Watt by Samuel Beckett (1953)

Reading Samuel Beckett's Watt is like living a linguistic fever dream. If this were a cartoon, peculiar words would spill loose from the novel’s pages, run wild, then taunt the reader to leave quickly and find meaning elsewhere. This novel is a prose monster, littered with deliberate mistakes, constant misspellings, and wacky rhymes. Clearly, Beckett wrote it only for the bravest of readers.

 

Watt is uncompromising in its banality, for nothing much actually happens. An eponymous Irishman travels to a country house, serves a master named Mr. Knott, then returns home — and that's it.

 

This sounds like dry as dust reading material. But a wicked sense of humour gives the novel an unusual power. Absurdity, surrealism, madness — all typify Beckett's experimentation with language, as he employs a comic prose style that (admittedly) takes a certain type of person to appreciate.

 

This is a book for language nuts. Think James Joyce’s Finnegan's Wake, but much shorter. Watt’s rhythmic paragraphs go on and on like wayward streams; sentences usually descend into Gertrude Stein-like word games, designed to slap your mind still.

 

For example: "[W]ith some appearance of reason, Watt is a man, all the same, Watt is a man, or, Watt is in the street, with thousands of fellow-creatures within call" (p. 68). Notice the fervent repetition. This is how Beckett for lack of a better phrase fucks with our brains, and as a result, the entire book reads like a long prose poem for neurotics, more nonsense than anything else. Here is a writer more invested in "Watt's need of semantic succour" than in the actual telling of a story (ibid.).

 

There is a good explanation for this. Watt's distressful prose comes from distressful circumstances. Beckett wrote the bulk of the book between 1943—45, living in southern France while on the run from the Gestapo. During the day he would work on farms around Roussillon, avoiding German surveillance and staying undercover, and lose himself in manual labour; during the evenings he returned to bed and composed Watt on sheets of tissue paper, night after night. No wonder the book is so complex: writing it was an exorcism of day-to-day danger — as Beckett later explained in a letter "only a game, a means of staying sane", a way to batter away the existential dread of Nazi annihilation.

 

Reading the book again, a late phrase seems to fully illuminate the author's predicament. "In [Watt's] skull the voices whispering their canon were like a patter of mice, a flurry of little grey paws in the dust" (p. 201). Only once you let the mice free, you end up with books like this. . . .  

 

Begin to look at it this way and Watt makes more sense as a work of automatic writing — constructed with little conscious control. If this is the sort of obsessive-compulsive writing that arises from the writer’s despair, then they have no choice but to push language to its limits.

 

A big part of this was Beckett’s taste for the seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes, who developed a well-known form of rational thinking. This sought to reduce the world to base certainties — i.e. I am alive, my heart is beating, and I am a thinking thing, etc. Beckett satirised this system of thought with sentences like:

 

So that what with one thing and another, and with Watt’s not wishing this, and with Watt’s not wanting that, it seemed that Watt, as he was then, could never get into Erskine’s room, never never get into Erskine’s room, as it was then, and that for Watt to get into Erskine’s room, as they were then, Watt would have to be another man, or Erskine’s room another room (p. 109).

 

Being this pedantic, observing the minutiae of every detail and possibility, Beckett demonstrated the absurdity of pushing Cartesian reduction to its seams. That is, extreme itemisation gets us nowhere. An abundance of logic can be a trap — and that’s sort of what Watt (!) is all about.

 

In their despairing moments some writers turn to the bottle, some turn to drugs; some like Samuel Beckett ramble on until they create something new: a monstrosity like Watt. Who else in their darkest hour would write about the “soundless tumult of the inner lamentation”? None other than the writer at forty-seven, an addict to logical games — “Watt will not / Abate one jot”.

 

SOURCE

Watt. By Samuel Beckett (ed. by C. J. Ackerley). Faber & Faber: London, 2009). 978-0-571-24474-4.