beckett, valéry and ‘watt’
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Journal Of Beckett StudiesTRANSCRIPT
Beckett, Valry and WattRoss PosnockThe most fundamental critical
challenge Beckett presents is to discover ways to discuss his work;
the construction of analogous paradigms is one method of approach.
The usefulness and validity of the paradigm will depend, of course,
on its congruence to Beckett; the more apt the paradigm the greater
elucidation it will yield. It seems to me that some of the critical
writing of Paul Valry can directly illuminate Becketts strategies
as a novelist, particularly those evident in Watt. I will limit
myself to a discussion of Watt, which can be seen as Becketts
critique of the traditional novel, providing as well a tentative
answer to that tradition. Valry is pertinent for he makes a
distinctly similar critique of the novel as a genre.Valry and
Beckett are not a surprising coupling; a few of the obvious
affinities between the two authors can be quickly enumerated. Both
share an absorbing interest in Cartesian rationalism that informs
their work. They have a fondness for perceiving mathematics as an
exercise of purely formal relationships akin to literature; as well
they both possess a definite methodological rigorousness. Despite
these intersections, and these are only the most noticeable,
Federman and Fletcher, in their exhaustive bibliography, report
that only two essays on Beckett mention Valry; on further
investigation these essays include Valry solely in passing.
However, the grounds for an analogy between the two seems to have
some initial validity. Despite the vast difference between their
oeuvres some aspects of their sensibilities engage one
another.After reading Watt, how does one account for its
stangeness? The perplexed reader may observe that the relationship
between Watt and reality has clearly been altered; this novel has
little interest in any traditional, i.e. mimetic obligations. The
narrator, late in the novel, makes this explicit: For since when
were Watts concerns with what things were, in reality? (227). A
street, a house, a mental institution, a train depot, and a
university are the sole remnants of the familiar world in Watt; the
action of the novel centers around the linguistic experiences of
the title character as he constructs intricate schemes and systems
of relations and possibilities in an effort to cope with the world.
The novel traces Watts tenure as servant to a Mr. Knott; by the
novels conclusion Watt leaves Knott and literally fades away at the
depot.The realism of the novel exists in a paradoxical state;
although this is clearly not a realistic novel in a traditional
sense, in another aspect it is hyper-realistic. The many catalogues
of various trivial phenomena constructed by Watt, for instance the
recording of Knotts movements in his room, cover with language
every conceivable movement Mr. Knott could make. This is realism in
extremis and reduced to absurdity because it obliterates the
traditional novelists selection of detail and substitutes for this
necessarily arbitrary selection (upon which the traditional novels
illusion of life rests) a transcription of every variable and every
possibility that is available to a given character in a given
situation. In a frustratingly limited but nevertheless logical
sense, the reader is supplied with knowledge of Mr. Knott.
Arbitrary is the key word in describing the traditional novelists
procedure of mirroring reality; it is this quality that Beckett
ridicules in his critique of the Novel that is implicitly operative
in Watt. When one rejects the basic tenet of realism - that the
task of language is to reflect with fidelity familiar reality
through a selection of detail - the result is to vanquish selection
by including everything, which is what occurs in Watt. As early as
1931 in his essay on Proust, Beckett had scorned realism and
naturalism. Surely he speaks of his own taste when he writes of
Proust: . . . his contempt for the literature that describes, for
the realists and naturalists worshipping the offal of experience,
prostrate before the epidermis and the swift epilepsy . . . 1Valry
would have enjoyed Watt, completed in 1945, the year of his death,
because its author shares with Valry similar reservations about the
Novel. In 1937 Valry wrote this about the genre: I can admire them
as stimulants, pastimes, and works of art; but if they claim to
truth and hope to be taken seriously their arbitrary quality and
unconscious conventions at once become apparent, and I am seized
with a perverse mania for trying possible substitutions.2 Valry is
implicitly attacking the enemies of Beckett and Proust: the
naturalists, preeminently Zola. Valry augmented his critique of the
Novel (Zola is only one target; the nineteenth century mimetic
tradition is the general object of criticism) with a vivid example.
