In Murphy Beckett engaged in an aesthetic debate with Joyce, and it was necessary as a prolegomenon to our discussion to deconstruct the assumptions about what constituted the so-called Joycean sources and influences. No such barriers block the critical approach to Watt. Indeed, the overwhelming consensus is that Beckett has by now moved decisively beyond Joyce, once and for all. This judgment is echoed even with reference to the one feature of Watt that critics from early on did deem to be obviously ‘Joycean,’ namely, how the maddeningly (pseudo-)logical permutations of inventoried ‘items’ of all sorts in Watt seem reminiscent of Joyce’s ‘scientific catechism’ of the ‘Ithaca’ section of Ulysses. In The Stoic Comedians: Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett, Hugh Kenner proposes that in the logical analyses of possibilities in Watt ‘Beckett is ‘subtracting from the methods of Ulysses all the irreducible realities of Joyce’s Dublin, and so transposing the novel to a plane of empty but oddly gripping construction.’1 In Kenner’s assessment, the Joycean elements identifiable in Watt show Beckett moving from Joyce’s comedy of the inventory to Beckett’s own comedy of the impasse. As we will see, the Joycean aspects of Beckett’s Watt are much more extensive, to say the least, than those adumbrated by Kenner in his early study and not significantly added to in subsequent Beckett criticism.
It could in fact be said that Watt is in many respects Beckett’s effort in memoriam Joyce. Watt was begun in Paris on 11 February 1941, less than a month after Joyce’s death on 13 January of that year. Most of Watt was written by Beckett in Roussillon in Vichy France, where he was working as a peasant by day and labouring fitfully on Watt by night; in short, Watt is a work about fragmentation written in a perforce fragmented manner, and not completed until the middle of 1945. As Watt developed over this long period of time, the Joycean elements clearly became more and more pronounced, and it is no exaggeration to say that Joycean elements haunt Watt and are deciding factors in the very shaping and development of the novel’s structure and guiding ideas. Simply put, Watt is about one man (Watt) replacing another man (Arsene) in attendance at the house of Mr Knott; on another plane, it is about Beckett trying to find his way after Joyce. Beckett’s Watt is a complex portraiture of Beckett’s Joyce, at once a hail and farewell, a homage, and a critique.
In the period after the completion of Murphy (1935; published 1938), Beckett explored in more depth the crucial question of art’s function and the vehicles for its expression, issues which were raised in Murphy but the engagement with for the most part suspended. It is hardly a surprise that in Beckett’s investigation of these issues Joyce figures in various ways in a prominent fashion. In the 1937 letter to Axel Kaun, Beckett sets out what sounds like a program for his future writing: ‘And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it.’ Within a few sentences, Beckett repeats this idea of getting behind or beyond language, though now the attack is more calculated: ‘To bore one hole after another in it [language], until what lurks behind it – be it something or nothing – begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today.’ And in the third phrasing concerning what might be found out as a result of this ‘tearing’ and ‘boring,’ to which now is added ‘this mocking attitude towards the word, through words,’ the ‘something or nothing’ either/or proposition is itself transformed to ‘it will perhaps become possible to feel a whisper of that final music or that silence that underlies All.’ Then, dramatically, in the very next sentence of the following paragraph enters Beckett’s Joyce: ‘With such a program, in my opinion, the latest work of Joyce [Work in Progress] has nothing whatever to do. There it seems rather to be a matter of the apotheosis of the word.’ Beckett is unable to ‘imagine a higher goal for the writer today’ than to seek to somehow get beyond the limitations of language, whereas Joyce is said to exalt the very powers of language itself, raising himself on high to god-like status in a veritable ‘apotheosis of the word’ (Dis, 171–2).2 Beckett’s strategic intent here is obviously designed to distinguish his own enterprise from Joyce’s in that its ‘higher goal’ has nothing to do with the supposed omniscience and omnipotence of the Joycean ‘apotheosis of the word.’ Through the proper arrangement of the right words, Joyce believed significant meanings might be expressed, a Logos validated and sustained, remarking to Beckett that he could ‘justify every line’ (JJ, 702) in his own writing.
That these judgments have more to do with Beckett’s own need to claim original points of departure from Joyce, a certain rhetorical distancing (‘in my opinion,’ ‘it seems’), than with any definitive evaluation of the Joycean enterprise is made clear by juxtaposing statements made in the same year (1937) in his German Diaries, which were made available to Knowlson for the work on his biography. Beckett records a heated discussion in which his interlocutor won’t even entertain the question of the word’s inadequacy (the same topic that the Kaun letter focused upon) and refuses categorically to accept that ‘dissonance […] has become principle and that the word cannot express, because literature can no more escape from chronologies to simultaneities, from Nebeneinander to Miteinander, that [than] the human voice can sing chords.’ In the Kaun letter Beckett definitively rejects any identification between Joyce’s work and this principle of ‘dissonance,’ there phrased in terms of the inherent weaknesses of words: ‘In this dissonance between the means and their use it will perhaps become possible to feel a whisper of that final music or that silence that underlies All’; in the German Diaries entry Joyce is, however, now identified with Beckett’s own avant-garde program: ‘As I talk and listen realise suddenly how Work in Progress is the only possibility [possible] development from Ulysses, the heroic attempt to make literature accomplish what belongs to music – the Miteinander and the simultaneous. Ulysses falsifies the unconscious, or the ‘monologue intérieur,’ in so far as it is obliged to express it as a teleology’ (DF, 258). A couple of points are worth underscoring here. First, Beckett’s sudden insight into Joyce’s laudable program of turning ‘simultaneities’ against the grain of conventional narrative ‘chronologies’ does indeed seem to leap unannounced off the page – a veritable critical epiphany. Hence the form of Beckett’s revelation does poetic justice to this new conceptual vision Beckett has of Joyce’s work. Secondly, in both the Kaun letter and the German Diaries entry Joyce’s presence suddenly breaks into a discussion that ostensibly has nothing in particular to do with him, his sudden interjection testifying, however, to how Joyce was for Beckett the touchstone figure when it came to the dilemmas and challenges confronting the modern writer.
What then is one to make of these two contradictory views of Joyce’s Work in Progress voiced virtually simultaneously in 1937, both occurring within a German cultural context? The Axel Kaun letter attempts to establish the nature of the real world of things-in-themselves (what Beckett refers to as something or nothing, music or silence behind the veil of language), resulting, however, in what Kant called ‘antinomies,’ contradictory conclusions both of which can be reasonably ‘proven’ to be true. No wonder Beckett later dismissed this letter as ‘German bilge’3 – it contains a number of uncritical judgments and smacks of naive Idealism/Transcendentalism in its portentous references in phrases such as ‘that final music or that silence that underlies All.’ The probing of the ‘dissonance’ within language itself comes across authentically, even if the terms in which the consequences of such a program are phrased seem mere metaphysical maundering. On the other hand, the German Diaries entry has the ring of a spontaneous insight, in sharp contrast to the overwrought rhetoric of the Kaun letter. The real antinomy at stake here is the two fundamentally contradictory views of Joyce’s work that Beckett puts forward. Decisive here is not the so-called truth value of either judgment (both of which can be ‘proven’ and ‘disproven’), but Beckett’s own abiding needs and his conflicted nature: at times identifying with Joyce’s work (‘to make literature accomplish what belongs to music’), at other times rejecting Joyce’s way (‘the apotheosis of the word’) in order to underscore just how very different his own work is.
The Denis Devlin review (1938) is focused upon seeing art (poetry) in ‘its own terms, that is in terms of need’ and is hence very much on the way to Watt, to be begun in the next few years. The Joycean reference points here are not so explicitly identified but suggested more indirectly. Beckett’s argument that art now has to deal with itself on its own terms is further supported by historical circumstance since ‘social reality (pace ex-Comrade Radek) has severed the connexion’ (Dis, 91) with art. As we have encountered in Murphy, Beckett adapts this phrase from Joyce’s Ulysses where Leopold Bloom cautions the aspiring artist Stephen Dedalus to ‘sever the connexion’ with Buck Mulligan (and by implication any of his ilk who would lead him away from the true domain of aesthetic speculations). In 1938, such an injunction is, of course, much more politicized and necessarily generalized in larger societal terms. The consequent development of a theory of art that turns in upon itself is formulated in terms which do, however, appropriate some identifiable Joycean elements: ‘On the one hand the “Unbefriedigt jeden Augenblick,” the need to need (“aimant l’amour”), the art that condenses as inverted spiral of need, that condenses in intensity and brightness from the mere need of the angels to that of the seraphinns, whose end is its own end in the end and the source of need’ (Dis, 91–2). The defining quality of this type of authentic need – as distinct from the other kind, ‘the need that in its haste to be abolished cannot pause to be stated’ – is that it is ‘condense[d] in intensity and brightness,’ as a variant of claritas or radiance.
