[andre breton: surrealism & mimesis]

"Je persiste à réclamer les noms, à ne m'intéresser qu'aux livres qu'on laisse battants comme des portes, et desquels on n'a pas à chercher la clef" (Breton, Nadja).

As I'm working on chapter three (temporality in web fiction), I find myself wading through books online and off. Perhaps it is simply a way of procrastinating which I like to pretend is actually me being academic... Sitting in our "library" (actually a collection of bookshelves on the landing) I set about exploring my collection. I pulled out books on cyberspace, digital living, French feminisms, I fingered through travel guides eagerly awaiting my next forray, and then I pulled out a dusty little number, Breton's Nadja. I flipped through the pages and the above line caught my eye. With multi-mimesis dancing in my head, Breton's thinking seems so very pertinant (we'll ignore his womanizing/stereotyping tactics in favour of certain aspects of his philosophy). How can books be like swinging doors? Perhaps this is Breton insisting upon the potentiality of language, of writing. But then he denies it when he declares that "la vie est autre que ce qu'on Écrit." Maybe this opposition can be fruitful. This is the game of the text; of writing, of reading, of living. What Breton sees as an irreducibility of confict, allows him to play with appearances, realities. Against this background of perpetual oppsition, Breton positions his text outside of common literature while at the same time recommending that Nadja should appear at the axis of all that is literary: "J'envie (c'est une façon de parler) tout homme qui a le temps de préparer quelque chose comme un livre, qui, en étant venu àbout, trouve le moyen de s'intéresser au sort de cette chose ou au sort qu'après tout cette chose lui fait" (173). The metaphor of the swinging doors is relevant here too. A door, swinging back and forth, beginning from the same place but opening out and offering multiple directions, is emblamatic of Nadja and Breton's view of language. In his attempt to illustrate the discontinuity between life and narrative, the former being disordered and the latter, if not ordered, at least arrangable or organisable, Breton seems to have created a mimetic analogue to life. In all his contradictions and game-play, Breton reminds readers that literature, like life, is a perpetual process.