Marie Antoinette all met up via mediumship. With

merger a saving grace for someone with such a disordered sense of self, Leé ona

promptly proclaimed: “Je suis Hélène” (I am Heé leà ne). While delusions of grandeur are

typical in disordered minds, Leé ona choose to meld minds with a Parisian medium.

Traumatic deaths are more likely to later entrain reincarnation claims (Braude); not

grandiose, Leé ona wondered who she had been in Marie Antoinette’s entourage,

rather than the queen herself.

In a sense, the brief collaboration of the Surrealist and his street muse was a folie à

deux; but only she was folle. Breton was founding a movement, abjuring logic,

seeking significant coincidences, and resolving absurd opposites like the chance

meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on an operating table, the famous line

lifted from Lautreé amont.

Breton and other Surrealists, including Marcel Duchamp, aka artist and cross-

dresser Rrose Seé lavy, believed that “Eros, c’est la vie!” (Éros is life!) Based on the

lives, writings, and artistic representations of the Surrealists, women were indeed
 28

mostly revered as sex objects and muses. In the Manifeste du surréalisme, Breton

says, “Puis l’essential n’est-il pas que nous soyons nos maîtres, et les maîtres des

femmes, de l’amour, aussi?” [The essential, then, isn’t it that we are our masters, and

the masters of women, of love, as well?]. Ileana Alexandra Orlich (2006) got it right

when she identified “the impact of Surrealism and its image of woman as a sensual

bodily backdrop for the male vision.” The “irrational” feminine complements the

“rational” masculine and “might serve as a means for humanity to attain spiritual

enlightenment and renewal (215-16),” on one hand; but also, on the other, she is

somewhat satanic (220). Jung, quite frankly, held a similar view, saying that the

feminine psyche was emotional, dark, and “earth-bound,” whereas the masculine

psyche was logical, shining and high. Nonetheless, both were needed for the fullness

of being (Wilhelm 82).

Alchemy, French History and the Eye of the Beholder

Breton said, in his Second manifeste du surréalisme: “Tout porte à croire qu’il existe

un certain point de l’esprit d’où la vie et la mort, le réel et l’imaginaire, le passé et le

futur, le communicable et l’incommunicable, le haut et le bas cessent d’être perçus

contradictoirement (1930/1969, 76-77).” [Éverything tends to make us believe that

there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the

imagined, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be

perceived as contradictions (my translation).]

 29

Finding the names of alchemists Hermes Trismegistus, Raymond Lulle, Nicolas

Flamel, Cornelius Agrippa, Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, Émmanuel Swedenborg

and Joseé phin Peé ladan in the online catalogue of Breton’s library, Albach purchased

and studied some of them. She became convinced of the alchemical connection in

Nadja. La Table d’émeraude (The Émerald Table) by Hermeà s Trismeé giste, the

foundation text of alchemy, for one, purports to explain all of Nature in terms of the

reconciliation of opposites.10

Albach also found that Leé ona’s letters to Breton, subsequent to their nine-day

encounter, did not have much in common with the person portrayed in Nadja, but

did have alchemical references. For instance, Leé ona refers to Breton as “Khephen,”

who, in alchemical lore, is the son of Pharaoh, the sun and God, as well as the

perfected self. Albach then interpreted drawings Leé ona sent to Breton, inserted in

Nadja, as alchemical references.

In Leé ona’s medical records, Albach learned that the troubled woman had indeed

claimed to be a medium that could predict the future, saying, “Time is a tease.” It can

sometimes let us know a slice of the past or the future, statements in synch with

both Breton’s and Jung’s beliefs. Leé ona’s records also indicated her inhumane

treatment, showing that she had been rolled up with arms crossed in wet sheets that

got progressively tighter as they dried. This abhorrent method had been used in the

10
Baudelaire referenced Hermeà s Trismeé giste (three times great) in the opening poem / preface to
Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Évil), “Au lecteur” (To the Reader). This reference was well known
to French poets.
 30

nineteenth century as well, when Nerval was institutionalized in the asylum of Dr

Blanche.

Éventually, Leé ona’s family insisted she be placed in an institution closer to their

home. Able to visit, they witnessed her mental state grow progressively worse under

the harsh conditions of her confinement. Her brief weeks of happiness in Paris had

turned into a living hell with paranoid hallucinations and no exit. She died in 1945 at

only 38 years of age.

While I can neither confirm nor deny Albach’s explanations of some curious facts in

Nadja as referencing alchemy or French history, she makes an interesting case.

Tracing the footsteps of Breton and his mediumistic muse in present day Paris, she

attributes his comment that la Porte Saint Denis is useless due to the fact that kings

no longer pass through the threshold, thanks to the French Revolution. Decapitated

heads are a theme in Nadja. After Denis lost his, he managed to pick it up and walk,

or so the legend goes. Albach later discovered a fresco of Saint Denis searching for

his head at the entrance to the Pantheé on, making it seem a preordained theme.

Marie-Antoinette’s beheading, along with the cyclical killing of young girls in Les

Détraquées, the play Breton curiously admired, also fit the theme.

While Breton was attracted to Leé ona’s eyes, her haphazard ways and precognitive

abilities, she was drawing herself dressed in an ermine coat or as the mythic

Meé lusine, casting a spell on him. Curiously, in one of her letters of entreaty after
 31

their liaison ended, Leé ona says Breton “lui a pris ses yeux.” Albach interprets this as

Breton “taking his eyes” away from her, representing the young woman’s sense of

depersonalization after losing his confirming look. Without Breton the observer,

Leé ona no longer existed.

Meanwhile other seers had been predicting potential harms. In Leé ona’s later letters,

we learn that when Breton asked Max Érnst to draw a portrait of Nadja, he refused.

Consulting the medium Mme Sacco, Érnst had learned that a Nadia or Natacha

would cause physical harm to the woman he loved. Breton also visited the medium

Pascal Forthuny who, among other things, charged him with plunging a young

woman (easily attributable to Leé ona) into “un cruel drame de conscience (Albach,

185).”

Albach reminds us that alchemy envisioned the universe as a single state of

consciousness that brings all of its disparate parts together. Other theorists say that

the further consciousness extends, the closer it approaches the divine, distancing

itself from the mineral realm where light and consciousness are lacking. The Secret

of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Books of Life, a work that highly influenced Jung,

describes a meditative state so absorbing that the heart opens to “a world of light

and brightness (49).” Mystics almost always connect light phenomena to their

experiences. Éven Victor Hugo interpreted metempsychosis as a transmigration of

souls progressing toward the light or regressing to dark unenlightened mineral,

depending on actions in their previous lives.

 32

Yet, Bauduin says, and I tend to agree, that the Surrealists where interested in the

alchemy of words, not metals, following Rimbaud. The inscription on Breton’s tomb

read: ‘Je cherche l’or du temps’ (I’m looking for the gold of our time). But his vision

was a poetic, societal, and revolutionary process designed to usher in a new way of

being in the world, free from logical constraints. Jung crafted a beautiful, mystical

text to save his own mind from what felt like incipient madness and, in so doing,

provided posterity with a new form of psychology to integrate the Self into

wholeness. Nadja was a poor, traumatized woman seeking support from a man

briefly mesmerized by her uncanny powers of perception. Left to suffer an ignoble

end, she believed all the while that she was a medium and, indeed, her prediction

that Breton would write a book about her did come true.

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