For Beckett, however, such ‘condensation’ of ‘intensity and brightness’ also must, ineluctably, as we have seen in Dream and Murphy, be intimately conjoined with darkness and issues forth in a paradoxical revision as a ‘dark radiance.’ This admixture of elements is what the conclusion of Beckett’s Devlin review concentrates upon, suggesting that the creative act should not ‘burk its own conditions for the sake of clarity.’ Beckett’s major point is that through poetic images there is a ‘minimum of rational interference,’ whereby artistic consciousness manifests itself ‘with the least loss of integrity.’ Such integritas in Beckett’s world is from ‘Assumption’ onwards pictured as a multiplicity of selves engendered by the creative act itself: as the first sentence of the Devlin review elliptically announces with reference to the artist’s predicament, ‘With himself on behalf of himself. With his selves on behalf of his selves’ (Dis, 91). This ‘integrity’ is the first mode of apprehension in the theory of aesthetics advanced in Portrait, and, in another related ethical sense of the word, it is what Beckett said he learned from Joyce and what was vital for his own development as an artist.4 Beckett concludes his own manifesto within a review with a mannered repetition of the idea of ‘clarity,’ which at once seems to endorse an affinity with Joyce while also implying a significant point of departure: ‘The time is perhaps not altogether too green for the vile suggestion that art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear, any more than the light of day (or night) makes the subsolar, -lunar and -stellar excrement’ (Dis, 94). Art’s role is not to make clear, just as light does not make clear the various excrementa that encompass us in our various subpositions. Logically conjoined here by their negative functions, ‘art’ and ‘light’ can apparently work together to reveal what is, even if they do not make this clear ‘in terms of enlightenment’ (Dis, 94), that is, in a rational, coherent manner, as those terms have been traditionally understood, mockingly referred to earlier in the Devlin review as ‘Davus and the morbid dread of sphinxes, solution clapped on problem like a snuffer on a candle’ (Dis, 92). Hence Beckett reinforces in a more affirmative manner the parallelism of ‘sub-solar, -lunar and -stellar excrement’: ‘Art is the sun, moon and stars of the mind’ (Dis, 94). This ‘whole mind’ includes the outside world, even if, as Beckett stressed at the beginning of his review, art is likened to an ‘inverted spiral of need,’ turned in upon itself. But this is not so much an art-for-art’s-sake argument as an argument in support of art for life’s sake, an acknowledgment of the ‘absolute predicament of particular human identity’ (Dis, 91), as Beckett characterizes the artist’s dilemma at the beginning of his review.
Watt is much more fundamentally and directly engaged with Joycean concerns than the much more ballyhooed Murphy in this regard. Stephen Dedalus expounds the theory that this claritas or radiance is ‘quidditas, the whatness of a thing. This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure’ (P, 185). Watt could be read as a novel whose founding principles are self-consciously set in some type of conjunction with and opposition to those outlined above in the excerpt from Portrait. Watt cannot comprehend or, in the Joycean sense, ‘apprehend’ the ‘whatness’ of various things and experiences encountered at the house of Mr Knott (and hence by implication his own ‘Watt-ness’). Instead, Watt’s predicament consists of the very painful experience of undergoing a whole series of negative epiphanies, as he vainly and futilely tries to draw meaning from a series of inexplicable events. Language and logic seem helpless before a number of experiences that refuse to be fitted into encompassing patterns within a series of similar events.
Beckett’s last sentence in the ‘review’ (more properly viewed as a critical probing into his own aesthetic credo) accords his ostensible subject (Devlin) a memorable endorsement as ‘a mind aware of its luminaries’ (Dis, 94). In Watt Beckett himself is indeed just such a mind and the two most important ‘luminaries’ are Immanuel Kant and James Joyce. Strange bedfellows upon a first consideration, to be sure, but most appropriate in terms of Beckett’s overall development of his own aesthetic at the time of writing Watt. In an earlier discussion, ‘Beckett and the Philosophers,’ I argued in detail that Watt is a Kantian novel and that for Beckett Kant remains the indispensable philosopher in so far as Beckett used his reading of him to help clarify for himself the boundary lines of the knowable and unknowable.5 There is no need to rehearse here the details of that argument; specifics as needed will be referred to in the following critique of Watt. In effect, what Beckett is doing by bringing these two ‘luminaries’ into conjunction is testing out the limitations of the aesthetic theories of modernists such as Proust and especially Joyce, whose theorizing turns in Beckett’s reading on a mystical transcendence of sorts that is, logically enough, ineffable in that it crosses the boundary lines of that which is comprehensible by ‘pure reason’ as set out by Kant. Mr Knott embodies this Kantian function of bringing into play the various types of negation encountered under such liminal conditions. Arsene is the Joycean figure whose epiphany temporarily transcends such limitations, but which singularly fails to sustain itself and in time collapses. Watt is the middle-aged man with an imagination that had never been very ‘lively’ and whose name itself embodies a key aesthetic tenet of Portrait, quidditas, the testing out of which will determine the directions Beckett’s art might take.
These generalized judgments play out in a number of very specific and detailed ways in terms of the actual structure of Watt. The pseudo-realistic frame tale of the ‘twilighters,’ Mr Hackett and Mr and Mrs Nixon, affords us our first glimpses of Watt as he prepares to set off on his fatal journey to Mr Knott’s. Speculating about why Watt has got off the train at this particular stop and not simply proceeded on to the train station for his journey out of town, Mr Hackett ventures that Watt was of two minds after his initial departure. Summarizing his view, Mr Hackett says that Watt has been caught up in the impasse of at once wanting and not wanting to go and offers this ‘conclusion’: ‘Too fearful to assume himself the onus of a decision, said Mr Hackett, he refers it to the frigid machinery of a time-space relation’ (W, 21). This subjection to the Kantian catergories of the knowable – lo scibile6 – echoes another street scene in Dublin as described in Stephen Dedalus’s penultimate page of journal entries in Portrait, as he readies himself for his departure from Ireland. He runs into his ‘beloved’ in Grafton Street and changes his tactics from that of indirectly chastising her to one of mocking self-aggrandizement: ‘Turned off that valve at once and opened the spiritual-heroic refrigerating apparatus, invented and patented in all countries by Dante Alighieri’ (P, 217). Stephen’s poetic posturing is, of course, in dramatic contrast to the onlookers’ speculations about Watt, who is, to say the least, at this point in time anything but a would-be artist joyously on the verge of embracing untold new opportunities of self-discovery. Nevertheless, the embedded terms ‘frigid machinery’/’refrigerating apparatus’ are aligned so as to constitute the first allusion to Portrait in Beckett’s Watt, a work which is engaged in an extensive rewriting of its great predecessor text. Support for this contention is found in the description Arsene offers of his negative or reversed epiphany. Arsene as Beckett’s version of Joyce describes the experience in specifically Kantian terms: ‘I perceived it [the ‘slip’] with a perception so sensuous that in comparison the impressions of a man buried alive in Lisbon on Lisbon’s great day seem a frigid and artificial construction of the understanding’ (W, 43). This is a recondite reference to Kant’s pre-critical De Igne, which commented on the Lisbon earthquake and which Beckett referred to in his poem ‘ainsi a-t-on beau’ where Kant is depicted as dispassionately viewing the spectacle of destruction: ‘sur Lisbonne fumante Kant froidement penché.’7 The critique of Kant’s philosophical sang froid implicit here is not, however, simply an ironic dismissal, for Arsene notably cannot sustain his ‘existence off the ladder’ and so falls back into the ‘old thing where it always was, back again’ (44); in other words, back again into the world in which the Kantian distinctions and boundaries between the noumenal and phenomenal do indeed unfortunately apply.
