ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that Nadja playing/acting according to the rules that Andr Breton lays out in his prolific writings Nadja's play reflects Breton's major ideas about language and its surrealist use, along with its relation to the images and the position of the self before "surreality", as he had expressed them in 1924 in the Manifesto of Surrealism, and in the "Introduction au discours sur le peu de ralit. Surrealism's influence on Lacan is well documented; as Stamos Metzidakis states, Lacan, who was to provide structuralism with a radically new language and a rewriting of the sign, "was largely inspired by the automatic writing to which Breton held all his life". Nadja's game seems to have the elements most characteristic of surrealist thought: an unconventional dialogue that defies reason and finds its best expression in the language of children (and the insane), as well as a distinct image-building technique that, at first glance, looks like a cluster of incongruent images.
