The third example of how to circumvent the supposed dangers of life writing is André Breton's Nadja (1927-1928), an important milestone in the history of the revival of personal literary practices in the 20th century, from the Proustian novel's challenge of assembling all the fragments of a life to contemporary life writing's emphasis on sketch, lacuna and juxtaposition.
The starting point for Breton's enterprise was the incompatibility of literature and life, a commonplace of modernity that Surrealism itself helped to radicalize. In the "Avant-dire" added as a preface to Nadja in 1963, Breton asserts the vanity of all self-writing, in the name of fidelity to life. The autobiographical question "Who am I?" posed at thebeginning of the work is replaced by the question "Who lives?" at the end of Nadja, before the very last part of the book opens with a denunciation of literature and its deficiency in relation to life. The end of the work highlights the irreconcilable nature of two temporalities that can only collide, without coming into harmony: that of writing, a "long-drawn-out" undertaking, and that of "life at a loss of breath ", as Breton conceives it, and whose urgency it conveys echoes the famous final formula: "Beauty will be convulsive or it won't be." Breton's hatred of the time that writing steals from life reflects a vitalism that is paradoxically expressed at the very heart of the book, in the utopia of the open book "beating like a door". Breton's narrative is saved from affabulation by its fidelity to chance, which alone can preserve the movement of life; it occupies a space outside literature, obeying antiliterary imperatives of documentary and medical observation: photographs take the place of descriptions, while testimony is affirmed by the intention to stick to attestation on the part of a writer who describes himself as a "haggard witness" to the facts.
Blanchot saves Nadja from his outright condemnation of personal literature by placing it in the category of "narrative", which he contrasts in Le Livre à venir with the "diary". Yet it is precisely the narrative, insofar as it is the vehicle of novelistic affabulation, that is the target of Robbe-Grillet's, Barthes's and Breton's criticism of personal literature. This contradiction can be explained in two ways: firstly, if we take into account the fact that Blanchot wrote Le Livre à venir before the publication of the "Avant-dire" to Nadja, in 1963, where Breton is most virulent against literature and narrative; but above all, and more fundamentally, this apparent contradiction on the value of narrative - a solution for Blanchot, a dead end for Breton, Barthes and Robbe-Grillet - illustrates a paradigm shift affecting literature and its practices between the Fifties and the Seventies. For Blanchot, narrative goes to the heart of the matter, as opposed to simple observation, notation or reportage; in this sense, although the heart of the book is a diary whose stated aim is to confine itself to observation, Nadja delivers a narrative capable of grasping the excessiveness of reality, and which goes beyond its simple recording: "Chance has no place in the daily observation of the diary". Blanchot thus grants narrative a power that Barthes and Robbe-Grillet would deny it; he defends a still romantic conception of narrative as the only one capable of accommodating true chance, the surprise that upsets the measured chronology of the everyday, everything that "tears the fabric of life", according to a metaphor common to the three authors despite their diametrically opposed conceptions of narrative, the only one capable of capturing the thickness of life according to the first, while it is an obstacle to the writing of life according to the other two. In reality, this opposition stems from a different understanding of the "life" that literature sets out to write: for Blanchot, the life captured by Nadja 's narrative is the event that cuts through, the surprise, the chance, the catastrophe, the excess, or "life at a loss for breath", in Breton's own words; for Barthes, the life that escapes all narrative is the truth of emotion, sensation and the body, which he criticized the Surrealists for missing - it's the "corset imposed on syntax" that he denounced in Breton.