Arsene’s frametale opens with him projecting for Watt the experience that he initially had himself upon his arrival at Mr Knott’s House – ‘The dawn! The sun! The light!’ (39) – and via this ‘anticipation’ Arsene reflects that ‘it all comes back to me.’ And, lo and behold, the frametale does end twenty-five pages later with the prospect of Watt actually undergoing his own experience of claritas or radiance after Arsene has completed his ‘short statement’ and vacated the premises, leaving Watt in his stead. Arsene’s ‘statement’ is also a ‘frame’ in the sense that Mary Ann Caws employs the term to describe the experience many readers have of finding that certain passages in works of prose fiction ‘stand out’ from their surroundings, are foregrounded, particularly in modernist fiction.8 This is certainly the case with what is in reality Arsene’s monologue; it has garnered a great deal of critical attention, even if the set piece as a whole has not yet been thoroughly investigated. The key to this ‘outstanding’ passage is to trace the process of the epiphanic experience for Arsene and then the process of disintegration whereby this ecstatic experience ‘slips’ away and is lost. Subsequently, the rest of the novel turns upon a comparative analysis, a contrasting of Watt’s experience of the ‘radiance’ of ‘the new day at last’ (64) at Mr Knott’s with that of Arsene, whose rhetorically powerful first-person rendition is the ‘frame,’ which does indeed stand out for readers of Watt.
As with Murphy, Beckett has set up a cunning literary artifice whereby he can test out his views against those of Joyce, here expressed via Arsene, who is, as we will see in many and varied ways, designed as a Joycean figure or surrogate within the novel. The encounter is, however, still mediated or indirect in fundamental ways, for even though an intermediary figure such as Meredith is no longer employed we discover as readers to our dismay that our version of events comes via a narrator named Sam who met Watt while they were both inmates in a mental asylum. Supposedly, Watt experiences and Sam records. Of course, the whole narrative modus operandi of Watt is hopelessly riddled with in-built misinterpretation in that Arsene’s ‘short statement’ itself only comes to us via Sam’s revision; and this is a riddle compounded by an enigma since we know that at the time Arsene delivered his oration Watt paid virtually no attention, and it is only in the tenth entry in the ‘Addenda’ that we are told that ‘Arsene’s declaration gradually came back to Watt’ (248). ‘Gradually came back,’ as in the sense of overcoming an amnesiacal trauma or coma, is a far cry indeed from the very idea of the epiphany’s instantaneous nature, as defined by Joyce in Stephen Hero. The so-called authenticity of Arsene’s vision is obviously open to question, but there is no doubt that Beckett (if not Sam) intends those views to be his own particular version of Joyce’s aesthetic credo.
The Joycean echoes and parallels are decisive for a deciphering of Watt; hence, it is vitally important in terms of ‘source and influence’ to set out just how these Joycean elements are crucial and the Swiftian parallels, so often educed by much influential criticism of Watt, are, finally, decidedly of secondary importance. Two of the most suggestive arguments for the Swiftian influence in Watt are by Francis Doherty, who maintains ‘Swift presides over a good deal of Watt,’ and Frederik N. Smith, who pushes the case even further, arguing that Watt ‘demonstrates a far deeper Swiftian influence than any text we have discussed so far,’9 and then proceeds to develop a ten-page comparative analysis of Beckett’s novel and Swift’s A Tale of a Tub. Granting the relevancy of the ‘general affinities’ and even some of the specific details, correspondences, and allusions still does not, however, constitute a convincing case of ‘influence’ in the sense that Beckett’s Dedalus is pursuing; namely, those ideas which determine the very structure and direction of the work itself. Swift has long been rightly regarded, of course, as an important influence on Beckett, and the works of Doherty and Smith certainly do make significant and valuable additions to this tradition. Nevertheless, neither of these more detailed analyses develops a critical engagement with the Arsene tale (itself, of course, a narrative interpolation common to the eighteenth-century novel), which is crucial for seeing the structure and strategic design of this radically fragmented text. Indeed, one might say that Arsene’s story, after the ‘slippage’ that undermines his sense of engulfing ‘radiance,’ is, in effect, a veritable ‘Tale of a Turd,’ his disgust with his return to the old world in which subject and object are ruptured and broken apart termed a disgusting excremental vision (variously regarded as ‘ordure,’ ‘excrement,’ and ‘turd’). But, again, this would be too easy, mere ‘analogymongering’ of the ‘book-keeping’ variety: the aftermath of Arsene’s experience may indeed contain ‘Swiftian’ elements, granted; nevertheless, the lynchpin behind the very nature of the Arsenean visionary experience is Beckett’s own version-cum-misprision of Joyce’s aesthetic theories and his complex and, in so many ways, contradictory attitudes towards it. Joyce’s modernist innovations are for Beckett in the foreground; the concerns of Swift’s Moderns and the related issues of the general limitations of reason, however congenial to Beckett generally speaking and still obviously relevant to the perplexities encountered in Watt, are, in the final accounting, of a secondary, less decisive nature.
The problem of determining what ‘sources’ are most ‘influential’ in Watt is compounded by the fact that the very lack of any ostensible meaning seems to drive the reader towards discovering (or creating) his own meaning; as David Hesla said a long time ago, ‘Every major character, every major scene and incident, invites interpretation based on esoteric intelligence.’10 Hesla, for example, puts forward the case in some detail that Arsene is really Arsenius, an anchorite and saint, whose whole life was dedicated to escaping from the public world, of being dead to that outside world, so that he could explore in silence and repose identification with the God within.11 Even if Beckett does ‘intend’ such an ‘esoteric’ interpretation in this instance, it can, however, only be meant ironically, for the fundamental reality of Beckett’s Arsene is that he is compelled to leave Mr Knott, where he had found a certain type of beatific vision, never to return. Mr Knott is a good master; he compels his servants to leave him to pursue their own lives. Mr Knott’s house affords a ‘window on refuge,’ not that opening of a ‘window on the real’ (16) that Beckett in Proust saw as the vision vouchsafed by the ‘suffering’ which underlies aesthetic experience.12 What Beckett seems to be engaged with here is an extended critique of the essentializing nature of the modernist aesthetic of the ‘moment’ of revelation (which however extended in time will not be able to sustain itself indefinitely) as exemplified in two of its major practitioners, Proust and Joyce. In Proust, for example, Beckett points out the logical limitations and existential implications of his author’s ‘reduplication’ or ‘re-membering’: ‘But if this mystical experience communicates an extratemporal essence, it follows that the communicant is for the moment an extratemporal being’ (56). In experiencing the manifestation of the ‘soul’ of even the meanest object, it stands to reason that the ‘communicant’ is partaking of a ‘transubstantiation’ of sorts whereby he is ‘for the moment an extratemporal being.’
This is the case as presented in Portrait in the aftermath of the birdgirl epiphany that ends chapter 4; Stephen loses track of time completely, ‘What hour was it?’ (152) And in his ‘brief eternity’ of aesthetic revelation he identifies with the cosmos in an oceanic experience that, in many ways, anticipates Arsene’s experiences at Mr Knott’s before his ‘fall’ off the ladder whereby he has reached a transcendental experience of sorts (an apotheosis – if not of the word – since this experience remains ‘ineffable’), a sense of oneness with the universe: ‘His eyelids trembled as if they felt the vast cyclic movement of the earth and her watchers, trembled as if they felt the strange light of some new world’ (152). At this very juncture, just as he did with Proust, the Beckettian ‘But’ would critically intervene: how, for example, does ‘light of some new world’ connect with that radiant ‘wholeness’ which in theory young Stephen Dedalus asserted is of this world, the secular and profane world that is the artist’s workshop? Compare Stephen’s transports at this pivotal point in Portrait with Arsene’s opening description of his own sense of ‘whatness’ as enveloping ‘radiance’ at the beginning of his ‘short statement’: ‘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’ (40–1). Stephen’s visionary experience is similarly framed by deictics of ascent/descent: ‘He felt above him the vast indifferent dome and the calm processes of the heavenly bodies’; ‘the earth that had borne him, had taken him to her breast’ – and this scene is framed by Stephen lying down in a ‘sandy nook’ where he closes his eyes and has these visionary experiences of ‘the strange light of some new world’ described above and later wakes and climbs ‘to the crest of the sandhill and gazed about him’ (152, my emphasis). The chapter ends at this point, elongating the moment of ‘eternity’ of Stephen’s ecstatic experience (at least until the bathetic opening of chapter 5 with its breakfast scene of ‘dregs’ and ‘yellow dripping’ [P, 153]).
