[In the following essay, Katz studies Watt as a transition between Beckett's life in Ireland and England and his move to France as well as between his early conventionally composed works and his later experimental writing.]

Beckett's mystifying second novel, Watt, seems to have generated two main lines of critical approach. One influential trend points to the mock-Cartesian elements of the novel and reads it as a critique of rationalist epistemological pretensions regarding both hermeneutics and problem solving. As Thomas Cousineau writes, “Critics have tended to treat Watt as an allegory in which human beings' rationalistic pretensions are ridiculed.”¹ Many critics have pointed out, for example, that Watt's absurd speculations concerning Mr Knott's knowledge and approval of the arrangements concerning the preparation and ingestion of his food, along with the suppositions regarding the dog and the Lynches, wholly follow Descartes's four crucial epistemological precepts from the Discours de la méthode:

Le premier était de ne recevoir jamais aucune chose pour vraie, que je ne la connusse évidemment être telle: c'est-à-dire d'éviter soigneusement la précipitation et la prévention. …

Le second, de diviser chacune des difficultés que j'examinerais, en autant de parcelles qu'il se pourrait et qu'il serait requis pour les mieux résoudre.

Le troisième, de conduire par ordre mes pensées, en commençant par les objets les plus simples et les plus aisés à connaître, pour monter peu à peu, comme par degrés, jusques à la connaissance des plus composés; et supposant même de l'ordre entre ceux qui ne se précèdent point naturellement les uns les autres.

Et le dernier, de faire partout des dénombrements si entiers, et des revues si générales, que je fusse assuré de ne rien omettre.

(46)

[The first was never to accept anything as true that I did not know to be evidently so: that is to say, carefully to avoid precipitancy and prejudice. …

The second, to divide each of the difficulties that I was examining into as many parts as might be possible and necessary in order best to solve it.

The third, to conduct my thoughts in an orderly way, beginning with the simplest objects and the easiest to know, in order to climb gradually, as by degrees, as far as the knowledge of the most complex, and even supposing some order among those objects which do not precede each other naturally.

And the last, everywhere to make such complete enumerations and such general reviews that I would be sure to have omitted nothing.

(Discourse, 41)]

No reader who has staggered through the serial lists of Mr Knott's displacements of his furniture or changes in appearance would dream of reproaching Watt, or the narrator, Sam, with having ignored Descartes's final precept. However, these “antirationalist” readings seem to suffer from two major inadequacies. First of all, they often end up privileging, by contrast, an implied intuitionism that the novel's devastatingly systematic strategies of estrangement and doubt throw into equal disrepute. Second, they tend to overlook the clear specificity of the sort of conundrums that arouse Watt's “failed rationalism”: they virtually always are linked to symbolic exchange and social practice—habits, custom, ritual, art, and language. There is little phenomenological anxiety concerning the attempt to grasp the true nature of a “thing” as such, but rather affective eruptions and hallucinations concerning the cultural economies that produce, inscribe, and retain meaning. As Watt attempts to penetrate the meaning of his duties at the Knott household, or the picture in Erskine's room, or the word “pot,” the book's metaphysical investigations are linked to a kind of practical anthropology in a manner quite foreign to the sort of pseudo-Cartesian philosophizing that runs rampant in the trilogy or the Texts for Nothing, for example.

Perhaps in response to these limitations, more recently another school of criticism has arisen, which despite significant divergences of emphasis tends to be in accord in its consistent stressing of the issue of the foreign, the artificial, the unnatural, and the unknown. Thus, Watt's obsessive and convoluted hermeneutic enterprises tend to be taken less as a global critique of rationalism than as reactions to the violently incomprehensible customs and undivulged mysteries of the Knott household, while the novel's stylistic dislocations are seen as reinforcing this problematic by providing a systematic estrangement of the reader from the conventions of the realist novel and narrative fiction generally. Once this basic framework is established, its implications are then allegorized in a variety of ways. To list a few recent examples, Knott's household has been taken for an allegory of the realm of human experience in its entirety, skeptically seen as epistemologically unknowable, as the site of a systematic breaking down of the familiar patriarchal structures of filiation and symbolic reproduction, and, more mystically, as a crystallized centering of the circumference of nothingness which habitually brackets our petty acts of interpretation in the world as we live it. The wrenching away of the English from its usual syntactical forms and the plethora of gallicisms, in turn, are also often read biographically as an effect of Beckett's long sojourn in France and isolation from other English speakers during his wartime hiding in Rousillon, and thus as a harbinger of his subsequent shift into French as a literary language following his completion of the novel.²

I, too, shall read the novel largely in this light—as a transition from Ireland to France and English to French, and stylistically, a transition from the solid mock realism of Murphy and the early stories into the extremities of plotlessness and characterlessness found in the trilogy and Texts for Nothing. The novel stands firmly between the learned, arch wit of Murphy and the more austere syntactical and grammatical demolitions conducted in the trilogy, while its approach to character and narrative conventions pull further away from realism than the previous novel, while stopping short of the trilogy's near-total evacuation of these props. But if both biography and authorial “development” amply justify a focus on such concerns, more important than this is the fact that the narrative of the novel itself, such as it is, with its constant emphasis on demarcations, limits, thresholds, boundaries, and arrivals and departures, already displays a continual obsession with the issue of transition, regardless of the context of the book within Beckett's biography and œuvre.

As for Beckett's impending personal and linguistic transitions, we should note that not long after the novel was completed, Beckett wrote a short, little-known piece which also explicitly raised the question of the foreign and cultural difference, in the entirely literal context of Franco-Irish postwar cooperation. By June 10, 1946, Beckett had written a text titled “The Capital of the Ruins,” intended for broadcast over the airwaves of Radio Éireann, which detailed his experiences as a volunteer in the Irish Red Cross Hospital in Saint-Lô, Normandy, where he had worked from August 1945 to January 1946.³ He wrote the text to defend the enterprise against Irish criticism of its lack of facilities and poor working conditions, which by implication were criticisms of the French elements of the staff and administration. Coming in the immediate aftermath of World War II and following Beckett's experiences in the résistance and subsequently in hiding in the Rousillon, it is also one of Beckett's first statements of the postwar sense of physical and moral desolation of which his drama would be taken as a major expression in the fifties. But if the text is devoted largely to portraying the devastation of the city of Saint-Lô, “bombed out of existence in one night” (As the Story Was Told, 25),⁴ it also gives a fair amount of space to questions of cultural appurtenance and cultural difference—issues clearly of interest to Beckett at this time. Indeed, Beckett asserts that the final importance of the project is to be found elsewhere than in the concrete medical aid brought by the Irish: “And yet the whole enterprise turned from the beginning on the establishing of a relation in the light of which the therapeutic relation faded to the merest of pretexts” (22-23). Beckett claims that what was “important” was rather “the occasional glimpse obtained, by us in them and, who knows, by them in us (for they are an imaginative people), of that smile at the human conditions as little to be extinguished by bombs as to be broadened by the elixirs of Burroughs and Welcome” (23). Behind Beckett's characteristically caustic view of the Irish, one finds an uncharacteristically optimistic, reassuringly humanist rhetoric in this passage. It is, however, subjected to an immediate correction which I would like to quote in full:

It would not be seemly, in a retiring and indeed retired storekeeper, to describe the obstacles encountered in this connection, and the forms, often grotesque, devised for them by the combined energies of the home and visiting temperaments. It must be supposed that they were not insurmountable, since they have long ceased to be of much account. When I reflect now on the recurrent problems of what, with all proper modesty, might be called the heroic period, on one in particular so arduous and elusive that it literally ceased to be formulable, I suspect that our pains were those inherent in the simple and necessary and yet so unattainable proposition that their way of being we, was not our way and that our way of being they, was not their way. It is only fair to say that many of us had never been abroad before.

