Nadja - Closing

Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.

Nadja - pg. 55

She is still a young woman and extremely jovial. She continues speaking with a great deal of animation to someone who seems to be a workman of her acquaintance and who listens to her, apparently, with delight. We too engage her in conversation. Extremely cultivated, she has no objection to Nietzsche, and Rimbaud. Quite spontaneously she even mentions the surrealists and Louis Aragon's Paysan de Paris, which she has been unable to finish, the variations on the word Pessimism having thrown her off. All her remarks indicate a great revolutionary faith. Upon my request, she gives me her poem which I had found in the book and a few others as well, all of which I had found in the book and a few others as well, all of which are interesting.

Nadja - pg. 17

He has familiarized me with that tremulous ennui which almost any spectacle induced in him; no one before Huysmans could, if not exemplify this great victory of the involuntary over the ravaged domain of conscious possibilities, at least convince me in human terms of its absolute inevitability and of the uselessness of trying to find loopholes for myself. How grateful I am to him for letting me know, without caring about the effect such revelations produced, everything that affects him, that occupies him in his hours of gravest anxiety, everything external to his anxiety, for not pathetically "singing" his distress like too many poets, but for enumerating patiently, in the darkness, some quiet involuntary reasons he still found for being, and for being -- to whose advantage he never really knew -- a writer!

Nadja - Opening

Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I "haunt". I must admit that this last word is misleading, tending to establish between certain beings and myself relations that are stranger, more inescapable, more disturbing than I intended.

Copyright 1960 Grove Press, Inc.
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Originally published in 1928 by Librairie Gallimard, Paris, France.
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Manifesto of Surrealism

But we, who have made no effort whatsoever to filter, who in our works have made ourselves into simple receptacles of so many echoes, modest recording instruments who are not mesmerized by the drawings we are making, perhaps we serve an even nobler cause.

Manifesto of Surrealism

Man proposes and disposes. He and he alone can determine whether he is completely master of himself, that is, whether he maintains the body of his desires, daily more formidable, in a state of anarchy. Poetry teaches him to. It bears within itself the perfect compensation for the miseries we endure. It can also be an organizer, if ever, as the result of a less intimate disappointment, we contemplate taking it seriously. The time is coming when it decrees the end of money and by itself will break the bread of heaven for the earth! There will still be gatherings on the public squares, and movements you never dared hope participate in. Farewell to absurd choices, the dreams of dark abyss, rivalries, the prolonged patience, the flight of the seasons, the artificial order of ideas, the ramp of danger, time for everything! May you only take the trouble to practice poetry. Is it not incumbent upon us, who are already living off it, to try and impose what we hold to be our case for further inquiry?

It matters not whether there is a certain disproportion between this defense and the illustration that will follow it. It was a question of going back to the sources of poetic imagination and, what is more, of remaining there. Not that I pretend to have done so. It requires a great deal of fortitude to try to set up one's abode in these distant regions where everything seems at first to be so awkward and difficult, all the more so if one wants to try to take someone there. Besides, one is never sure of really being there. If one is going to all that trouble, one might as well stop off somewhere else. Be that as it may, the fact is that the way to these regions is clearly marked, and that to attain the true goal is now merely a matter of the travelers' ability to endure.

Le Manifeste du Surréalisme (1924)

Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express -- verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner -- the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.