ABSTRACT
I go there often [the Saint-Ouen flea-market], searching
for objects that can be found nowhere else: old fashioned,
broken, useless, almost incomprehensible, even perverse-at
least in the sense I give to the word and which I prefer-
like, for example, that kind of irregular, white, shellacked
half-cylinder covered with reliefs and depressions that are
meaningless to me, streaked with horizontal and vertical
reds and greens, preciously nestled in a case under a
legend in Italian, which I brought home and which after
careful examination I have finally identified as some kind
of statistical device, operating three-dimensionally and
recording the population of a city in such and such a year,
The Marvelous is not restricted by the limits of the object as a thing. Instead it is associated with experience and the emotional encounter of situations. The collection of forty-four photographs
that structures Nadja is evocative of many and different chance meetings: places, poets, objects, signs, masks and seemingly worthless things. Chance, ‘shock’ and ‘convulsive beauty’ are all incorporated in the making of choices and in the making of the novel in order to negate the boundaries of logic and rationality and enter a zone of experiencing dreaminess within reality.