(24-25)

Beckett's articulation of cultural difference, contained in the “so unattainable proposition” that “their way of being we, was not our way and that our way of being they, was not their way” deserves careful reading. Obviously, Beckett is not laying claim to any naive notion of insuperable cultural difference—he is not saying “their ways were not our ways.” Nor does he write, “Their ways of being they were not our ways of being we,” which would imply that although culture may be arbitrary, after a certain point unsurpassable limits become established. We must also avoid even a more sophisticated potential paraphrase which might affirm, “They tried to be like us and we tried to be like them, but both our ways failed to achieve their objects.” Such a proposition would imply a “natural” or at least naturalized Irishness and Frenchness, which each foreign party attempts to approximate through artifice, a “way” which can never be more than an affectation. In other words, the French way of being Irish would not be the same as “really” being Irish, nor would the Irish way of being French be the same as simply being French. But Beckett rejects this also. For in Beckett's formulation there is no unmediated cultural appurtenance at all—he does not even claim that “they” were not “we” and that “we” were not “they.” Beckett acknowledges that they had a way of being we; they were we, in a way. And again, this does not mean that they were we, in a way, while we were simply we, for we were also we “in a way”: “their way of being we was not our way.” Thus, if they are not simply “we,” for that matter, neither are we: our “weness” is just as constructed as their attempt to be “like us.” Meanwhile, they are not simply “they” either, for they also have a way of being they. We see now why this “simple and necessary” proposition is also “unattainable,” for if one follows its rigorous logic we arrive at a point where the law of noncontradiction is clearly violated: “they” both are and are not “we”—they are “we” in that Beckett's grammar places “their” claims to “weness” and “our” claims to “weness” in exact, indistinguishable parallel. But “they” are not “we” in that a difference is introduced between “their way” of being ourselves and “our way” of being ourselves. Beckett's delicate rhetoric here recognizes cultural identity as a construct and thus theoretically nonexclusionary for foreigners. But more importantly, being a construct, cultural identity is also on one level just as much an artifice, a “way” of behaving, reacting, and constructing reality for those who are defined or who define themselves as within as for those who are defined or define themselves as without. Beckett refuses all rhetoric which might pose a “native” culture as being natural or naturalized in a manner which would place a “foreigner” in an irremediable relationship to it of exteriority, mediation, and artifice. Yet Beckett also rejects any appeal to nonhistorical, nonculturally specific criteria of “universal human values,” which can so easily serve to erase the distinct specificities and very real divergences that collectively constitute “universal” human culture and history. Strictly speaking, there are no “theys,” but every “we” has its “way.” An unattainable proposition indeed.

Thus, “The Capital of the Ruins” invites meditation on the construction of subjectivity through cultural ritual—the “ways” through which one becomes what one is. And Watt is largely an investigation of ritual, whether it be the mysterious, guiding rituals of the Knott establishment, or those surrounding the meetings and discussions of Sam and Watt, or the increasingly ritualistic use of serial repetition as a stylistic device in the narration. But the rhetoric of “The Capital of the Ruins” also offers a means of reconciling the “anthropological” school of criticism with the metaphysical one, if we examine the novel's use of Cartesian thought in its light. For if Descartes largely ignores questions of culture and cultural difference, his concern is nevertheless nothing other than how the subject constructs and recognizes itself as such. For Descartes, of course, neither immediate certainty nor a priori subjective presence is ever a given, and even the most fundamental of all intuitive notions—the sense of one's own existence—is seen by Descartes to be in fact constructed through the logical and linguistic practice of the cogito. In this sense, the cogito, chief among Descartes's méthodes, itself may legitimately be seen as a “way of being oneself”—a radical way which through its profound skepticism regarding all externality seems to annul any possibility of a “we,” while simultaneously rendering plural every individual subject through its logical exigence that one witness oneself.⁵ Thus, linking Beckett's emphasis on the “way” to Descartes's méthode, Watt may be seen as Beckett's attempt to write the necessarily repetitive, performative, skeptical ritual of the cogito and the individual over the performative, repetitive, group rituals and rites by which a “culture” enacts itself.

Beckett's attempt to think this juncture between culture and subjectivity, between subjective singularity and a cultural plurality which must in some way precede it, inevitably leads him to Freud and psychoanalysis.⁶ For if Watt is evidently concerned with ritual and “method” (in the Cartesian sense and more generally), it is also equally concerned with law, transgression, and taboo, and the elaboration of the rites and prohibitions of the Knott household (whose proprietor's name simultaneously invokes the law's prohibitions and the necessary vacancy of the symbolic space that anchors them) seems resonant with echoes of Freud's reading of ritual in Totem and Taboo. For Watt not only superimposes cultural practice over Cartesian “method,” it also draws the latter into relation with the repetitive personal rituals of obsessional neurotics. Yet the novel's rendering of taboo is oddly vacuous, in that it never allows the extrapolation of the unconscious impulses which, according to Freud, taboo laws are established to counter. A large part of the novel's difficulty derives from its voiding of the libidinal energy that such a taboo structure should generate (in stark contrast to both halves of Molloy, for example). The book is neither a simple critique of Cartesian “rationalism” nor an anthropological inquiry into cultural practice, patriarchy, and the foundation of law, but rather an attempt to think subjectivity as ritual, ritual as method, and method as neurosis, in a chain which would refuse to label neurosis as simply a rhetorical response to desire. Watt's elaborate staging of what could be called culture shock, in that Watt's crises are so often linked to his utter estrangement from and incomprehension of the rituals it is his task to perform, is thus not an affirmation of the inscrutability of the foreign, nor simply an assertion of the inherent “foreignness” of all culture as compared to some sort of “naturalness” of the individual which could preexist it. The novel deconstructs the opposition individual/culture, allowing no clear boundary between culture shock and what could be called “subject shock”: indeed, for Descartes the “shock” is produced by the culture of the real. Throughout the novel, the point of convergence where questions of subjective introspection dissolve into allegories of cultural inscription is language, and it is there that our reading must begin.

Many critics have noticed the prevalence of gallicisms in the novel, and speculation abounds as to whether their presence is due to an intentional authorial choice or unconscious linguistic interference from the French. Is Beckett then suffering from the interference endemic to those who immerse themselves in a foreign code, or is he commenting on it? That the inclusion of the gallicisms indicates at least in part a deliberate decision is evident from the obvious foregrounding Beckett provides for many of them, as we shall see. They also tend to be concentrated in certain sections of the novel, most notably the early discussion between Hackett, Nixon, and Tetty, and Arsene's parting speech to Watt. Indeed, at one point, Arsene seems to catch himself committing one: “Where was I? The change. In what did it consist? It is hard to say. Something slipped. There I was, warm and bright, smoking my tobacco-pipe, watching the warm bright wall, when suddenly somewhere some little thing slipped, some little tiny thing. Gliss—iss—iss—STOP! I trust I make myself clear” (42-43). Arsene is apparently on the verge here of replacing “slip” with the French “glisser,” thus what is slipping is in fact the word “to slip.” The “change” Arsene is discussing when “slip” slips is that from his prior feeling at Knott's that “he [i.e., Arsene] may abide, as he is, where he is, and that where he is may abide about him, as it is” (41) to this other condition, which Arsene is unable to define more precisely than in the following terms: “What was changed, and how? What was changed, if my information is correct, was the sentiment that a change, other than a change of degree, had taken place” (44). Typically, Arsene never manages to bring these meditations to any conclusion, deliberately changing the subject with the announcement that he has “information of a practical nature to impart” (45). But prior to this, he clearly depicts the effects of this undefined change as a dépaysement from the comfortable fit between himself and the Knott residence where he was abiding:

The sun on the wall, since I was looking at the sun on the wall at the time, underwent an instantaneous and I venture to say radical change of appearance. It was the same sun and the same wall, or so little older that the difference may safely be disregarded, but so changed that I felt I had been transported, without my having remarked it, to some quite different yard, and to some quite different season, in an unfamiliar country.

