She's the first thought of the day, one second before you open your eyes and realise where you are, maybe even whom. She's the last conscious breath before you fall asleep, pondering all the million variables of that thought. In so far as Breton’s collection, both its title and its surrealist spirit, was subsequently “modified in the guts of the living,” to echo Auden’s poem about Yeats, it certainly proved creative and regenerative: the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos (1953), The Lost Steps, in some respects a postcolonial critique of surrealism, brilliantly explores not only what it means to get lost in the jungle but also just how difficult it is both to move on foot in the streets of a city and to live according to the “laws of collective motion” that prevail in them. As individual pedestrians, isn’t this what we are all trying to do in our everyday lives? Aren’t we fighting, in effect, to coordinate the city’s “laws of collective motion”? Like a conductor who arrives at their podium halfway through the fourth movement of the symphony? Still, he appears to have had mixed feelings about the photographs in Nadja, describing the images soon after publication as “dreary and disillusioning,” while nevertheless dedicating a copy to Boiffard with the encomium (perhaps it was faint praise) that his were “the most beautiful photographs in this book.” Can you say ‘Emperors new clothes’? The ruminations above are necessary to justify the mundane story of a married middle aged man embarking in an adulterous affair with a vulnerable younger woman who happens to be enthralled by his intellect and success as an author. Life is random. It has intervals and occurrences that disrupt the flow of your day: it doesn’t follow a perfect construction of organisation. Breton replicates some of these ideas here, but I just don’t think he does it very well. His interludes don’t hold much. There’s an odd bit about cocaine and several autobiographical bits at the start before the novel even gets going. But, again, there’s just not much too them. The real power is with his Nadja.

Collecting images was probably a fairly easy, haphazard enterprise, and it probably didn’t take him much time. Omissions bothered him a little (p. 152), but not too much. This paints a very different picture from the photographs collected, for example, by Sebald, or other authors more engaged with the visual. Les pas perdus includes the account of an adventure Breton and Louis Aragon had on a Parisian street when, to absolutely no narrative consequence, they became intrigued by an enigmatic and oddly disorientated woman. This passante, the object of those “cares” and “glances” apparently legitimated, in a patriarchal society, by the sight lines and the sexual-political dynamics of the street, is a Baudelairean passerby who unlike Nadja resists with considerable insouciance the surrealists’ more or less predatory attempts to recruit her to their schemes. Refusing to audition for the part of Nadja the two men are effectively hoping to cast, this anonymous woman ignores or, still more gloriously, remains completely unconscious of them: “Louis Aragon and André Breton,” the piece concludes, “unable to give up the idea of finding the key to the riddle, searched through part of the sixth arrondissement—but in vain.” Matthew Beaumont is a professor in the department of English at University College, London. He is the author of Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England 1870–1900 (2005) and the coauthor, with Terry Eagleton, of The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue (2009). He has edited or coedited several collections of essays: As Radical as Reality Itself: Essays on Marxism and Art for the 21st Century ; The Railway and Modernity: Time, Space, and the Machine Ensemble ; Adventures in Realism ; and Restless Cities . In Nadja (1928), André Breton’s great surrealist novel, his autobiographical narrator at one point describes bringing a pile of books to a bar where he has made an arrangement to meet Nadja herself, who is fast becoming the object of his strange, not to say obsessive libidinal and spiritual investments. This pile of books includes a copy of Les pas perdus (1924), The Lost Steps, Breton’s first collection of essays, which he no doubt brings, along with the first Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), in an attempt both to educate her and aggrandize himself. “Lost steps?” Nadja exclaims on seeing its title. “But there’s no such thing!”

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Breton, André. 1969. Manifestoes of surrealism. Trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Certainly, it is the article of faith according to which, as a committed, even devout pedestrian, I like to live. No walk, as far as I am concerned, is ever wasted. In contrast, for example, to a car journey. In a city—especially one dominated by cars, by individualistic rather than collective, private rather than public modes of transport—it is walking that habitually makes me feel alive. It makes me feel both vitally connected to the city’s ceaseless circuits of energy and, at the same time, delicately detached from them. Stimulant, then, and narcotic.

But what is Nadja? The physical Nadja in the novel is a woman dealing intense emotional and psychological problems; she captures the gaze of the narrator and his heart. She becomes his muse, his artistic inspiration. His desire for her is incredible. But does she actually exist? This book is deeply abstract. Breton wrote the manifesto for the surrealist art movement, and some of these ideas are deeply thematic in here. The book's non-linear structure is grounded in reality by references to other Paris surrealists such as Louis Aragon and 44 photographs. The last sentence of the book ("Beauty will be Convulsive or will not be at all") provided the title for Pierre Boulez's flute concerto ... explosante-fixe. ... The critical reception of Nadja focuses on the unreliability of the narrator, the fictitious construction of Nadja, and the possibility that Nadja is all of Paris. I think, based on the claims made in the text—how it represents itself—that Breton would have been surprised by that. I think he also would have been surprised to read that the images are generic, and that the contrast between their faceless anonymity and the story of Nadja creates the Surrealist effect. That is, to put it directly, not what the text claims. Authors who have tried to illustrate their novels with photographs have often found that the photographs have to be of deserted scenes, often seen from a distance: otherwise the photographs interfere with the reader’s sense of the characters and places. Breton only laments he did not have more photographs, not that he couldn’t find more poignant scenes of deserted streets. Readings of Nadja that picture the sum of the images in the book as oddly deserted, inhuman, generic, unaesthetic, random, or uncanny miss what I take to be the author’s intention: the images are admittedly “inadequate” attempts to “document” the relationship. But Breton’s article, titled “The New Spirit” and first published in 1922 in the surrealist periodical Littérature, is itself proof that their search was not in vain. For the surrealists, all experiences on the streets take the form of experiments, and no experiments are unsuccessful. Furthermore, if the point of this sketch is that it goes nowhere, Breton himself was clearly confident that he was going somewhere. The essays and fragments collected in Les pas perdus, which announce an arrival and a departure, function as important preparatory exercises. After all, the Manifesto of Surrealism, representing a signal departure for the avant-garde, appeared in the same year. There are no lost steps.There are many illustrations (44) in this book: photos, drawings, etc. No picture of Nadja here, but the text claims she was beautiful enough to make heads turn and have regular men in her life. This is the 1928 original, without the changes of 1963 reissue. The book was received well, but sales were slow at first.