He reported that if he happened to read the sentence The Marquis
went out at ten oclock in a novel he would immediately ask why not
at 10:15 or 9:46 for example. Valrys point is that selection of
detail must rest upon arbitrary convention rather than internal
necessity.The answer to Valrys question should be supplied. The
novelist has the Marquis go out at ten oclock as a convenience; it
is a cog in the steady progression of the plot. Of course ten is
arbitrary but it is a convention obeyed by the reader as he follows
the story. That the Novel tells a story is the aesthetic premise
underlying the authors selection of detail. To the novelist who
rejects this premise and its attendant conventions, an enumeration
of every possible time the Marquis might leave is transcribed. A
logical system of possibilities is reported and the progress of the
story, stalled by these systems, is secondary and relatively
ignored. Instead of telling story about the real world, Beckett
provides the linguistic manifestations that occur when a novelist
refuses to select detail; language is given free rein to proceed
according to its own inner and obsessively systematic logic.
Beckett in Watt shares with Valry a perverse mania for trying
possible substitutions. Therefore Mr. Knott does not simply move to
and fro from the door to the window; reality is more complex and
tiresome than this arbitrary, story-telling convention allows. For,
strictly speaking, Mr. Knott moves in all sorts of directions in
relation to his door, window, fire and bed. And to record reality
one must scrupulously record all the directions.Throughout Watt
language turns back upon itself, crippling any narrative efforts
because all its linguistic energy is spent in absorbing every
element of the text into systems, lists, schemes. The novel
consistently flirts with an infinite regress of closed system of
logic upon closed system of logic. In terms of narrative everything
that happens occurs as if in slow motion, anchored by tireless
feats of analysis through language.Quite strikingly, Valry asks for
a novel like Watt. In the same 1937 essay he writes: Perhaps it
would be interesting, just once, to write a book which at each
juncture would show the diversity of solutions that can present
themselves to the mind . . . To do this would be to sub- stitute
for the illusion of a unique scheme which imitates reality that of
the possible at each moment, which I think more truthful. (Valrys
emphasis)3Watt denies the illusion of a unique scheme and opts for
the possible at each moment because of the degree of its realism.
By abolishing the cherished selection of detail upon which the
traditional novel rests, Beckett, in the words of Leo Bersani,
helps to kill the realistic novel by the very profundity of [his]
commitment to realism.4 For Valry, like Beckett, novels are
unfortunately bound to the real world seeking to create the
impression of life and truth from a pattern composed of actual yet
arbitrary details.5 According to both writers the novel has refused
to confront the diversity of solutions that can present themselves
to the mind, which is the more truthful realism. In Watt Beckett
confronted the diversity of reality, unaware that he was fulfilling
Valrys request. I offer Valry not as a direct source of anything in
Beckett but rather as a distinctly parallel sensibility in his
views on the novel and its aesthetic implications.What is at the
heart of sensibilities that exhibit extreme sensitivity to the
arbitrary? Valry, in what is most likely mock befuddlement, says: I
do not know whence I derive this very lively sense of the
arbitrary.6 It seems to me that an explanation for this acute
awareness in both Valry and Beckett can be found in their Cartesian
rationalism. For the rationalist anything arbitrary is repellent;
he seeks to master experience by comprehending everything through
the power of the mind. The notion of an art form dedicated to
producing, though arbitrary selection of detail, an illusion of
life is something worthy of laughter for the rationalist. One
method of conquering the arbitrary is a rigorous insistence on the
transcribing of all possibilities of a situation; thereby
systematizing all elements in a logically necessary order.
Therefore, for the rationalist, a recording of Knotts movements is
not an absurdity but rather a safeguard against absurdity. The
positing of solutions to the phenomena of Knotts actions in his
room is one way the rationalist can control and understand Mr.