(43-44)

The rhetorical chain here is relatively clear: this radical change is both figured as a transportation to an “unfamiliar country” and referred to as a “slip,” while this act of designation itself instigates a linguistic slip into the language of another country, sliding into “glisser.” What happens, then, is that the act of naming the “slip” repeats and reproduces it. So the language of Arsene would seem not only to represent but also to symptomatically reenact what it recounts. Such a conception, however, only delivers half of the complexity of the passage. For the “slip” represented by Arsene's linguistic shift is not just a repetition of but also the model for Arsene's previous slip, as it is only in terms of transportation to an “unfamiliar country” that the latter can be understood. In this sense, linguistic interference, or what might be termed “cultural” interference generally becomes the model for all subjective “qualitative changes,” and not just a species within their genus. Group identity and cultural economy is thus rhetorically posited as prior to any sort of individual subjectivity which would subsequently extend itself toward a group. The mediation between the group structures and the subject's self-positing seems to be effected in this passage through a further slip of the “tongue.” Let us consider some of Arsene's early comments concerning the dawning of the recognition that this “change” has taken place. Speaking of the uncanny day when, although feeling better than ever, the servant of Knott is nevertheless led to ask himself, “Am I not a little out of sorts, to-day?” (42), Arsene goes on to claim: “But that is a terrible day (to look back on), the day when the horror of what has happened reduces him to the ignoble expedient of inspecting his tongue in a mirror, his tongue never so rosy, in a breath never so sweet” (42). In the immediate context of the passage, the phrase would seem to imply the servant's desire to check himself for symptoms of illness, but in the larger context of the disorder Arsene sketches, this “tongue” must also be read in its Gallic nuance as “language,” so intimately tied to Arsene's unnamable catastrophe. And indeed, Watt certainly gives us one of the greatest spectacles we have of an author “inspecting his tongue in a mirror,” as it were, not least of all in section 3 where Watt narrates to Sam in what could be seen as mirrored inversions of words, sentences, and paragraphs.⁷ To examine one's tongue in a mirror would thus mean not simply to produce an adequate representation of it, but to work through a representation which necessarily doubles by reversing. Beckett's “mirror” is not at all the perfectly transparent medium of representation, but rather one which reveals by doubling and extending the original in an uncannily inverted fashion, thus highlighting and estranging the structure of articulations of the original which had come to be naturalized. Arsene's following speech is filled with somewhat understated gallicisms: “ordure” (46), “luxurious” for “lustful” (49), “defunct” for “deceased” and “Daltonic” for “color-blind” in the space of two lines (51), and “collation” and “imprevisible” in the same sentence (53), to name a few. The relationship of these “slips” to the something that “slipped” is left unelaborated, although the evocation discussed above of the sense of transportation to an unfamiliar country cannot but color our reading of them. However, in order to continue our examination of gallicisms in the context of the inspection of the tongue, we must turn to the verbal perpetrations of Tetty Nixon.

The discussion surrounding Tetty Nixon's burlesque account of the birth of her son, Larry, and the history of Watt foregrounds gallicisms even more clearly than does Arsene's speech. There is at the least a Gallic inflection in Hackett's use of “antecedents” (22) to designate Watt's past, and Nixon's term “facultative stop” (19) for a tram stop serviced only if requested by a passenger is a clear transposition of the French. But Tetty's gallicisms are different—they are not based on the choice of a false cognate, as in the examples given above, but are rather phonetic transpositions of French terms, which do not respect the regular morphological structures of English appropriations of Latinate words.⁸ Thus, describing the sudden onset of labor pains, she says, “No trace of this dollar appeared on my face” (13), where “dollar” would appear to be her pronunciation of the French douleur, or “pain.” A few lines later, she refers to a risqué repartee as “Not too osy” (14). Hackett, at a loss, asks, “Not too what?” Mr Nixon replies, “Osy. … You know, not too osy” (14). “Osy” here would seem to be an assimilation of the French osé. But one cannot claim that Tetty's speech is simply denatured by the invasion of foreign terms, for prior to her notable gallicisms, Tetty demonstrates a sort of aphasia which it is impossible to attribute to the interference of a foreign code. As Tetty recounts the fateful night of Larry's delivery in the midst of a dinner party, we find the following exchange:

The first mouthful of duck had barely passed my lips, said Tetty, when Larry leaped in my wom.

Your what? said Mr Hackett.

My wom, said Tetty.

You know, said Goff, her woom.

How embarrassing for you, said Mr Hackett.

(13)

This phonetic disturbance “within” the “mother tongue” is a harbinger of much that is to follow in the novel. First of all, it introduces the structural convolutions of the English language which comprise so much of the burden of part 3, and which Beckett investigates more systematically, more methodically in the Cartesian sense, than any other author has ever done. Second of all, this insistence on Tetty's error in contrast to the gallicisms that follow seems to warn against a reading that would interpret these structural convolutions and breakdowns as the result of an incursion of the “foreign” that would in some way damage the integrity of a given code. The damage is already operative from the “inside,” and note that these linguistic disturbances within the “mother tongue” take place in the context of a discussion of maternity, and thus in the context of that other notable system of differences, which is kinship structure. On the one hand, Beckett parallels linguistic structures, whether syntactic, discursive, or phonetic, to family and kinship structures, and in Watt, disturbance in one register tends to mirror disturbance in another. This is why the novel disallows a separation of Cartesian skepticism or epistemological investigation from questions of cultural and social practice and kinship organization. The interrogation of patriarchal structures epitomized by the Knott household is written into the interrogation of linguistic structures we have been examining, and both investigations are conducted through the mode of estrangement. On the other hand, any idea of naturalness which might be associated with the “mother tongue” is implicitly challenged not only by Tetty's aphasia, but also by the wholly uncanny story of maternity she recounts. Larry is delivered in three minutes flat single-handedly by the mother herself while his father and friends play billiards downstairs. The umbilical cord, we are told, was severed by the mother's teeth, she “not having a scissors to her hand” (14). Thus, if linguistic law and patriarchal law are clearly put parallel in the book, we should resist all recourse to any concept of the maternal or the natural to which these laws would be opposed. Rather, in Watt both the “maternal” and the “natural” are necessarily seen as effects created and dominated by these very structures.

The novel itself expounds the idea that concepts, categories, and oppositions are not simply descriptive terms that maintain a relationship of adequation with the real, but rather products of structures which the relationship to the real provokes. Indeed, the “real” itself is also paradoxically described as one of these effects. This problematic is treated most explicitly in the episode involving the Galls, father and son, who come to tune Mr Knott's piano. The passage, one of the most widely discussed in the novel, is quite rightly described by Leslie Hill as “paradigmatic” (20). Indeed, the narrator tells us it is a model for many of Watt's “experiences” in his early days at the Knott household. Hill goes on to read the episode in the light of filial relations, stressing that which pertains between the Galls and the memory they induce in Watt of his father's legs and trousers. This leads to a broader discussion of Knott as symbolic father. Critics also often discuss the role of music in the novel, additionally raised by the picture of the piano in the “addenda,” and finally, mention is usually made of the way the passage's discussion of memory establishes Watt as a generally “unreliable” narrator.⁹ However, the major point of focus tends to be the status of this passage as the novel's most detailed exploration of the relationship between experience, immediacy, memory, and linguistic construction, questions that recur incessantly in Watt. Certainly, as a theory of Watt's need to narrativize and construct meaning, it provides the thread that will bind all the subsequent episodes: indeed, it leads directly to the famous discussion of the “pot,” which, in turn, is immediately followed by the long episode recounting Knott's dietary habits, the need for a dog to dispose of his leftovers, and the hallucinatory Lynch family. Now, what must be emphasized is that the concerns raised by these two later episodes are entirely extensions of the problems caused by the “memory” of the Galls. A full forty-five pages after the beginning of the section on the Galls, the story of the Lynches concludes with a declaration on precisely what was at stake in the previous saga also. For Watt has no conviction at all concerning the veracity of the elaborate myth he has constructed around the Lynches: “Not that for a moment Watt supposed that he had penetrated the forces at play, in this particular instance, or even perceived the forms that they upheaved, or obtained the least useful information concerning himself, or Mr Knott, for he did not. But he had turned, little by little, a disturbance into words, he had made a pillow of old words, for a head. Little by little, and not without labour” (117). What is established in the sequence of these three central passages—the Galls, the pot, and the Lynches—is a link between, respectively, linguistic constructions of memory and meaning, the referential tie implied by any semiotic act, and kinship and family structures. The “pillow of old words” is composed of a familial narrative, and the construction of reference is embodied in the story of the father and son. The point of this is not that some Oedipalized structure forms a “primal” content of all subjectivity but rather that there is profound complicity between subjective self-scrutiny and kinship structures inasmuch as the former insists on an emphasis on the question of origin which only the latter can answer. It is through the concatenation of these passages that Beckett achieves his linkage of Cartesian dogma to questions of filiation and thus of Cartesian method to Freud's view of obsessional ritual. Obsessional ritual leads to taboo and finally to the investigations of patriarchy conducted through the figure of Knott.