Contrast these images of ‘sandy nook’ and ‘crest of the sandhill’ with Arsene’s picturing of the ‘change’ that undermined, forever, his sense of ‘wholeness’ (‘the long joys of being himself’ [W, 41]), ‘harmony’ (the ‘irrefragable’ will indeed be ‘disputed’) and ‘radiance’ (being fully himself in the service of Mr Knott – ‘The dawn! The sun! The light!’), whereby a veritable light dawned. Then the ‘negative’ or reverse epiphany:
when suddenly somewhere some little thing slipped, some little tiny thing. Gliss—iss—iss—STOP! I trust I make myself clear. There is a great alp of sand, one hundred metres high, between the pines and the ocean, and there is the warm moonless night, when no one is looking, no one listening, in tiny packets of two or three millions the grains slip, all together, a little slip of one or two lines maybe, and then stop, all together, not one missing, and that is all, that is all for that night, and perhaps for ever that is all, for in the morning with the sun a little wind from the sea may come, and blow them one from another far apart, or a pedestrian scatter them with his foot, though that is less likely. It was a slip like that I felt that Tuesday afternoon. (43)
This turning point for Arsene is counterpointed in Portrait by Father Arnall’s hyperbolic image of a ‘mountain of sand’ (a million miles high and wide, for starters) as he tries to convey to those young penitents at the retreat the unimaginable awfulness that is ‘the eternity of hell’ (P, 119). The image of a bird coming every million years to carry away one grain of sand rubs in the point that even after ‘millions upon millions of centuries’ (P, 120) virtually nothing would have been changed and ‘not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended’ (P, 120). It is all a matter of Time – ‘that double-headed monster of damnation and salvation’ (1), as Beckett characterized the situation in Proust. The only permanent ‘stasis’ is afforded by Father Arnall’s Jesuit rhetoric of eternal damnation. On the other hand, Arsene’s sense of ‘salvation’ at Mr Knott’s where all is ‘forgiving’ and ‘healed’ (W, 40) is definitely projected in terms of the paradoxes of a modernist-type transcendence: ‘For ever. In a moment’ (40). Two sentence fragments juxtaposed. Such an epiphanic ‘moment,’ however stretched out, is unavoidably subject to change; even if it is impossible to determine in such a case ‘the distinction between what was inside and what was outside,’ the perception of the ‘change’ or ‘slip’ is ‘sensuous’ (we are back at this point to the Kantian allusion discussed earlier). Here we are back in the mundane via the loss of a ‘distended’ sense of self (‘my personal system’ [43]); instead, Arsene is plunged back into the world as characterized by the rupture of the lines of communication, the breakdown of subject and object: ‘the reversed metamorphosis. The Laurel into Daphne. The old thing where it always was, back again’ (44).
Arsene’s monologue is composed of two enormous paragraphs: the first (seven pages long) basically deals with Arsene’s visionary experiences and loss thereof; the second much longer one (eighteen pages) consists of a number of discrete topics that increasingly reflect Arsene’s anxiety-ridden final efforts to make some sense of Mr Knott’s establishment and to pass this information to his successor. (The twenty-five-page total for this interlude is virtually the same as that devoted to Stephen’s aesthetic theory in Portrait.) These topics consist of a very short anecdote about Mr Ash that is intended as some type of exemplum and bridges the two paragraphs; the famous discussion of the three laughs (the bitter, hollow, and ethical); the eight pages on the ‘increeping and outbounding house and parlour maids’ (50), followed by five pages on the corresponding set of permutations as applied to the servants who have waited on Mr Knott, up to and including Arsene and Watt; and, finally, the ‘hail and farewell’ as Arsene, at last, takes his leave of Watt for good. For the further development of the Joyce-Beckett connections, the two most important sections are those that ‘frame’ this second ‘paragraph,’ the Mr Ash story and Arsene’s ‘hail and farewell.’ The story of Mr Ash is also ‘framed’ in Caw’s sense: it stands out from the incredibly long ‘short statement’ as the foregrounded beginning of its second part, and its opening sentence forces the reader (no ‘gentle skimming’ possible here) to draw out a comparison with the ideas implicit in the concluding sentence of the preceding paragraph: ‘But I am worse than Mr Ash, a man I once knew to nod to’ (45).
In his summing up at the end of his first paragraph, Arsene says he has ‘information of a practical nature to impart.’ This consists of his ‘opinion’ that his visionary experience ‘was not an illusion, as long as it lasted, that presence of what did not exist’ (45) and, secondly, the tortured question of whether what has happened to Arsene will happen also to Watt, ending with the generalization ‘For in truth the same things happen to us all, especially to men in our situation, whatever that is, if only we chose to know it.’ So: the question upon which the two disjointed parts of Arsene’s celebrated ‘short statement’ turns is how does a statement of a general principle (‘in truth the same things happen to us all’) connect with, ‘But I am worse than Mr Ash, a man I once knew to nod to.’
Let us briefly suspend the answer until we have summarized the Mr Ash episode and considered the most influential critical interpretations of it. Arsene meets Mr Ash on Westminster Bridge one day when ‘it was blowing heavily.’ In vaudevillian fashion, Mr Ash unpeels various layers of clothing, extracts his watch (‘a gun metal half-hunter’) and declares, unsolicited, that the time is ‘seventeen minutes past five exactly, as God is my witness’; but, a moment after he has sped away, Big Ben tolls six o’clock. Arsene’s summary conclusion follows: ‘This in my opinion is the type of all information whatsoever, be it voluntary or solicited’ (46). The distinguished Joyce scholar David Hayman has argued that this scene is ‘curiously similar’ to Joyce’s version in Finnegans Wake I ii of the meeting of HCE with the Cad:
Walking across Phoenix park one gusty April morning, HCE was accosted by a stranger, a ‘cad with a pipe,’ who asked him ‘how much a clock it was that the clock struck.’ In response, motivated by fear of violence, HCE drew from his ‘gunpocket his Jurgensen’s shrapnel Waterbury,’ but just as he was about to announce the time he heard the ‘ten ton tonnant thunderous tenor foller in the speckled church’ ring the hour. Promptly he told the ‘inquiring kidder’ that ‘by Jehova, it was twelve of em sideral and tankard time.’ The cad’s question was suspicious, given the fact that the clock had not yet struck, but so was HCE’s response, given the discrepancy between the two times.13
Hayman develops in detail a comparison of the two episodes and concludes that it is probably best regarded as Beckett’s ‘oblique and probably reflexive homage’ to Joyce. What is most fascinating here, however, is Hayman’s description of Beckett’s reaction to this proposed source of influence when Hayman visited him in Paris in 1969. In Hayman’s words, Beckett was fascinated by the supposed ‘parallel’ (took a ‘lively interest’ in it), denied any such intention, yet during the visit ‘returned frequently to the subject, asking first to see the passage, then to hear it, and finally to have the page reference.’14 Hayman’s case that the Mr Ash episode strongly echoes the Cad scene in Finnegans Wake is endorsed by another distinguished Joyce scholar, William York Tindall, in his Reader’s Guide to ‘Finnegans Wake.’15 John P. Harrington in The Irish Beckett (1991) simply regards this as an accepted critical judgment and refers to it as ‘Watt’s allusion to Joyce,’ along with the apparent assumption that this is the only such allusion in the text.16
No wonder Beckett took such a ‘lively interest’ in Hayman pointing out to him the ‘parallel’ with Joyce: his persistent questioning for specific details might be explained, at least in part, by the argument I have put forth with respect to Watt as a Joycean novel and Arsene a composite Joycean figure. To have a renowned Joyce scholar visit him and point out a supposed analogue to the Wake without, however, making any mention at all of the extensive referencing in Watt of other Joycean materials would indeed be somewhat surprising. Doubly so, for the Joyce material invoked by Hayman, however interesting in itself, does not address the issues raised and so carefully foregrounded and poised in Arsene’s transition between the first and second parts (‘paragraphs’) of his ‘statement’ to Watt; in short, that question of linkage between the two parts that we suspended in order to set up the Mr Ash episode in conjunction with the story of HCE and the Cad in the Wake.