Knott. Language is a protecting force in Watt. Before expanding
upon this important theme in the novel, a significant qualification
must be registered concerning the arbitrary and fiction. All
literary art, however strenuously it seeks to purify itself by
purging the arbitrary, is inherently arbitrary. For language, the
fabric of literature, is never anything but selection, choice,
discrimination.Valry is aware that it is the burden of art to forge
from a medium that is arbitrary an artifact that possesses an
internal necessity. He writes: In all arts, and this is why they
are arts, the necessity a successfully created work must suggest
can be engendered only by what is arbitrary.7 (Valerys emphasis).
Only poetry, says Valry, approaches a condition of necessity that
the Novel as a genre so sorely lacks. Watt, in its creation of
internally coherent, logically necessary private systems of
language, has reached, in a perverse way, the condition of a
symbolist poem. This will be elaborated upon later.Throughout his
life Valry was fascinated with the example of Descartes, devoting a
number of essays to the philosopher. In a 1925 essay Valry writes a
description of Descartes that bears directly on Becketts Watt: In
full independence of mind, he enjoys the pleasure of existing
simply in order to understand. The properly organized conscious-
ness turns everything to account. Everything contributes to its
detachment; everything serves to engage it; it stops at nothing.
The more relationships it absorbs or endures, the more closely
integrated it is . . .8This might serve as a portrayal of Watt
after he has puzzled out the vast complexities of the famished dog
and Mr. Knotts food. Beckett writes of this: But once Watt had
grasped . . . the mechanism of this arrangement . . . enjoyed a
comparative peace of mind . . . he had turned, little by little, a
disturbance into words. (117) Becketts peace of mind that he
attributes to Watt is the equivalent of Valrys description of
Descartes as existing for the pleasure of understanding. Both Watt
and Valrys Descartes seek detachment, that is protection from
experience either by mental absorption or through articulation. The
fact that Watt realizes, in regard to the dog and food, that he has
failed to penetrate the forces at play, in this particular instance
. . . or obtained the least useful information concerning himself
or Mr. Knott . . . (117) is finally irrelevant. What is vital is
that Watt has verbalized every possibility of a situation; he has
stopped at nothing (to use Valrys phrase) in order to
understand.When applied to Watt, Valrys description indicates that
Watt bears the Cartesian cross, the discursive intellect9 as Hugh
Kenner has written. Valrys statement, he enjoys the pleasure of
existing simply in order to understand, can be revised in the light
of Watts character to read: he exists in order to formulate private
systems of logical enumeration that serve to encompass and disarm
anything. Watt can hardly be said to enjoy the pleasure of existing
for his is a consciousness singularly melancholic in its absorption
in hermetic, selfcreated systems. Watt is a Descartes manqu,
scrambling to name things, always in need of semantic succour so he
can be at rest.In a recent essay one critic has attempted to prove
that Watt is a devastating depiction of the cul de sac of modern
Western rationalistic philosophy.10 His evidence is that on close
examination the internal systems devised by Watt prove to contain
errors that make their calculations logically incorrect. Therefore,
according to the critic, Watt has portrayed the equal failure of
rationality to provide an internal system of any validity or use.11
Although his exposure of errors in Watts systems is accurate, what
is ignored is this important fact: all of Becketts works present
various situations and computable data that are persistently awry,
slightly out of joint. Murphys seven scarves that are in fact only
six is an example that comes immediately to mind. In Becketts world
mathematical notations refuse to cohere exactly - this is one of
the perverse donnes in that world, a condition of its existence. In
Watt there is an anecdote told by Arsene that expresses the
condition of pervasive misinformation that is all that is available
to a Beckett character. Arsenes story concerns a man who tells him,
after great deliberation, that it is 5:17 and a moment later Big
Ben . . . struck six. It is Arsenes comment on this that is
crucial: This in my opinion is the type of all information
whatsoever, be it voluntary or solicited. (46) Therefore, to say
that Watts errors are a critique of rationality is to refuse, in
effect, to grant Beckett his donne that nothing, including
rationalism, is in fact rational. Becketts characters tacitly
acknowledge this condition and act as if the construction of
logical systems, for instance, was founded on accurate information.