The incident of the Galls, like that of the Lynches, involves disposing of “disturbances” by transferring them into language or “foisting a meaning there where no meaning appeared” (77), not in the sense of determining a metaphysical signification but merely through the construction of the simplest temporal narrative. Thus, we learn that in fact the “incident of the Galls” might in reality have had nothing to do with either a piano, tuners, or a father and son, and that this might simply be the “meaning” Watt arrived at to disperse his phantoms: “For to explain had always been to exorcise, for Watt” (78). And this explanation might very well be pure fabulation:

Watt spoke of it [the incident] as involving, in the original, the Galls and the piano, but he was obliged to do this, even if the original had nothing to do with the Galls and the piano. For even if the Galls and the piano were long posterior to the phenomena destined to become them, Watt was obliged to think, and speak, of the incident, even at the moment of its taking place, as the incident of the Galls and the piano, if he was to think and speak of it at all.

(79)

Moreover, we are told that Watt's fabulations tend to wear out and necessitate new ones to take their place, themselves to be at times replaced in turn by previous constructions which have recovered their power to convince. It is due to such considerations that “one is sometimes tempted to wonder, with reference to two or even three incidents related by Watt as separate and distinct, if they are not in reality the same incident, variously interpreted” (78). Thus, concerning what “really happened” in the incident of the Galls, we know absolutely nothing, but only how at one particular moment Watt linguistically and conceptually “exorcised” it. We do not know if this was the original exorcism, the only one, or simply the latest of a long series. As this incident is the type of the majority of those which occurred at the Knott household, strictly speaking we have no idea if any of the events therein should be taken as anything other than Watt's fabulation. Such a skeptical reading would give us a very different novel, consisting of the early episode of Hackett and the Nixons, Sam's account of meeting Watt in part 3, perhaps the departure at the train station, and then a long, interpolated narrative with the status of a fable. This reading would produce a work in line with Company, or the problems raised by Moran's disavowal of his narrative in Molloy, which is far from the optic in which Watt is usually read.

In any case, the incident of the Galls, the discussion of the pot, and the story of the Lynches all emphasize linguistic narrative as a means of constructing “reality” and memory, not as a means of representing them or depicting them. The manners in which this form of construction is itself arbitrarily structured and subject to disturbance are foregrounded in many ways: largely by the way the book permits rhyme schemes and sentence structure to generate slots and oppositions which are then filled by a semantic content which comes to seem increasingly random, irrelevant, and, in practical terms, increasingly difficult to convert into ideational content given the density of the repetitive linguistic mass that vehiculates it. But as we have seen, the book also stresses very early on such structural disturbances as aphasia and interlinguistic interference, such as gallicisms. This being the case, it seems worth pondering the proper name of the piano tuners: given our gallicisms, what does it mean for the Galls to come to tune the piano? After our awkward gallicisms, do we finally have the arrival of the Galls in person, and not just their linguistic forerunners?¹⁰ After all, their task of “tuning the piano” can be read in highly allegorical fashion: they have come to tune the literary instrument, language, so clearly off key in the novel up to this point. Such an allegory has at least two clear applications. First of all, it replicates one of the central, founding myths of early Anglo-American modernism: that a turn to French literature was necessary to achieve a cleaner, clearer, harder, “modern” literary language. Such thinking is prevalent in Eliot, in Joyce's admiration and emulation of Flaubert, and most of all in Pound's critical writings. And it may be argued that it is only with Watt that Beckett manages his difficult break with the modernist trend these writers represent, which is much more clearly in evidence in his earlier prose and poetry. The Galls then would represent a paradigm that Beckett here is rejecting.¹¹ However, this episode could also be seen as a comment on Beckett's own subsequent shift into French as language of composition and a reinscription of his filial position within a different symbolic structure (thus the Galls “father and son”). But before embarking on a heroic reading of the shift into French as the choice of the proper, well-tuned instrument, the move away from a suffocating, castrating maternal language into a phallicized, instrumentalized, distant paternal one, or a move away from the language bearing the patriarchal inscription of the patronym into a neutral space of auto-engenderment,¹² we should remember that the episode of the Galls is constantly stressed as a fantasy, as “foisting a meaning there where no meaning appeared” (77). Thus, the story could also be taken as a warning against all forms of critical linguistic exoticism, that is, the assertion that a shift from one specific linguistic structure to another can free one from the bounds of structure generally, or the symmetrical claim: that all linguistic structure distances one from the purity of a real beyond expression.

The episode of the Galls can also be taken as an allegory of allegorization generally, that is, of the need to foist meaning where there is none. But this does not lead to a global critique of hermeneutics and a privileging of the literal and the proper, for the pages on the Galls make it quite clear that the construction of any literal or proper is already an allegorization in this sense. The literalist readings of Beckett would be the most mystified of all. Beyond this sort of “allegory,” all is unnamable, but not in the sense of being ineffable or beyond the illusory grasp of linguistic mediation. On the other side of cultural graphematic constructions is something which seems much less the “real” of traditional Western metaphysics, to which language can only point and approximate, than the real as evoked by Lacan. Speaking of Watt's occasional failures to foist meanings in the manner of the Galls story, Sam tells us:

As to giving an example of the second event, namely the failure, that is clearly quite out of the question. For there we have to do with events that resisted all Watt's efforts to saddle them with meaning, and a formula, so that he could neither think of them, nor speak of them, but only suffer them, when they recurred, though it seems probable that they recurred no more, at the period of Watt's revelation, to me, but were as though they had never been.

(78-79)

It is important to note here Beckett's distance from both phenomenology and logical positivism. For the events that resist being saddled with meaning or formula have no phenomenological status at all and cannot be considered events or objects as such—as the passage tells us, they are literally unthinkable. Being unthinkable, they cannot be considered in the light of Wittgenstein's language games either, in which words or counters are exchanged for prelinguistic entities. The sort of narrativization of which the Galls story forms the example has all the characteristics of an obsessional ritual or rite, being repeated, modified, and, when need be, reinvented in a ceaseless effort to keep a potential suffering at bay. Indeed, the opposition of meaning, no matter how gratuitous, to suffering is one upon which all critics of the novel would do well to dwell. If Watt is dominated by the pleasure principle, his suffering cannot be said to originate with the distance between language and a “real”—indeed, it is the possibility of such a difference which provides his occasional salvation, and his rituals are less motivated by a desire to comprehend or represent the real than to create a real whose laws provide repose. And this “exorcism” through explanation would seem to hold good for Watt's fabulation generally, being the archetype of most of his experience at Knott's: “For the incident of the Galls father and son was the first and type of many” (76). Thus, the general process for which the Galls provide the model and which is also the model for most processes generally undertaken by Watt, might be called gallicization—that is, the need to foist a meaning where there is none through the creation of a ritual narrative.