The link between Mr Ash and Arsene and the critical probing of the way in which, in some particular regard, the latter could be deemed ‘worse’ than the former has nothing to do with Joyce. It does, however, have a great deal to do with Kant’s philosophy, and this can be much more convincingly argued as intentionally there than the Wake analogue. In his commentary on Beckett’s reading and notetaking from Kant in the Murphy Notebook, John Pilling supplies hints for a quasi-Kantian reading of the Mr Ash incident, one which can be extended and more directly connected with the linkage between the two parts of Arsene’s statement. One of Beckett’s notes on Kant conjures up the mise en scène of the Mr Ash story: ‘Kant’s exact description of Westminster Bridge (having never set foot outside Prussia).’17 Kant was indeed famous for his precise and exacting schedule: the inhabitants of Königsberg could set their watches by his daily constitutional. Hence there is a grotesque contrast between Kant’s ordered world in which various chronologies are synchronized and the very bizarrely detailed description of Mr Ash, which is still somehow lacking in such ‘exact[ness]’; and there is a maddening disparity between his time (‘as God is my witness’) and official authorized time as pounded out by Big Ben. There is obviously no longer any Enlightenment master narrative that can encompass these conflicting perspectives.
There is also present in the Mr Ash story another set of Kantian ideas that would be more accessible to a general reader and do address the link between Arsene and Mr Ash that occurs at an important point both structurally and thematically in Arsene’s speech. In the Mr Ash story, Arsene does indeed have ‘information’ of ‘a practical nature to impart,’ offering up as he does a version of Kant’s famous categorical imperative from the Critique of Practical Reason. Kant formulated the categorical imperative in several different ways, the first of which is this: ‘Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law.’18 Arsene’s first ‘paragraph’ ends with his own neo-Kantian version of a universal law, which applies to the servants of Mr Knott: ‘For in truth the same things happen to us all, especially to men in our situation, whatever it is, if only we chose to know it’ (45). Here, of course, there is an uneasy fluctuation between passive and active roles that undercuts the dynamic ‘act’ of Kant, which is a declared imperative. Nevertheless, Arsene is putting forth a general law that could become the basis for ethical conduct based upon an examination of the existential realities referred to in the following phrases and clauses – ‘especially to one in our situation, whatever that is, if only we chose to know it.’ Arsene is ‘worse than Mr Ash,’ therefore, in that he wants to impose a sameness, a number of universalizing factors that lay out a uniform reality or common ground of experience, whereas the story of Mr Ash’s own time being out of joint with the big world’s reckoning is exemplary of the differences that subvert any general law. Hence Arsene adds the moral to the story: ‘This in my opinion is the type of all information whatsoever, be it voluntary or solicited’ (46).
Is Arsene’s ‘information’ of a supposedly ‘practical nature’ then only ironically equivalent to mis-information, a mis-taking of reality? Not quite. The vital issue upon which the novel pivots, and implicit in the complex connections suggested between the last sentence of Arsene’s first paragraph and the first sentence of his second, is whether a series of generalizations based on what happened to Arsene can be legitimately projected to anticipate what will happen to Watt. With reference to this pervasive question of ‘influence,’ of ‘tradition and the individual talent,’ to recast the terms, another of Kant’s famous formulations of the categorical imperative is also relevant: ‘So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as a means only.’19 This is, in effect, another way of stating such maxims as ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ That is, each man should be treated as an end in himself; at Mr Knott’s house there is only false equality in that all his servants are employed as a means only of testifying to Mr Knott’s needs, not to their own. Arsene’s compulsive fixation upon the series in which such servants may be slotted (and which Watt will take to an even more advanced state of mania) is pursued in conjunction with the ‘practical’ (ethical) issue of individuality, of Arsene and Watt, for instance, and how each will have different experiences at Mr Knott’s and afterwards as well, how each will be potentially his own end. This is the decisive question Arsene raises at the end of the first part of his speech and to which he returns at the very end of his speech, appropriately enough. Watt needs to be himself, not just a mimic-man version of Arsene, and the same goes for Beckett in his relationship to Joyce.
Arsene ends his first paragraph with the idea that he has ‘information of a practical nature’ to impart; he ends his second paragraph with a paradoxical formulation of his failure to convey his ‘quite useless wisdom so dearly won’ during his tenure at Mr Knott’s. In Arsene’s monologue the discussion has moved from a consideration of the boundary lines of ‘pure reason’ and the two worlds of the phenomenal and noumenal, to considerations of an ethical nature (what Arsene refers to in Kantian terms as ‘practical’), and, finally, in his last words of advice to Watt, to a consideration of the role of the imagination, to issues of ‘aesthetic judgment’ (W, 165). But such is the angst-ridden nature of Arsene’s statement that there is no neat compartmentalization of these various ‘critiques,’ for they are all patently self-critiques.
In his pointed questioning of man’s conflicted being, Arsene is echoing Kant’s well-known dictum in the Critique of Judgment that ‘Beauty is an object’s form of purposiveness insofar as it is perceived in the object without the precondition of a purpose.’20 Arsene is not merely an aesthetician, however, being concerned rather with a number of excruciating questions of an existential nature as he tries to determine whether in all our comings and goings there might not be some larger pattern of meaning: ‘For what is this shadow of the going in which we come, this shadow of the coming in which we go, this shadow of the coming and the going in which we wait, if not the shadow of a purpose, of the purpose that budding withers, that withering buds, whose blooming is a budding withering? […] And though in purposelessness I may seem now to go, yet I do not, any more than in purposelessness then I came, for I go now with my purpose as with it then I came, the only difference being this, that then it was living and now it is dead’ (58). In a footnote example of this ‘Beauty,’ Kant says that ‘when we are judging the flower, we do not refer to any purpose whatever.’21 But Arsene does refer to a purpose, or at least the shadow of a purpose: man’s coming and going is a budding and a withering, not an aesthetic stasis, and how do we make sense of that? On one level, the answer would be an artistic embodiment that combines stasis and kinesis, the two defining characteristics of supposedly opposing views of artistic experience as set out in Stephen Dedalus’s theory in Portrait.
In an attempt to ‘formulate’ his ‘useless wisdom,’ Arsene draws a comparison from classical mythology: he says that he is so totally ‘imbued’ with this ‘useless wisdom’ ‘that I neither eat nor drink nor breathe in and out nor do my doodles but more sagaciously than before, like Theseus kissing Ariadne or Ariadne Theseus, towards the end, on the seashore’ (62–3). The classical allusion is appropriate in a number of ways. First of all, as Arsene is winding up his ‘advice’ to Watt he is just about to leave Mr Knott’s house, which at the beginning of his speech was likened to a labyrinth of sorts: ‘All the old ways led to this, all the old windings’ (40). He has gained a sort of wisdom, however ‘useless,’ in that he has now worked his way through the maze of Mr Knott’s house and is about to leave it – just as Theseus and Ariadne have gained a new knowledge of the labyrinth by killing the Minotaur and escaping by means of Ariadne’s guiding thread. But the ironic connection between Arsene and Theseus and Ariadne in terms of their future situations is also becoming obvious here. What follows the scene on the seashore is, in Ovid’s words, described this way: ‘but on the shore of that island he cruelly abandoned his companion’22 (reportedly upon the command of Minerva, who appeared to him in a dream vision). Theseus will abandon Ariadne, just as Arsene will now be ‘abandoned,’ replaced by another man at Mr Knott’s, namely, Watt. Or one could speculate that in a sense Arsene has ‘abandoned’ Watt, even though there are, we are told, very strict regulations controlling the coming and going of the servants. Did Beckett, on another level, feel ‘abandoned’ by Joyce’s ‘departure’ just a month before he started work on what became Watt? Whatever the case, Joyce’s presence is most pronounced in Watt at this very end point of Arsene’s seemingly endless ‘short statement.’ The sentence from Ovid’s Metamorphoses cited above comes only seven sentences before the famous formulation concerning Daedalus’s inventiveness, from which Joyce extracted the epigraph for Portrait: ‘with these words [referring to his means of escape: Minos ‘does not possess the air’], he set his mind to sciences never explored before, and altered the laws of nature’ (epigraph italicized). – ‘Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes’ – Ovid, Metamorphoses, VIII, 188. Thus, by invoking the Theseus-Ariadne story Beckett also brings into play by association and textual proximity the whole story of the Cretan Labyrinth and Daedalus’s construction of it.