Beckett is only being consistent to the unique epistemological
foundations of his fictional world in his deliberate errors of
calculation in Watts construction of closed systems of order.The
motive for Watts system building, his need of semantic succour, is
a fear of nothingness. Nothingness is anathema to the rationalist,
who, as Valry pointed out, thrives on everything. The Galls father
and son exploit Watts fear: What distressed Watt in this incident
of the Galls . . . was not so much that he did not know what had
happened . . . as that nothing had happened, with all the clarity
and solidity of something. (76) The rationalist, like nature,
abhors a vacuum; one way to fill a vacuum is with words, with
names: . . . he would learn the name, some day, and so be
tranquillized. (82) Beckett calls into question the very existence
of the Galls in relation to Watt: . . . were there neither Galls
nor piano then, but only an unintelligible succession of changes,
from which Watt extracted the Galls and the piano in self-defence?
(79) This is a key statement in Watt for it exposes the motive and
hence the direction language takes in the novel; as well as giving
pause to the reader to wonder if the entire work has not evolved
from self-defence. The line between referential language and
private fantasy becomes obscured.Language which comes into being
out of self-defence is necessarily a private language that can
exist only by the rules of its internal coherence. This closed
system turns its attention from any public utility, i.e.
communication, for it seeks to stand autonomously on the strength
of its purely formal unity. Closed systems care to have little
commerce with reality. The stages in the formation of Watts private
language are reported to the reader in part three by Watts fellow
inmate Sam, the presumed narrator of the novel. Beginning by
dislocating syntax, Watt proceeds to invert letters of words and
finally to invert every element in his sentences, retaining,
however, a consistent and comprehensible logic. This allows his
language, no matter how mutilated, to be understood by Sam. Watts
final linguistic contortions, the last version of his language,
prove unfathomable even to Sam. The entire novel, I think, can be
read as a series of various closed systems of language that reveal,
to use Becketts phrase from Proust, the comedy of an exhaustive
enumeration.12Before discussing some of the other closed-systems in
Watt, it is interesting to note that at the heart of Becketts
linguistic strategies in the novel is an attitude towards language
that bears striking resemblance to Valrys well-known belief in the
radical disjunction of poetry and prose. Valrys poetics rest upon
the premise that poetry uses language in ways distinct from its use
in ordinary (non-poetic) discourse. The essence of the difference
is that for the poet the medium of language is an end in itself,
rather than a means to communication. This is a central Symbolist
insight, derived from Mallarm and cherished by his principal heir
Valry. The prose/poetry dichotomy, crucial for Valry, is directly
involved with the construction of closed, private systems of
language. Language is a public possession, handled by everyone day
in and day out. Public language is prose; it burns itself up as it
is uttered, obliterated as it fulfills its duty of communication.
Its lack of internal necessity makes it perishable. In direct
contrast, the poet, according to Valry, abuses language, making it
so private that finally he is the only one who can understand his
words.In a passage from his famous essay Poetry and Abstract
Thought, Valry lucidly charts the journey of language in its
passage from public use to private use: . . . in practical or
abstract uses of language, the form - that is the physical, the
concrete part, the very act of speech - does not last; it does not
outlive understanding; it dissolves in the light; it has acted; it
has done its work . . . it has lived. But, on the other hand, the
moment this concrete form takes on, by an effect of its own, such
importance that it asserts itself and makes itself, as it were,
respected; and not only remarked and respected, but desired and
therefore repeated - then something new happens: we are insensibly
transformed and ready to live, breathe and think in accordance with
a rule and under laws which are no longer of the practical order .
. . We are entering the poetic universe.13It seems to me that what
Valry has described above - the movement of language from public
utility to private construction - is precisely what occurs in Watt.