Thus, staying within the Gallic register we may begin to see how the novel reads Descartes—not only as the author of a narrative of rituals, the precepts, but also as the philosopher who takes as his foundation a ritual narrative, that is, the cogito. Already in Whoroscope, as we have seen, Beckett had read Descartes in terms of ritual and superstition, such as those surrounding the preparation of his omelettes and his fear of fortune tellers. And indeed, Descartes's own investigations in the Discourse and especially the Méditations teeter precariously between the need to recognize meaninglessness on the one hand, and the need to abrogate or name it, on the other. In this connection, God is the name given to the fact that rationally, reason cannot be established as equivalent to truth. According to Descartes, in addition to things that can be proven, we must accept as true also those which defy logical proof but are intuitively obvious. Yet for Descartes, the only assumption which permits us to accept as true the suprarational intuitive would be the existence of a perfect God, disinclined to deceive us in our innermost impressions: “Car, premièrement, cela même que j'ai tantôt pris pour une règle, à savoir que les choses que nous concevons très clairement et très distinctement, sont toutes vraies, n'est assuré qu'à cause que Dieu est ou existe, et qu'il est un être parfait, et que tout ce qui est en nous vient de lui” (67) [For, firstly, even the rule which I stated above that I held, namely, that the things we grasp very clearly and very distinctly are all true, is assured only because God is or exists, and because he is a perfect Being, and because everything that is in us comes from him (Discourse, 58)]. Descartes offers the above to argue specifically that only the hypothesis of the Deity allows us to have faith in our ability to distinguish dreaming from waking life, for while we dream we often have the impression of being awake, and at no particular moment can we be rationally or phenomenologically certain we are not within some particular dream, with its own particular false reality. Now this distinction between reality and hallucinatory or oneiric perception is one which, the Galls episode teaches us, Watt has no desire to make—all that matters for him is the imperative that there be a meaning; its ontological status is of no real concern. But there is another Cartesian proof of the existence of God that is perhaps also in play here. In Whoroscope Beckett sums it up in the following lines:

I'm a bold boy I know
so I'm not my son
(even if I were a concierge)
nor Joachim my father's
but the chip of a perfect block that's neither old nor new,
the lonely petal of a great high bright rose.

(lines 78-83)

In the notes, Beckett explicates this passage with the phrase, “He proves God by exhaustion” (Collected Poems, 6). Beckett is here referring to Descartes's assertion that his own existence is proof of the existence of God. Descartes reasons that he did not bring himself into existence, for were he “l'auteur de mon existence” (211) [the author of my birth and existence (Discourse, 127)], he would be endowed with every perfection, being his own cause and therefore independent of all externality. As he is instead, in Beckett's Irishism, a far from perfect “bold boy,” another answer must be hazarded. The obvious answer, that his parents created him, is not a final answer, because of course his parents could not have brought themselves into existence either, and thus another step back must be taken. As living things cannot create themselves ex nihilo, moving backward genealogically one is obliged to finally assert the existence of a first cause, that is, God (by exhaustion). However, in Descartes's argument in this section of the third meditation, the conclusion is not only that God is the ultimate engenderer, but also that he leaves his mark on his creation, “comme la marque de l'ouvrier empreinte sur son ouvrage” (215) [like the mark that the workman imprints on his work (Discourse, 130)]. Descartes goes on to claim that this mark of resemblance to God is known by the individual through the same mechanism by which the individual knows itself: “Je conçois cette ressemblance (dans laquelle l'idée de Dieu se trouve contenue) par la même faculté par laquelle je me conçois moi-même; c'est-à-dire lorsque je fais réflexion sur moi” (215) [I perceive this likeness, in which the idea of God is contained, by means of the same faculty by which I apprehend myself; that is to say that, when I reflect upon myself (Discourse, 130)]. The Galls, who appear as father and son, are perhaps an evocation of this exhaustive link; that “There was no family likeness between the two, as far as Watt could make out” (70), is perhaps Beckett's ironic nod at the idea of the creator's imprint left on the creation. But in any event, the implication of this passage from the Méditations and Descartes's accompanying argument that not only is God the ultimate engenderer but that he reengenders each being in every separable moment of its existence is that the cogito serves not only to prove my existence but simultaneously and by the same token to inscribe me in a filial position in a fully elaborated kinship structure.

Indeed, despite the cogito's apparent logical austerity, its status as proof is untenable without this inscription: “[I]l est nécessaire que Dieu soit l'auteur de mon existence; car tout le temps de ma vie peut être divisé en une infinité de parties, chacune desquelles ne dépend en aucune façon des autres, et ainsi de ce qu'un peu auparavant j'ai été, il ne s'ensuit pas que je doive maintenant être, si ce n'est qu'en ce moment quelque cause me produise, et me crée” (211-12) [God is necessarily the author of my existence. For the whole time of my life may be divided into an infinity of parts, each of which depends in no way on the others; and thus, it does not follow that because I existed a little earlier, I must exist now, unless at this moment some cause produces and creates me anew (Discourse, 127)]. Thus, subjective ritual comes to be both dependent on and productive of progenitory myth, which links the Cartesian rituals of self-recognition or subjective assertion to those Freud describes in Totem and Taboo, equally concerned with subjective construction through kinship structuration. Likewise, this moves us from the Galls dyad to the sprawling Lynches.

Although Totem and Taboo is most notorious for its mythic account of Oedipal violence and desire, the burden of the book is in fact more occupied by discussing how kinship structures are built through relation to a totem animal. Freud argues that it is through a shared relation to the same totem animal that any particular group establishes its identity. Moreover, it is this identity and not that established by the nuclear family which will be the model of all group identities, including national, to follow. This contradiction is only one of appearance, however, because the totem itself represents a father figure, transformed into animal shape. The general prohibition on killing or eating one's totem animal echoes the prohibition on parricide, whereas the ritual eating of the totem animal on festival days serves two purposes: first, it enables the identification with the totem animal to be reinforced through a literalized incorporation, and second, it gives expression to the other pole of the ambivalent relation to the father, that is, the homicidal one. But following Freud's logic, it is not the “real” tribal father who is projected into the totem, but rather the relationship of paternity itself is only constructed by the mapping of the totemic relationship onto it. The relevance of all this for Watt lies in the book's emphasis on taboo rituals and the erection of the bizarre and absent patriarchal icon with the name of Mr Knott. Much of the book's discussion of taboo centers precisely on culinary ritual: in what seems a condensed parody of Totem and Taboo, the elaborate prohibitions regarding Mr Knott's eating habits and leftovers lead to the absurd and lengthy investigations of the kinship structure of the Lynch family. The Lynches, joint custodians of the sacred dog appointed the task of eating Knott's remains, also provide us with a totem animal. Watt's relationship to his duties is also clearly governed by taboo law, that is, not an internalized sense of right and wrong pertaining to conscious intention, but a “superstitious” belief that the failure to observe certain regulations and rituals will have disastrous consequences, regardless of the intentions surrounding their observance. An example of this is found in Watt's uncharacteristic transgression consisting of his refusal to actually watch the dog eat Knott's leftovers. We are told that this refusal “might have been supposed to have the gravest consequences, both for Watt and for Mr Knott's establishment” (115) and that indeed “Watt expected something of this kind” (115). We learn that Watt's course of action was determined by his insurmountable hatred of dogs, despite his fear of its consequences. These consequences, however, fail to appear:

As it was, nothing happened, but all went on, as before apparently. No punishment fell on Watt, no thunderbolt, and Mr Knott's establishment swam on, through the unruffled nights and days, with all its customary serenity. And this was a great source of wonder, to Watt, that he had infringed, with impunity, such a venerable tradition, or institution. But he was not so foolish as to found in this a principle of conduct, or a precedent of rebelliousness, ho no, for Watt was only too willing to do as he was told, and as custom required, at all times. And when he was forced to transgress, as in the matter of witnessing the dog's meal, then he was at pains to transgress in such a way, and to surround his transgression with such precautions, such delicacies, that it was almost as though he had not transgressed at all. And perhaps this was counted to him for grace. And he stilled the wonder the trouble in his mind, by reflecting that if he went unpunished for the moment, he would not perhaps always go unpunished, and that if the hurt to Mr Knott's establishment did not at once appear, it would perhaps one day appear, a little bruise at first, and then a bigger, and then a bigger still, until, growing, growing, it blackened the entire body.

