Watt

"This is perhaps even more unique than his other writings. It’s also a transitional work. Here, Beckett finally seems to find his own voice. He was already, in the mid- and late-1930s, very dissatisfied with the work he was writing, and its lack of success—he wasn’t being published. Dream of Fair to Middling Women , the first novel, remained unpublished until after his death. Murphy was only published after two years, in 1938. By this point, Beckett was more or less giving up on a writerly career—so much so that he’s applying to the National Gallery in London. Visual arts became nearly as important to him as literature. “Visual arts became nearly as important to him as literature.” It’s clear that he’s also trying to get away from writing like Joyce: writing in an erudite expansive way, which is still there in Murphy to a certain extent. What seems to be this turning point to the post-war work that we know as ‘ the ’ Beckett work—a move towards this absence of specificity—starts to manifest in Watt . Purely linguistically, it is completely different. In its arrangement, the syntax predicts Beckett’s change to French in 1945 and 1946. It is a book that shows him reformulating who he is as a writer and finding his voice. That, for me, is why it’s such a fascinating book. At the same time, it’s just one of the funniest books by Beckett purely because he pushes his critique of rationality to its absolute limit. It shows the irrationality of rationality if taken to extremes. Think about the long lists of permutations which can go on for two or three pages in Watt. These are very different from Joyce’s lists: Joyce’s lists accrue; they are not permutations per se . Even in Ulysses , it’s not quite the same. Whereas the lists in Watt are fundamentally mathematical but always flawed. In that sense, it predicts the change where he says to Knowlson: I realised that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realised that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding. That step is at the core of Watt , in many ways. The plot of Watt is an anti-plot. It’s all about Watt’s journey to Knott’s house, his time at Knott’s house, and the journey away from Knott’s house. That’s essentially it. So, there is a linear progression of the plot, but the way in which we find out about it is not linear. The entire structure of the novel is very uncertain; it seems to be told in a random order. The narrator appears to be someone called Sam who meets Watt in an asylum. The whole book is a meta-narrative. It’s already hinting at that just by Beckett calling his narrator ‘Sam’, it’s a critique of rationality. But it’s also very much a critique of language, so much so that there’s a point at which Watt, when he meets with Sam, starts speaking backwards, for example. This is the first novel in which Beckett really pushes his critique of language to the extreme that he will then pursue in subsequent texts, in particular in How It Is , and the late trilogy : Company , Ill Seen Ill Said , and Worstward Ho . “This is the first novel in which Beckett really pushes his critique of language to the extreme that he will then pursue in subsequent texts.” The novel as we have it grows out of many novels. As we mentioned before, Beckett is writing this over a very long period of time. He starts it in February 1941 whilst he’s still in Paris working for the Resistance, and he then has to go on the run after his cell is betrayed to the Gestapo. He travels to Vichy, France, and then even further south to Roussillon. So, it’s a book that is written on the run. In many ways, especially when he gets to Roussillon, he’s only working on it in the evenings and at night, because during the day he’s working as a farm labourer. He’s writing it without any time pressure. Tellingly, he’s also writing it without all the books that previously had laid the foundations of his works. Although he has much of it in his head, it’s not as easily grasped, which is one reason why it’s not as intertextual as the earlier work. He’s writing it with no rush, to a certain degree. Nobody knew how long the war was going to last. At the same time, it’s also written from an atmosphere of tension that war brings. It has this tension between ‘I’ve got time’ and ‘I don’t know if I’ve got time’. There are six manuscript notebooks for Watt . They are sprawling. They are huge. They are the most complex manuscripts of Beckett’s work. And it’s only right towards the end of 1944 that somehow, out of this mass of notes and different storylines where everyone has different names than they have in the final text, that the Watt we now know emerges. That’s why the Addenda is there. The Addenda, as it were, is a reflection of the way it is written. You could argue that Watt is an unfinished book because of that. Even within the text itself, there are sometimes gaps where words are missing, or where a question mark replaces a missing word. There are lacunae. It’s a book that very much advertises itself as unfinished."