EN 3203 RSP/BT Lecture on Beckett

1 COMEDY AND THE UNCONVENTIONAL

Much about Beckett is going to appear confusing and off-putting if his willed (almost willful) desire to thwart conventional expectations and attitudes is not appreciated.

For example, note how Mr. Nixon’s claim that it feels as if he had known Watt all his life is found incomprehensible by Mr. Hackett:

“But you must know something, said Mr. Hackett. One does not part with five shillings to a shadow. Nationality, family, birthplace, confession, occupation, means of existence, distinctive signs, you cannot be in ignorance of all this.” (19)

Beckett loves to take the odd angle on things, on everything: people, situations, conversations, attitudes, human character, narrative. Beyond the mere appeal of eccentricity, his unexpected angle provides insight into the underside of what we might take for granted as the “normal”, the “ordinary”, the “routine”, or the “conventional”. He undermines and challenges the assumptions that subsidize complacent, uncritical or unreflexive mindsets.

Thus the protagonist is an anti-heroic figure. Thus the plot consists of little more than Watt taking employment with a Mr Knott and then leaving him after a period during which he finds out next to nothing about who or even what Mr Knott is!

2 THE DRAMATIZED NARRATOR

“… all that I know on the subject of Mr. Knott, and of all that touched Mr. Knott, and on the subject of Watt, and of all that touched Watt, came from Watt, and from Watt alone.” (123)

The dramatized narrator adopts the attitude of someone who knows very little of what is going on. This goes against the conventional expectation that a story-teller is in charge of the materials of his story. In contrast, Beckett’s narrator professes to be external to the characters and events, i.e., he claims to know little, and be in a position to explain even less. How does this mode of narration contribute to the comic effect?

The novel is divided into four uneven sections, and the narrator briefly becomes a character in the story in the third section. We are told that he lives (works?) in the “mansion” neigbouring the one Watt works in, that they meet in the gardens linking the two properties, and briefly become friends. The narrator also gives us a story within a story, when Arthur (one of the newer servants in Mr Knott’s establishment) tells the anecdote of his friend Ernest Louit (169-196). We are given to understand that the narrator has had a university education (169), but we also get told that in his current employment he wears a “pretty uniform” (158). The narrator also describes a relation with Watt which mixes tenderness and care for Watt (150), with the report of them exchanging kisses (152). He also introduces a resemblance between Watt and the image of Christ-suffering in the painting by Hieronymus Bosch (National Gallery). In what sense is the analogy with the suffering Christ made sustainable by the novel?

The narrator’s name is given as Sam, and he expends a lot of energy on humanizing Watt for the reader, while also giving an account of the strange phase in Watt’s stay with Knott during which he practices various forms of utterance in reverse.

3 THE SOLITARY AS COMIC

The typical Beckett protagonist is alone, a solitary, a wanderer and a tramp, i.e., human society and sociability are kept at arm’s length, stability and settling down are always envisaged as temporary or even illusory, and the type of individual that gets represented is in most senses well below any ordinary conception of normalcy or ordinariness, without either romanticizing solitariness or rendering the anti-heroic as anything other than grotesque. Yet the solitary is also made resonant as typical of our earthy existence. How far is it possible for you to see Watt as a kind of mock-ironic Everyman? Trapped but sighted:

“… I was very fond of fences … not of walls … but to all that limited motion, without limiting vision, to the ditch, the dyke, the barred window, the bog, the quicksand, the paling, I was deeply attached…” (156)

4 FUTILITY

The world of the novel reflects a profound skepticism about the human desire for fulfillment that drives most human beings through the repetitive aspects of life’s routine towards the hope of happiness.

“To hunger, thirst, lust, every day afresh and every day in vain, after the old prog, the old booze, the old whores, that’s the nearest we’ll ever get to felicity, the new porch and the very latest garden.” (43)

The comedy is therefore closely allied with glumness, dejection and pessimism. However, a distinctive type of humour is produced when the author’s (narrator’s) sardonic temperament turns these negatives inside out through whimsy, parody and an extravagantly self-indulgent appetite for the grotesque combined with an instinct for seriousness despite itself.