(115-16)

The above should give pause to the many naively “Oedipal” readings to which Watt has been subjected. What this remarkable passage establishes is not Watt's resentment of the paternal principle or its laws, but rather his anxiety at the potential fragility of these laws themselves. Watt does not fear punishment, but rather that he will not be punished. For this sort of reason, we should hesitate to read Knott simply as an emblem of paternal or patriarchal despotism. For Knott, as his name might imply, is not simply the source of the system, although he does seem to be the knot which ties it together. And the novel does not give us the drama of the son's embattled assertion of his subjectivity in the face of oppressive paternal authority, but rather anxiety at the potential breakdown of a social signifying structure in which the father is no more than a marker, thus, “not.” Not the primal father who dominates his subservient sons, Knott far more closely resembles the sort of tribal chiefs discussed by Freud, who by the fact of their very sacredness are more bound by taboo law than their subjects.¹³ As Freud explains, since the totemic ruler is divinely linked to the well being of his subjects (being intimately tied to the elements, for example), it is crucial that he be protected from any mishap which might find a cosmic reflection. These protections are often violently restrictive. Such a structure once again represents for Freud a compromise formation in which the primal ambivalence toward the ruler may be expressed: on the one hand, taboo laws protect, honor, and isolate him. On the other, they can eventually become so restrictive and violent that they come to resemble the murderous act that they are established to defend against. A detail from Freud which seems particularly relevant to Watt is that “the principal part [in taboos concerning kings and priests] is played in them by restrictions upon freedom of movement and upon diet” (45-46), both of which are prominent in the rituals surrounding Knott's care and behavior. Freud then quotes a list of prohibitions from Frazer concerning the Flamen Dialis of ancient Rome, which for the very rhythm of the list of nots, in addition to its content, is evocative of Beckett's novel: “He ‘might not ride or even touch a horse, nor see an army under arms, nor wear a ring which was not broken, nor have a knot on any part of his garments; … he might not touch wheaten flour or leavened bread; he might not touch or even name a goat, a dog, raw meat, beans, and ivy’” (46).¹⁴ In addition to the knot, the dog, and the prohibition on naming, the broken ring also has its place in the novel, being depicted in the picture in Erskine's room.

Thus, the novel's emphatic Oedipal nods must be answered not in terms of the boy-child's desire for the mother, which finds itself blocked by the “Not!” of the Father's commandment. The figure of the mother is largely absent from the novel, as desire is from Watt, while Knott, like one of Freud's tribal chiefs, is as powerless as his subjects. Rather, Beckett's interrogation of the patriarchal economy seems more concerned with its function in determining subjective identifications, positionings, and group identities. Of course, the question of desire cannot be separated from the process of identification, but as we saw above, the anxiety of the novel is centered not on castration, or the paternal punishment of the son's desire, but rather on the fragility of the laws which give the son his “place” in the symbolic economy.¹⁵

Thus, if Knott seems in some ways to be invulnerable, abiding impassively the serial replacements of his rotating servants, he is by no means beyond the laws they enforce. Indeed, Knott's apparent omnipotence is, in fact, but a reflection of the most imperious need of all: “For except, one, not to need, and, two, a witness to his not needing, Knott needed nothing, as far as Watt could see” (202). The need to need nothing is precisely the need that can never be met, as every abolition of need becomes no more than a reinforcement of its law. In order to finally achieve the state of needing nothing, one would also have to reach the state where one no longer needed to need nothing, which would then open the door to all the needs one wished to exclude. So Knott is also the tie that doubly binds.¹⁶ Thus, just as Watt must witness, so must Mr Knott be witnessed—neither are free from or within their places in this arrangement which looks less like Hegel's master/slave dialectic than Freud's description of an “organized” group. In his “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” Freud begins by summarizing accounts of how the behavior of groups tends to reduce or cancel the intelligence, moral inhibitions, and critical functions of the individuals which comprise them. But following W. McDougall, Freud also discusses what he calls “organized” groups, which on the contrary allow for greater achievements than those undertaken by individuals alone. Of the five necessary conditions for the formation of an organized group, four are strikingly present in the Knott household, the third being the only conspicuous absence:

The first and fundamental condition is that there should be some degree of continuity of existence in the group. This may be either material or formal: material, if the same individuals persist in the group for some time; and formal, if there is developed within the group a system of fixed positions which are occupied by a succession of individuals.

The second condition is that in the individual member of the group some definite idea should be formed of the nature, composition, functions and capacities of the group, so that from this he may develop an emotional relation to the group as a whole.

The third is that the group should be brought into interaction (perhaps in the form of rivalry) with other groups similar to it but differing from it in many respects.

The fourth is that the group should possess traditions, customs and habits, and especially such as determine the relations of its members to one another.

The fifth is that the group should have a definite structure, expressed in the specialization and differentiation of the functions of its constituents.

(Civilization, Society and Religion, 114-15, my emphasis)

This sort of organized group is held together not so much by the libidinal ties between its members nor by those between the members and their leader, but rather by an identification with an abstracted concept of the group itself—a group which should continue beyond the lives and scope of the individuals who comprise it at any given moment. Watt's fixations are less on the other servants or even Mr Knott than on the customs and rituals that constitute the household. And as Watt's speculations concerning Knott's consciousness of and responsibility for his feeding arrangements indicate, there is no necessity that Knott be taken as the origin, source, or inventor of these customs, although his structuring role within them is crucial. Like the Cartesian God, Knott becomes a necessary hypothesis for the functioning of a series of repeated rituals that create subjective identifications. The sense in the novel that prohibitions and rituals are due to arbitrary custom rather than the whim of an individual source of power and desire is reinforced by the way Watt seems to inherit them—although we are told that Erskine did spend some time explaining to Watt his duties (85), the perpetuation of the enduring structures of the Knott household, despite the frequent changes of not wholly articulate servants, seems to lend the customs a regulating power of their own. The laws of the household are inherited and assumed like social custom, like the divergent cultural manners that form the “ways of being we,” and, of course, also like the structures of language, which present themselves as the laws of the signifying combinations through which the subject can be constructed. It is precisely these laws which begin to dissolve for Watt in the famous “pot” passage.

This amply discussed passage describes the dissolution of semantic links for Watt, so that the object or concept of a pot no longer completely corresponds to the word that signifies it: “Looking at a pot, for example, or thinking of a pot, at one of Mr Knott's pots, of one of Mr Knott's pots, it was in vain that Watt said, Pot, pot” (81). What Watt suffers here is quite properly an estrangement from the seeming naturalness of linguistic structures. Contrary to many other sections of the novel, this passage presents us with no aphasia. For example, Watt does not find himself unable to recall a word that would signify “pot,” nor does he hear the word “pot” without remembering what it signifies, as in classical cases of aphasia. On the contrary, he clearly remembers the law that binds the signifier to the signified but is forced to make the detour of an appeal to this law for his understanding to function. Jakobson defines similarity aphasia as an atrophy of the metalinguistic function: “The aphasic defect in the ‘capacity of naming’ is properly a loss of metalanguage” (104). But for Watt the situation is the inverse: only metalinguistic verification allows him to keep his faith in semantic links that no longer ring either true or false for him. As many critics point out, this is the situation in which one finds oneself when learning a foreign language, in which the links between signifier and signified have yet to be reinforced by repetition, use, and context and are established only by the copula of the bilingual dictionary. But what is lost for Watt here is neither linguistic binding, in the sense of an aphasic, nor lexical anchoring, in the sense of someone operating in a foreign language. We are told:

And Watt preferred on the whole having to do with things of which he did not know the name, though this too was painful to Watt, to having to do with things of which the known name, the proven name, was not the name, any more, for him. For he could always hope, of a thing of which he had never known the name, that he would learn the name, some day, and so be tranquillized. But he could not look forward to this in the case of a thing of which the true name had ceased, suddenly, or gradually, to be the true name for Watt.