Arsene’s valedictorian address invokes a number of other famous literary leave-takings. Arsene tells Watt that he has taken him ‘as far as it lay in my power to take you, under the circumstances’ (63). This echoes that most famous of all ‘hail and farewells’ in literature, Virgil’s guiding of Dante to the point beyond which he must travel on his own. And it is hardly a surprise that Beckett’s own doodles in the Watt manuscript show him depicting this very scene.23 There is even a muted echo of one of the most poetic passages in all of Joyce, the very last words of Finnegans Wake, in Arsene’s last words to his successor: ‘And now for a little along the way that lies between you and me Erskine will go by your side, to be your guide, and then for the rest you will travel alone, or with only shades to keep you company, and that I think you will find, if your experience at all resembles mine, the best part of the outing or at least the least dull, even though the light falls fast, and far below the stumbling feet’ (63). Compare ‘for a little along the way’ and ‘for the rest you will travel alone’ with ‘A way a lone a last a loved a long the.’ Here are also embedded the famous words of Knowledge when he introduces himself to Everyman: ‘I will go with thee, and be thy guide,/In thy most need to go by thy side.’ And, in short order, Everyman is led to the realization that at the point of death he will indeed have to travel alone, with only shades for company. The great comic irony is that in Beckett’s redaction Arsene is introducing the totally un-informed Erskine to play the role of Knowledge for Watt. Arsene’s purported desire to impart his own ‘information’ of a ‘practical nature’ has thus turned out to be a sort of literary practical joke.
In a more serious vein, Arsene’s final words also focus on the imagination, or ‘aesthetic judgment’: ‘And I think I have said enough to light that fire in your mind that shall never be snuffed, or only with the utmost difficulty’ (62). After Arsene departs, Watt resumes his ‘innocent little game’ (38) of playing with the lamp, covering and uncovering it so the ashes in the fire alternately ‘greyen, redden, greyen, redden’ (38).24 The whole monstrously long ‘short statement’ of Arsene is framed by Watt playing with the light of the fire, which is oddly reminiscent of that section in chapter 5 of Portrait when Stephen Dedalus discusses, or rather attempts to discuss, aesthetic matters with the dean of studies. Stephen says he is working ‘by the light of one or two ideas from Aristotle and Aquinas’ (164) and that they are only ‘for my own use and guidance until I have done something for myself by their light’ (164). At the end of part 1, we see Watt trying to distinguish whether the dawn of the ‘new day’ has indeed risen, or whether it is a false light he is seeing; to clarify his vision, Watt turns down the wick of the lamp ‘and blew down the chimney, until it was quite extinguished’ (64). The sense of the old ending and the new beginning is cunningly woven Dedalian fashion into the beginning and ending of Watt’s very long and drawn-out encounter with Arsene. When Watt finally gets into Mr Knott’s house for the first time, he encounters a gentleman, who, we learn later, is Arsene: ‘The gentleman gazed long at Watt, and then went away, without a word of explanation’ (38). The gentleman soon reappears, ‘dressed for the road,’ and delivers his infamous ‘short statement’ to Watt. The ‘gazed long at Watt’ echoes the famous birdgirl epiphany of Portrait: ‘Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither’ (151). Twenty-five pages later, in his final words of wisdom to Watt, Arsene finally completes the birdgirl epiphany sentence of Portrait cited above; Arsene is explaining how difficult – in fact, impossible – it was to express epiphanic moments even when he found himself experiencing ‘the pleasant dawdling motion carrying me about in the midst of them, hither and thither, with unparalleled sagacity’ (63). Watt’s arrival signals Arsene’s departure into silence and exile.
It now remains to be seen what Watt can make of his experiences at Mr Knott’s without the company of Arsene. The short answer: not very much. Watt is definitely no Arsene – he has no visionary experience to speak of; no epiphany of any discernible import radiates within Watt’s mind, the phenomenal world outside, or points betwixt the two. The most obvious reason for this anticlimactic outcome of Watt’s ‘new day’ is that he does not expect or desire any such outcome; he is simply not attuned to such possibilities. To adapt the last words of the novel: ‘no [epiphanies] where none intended.’ Watt clearly does not ‘intend’ any such revelations. Instead Watt seeks consolation in a number of pseudo-logical permutations of reality (such as the options inherent in feeding Mr Knott’s dogs), finally focusing in the asylum scenes of part 3, where he meets Sam the narrator, on the various permutations that can be applied to language itself in terms of both diction and syntax. In such discussions of language in Watt, and they have predictably dominated criticism of the work, parallels with Mauthner and Wittgenstein have often been invoked, as well as with Joyce, as mentioned earlier, particularly to the ‘Ithaca’ chapter of Ulysses. There is no need to rehearse these arguments here; it is, however, worth noting that Beckett’s bizarre presentation of Watt’s linguistic breakdown probably owes less to Ulysses proper and more to Beckett’s ironic response to Joyce’s statement to him that he had a supreme confidence in making words say what he wanted, that it was a matter of rearranging the right words in the right order to achieve the intended effects: ‘I have discovered I can do anything with language I want’ (JJ, 702). Watt does implement such tactics in a parodic and demented manner; his imagination, which we are told had never been ‘lively’ (83), is ostensibly satisfied by surface appearances, as long as they fit neatly into his categories of cognition. He is certainly not looking for any symbols whereby the penetration of the phenomenal by the noumenal might miraculously occur. Hence the appropriateness of Beckett’s own judgment that Watt was basically a series of ‘exercises’ whereby he could keep his mind off the chaos of the engulfing war years.25 Some qualification is, however, needed here: the designation of Watt as a series of ‘exercises’ can only legitimately be applied to the last three sections of the novel, not to the opening part dominated by Arsene’s tour de force of the ‘short statement.’ But Beckett and his fictional probe, the hapless Watt, do not know what to do next, after having paid homage to as well as having proffered a critique of the modernist tenets inherent in Arsene’s visionary experience. Not able or willing to repeat Joyce’s work and unable to supply at this point a viable alternative to it, Watt turns out to be post-Arsene a series of ‘exercises’ whereby Beckett can begin to work towards what his own aesthetic might entail.
The principal ‘incident of note’ during Watt’s early days at Mr Knott’s involves the visit of the piano turners, the Galls, father and son. How Beckett has reframed Stephen Dedalus’s central aesthetic tenets is made explicit in the following sentences with their memorable phrases concerning the ‘nothingness’ rather than the ‘whatness’ (or quidditas) of Watt’s processes of apprehension:
(i)‘For the incident of the Galls father and son was followed by others of a similar kind, incidents that is to say of great formal brilliance and indeterminable purport’ (74, my italics).
(ii) ‘Yes, Watt could not accept … that nothing had happened, with all the clarity and solidity of something’ (76, my italics).
In the first citation, it might be said that morphē has been apprehended, but there is no corresponding revelation of significance as in Portrait’s synthesis of the three stages of aesthetic apprehension; in the second example, we do have a sort of ‘whatness,’ but it is depicted as a ‘nothingness,’ ‘with all the clarity and solidity of something.’ Somehow Watt and his narrator Sam need to find a way of reconciling these apparently antithetical elements.
In a sense, Beckett is saying in Watt what Stephen Dedalus said at the beginning of his discussion of aesthetics with the dean of studies: he is provisionally using one or two ideas (in Stephen’s case from Aristotle and Aquinas; in Beckett’s and Watt’s case from Portrait’s aesthetic), but he needs them for his ‘own use and guidance’ only until he has done ‘something’ for himself ‘by their light’ (P, 164). Whereas Arsene could experience moments of transcendence of god-like insight during his time at Mr Knott’s (‘I was the sun’), Watt is much more down to earth and just wants things to remain as they were before so that he can fit them into preconceived patterns, into certain various habitual configurations. If necessary he will even ‘extract’ (79) such patterns when they do not exist, as is suggested with reference to the episode with the Galls. This is a ‘self-defence’ of a Kantian nature since it manipulates a priori categories such as time and space to accommodate something of ‘indeterminable purport.’ The galling experience is not then totally unmitigated.