“Of all the laughs that strictly speaking are not laughs, but modes of ululation, only thee I think need detain us here, I mean the bitter, the hollow and the mirthless….The bitter laugh laughs at that which is not good, it is the ethical laugh. The hollow laugh laughs at that which is not true, it is the intellectual laugh… But the mirthless laugh is the dianoetic laugh … It is the laugh of laughs, the … laugh laughing at the laugh, the beholding, the saluting of the highest joke, in a word the laugh that laughs … at that which is unhappy. Personally of course I regret all.” (46-7)

How would you interpret the conclusion of Watt’s reflexions: “if one of these things was worth doing, all were worth doing, but that none was worth doing, no, not one, but that all were unadvisable, without exception.” (220)

Soon after, we are told: “But his fatigue was so great, at the end of this long day and his bedtime so long past, and the desire for rest so strong in consequence, that he stooped…” (220).

5 SERIOUSNESS

“I feel a feeling of sorrow, sorrow for what has been, is and is to come…” (48)

Watt is given a serious dimension, a form of metaphysical speculation shadowed by theological preoccupations.

[of the coming and going of people in Mr. Knott’s service] “ the coming is in the shadow of the going and the going is in the shadow of the coming… Or is there a coming that is not a coming to, a going that is not a going from, a shadow that is not the shadow of purpose, or not?” (56)

[The incident, like others] … “continued to unfold in Watt’s head … all the shifting detail of its march and ordinance, according to the irrevocable caprice of its taking place.” (69)

“But what was this pursuit o f meaning, in this indifference to meaning? (72)

[Regarding Watt’s communications] “Add to this the scant aptitude to receive to whom they were proposed. Add to this the scant aptitude to give to whom they were committed.” (72)

“a thing that was nothing had happened…. Nothing had happened, with all the clarity and solidity of something” (73)

“the only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something” (74)

“a circle and its centre in search of each other, or a circle and its centre in search of a centre and a circle respectively, or a circle and its centre in search of its centre and circle respectively…” (127)

His residence in Mr. Knott’s service constitutes “his efforts to distinguish between what happened and what did not happen, between what was, and what was not, in Mr. Knott’s house.” (124)

“… it is rare that the feeling of absurdity is not followed by the feeling of necessity … he felt the absurdity of those things of which he had just felt the necessity…” (131)

At one point his interest in things is reported as not an interest in “the Tomness of Tom … nor the ordaining of a being to come by a being past, of a being past by a being to come… but the interval between them … the time taken to have been true, the time taken to be proved true, whatever that is… Thinking then … of the possible relations between such series as these, series of dogs, the series of men, the series of pictures…” (134-35) What is the significance of the distinction Beckett makes here?

7 COMIC STYLE: THE GROTESQUE

Beckett finds the grotesque fascinating. He takes relish in poring over it.

He exaggerates its ugliness, and loves to dwell on all that might horrify more conventional appetites. Beyond shock-tactics and the love of perversity there is also the element of championing the underdog, of foregrounding the unheroic and valorizing the anti-heroic.

Grotesque violence:

As part of the friendly interludes shared by Sam and Watt, they plunder birds’ nests, frogs and fledglings in order to feed rats (153). What do you make of this macabre pastime?

Grotesque similes:

“Turd and fart, he said, for third and fourth. Watt liked these venerable Saxon words … And when Mr. Graves drinking … said, in mock deprecation, Tis only me turd or fart, then Watt felt he was perhaps prostituting himself to some purpose.” (142)

“There were sounds that at first, though we walked pubis to pubis, seemed so much balls to me.” (165)

“The [was] food necessary for the maintenance of his dog, a bull-terrier, in the condition of ferocious plethora to which it was accustomed…” (170)

“some thirty-five years earlier she had shot, with colours flying, the narrows of the menopause.” (233)

8 COMIC CHARACTERIZATION: MASTERS AND SERVANTS

“there is something about Mr. Knott that draws towards him, to be about him and to take care of him, two types of men, and two only, on the one hand, the big bony seedy shabby haggard knock-kneed type, with the decayed teeth and the big red nose, and on the other the small fat seedy shabby oily or juicy bandy-legged type, with the little fat bottom and belly sticking out in opposite directions, or, alternatively, that there is something in these two types of men that draw them to Mr. Knott, to be about him and watch over him…” (59-60)

Contrast the Watt-Knott (What not!?) relation with the Jeeves-Wooster setup.

The absurdity of the Wodehouse world may appear vastly removed from the bedraggled motley of Erskine, the famished dogs managed by the twin dwarfs Art and Con and so on, and yet… ?