(81-82)

Thus, in the case of a foreign language, Watt would be willing to apply the new name, as arbitrary and denatured as it might seem. But what has happened here is that an undeniable, recognizable, and “proven” name continues to function, but ceases to seem “proper.” What Watt has lost is the literal, having entered a world where the word, though recognizable, seems a catachresis—a figure or substitute name for something which is really “something else.” Watt is clear on this throughout: one can call it a “pot”; others will call it a “pot”; if I call it a “pot” others will understand me, but “pot” is not the right word. That Watt extends his worries about this phenomenon to the word “man” is not coincidental, as in the trilogy all subjective auto-designation and identification will come to be seen as catachrestical. In Watt, however, the end of the proper means the end of the natural, the end of the internalization of the identification which allows us to oppose a “we” to a “they,” although it could be argued that such a distinction is still possible, based on the difference between those who know what “pot” is supposed (in the literal sense) to mean in the system of English and those who do not. Thus, there is a clear analogy between the episode of the Galls and the question of the pot. As we have seen, the Galls story is less a memory than an attempt to saddle the meaningless with a meaning or a formula, to prevent its constant haunting return. In the later passage, the word “pot” would be seen as just such a saddle, which for Watt begins to fray. Beckett's criticism of language here is in no way that language fails to represent the real in its plenitude (the lack and distance inherent in the mediating sign), nor that language falsifies through its distorting figural additions (the spillage or the excess of the mediating sign with regard to the signification before which it should withdraw). Rather, the real in its plenitude is itself structured by language in the large sense, including the marks that are assembled to constitute memory, in a movement which seems to precede the distinction between true and false, relying more on the pleasure principle and its distinction between suffering and its other. And this is where Descartes's “method” finally meets Watt's pseudo-linguistics, pseudo-anthropology, and obsessional rituals, because for Descartes it is the real itself that is radically foreign and consequently threatening to subjective constitution, as seen in his radical exclusion of it from the interiority of the subject. Indeed, the cogito may be seen as an obsessive ritual defense mechanism against the incursions of all that the ego has rejected as outside it: not only the sense perceptions by which the real penetrates, but also and significantly the body and the drives it registers.

It is in the trilogy, the short stories, and the Texts for Nothing that this retreat from the question of collectivity and its relation to that of the construction of all intrasubjectivity will be carried out. The singularity of Watt in Beckett's oeuvre lies precisely in its interrogation of group or communal structures, and the mechanisms by which the sense of belonging or estrangement is built. In the works composed during the famous “siege in the room,” these questions will have largely disappeared through a sort of phenomenological reduction of all that they presuppose. Thus, Watt also marks the transition between Beckett's humorous investigations of Irish manners and morals in the early prose and the more atemporal, severe later work.¹⁷ So, having looked extensively at examples of foreignness in the novel, and the encounter with that which presents itself as the foreign, I would like to close by examining a very little studied passage.

Surely one of the most remarkable of the many tirades in Beckett's work is the “short statement” (39) that Arsene delivers to Watt when the latter arrives to take his place in the Knott establishment. Arsene's rant exceeds twenty pages, and in its descriptions of the eating habits of the hypothetical maid Mary, the list of ancestors, and the account of the sequences of Mr Knott's servants and their replacements, it provides an early example of the many mathematical permutations and serial lists that are the novel's most salient stylistic trait. But critics have paid rather little attention to some of the less immediately striking passages that discuss what Knott's household will mean for Watt.¹⁸ Speaking of the sense of peace the new arrival at Knott's must feel, Arsene describes it in these terms:

But he being what he has become, and the place being what it was made, the fit is perfect. And he knows this. No. Let us remain calm. He feels it. The sensations, the premonitions of harmony are irrefragable, of imminent harmony, when all outside him will be he, the flowers the flowers that he is among him, the sky the sky that he is above him, the earth trodden the earth treading, and all sound his echo. When in a word he will be in his midst at last, after so many tedious years spent clinging to the perimeter. These first impressions, so hardly won, are undoubtedly delicious. What a feeling of security! They are transports that few are spared, nature is so exceedingly accommodating, on the one hand, and man, on the other. With what sudden colours past trials and errors glow, seen in their new, their true perspective, mere stepping-stones to this! Haw! All is repaid, amply repaid. For he has arrived. He even ventures to remove his hat, and set down his bags, without misgiving. Think of that! He removes his hat without misgiving, he unbuttons his coat and sits down, proffered all pure and open to the long joys of being himself, like a basin to a vomit.

(40-41)

The passage, with its emphasis on journey and arrival, clearly evokes a return from exile or banishment, but that from which the servant has been banished is himself—in rhetoric prefiguring the pronominal torsion of the trilogy, Arsene states, “When in a word he will be in his midst at last.” As we have seen, this is hardly the experience that awaits Watt. Yet this scene of homecoming, already bracketed by the inevitable expulsion which Arsene lives here in Watt's place, is a sort of narcissistic arrival, a perfection of projection and fusion where the issue of the foreign disappears as the boundary between what one is and what one is not is annihilated: “when all outside him will be he, the flowers the flowers that he is among him, the sky the sky that he is above him, the earth trodden the earth treading, and all sound his echo.” This destruction of the threshold between the inner and the outer—that is, this destruction of the central organizing concept of the Cartesian system—is an element to which Arsene explicitly returns: “For my—how shall I say?—my personal system was so distended at the period of which I speak that the distinction between what was inside it and what was outside it was not at all easy to draw” (43). Arsene's implication here is that bliss comes not when the external world simply corresponds to the internal, as in the case of “natural” belonging or identification, but rather when the external world no longer maintains any externality at all—to come home in this sense means to be the home one comes to, and the joy of “being oneself” is the joy precisely of being both the basin and the vomit. In this context, some of Freud's remarks from “Instincts and their Vicissitudes” seem quite apt. After asserting that the ego originally hates the external world for introducing stimuli it cannot control, Freud writes: “At the very beginning, it seems, the external world, objects, and what is hated are identical.” Then Freud describes the fate of the external objects that, despite their extraneity, provide pleasure: “If later on an object turns out to be a source of pleasure, it is loved, but it is also incorporated into the ego; so that for the purified pleasure-ego once again objects coincide with what is extraneous and hated” (On Metapsychology, 134). Freud thus describes the ego as working by tautology: what is hated must be categorized as belonging to the outside; if anything is loved, its exteriority is simply denied through identification. Arsene's ideal of total narcissistic identification would serve to neutralize the world of objects entirely. One must think the pun on “Knot” in this sense also—a site which is not, or a site where that which one is not, is not.

But such a schema implies that to be banished from oneself is, in fact, identical to being banished within oneself; the sense of exile from oneself derives from one's own awareness of the boundary between the internal and the external. It is, then, the existence of objects that leads to the banishment. This odd contradiction—that it is, in fact, the existence of an outside which divides the subject from itself—is what leads Beckett to Descartes, for whom the subject can only be defined through the suspension of the external. This, as we shall see in the following chapters, is the proposition that the trilogy refuses, enacting the utter rejection of all the appropriative assumptions, linguistic and philosophic, that allow Descartes to postulate subjective self-presence in the ideal absence of an external world. But Watt, on the contrary, depicts such a hypothetical self-presence as necessarily constitutive of its own lack. To arrive at the sort of self-delimitation which constantly eludes the trilogy's “voices” is here defined as banishment, as subtraction from a world always irredeemably other, while, as the trilogy will make clear, to be both the traveler and the home, both earth trodden and the treading earth, both the basin and vomit, is to be originally doubled, and in consequence no less divided. On the one hand, then, subjective and objective self-presence create a remainder that cannot be managed, on the other, self-integrity is banishment.

The great irony of Watt, however, is found in the enormous distance between this vision of total harmony, reflection and fusion proffered between “haws!” by Arsene, and the absurdly arbitrary, ritualistic duties Watt is obliged to carry out, with no sense of their meaning or utility. As we have seen, Watt submits to the peculiarities of the functioning of the Knott household as to a law—questions of utility, desirability or significance cannot even be raised. Although Watt seems to enjoy the utter alienation of his service, it is certainly a far cry from the sort of bliss that Arsene had evoked. We seem to move from total narcissistic boundless unity and identification to the violent exteriority of the inherited, arbitrary law. But this is perhaps a contradiction in appearance only, for Arsene's vision goes beyond that of desire instantly gratified, providing instead a schema in which desire is automatically preempted, as the spacing or difference necessary for its establishment is denied. In both cases, objects, or that which is hated, have been removed from play—in one case, through the refusal to recognize separation, internalizing everything, in the other, through a structure of prohibitions in which libidinal investment in the structure replaces investment in the objects and actions this structure prohibits. This shift enables the structure itself to break its link from a repressed unconscious and to become truly arbitrary in the sense that Saussurian linguistics speaks of the arbitrariness of the signifier. Thus custom and ritual are logically prior to desire, and if they inevitably serve to create it, they cannot be said to represent it in the sense that a sign is classically seen to represent a logically prior referent. But what could be called Watt's hypercathexis of custom and ritual seems to create an economy where linguistic law goes lax and enters the motivated relationship to the unconscious that the taboo rituals do not here present. Both Arsene's evocation of complete narcissistic extension and Watt's experience of total egoistic effacement before an internalized ego ideal serve to short-circuit the tension that Beckett will explore in the trilogy—that of the ego's self-apperception. This, of course, leads to Beckett's further investigations of the cogito, but the crucial difference between Beckett and Descartes is that if for Descartes the cogito is logically prior to the hypothesis of the relationship with a possible other, for Beckett the mechanics of identification in the formation of the subject lead him into a sort of temporal aporia, or even anachrony, as we shall see in the following chapters.¹⁹ And the privileged figure for this dialectic in Beckett will be that of voice, which inextricably links the Cartesian question of the subject's self-apperception to the alterity of the interlocutor and shared social structure that Descartes attempts to provisionally bracket.