What my emphasis is meant to stress is that, for Valry, the moment
language calls attention to itself as an object (asserts itself and
makes itself . . . respected) simultaneously the maker seeks to
construct a system (poetic universe) that is operated by internal
laws and rules. These laws enforce necessity and outlaw the
arbitrary.In Watt the closed systems abolish the arbitrary in two
ways; one being that necessity is engendered internally by the
recording of all possible combinations of selected constants. Not
only do the closed systems achieve an inner necessity, but they
come into being as products of a logically necessary development
premised on the Cartesian principle that creation equals logical
entailment. This principle is clearly at work in the section
concerning the Lynch family, which is the logically necessary
answer to Watts predicament: who will provide the manpower to
coordinate the famished dogs and Mr. Knotts food. After Watt
patiently and scrupulously surveys the situation, computing various
possible solutions, he constructs an answer: A suitably large needy
local family. Thus is born the Lynch family; his computations
require them. Though the family is logically entailed, Becketts
insistence that everything, including logic is irrational, is
operative here for the Lynchs existence is somehow arbitrary - the
name of this fortunate family was Lynch. (100)When characters are
logically entailed one prominent feature of the traditional novel
is erased: characters so life-like they seem to obey their own
laws. Selection of detail creates the mimetic illusion of free,
spontaneous, real characters; the creation of logical necessity
circumscribes this selection and punctures mimetic illusion. Valry
scorns novelists who are enslaved to this task of mirroring reality
and consequently assure us that they believe in the existence of
their characters, whose slaves they claim to be, blindly following
their destinies ignorant of their plans, suffering for their
misfortunes, and experiencing their feelings . . .14 Obviously the
Lynches are the creation of a far different sort of novelist. No
one suffers over the Lynchs misfortunes, least of all Beckett; they
are a closed system created by the demands of Watts logic.The most
thoroughly self-contained closed system in Watt is the story of
Louit and the committee of examiners, that is related by Watts
coworker for twenty-six pages. Included in this tale is another
closed system - a five page inventory of the possible combinations
involved when the committee attempts to look at itself. The story,
told by Arthur, ends only because Arthur desires to return to Mr.
Knotts house, to its mysteries, to its fixity. (199) The fixity of
mystery which surrounds Knott can only be penetrated by the
creation of a closed system that will enumerate his actions within
a limited area. Therefore the reader is subjected to a three page
catalogue of Knotts movements and arrangement of furniture in his
room. Rationalism and absurdity blend into one here, as happens
throughout Watt. In one sense the reader is told a great deal
concerning Knotts movements, and in an equally logical sense the
reader learns nothing of Knott.Watt calls his tabulations of
trivial, obsessive phenomena a personal system (46): the plot of
Watt presents one personal system engendering another in a chain of
causal connection. Hugh Kenners notion of closed fields as being a
new form of fiction in the twentieth century serves to illuminate
the structure of Watt. Kenner writes: For centuries literature,
like arithmetic, was supposed to be, in a direct and naive way,
about the familiar world. But lately we have been getting what
amounts to the shifting of elements and postulates inside a closed
field . . . . Once we have a theory of fields we can invent as many
mathematical systems as we like, and so long as they are internally
consistent their degree of corre- spondence with the familiar world
is irrelevant.15 This analysis of non-mimetic form in the modern
novel, thoroughly apt concerning Watt, would have been quite
congenial to Valry for his own definitions of the poem and the
novel as literary forms combine Watts personal system and the
closed field. The ideal poem, according to Valry, is a closed
system... in all its parts, in which nothing can be modified. . .16
By contrast the Novel is defined as an open system . . . in which
elements are replaceable by others and into which new elements can
be introduced.17 A work of art in which nothing can be modified
because it has been purged of the arbitrary was almost impossible
for Valry for he believed that no work of art is ever finished. A
work is never completed except by some accident, like fatigue,
satisfaction, a deadline or death... There is no incontestable sign
of a works intrinsic completion.18 The problematics of closure are
surely evident in Becketts work. Watt ends for no discernible
reason; Watt seems to dissappear at the depot though this is barely
registered in the text.When novels become more concerned with the
construction of private fictional worlds, what Valry calls the
poetic universe, than with representing external reality, the act
of making becomes of primary significance: the doing means more to
me than its object. It is the doing and the making in themselves
which represent the achievement as I see it .19 This essentially
Symbolist concern is one that Beckett shares. I am interested in
the shape of ideas, even if I do not believe them. There is a
wonderful sentence in Augustine. . . Do not despair, one of the
thieves was saved. Do not presume, one of the thieves was damned.