In each, the master-servant relation is binding in a way that conserves social solidarity within hierarchical arrangements. The source is money and class. Both masters are eccentric. The servant can be, and eventually is, replaced. Thus Watt replaced others before him, and he in turn is replaced by Micks. Only Graves (pun?) continues to serve Knott as his forefathers have served Knott’s forefathers before him. All the servants — in Wodehouse as much as in this novel — accept the social order. Change occurs in the world of nature and decay in time, not in the social order. When Arthur wanders into his story about Louit and Mr. Nackybal, he returns with relief because: “what stooped Arthur … was … the desire to return … to Mr. Knott’s house, to its fixity.” (198)

We learn little about Mr. Knott because, as we are told, Watt finds out nothing about him. Thus through Watt’s failure to describe his master Beckett is able to suggest or imply two things: (a) in the comic vein, the frustration of any attempt to achieve any form of certain knowledge about the object of one’s curiosity (perhaps due to the variableness of the appearances of all things), and (b) merging the comic with the serious, the nature of appearance behind which, a s traditional religion affirms, resides some form of truth that we cognize as godhead or deity. This god-like master needs nothing and eats only as a form of endorsing the service that he is proffered:

“If he ate, and he ate well; if he drank, and he drank heartily; if he slept, and he slept sound; if he did other things, and he did other things regularly, it was not from need of food, or drink, or sleep, or other things, no, but from the need never to need, never never to need, food, and drink, and sleep, and other things.” (202)

“His habitual tone was one of assurance” (202), we are told. Also, that “Mr. Knott might never cease, but ever almost cease. Such appeared to be the arrangement.” (203). This can almost be read as a laconic way of evoking the sense of a God always there yet always almost out of reach.

It is possible to recognize a kind of family resemblance between the sources of mysterious authority and power in fictions like Kafka’s The Castle and the quality of mystery and transformativeness with which Mr. Knott is surrounded or endowed. Note however, that in the one episode where servant meets master, we are led to understand that he is gentle, and his eyes are closed: what Watt sees at his master’s feet is worm and flower. Both are obviously emblematic: “one day the flower would be gone and only the worm remain” (145). Unlike Kafka’s K, however, Watt is calm with or without Mr. Knott: “Watt suffered neither from the presence of Mr. Knott, nor from his absence.” (207)

9 COMIC ENUMERATION AND PARODY

Beckett is particularly fond of the habit of listing alternatives and variations to any given situation or choice. These alternatives are listed in a manner that threatens to become ad infinitum and ad nauseum. The habit of careful, methodical, systematic analysis is thus both deployed and parodied through being taken to deliberately exaggerated lengths.

Example 1: “But Watt heard nothing of this, because of other voices, singing, crying, stating, murmuring… Now these voices, sometimes they sang only, and sometimes they cried only, and sometimes they stated only, and sometimes they murmured only … and sometimes they sang and cried, and sometimes they sang and stated … and sometimes they sang and cried and stated and murmured… And sometimes Watt understood all, and sometimes he understood much, and sometimes he understood little…” (27)

Example 2: “… on the way to Mr. Knott’s door, and on the way from Mr. Knott’s door, there would be a languour, and a fever, the languour of the task done but not ended, the fever of the task ended but not done, the languour and the fever of the going of the coming too late, the languour and the fever of coming of the going too late, the languour and the fever of the coming of the going too soon.” (133)

Every permutation and combination of possible relations between several concepts or entities is elaborately worked out. Beyond the elements of parody and self-parody, this type of enumeration also acquires enormous representative power. On the one hand, it demonstrates through its laboriousness the self-defeating quality in any attempt at exhaustiveness. On the other hand, it also shows how many nuances there are to any apparently simple situation, which differ from one another, and yet relate complexly.

10 COMIC INVERSION

The narrator Sam recounts eight phases of linguistic inversion that Watt passes through in his second and final year with Mr. Knott (162-67).

Examples: “Day of most, night of part, Knott with now…”

“Ot bro, lap rulb, krad klub…”

“Of nought. To the source. To the teacher…”

“Deen did taw? Tonk. Tog da taw?...”

“Say he’d, No, waistcoat the, vest the, trousers the,…”

“Lit yad mac, ot tog. Ton taw, ton tonk…”

“Dis yb dis, nem owt. Yad la, tin fo trap…”

Why would it be a mistake to dismiss all this as gibberish?

What is the significance of this phase of Watt’s narrative?

11 COMIC STYLE: DIALOGUE

The comic dialogue in the novel ironicizes conventional notions of how language gets used to express, communicate and consolidate sociability.