Notes

1. Cousineau, “Watt: Language as Interdiction and Consolation,” in Gontarski, 64.

2. See Ross Posnock for a cogent account of Watt as “Beckett's critique of the traditional novel” (51). Steven Connor, in his fine chapter on the book, acknowledges that “Reading Watt is, of course, a slow and painful process” (31); and in a recent article, Martin Kevorkian begins by stressing that the text “seems to prohibit certain kinds of reading” (427) altogether. Meanwhile, the famous passage on the unnamable “pot,” among others, opens the way for Wittgensteinian reflections on an essential alienness or unnaturalness of language with regard to what it designates. On a biographical level, it is often recalled that Beckett started writing in French after finishing Watt, perhaps in response to the seeming exhaustion of English in this work. See Astro, p. 49, for one example. Stressing Beckett's “sceptical” outlook, Michael E. Mooney asserts that “Watt's sojourn in Knott's house teaches him the futility of attempting to impose meaning on events or to concern himself ‘with what things were in reality’ (Watt, 227)” (see Butler and Davis, 163). Leslie Hill posits Mr Knott as “a figure of paternal indifference, engulfment and indeterminacy, apathy and invisibility” (27), and claims that Watt's relationship to his largely extratextual, presumed biological father “turns on a failure of incorporation” (27). For Hill, the novel's central concern is “the possibility of a form of language in which the spectre of the father can be incorporated” (28). Gottfried Büttner writes of “Watt's path into nothingness or rather Mr Knott's house and garden,” which he later asserts quite simply “are to be found in another realm of existence” (Butler and Davis, 172-73). The fullest examination of the issue of Beckett's residence in a new tongue in Ann Beer's “Watt, Knott and Beckett's Bilingualism,” which repeatedly views the novel as a tentative plunge into the foreign: “Written in English, the novel seems exiled from any familiar realm of English literature and language; but it is also foreign to the French linguistic home which Beckett was to make his from 1945” (37). Another characteristic statement is the following: “In Watt Beckett begins to examine and externalize a language which is gradually shifting from its status as a mother-tongue, habitual and instinctive, to that of a language whose relative and arbitrary nature is clear” (37). Beer also mentions, critically, the argument of Patrick Casement, who attempts to forge a link between the “mother tongue” and Beckett's biological mother (43) in explaining Beckett's seeming attack on English and move into French. In this argument, linguistic appurtenance and monolinguism are inscribed into an overriding discourse of the natural and the native generally, in which the “naturalness” of the native tongue and culture will be likened to a supposed natural bond between mother and child. A whole series of oppositions ensues: native language/foreign language, maternal love/paternal law, womb/world, immediate perception/hermeneutic mediation. Beckett's works generally, and certainly Watt among them, call all of these oppositions into question.

3. It has not been determined whether this piece was actually broadcast or not. See Gontarski's note in Complete Short Prose, 285-86.

4. On June 6, 1944. That it was, in fact, the allies who destroyed the town in their bombardment of German positions in conjunction with D day is the sort of irony to which Beckett's work is consistently sensitive.

5. The following chapters on the trilogy and the Texts for Nothing will develop this idea in much greater detail.

6. James Knowlson's recent biography confirms the extent of Beckett's knowledge of psychoanalytic theory, already easily inferred from his writings. According to Knowlson, Beckett took lengthy and detailed notes on most of the leading figures and theories of his day, including the specialist on group psychology McDougall, whom I shall refer to later in this chapter (see Knowlson, 172-78).

7. For an examination of the question of mirroring generally in Watt, see Ramsey, “Watt and the Significance of the Mirror Image.” Ramsey discusses Watt's inversions on pp. 31-34.

8. An exception would be Arsene's “imprevisible,” which is not strictly speaking an English word. However, as “visible” is, and “pre” and “im” are acceptable English prefixes, Arsene's mistake is due only to chance; his inference is based on many valid examples of the transposition of French to English—for example, “visible” and “invisible”—and follows the general rules of French to English transposition.

9. Of course, the “real” narrator is Sam, but as Sam claims to be for the most part simply forwarding Watt's story, the latter's reliability remains a narratological issue.

10. Obviously, the root of “gallicism” is in fact the Gauls, not the “Galls.” But given that all the English words derived from this root drop the u, I think the reference is still operative. Michael Beausang links the name to Franz Joseph Gall, an early student of aphasia. See Rabaté, Beckett avant Beckett, (153-72). More recently, Richard Begam evokes the possibility that “Beckett, the Gaelic writer writing in Gaul, is tuning his piano, keeping his hand in, and wondering all the time whether it is worth it” (91).

11. I do not believe such a break could be read as either doctrinal or definitive, but rather strategic. However much Watt distances itself from a certain kind of Joycean wit that dominates Murphy and More Pricks than Kicks, stylistically and structurally it remains clearly indebted to the “Ithaca” chapter in Ulysses, to give just one example. As Peter Nicholls has recently shown, the term “modernism” itself should probably not be taken in the singular. But I would argue that Watt does represent a shift of interest to a different tangent of modernism, and a different kind of interest in France and the French—further investigations of Beckett's work of this period thus necessitate a close look at his relationship to the work of Gertrude Stein.

12. Ironically, this itself would inevitably inscribe a filial debt to Joyce, master of this strategy.

13. See the section “The Taboo upon Rulers” in Freud, Totem and Taboo.

14. The above translation comes from Strachey's standard edition, which would not have been available at the time of the novel's composition. A. A. Brill's translation, dating from 1918, rather than quote Frazer with elision, renders the passage this way: “He was not allowed to ride, to see a horse or an armed man, to wear a ring that was not broken, to have a knot in his garments, to touch wheat flour or leaven, or even to mention by name a goat, a dog, raw meat, beans and ivy” (62).

15. Thus, I would agree with Leslie Hill's emphasis on the novel as an attempt to construct a relationship with the father rather than an attempt to defy the paternal law, though I would differ with his account of the mechanics of incorporation, or his identification of Knott with the “father.” See the interesting chapter, “The Loss of Species,” especially pp. 23-30.

16. Beckett's 1938 article “Les Deux Besoins” (first published in Disjecta in 1984) raises similar questions but in quite dissimilar terms, as it stresses precisely that the artist needs to need, rather than not need, and goes on to chart the relationship between the need to need and the particular need that at any given time is needed. Thus, in “Les Deux Besoins,” the sort of ataraxy which Knott is under the injunction to search out is precisely the temptation which must be resisted in order to live “la seule vie possible.” A much longer study would be necessary to explore the relation between these two texts, but already it could be suggested that Knott's heroism lies in his (doomed) attempt to reject that which life ordinarily commands as its condition: that you need. A first sketch in this direction is probably provided by William Burroughs in Junky, where the attraction of heroin is that it supplants and supersedes all other needs while being itself in constant short supply: “Junk takes everything and gives nothing but insurance against junk sickness” (125); “Junk is a biological necessity when you have a habit, an invisible mouth” (124), but also, “The kick of junk is that you have to have it. … You cannot escape from junk sickness any more than you can escape from junk kick after a shot” (97).

17. Though Beckett never loses interest in ridiculing the assumptions and conventions of bourgeois society. We need only think of Moran.

18. For a notable exception, see Richard Begam's recent reading of the passage, which also views it as an interrogation of “Cartesian dualism” (72).

19. See chapter 4 in [Saying I No More] for a discussion of anachrony in Beckett and Derrida.