Within a couple of years though, some of them became frustrated with Dada's

inflexible negativity. This frustration was voiced by Breton in Entretiens: "The 1918

Dada Manifesto seemed to open wide the doors, but we discovered that they opened onto

a corridor which was leading nowhere" (qtd. in Bradley 19). Breton and the group of

artists who converged around him were more interested in walking down the corridor that

would open the door to new ideas, new forms, and to chance. To put it another way, as

Katharine Conley points out, they were more drawn to the "door that opens and reopens

continuously, like a door pushed by the wind or a swinging door, returning to a singular

point of departure yet ever opening new vistas of thought" (113). Early Surrealists were

much more intrigued by the logic of circularity and the thrill of the return rather than the

oppressiveness of linearity. Ten years after he closed the door on Dadaism, Breton

himself produced a work based on that logic. Nadja, a text he wanted to leave "ajar, like a

door," opens on to a world of endless departures and returns (156).9 For Nadja is not so

much a narrative as a series of unexpected encounters on Parisian streets, woven together

through turns and returns that continually disrupt the linear order. His constant, if

sometimes inadvertent, visits to sites where the ghosts of past insurrectional activities lie,

and his unexpected meetings with Nadja, create an eerie atmosphere that Breton concedes

gives the appearance of being left "at the mercy of chance" (Nadja 19). And his repeated

fortuitous encounters-as when Paul Eluard turns out to be the same person whom he

unknowingly encountered at the first performance of Guillame Apollinaire's Couleur de

Temps and coincidentally started corresponding with-produce a world that no longer

depends on logical connections. Instead, it becomes "an almost forbidding world of

sudden parallels [and] petrifying coincidences" (Nadja 19).