That Beckett is grappling with some of the perplexities and aporias of the philosophical problems associated with modernist aesthetics is reinforced in the Gall episode by an excursus on Proust’s aesthetic of involuntary memory (a fictionalized version of Beckett’s major reservations as voiced in Proust):
But what was this pursuit of meaning, in this indifference to meaning? And to what did it tend? These are delicate questions. For when Watt at last spoke of this time, it was a time long past, and of which his recollections were, in a sense, perhaps less clear than he would have wished, though too clear for his liking, in another. Add to this the notorious difficulty of recapturing, at will, modes of feeling peculiar to a certain time, and to a certain place, and perhaps also to a certain state of the health, when the time is past, and the place left, and the body struggling with quite a new situation. (75)
Sam then compounds this already vexed situation by adding a commentary about the disintegration of Watt’s language functions and ‘the obscurity of Watt’s communications.’ Crucial aspects of modernist aesthetics are now even more difficult to apprehend since the very means of conveying them, of expressing them, are now subjected to a radical and sceptical critique.
Such modernist dilemmas are even further compounded with theoretical and existentialist impasses in two other incidents of note, Watt’s pots and the picture in Erskine’s room. For Watt Mr Knott’s pots are no longer pots: word and thing, signifier and signified, are ruptured. However marginal, the gap is nevertheless decisive and the consequences for Watt ‘excruciating’ – ‘this hairbreadth departure from the nature of a true pot’ (81).26 Compare this with Stephen’s example in Portrait of a basket:
– In order to see that basket […] your mind first of all separates the basket from the rest of the visible universe which is not the basket. The first phase of apprehension is a bounding line drawn about the object to be apprehended. An esthetic image is presented to us either in space or in time.
What is audible is presented in time, what is visible is presented in space. But, temporal or spatial, the esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which is not it. You apprehend it as one thing. You see it as one whole. You apprehend its wholeness. That is integritas. (184–5)
The situation in Watt is indeed inverted: the ‘luminous’ quality is displaced by an enveloping ‘obscurity.’ Watt is ‘potty,’ a basket case, his ‘pottiness’ consisting of an inability to determine ‘whatness’ for at Mr Knott’s house there would appear to be a proliferation of some things being at once fixed and in flux, in a state of kinesis and stasis.27
The traumatic effects on Watt progressively deepen, as with the scene at the centre of the novel, Watt’s encounter with the picture in Erskine’s room, of a circle ‘broken at its lowest point’ and ‘in the eastern background’ a point that might be its centre. This private viewing has an untoward effect on Watt, who has struggled thus far to avoid ‘symbols’ of anything and to keep his mind only on the surface of phenomena: ‘at the thought that it was perhaps this, a circle and a centre not its centre in search of a centre and its circle respectively, in boundless space, in endless time, then Watt’s eyes filled with tears that he could not stem’ (177). This Watt ‘unbounded’ who has confronted the Kantian sublime is no longer of sound mind. He has lost his pots and general sense of wholeness and integrity. There is no longer a clearly discerned centre; whereas Lynch can retort wittily ‘Bull’s eye’ to Stephen’s pontifical aesthetic pronouncements, Watt can only haltingly admit that he is no longer certain about what to say about himself as a ‘man,’ no more so than he is certain about the pot’s ‘whatness.’ His only recourse is the idea of a series whereby he can tame such recalcitrant images of this disturbing new reality by pretending that there is indeed an encompassing pattern whereby an integritas of sorts might be re-established. Such cataloguings do not in the end convince even Watt and instead of supplying solace are symptomatic of his mental and linguistic breakdown, which leads him to the asylum where he meets our narrator Sam, since he cannot integrate his ‘knowledge’ of Mr Knott’s house with the more ordinary worlds of the frametales.
In the frametale that concludes the novel, Watt makes his way from Mr Knott’s house to the train station; one of the incidents of note here concerns Watt’s encounter with a chair in the waiting room. Unlike his experiences at Mr Knott’s, this particular object seems to meet Stephen’s initial requirements in Portrait for identifying ‘a thing’: ‘Your mind first of all separates the [object] from the rest of the visible universe which is not the [object]’ (184). Watt recognizes ‘what seemed an object of some importance’ (234), namely, the chair-to-be, and then proceeds to locate it in space by stating further what it is not: ‘It was not part of the ceiling, nor of a wall, nor, though it seemed in contact with the floor, of the floor, that was all that Watt could affirm, of this object, and even that little he affirmed with reserve. But that little was enough, for Watt the possibility was enough, more than enough, that something other than he, in this box, was not intrinsic to its limits’ (234). Watt is only able to effect Stephen’s ‘first phase of apprehension’ in which ‘a bounding line’ is ‘drawn about the object to be apprehended’ (P, 184) when the darkness in the waiting room lightened and ‘he saw now that his companion all this time had been a chair’ (W, 235). Watt notes the specifics of his new ‘companion’: ‘a high, narrow, black, wooden chair, with arms, and castors’ (235), and ‘came to know this chair, so well, that in the end he knew it better than many a chair he had sat on’ (235). Outside of Mr Knott’s house, objects such as this chair do seem to have regained their conventional status as particular things; whether or not there might be an epiphany that reveals their ‘radiance’ or ‘whatness’ is the decisive question. In Beckett’s transition scene between worlds at the ending of Watt, there are no ex cathedra aesthetic pronouncements in the manner of Portrait, only further critical questioning of the relevance of such theories to Beckett’s particular predicament in this novel.
In the midst of expounding his theory of beauty to Lynch, Stephen mentions that he has a book at home full of curious questions and that the answers to them have enabled him to formulate his provisional aesthetic theory. Here is the very first question he refers to: ‘Is a chair finely made tragic or comic?’ (P, 186) Watt’s chair has both ‘castors’ and ‘clamp[s]’ on its ‘feet,’ but only one foot is presently ‘screwed to the floor’; hence it is not fixed to one set of static points but can potentially move through a fixed circular pattern. Is this ‘tragic or comic’ or both or neither? Who knows? In Beckett’s discussion of Watt’s chair ‘no symbols’ are ‘intended,’ even if the whole episode seems designed to evoke such aesthetic speculations. At the climax of this discussion in Portrait, Stephen likens the moment when the aesthetic image is ‘conceived’ in the artist’s imagination to ‘The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal’ (185). Beckett also uses similar imagery in Watt’s chair episode: ‘Through the bars, which were vertical, of the back, Watt saw portions of a grate, heaped high with ashes, and cinders, of a beautiful grey colour’ (236). This ‘beautiful’ sight – by definition an aesthetic experience – is literally viewed through the bars of the chair’s back; but the two experiences are not fused into one, are not integrated as they are in Stephen’s discussion in Portrait. Beckett’s fundamentally parodic treatment of these ideas in Watt – even though he is nostalgically drawn to them – is emphasized by the comically grotesque images of Watt having often employed chairs for purposes of podiatry: ‘or toileted his feet on, one after the other, paring and curetting the nails’ (235). This is indeed a far cry from Stephen’s idealised image of ‘The artist, like the God of creation’ as somehow ‘above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails’ (187). Watt is a mere foot soldier in terms of such avant-garde critical speculations on beauty and aesthetic theories. To make sense of his disparate experiences – in this instance a chair and ‘the beautiful grey colour’ of the ashes – Watt and Beckett are going to have to find ways of being more directly engaged in the experience of aesthetic apprehension, of finding ways of defining themselves into existence as artist-figures in their own right, acting on their own behalf.