Conversations are funny when people talk at cross-purposes and the reader is surprised at the odd angles of perception that light up the oddity and quiddity of individual human perception.

She left you along in the yard, said Tetty, with the goat.

It was a beautiful summer’s day, said Mr Hackett.

And what possessed her to slip off like that? Said Goff.

I never asked her, said Mr Hackett. The pub, or the chapel, or both.

Poor woman, God forgive her, said Tetty.

Faith I wouldn’t put it past him, said Mr. Hackett. (14)

Note how (a) a goat alleviates solitariness, and (b) religion and social conviviality get linked easily in this passage while (c) attempted provocation on the allegation of parental neglect is shrugged off with calmly tangential explanations, and (d) a routine invocation of God is given a lively twist.

12 COMEDY AND THE SCATOLOGICAL

Beckett belongs to a large and diverse European tradition of the ribald, which includes Rabelais and Sterne. This form of comedy focuses on the materiality of existence, on the physicality of the bodily, in all its grossness and sexuality. Such references can be casual and gratuitous:

Examples can reach quasi-epic proportions of long-savouring grossness:

“Then he would …set her on his knee, and wrap his right arm about her waist, and lean his head upon her right breast (the left having unhappily been removed in the heat of a surgical operation)…” (138)

“Watt would kiss, in a despairing manner, Mrs. Gorman on or about the mouth, before crumpling back into his post-crucifx position… each kiss was in reality two kisses, first Watt’s kiss, velleitary, anxious, and then Mrs. Gorman’s, unctuous and urbane.” (139)

“neither Mr. Nackybal’s left hand, nor his right, were free, for with the former he was supporting the weight of his bulk now acutely inclined, whilst with the latter, invisible beneath the kilt, he was scratching, gently but firmly, learnedly, through the worn but still heating material of his winter drawers, a diffuse ano-scrotal prurit (worms? Nerves? Piles? Or worse?) of sixty-four years standing.” (181)

They can be extravagant in their exuberance:

“[Sam] made no secret of his having committed adultery locally on a large scale, moving from place to place in his self-propelling invalid’s chair…. paralysed as he was, from the waist up, and from the knees down, he had no purpose, interest or joy in life other than this, to set out after a god dinner of meat and vegetables in his wheel-chair and stay out committing adultery until it was time to go home to his supper, after which he was at his wife’s disposal.” (104)

Or they can be sly: [On how Ann got pregnant] “Others said it was her cousin Tom who, in a fit of exultation, or in a fit of depression, had done this thing to Anne.” (104)

Or they can be tart in passing: “Ann had a splendid bosom, white and fat and elastic…” (106)

“Mr. and Mrs. Micks, heroic figures, unique in the annals of cloistered fornication…” (215)

[Mr. Gorman] “lowered the hand that held the watch to the level of the glans (Gorman had a very long arm) penis, laid the other to this temple and took the time.” (238)

They combine the physical and the sexual in terms of the comedy of the grotesque:

Example: He who hourly passed an urgent water, a delicious water … did not count as such as weekly stool, nor biannual equinoctial nocturnal emission in vacuo…” (232).

13 THE SPIRITUAL DIMENSION

The comic and the grotesque aspects of the novel should not be allowed to obscure the latent elements which approach the spiritual dimension without always being explicit about it.

The narrator Sam likens Watt to the suffering Christ (157):

“Wonder I, said Watt, panky-hanky me lend you could, blood away wipe…” (157)

When Watt leaves Mr. Knott’s house and employment, he sees a mysterious figure approach and pass on the highway near the station (224-25). This figure retains its mysteriousness throughout as “this particular hallucination” (227), leaving Watt with the strange words: “The only cure is diet” (225). At the railway station (at the end of the novel) Watt is beset by a sense that he is not alone, that he can sense the presence of someone behind him. Eventually, the mysterious presence is acknowledged not as the numinous, but as an ordinary commonplace chair: “Watt saw now that his companion all this time had been a chair.” (235). Yet, we might argue, by being rendered as a mere chair, the numinous does not so much disappear as get materialized in the mundanely commonplace.

How would you interpret the following passage:

“What may it then have been, if not Watt’s face, that so repelled Mick …? … Or was it not perhaps something that was not Watt, nor of Watt, but behind Watt, or beside Watt, or before Watt, or beneath Watt, or above Watt, or about Watt, a shade uncast, a light unshed, or the grey air swirl with vain entelechies?” (219)