In my discussion in ‘Beckett and the Philosophers,’ I pointed out that the most important Kantian reference came at the very end of the novel and set up a complex interaction between the final scene and the taunting and tantalizing last entry in the Addenda, ‘no symbols where none intended.’ Rather than rehearse that argument in detail, its main point can be briefly summarized: Kant’s comments in ‘On beauty as the symbol of morality’ (the conclusion to ‘Part I. Critique of aesthetic judgment,’ in the Critique of Judgment) are treated satirically by Beckett to mock the trite conventional symbolism of Mr Gorman and his ilk, who cannot make any sense of Watt for he obviously doesn’t fit into their ‘pretty picture’ of God’s in his heaven, all’s well with the world. Beckett’s parody in this instance of Kantian aesthetics and morality is, however, critically focused in the very last words of the novel in its second ending, the Addenda: ‘no symbols where none intended.’ The superficial views of Mr Gorman and company are clearly not ‘intended’ as any resolution to the dilemmas that Watt has encountered at Mr Knott’s. Rereading Watt in terms of the Beckett-Joyce question can also throw some new light on the last entry of the Addenda and the relationship of this fragment to the work as a whole. Beckett has played off Kant and Joyce throughout the work, and this carries through to its final words in the last entry to the Addenda.
C.J. Ackerley’s annotated version of the Addenda goes beyond earlier criticism by not simply elucidating obscure philosophical and literary references but also setting these thirty-seven unused fragments or leftovers from the novel proper (if such a term may any longer be legitimately invoked in these circumstances) within their original context in the manuscript versions of the novel. The context is revealing in terms of the final entry of the Addenda. The last words of Watt appear as a concluding remark to a discussion between Arsene and Watt (then called Johnny Watt) in the darkened bowels of Mr Quin’s house (to be renamed soon Mr Knott’s) about the issue of illuminating the darkness. Here is Ackerley’s citation from the manuscript, accompanied by his summary-cum-gloss:
on the uttering of the sentiment, ‘Each in his own way, all are in the dark,’ a match is struck, and burns bravely, until its fire reaches the fingers and it is dropped; whereupon ‘it continued for a little while bravely to burn, till it could burn no longer, bravely or otherwise. Then it went out.’
But in that brief light, things are revealed: ‘the passage and the stairs, all as we had left them, and the dark in which we were, each in his or her own way, and Eamon [the duck] and Arsene and the passage and the stairs and the bells and newell – and we’ [the narrator, Johnny Watt in this instance, refers to himself as ‘we’]. It is all too easy: a little light in the big dark; a feathered and featherless biped; a dark passage; purgatorial stairs; the hint of eucharist in distant bells, rung by Watt to tell Quin his meal is ready, or by Quin, to tell Watt that he might clear away. But ‘we’ remains in the dark. In a context so insistently demanding symbolic interpretation, in the presence of details so often used to translate consciousness into meaning, the only thing Watt can say is: ‘No symbols where none intended.’28
Ackerley’s own final annotation says that these words of Watt invoke an ‘impossible paradox’ about not-knowing in that the text encourages us to deal with it symbolically at the very time its final injunction is to forestall such practices.29
The match struck in the dark hallway passage is a vintage example of Beckett revising the modernist aesthetic of the epiphany. (Indeed, the struck match and its brief flare of illumination is also strongly evocative of one of Virginia Woolf’s best-known ‘moments of being’ in her novels.)30 Arsene as a complex composite of Joycean characteristics would in this scene invoke the ‘miracle’ of a ‘sudden spiritual manifestation.’ We have already examined in a number of ways how such ‘transports’ do not work for Watt. The Kant-Joyce connection that Beckett has employed in a number of ways throughout Watt is here used as a sort of double negation: for Watt (and by indirection Sam and Beckett) the Arsene-Joyce symbolic weighting of the dark scene that seeks illumination is just as ‘pre-scribed’ in its own predictability as is the ‘gesture of worship’ of Mr Gorman and cohorts as they welcome their new day.31 Watt’s own ‘new day’ of ‘enlightenment’ at Mr Knott’s has come and gone, and no vision of the Arsenean-Joycean type has been vouchsafed him. Ackerley is dead right, of course; ‘it is all too easy’ in the dark passage scene to invoke a series of symbolic remedies of an ultimately theological nature. ‘No symbols where none intended’ is a rejection of such an easy way out; yet to leave the question engulfed only by a series of negatives at this point is also to miss the full import of Beckett’s critical strategies in Watt and throughout his early works.
The very title of Ackerley’s elucidation of the residual materials of Beckett’s third and last novel in English is indicative of this bias towards all too easily emphasized negatives in Beckett studies: ‘“Fatigue and Disgust”: The Addenda to Watt.’ Beckett’s (or Sam’s) footnoted entry on the Addenda reads in full: ‘The following precious and illuminating material should be carefully studied. Only fatigue and disgust prevented its incorporation’ (246). The two-part structure here is significant; even if ‘precious and illuminating’ is saturated with heavy mockery, it does, nevertheless, raise the spectre in its very phrasing of Joyce’s description of the epiphany in Stephen Hero, which was published posthumously in 1944: ‘He believed it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with great care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments’ (SH, 215–16).32 Beckett handles his leftover fragments with open contempt and simply confronts the reader with the thirty-seven entries, which have been denied entry into the story proper (such as it is), when Sam supposedly came to edit his little notebooks in which he recorded Watt’s jumbled narrative.
Yet some of the entries in the Addenda do have the potential for an epiphany or revelation within Stephen Dedalus’s own categories whereby such discoveries might occur, ‘whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phrase of the mind itself’ (SH, 215). Most of the entries in the Addenda fall into the third category; they do indeed require ‘careful study’ so that their significance may manifest itself. One man’s epiphany is, however, another man’s dud, for there is an absence of the context in which such an illumination might be experienced. From Ackerley’s identification of the last entry of the Addenda ‘no symbols where none intended’ within the context of an earlier manuscript version of Watt, we know that these words had originally been attributed to Watt himself. But they have been taken away from him and any such direct attribution withdrawn; Sam doesn’t know how to accommodate the caveat and leaves it suspended ambiguously in his final entry. Realization of a potential illumination can only occur when someone takes responsibility for the words and stories being conveyed; as it stands, Watt experiences and Sam records. Somehow or other experiencing and recording must be incorporated within a narrative structure that can validate both of their claims to being – ‘somethings’ and ‘nothings’ need to be brought into a new relationship. Mr Knott is indeed a good master; he compels his servants to leave his employ and return to the outside world whence they came, the task then becoming the quest for integration of these two realms in a critical and imaginative fashion. This is the first key step in Beckett’s moving forward to find his own way as he rewrites and critiques Joyce, via Kant in particular, thereby clarifying for himself how his own ‘a way a lone a last’ differs from Joyce’s, even as he acknowledges his influence. Beckett and Joyce, Watt and Stephen would all agree on this foundational point: after a certain point of theorizing, a new experience is indeed needed to see the way to an aesthetic of one’s own; the ‘reality of experience’ needs to be ‘forged’ anew.
Watt is about a middle-aged man who has no pretensions to being an artist. Nevertheless, Watt’s various failures do lead him, however unintentionally, towards questions of ‘aesthetic judgment’ (W, 165), such as the rearrangement of words and the selective hearing of various voices. His alter ego Sam is another matter; he clearly has artistic pretensions of a sort, even though they are concealed behind the figure and supposedly originating source of Watt. Sam’s own experience needs to come to the fore. The one aesthetic principle of Portrait that Beckett never seriously entertains (not even in Dream or Murphy) is that of a god-like author creator who resides, invisibly, behind his handiwork, ‘refined out of existence.’ On the contrary, in Beckett’s work the central literary-ontological issue is to find out and redefine the very existence of such an entity vis-à-vis the world that is to be represented. Joyce’s ‘invisibility’ allows Portrait to end with the semblance at least that Stephen is beginning to take control of his own story, as evidenced in his final twenty diary entries. The ending of Watt in the Addenda is no such ‘pretty picture.’ The leftover dog’s breakfast of various elements that could not be incorporated within the boundaries of the work itself do, in however disconnected a fashion, constitute a section unto themselves, the Addenda. The five distinct parts of Watt could be regarded as a botched and mangled parody of the five chapters of Portrait, which trace at least a chronologically coherent development of one figure, Stephen Dedalus. But Watt has also made some major strides forward in foregrounding the issues that must now be dealt with if Beckett is going to be able in his own way to incorporate the various fragments that are left unaccommodated in his last novel in English. Without Joyce’s guidance, Beckett could not have reached this point at which the need for new revelations is absolutely critical.