That sentence has a wonderful shape. It is the shape that matters.
When the shape of sentences become crucial every word in the
sentence matters; precision of syntax and diction is demanded. As
Beckett wrote of Proust it is the quality of language that is the
true writers first concern. In short Becketts insistence on formal
control places him firmly in the Symbolist tradition. His prose
seeks to reach a condition of immaculate necessity - a closed
system in which nothing can be modified.It has been written of
Valrys notion of poetry that every true composition is the
indissolubility of its internal relations. And every time this
unity can be decomposed, the work loses its life.20 On these terms
Watt is a true composition for its internal systems are
indissoluble because they rest upon logical consistency. Mr. Knotts
movements, as catalogued in the novel, are incapable of being
paraphrased; their unity cannot be `decomposed or `modified since
they exist in a coherent, logical series. The novel as a whole
exists as a closed system or field, consistent within itself and
serving as a framework for the closed systems within the novel.
Watt, in its refusal of arbitrary selection of detail has reached
the condition of a Symbolist poem as defined by Valry. Necessity
has emerged from the arbitrary; necessity is, for Valry and
Beckett, the handprint of art.Not only can Watt as a whole be
viewed as a Symbolist poem, but, as well, the closed systems
individually are Symbolist poems reduced to absurdity. It is
possible to read the novel as a prolonged and elaborate joke upon
Symbolist aesthetics and the desire to form closed, autonomous
worlds of discourse. It is also a joke upon Beckett himself,
perhaps, for he is surely sympathetic to many aspects of Symbolist
theory. Valrys one attempt at extended prose fiction, Monsieur
Teste, presents a man not unlike Watt - a man of pure thought
(tte). Valry describes Teste: `He was a man absorbed in his own
variations, one who becomes his own system, who commits himself
without reservation to the frightening discipline of the free
mind.21 This statement reveals both the differences and
resemblances between Teste and Watt. Teste is pompous and
humourless; he never loses his dignity or becomes foolish. Watt is
also absorbed in his own variations and commits himself to the
frightening discipline of the free mind, but in this endeavour he
crosses the line from supreme rationality to hopeless
absurdity.What is frightening about the free mind is that it can so
easily become enslaved by its own systems. Valry refuses to explore
this dilemma, his fictional character is perpetually condescending.
Beckett, in contrast, has acutely grasped the problematics of the
free mind and the profound fragility of its existence. Watt, in a
paradoxical way, is a far more human and affecting version of
Monsieur Teste.At the heart of Watt one can dimly sense the
nihilistic rage of its creator; a rage at the futile, dumb
exertions of language and the maddeningly immaculate rationality
behind it all. Watt is an inimitable and unrepeatable work that
seems to me to answer Valrys request that perhaps it would be
interesting, just once, to write a book. . .that would reduce to
absurdity the arbitrary conventions of the realistic novel. What
Valry didnt expect was the depth of anger and desperation from
which the novel rises, literally against the backdrop of the Second
World War. Beckett has pursued with rigorous determination the
implications of some Symbolist strategies; charging them with a
profounder and more disquieting meaning than their original
intentions might have allowed.Notes
1 Samuel Beckett, Proust, New York, 1957, 59.
2 Paul Valry, The art of poetry, New York, 1958, 103.
3 Ibid., 104.
4 Leo Bersani, Balzac to Beckett, New York, 1970, 21.
5 Paul Valry, Masters and friends, (Princeton, 1968, 296.)
6 The art of poetry, 104.
7 Jean Hytier, The poetics of Paul Valry, New York, 1966,
168.
8 Masters and friends, 11.
9 Hugh Kenner, Samuel Beckett: a critical study, (Berkeley, 1968,
59.)
10 John J. Mood, The personal system: Samuel Becketts Watt, PMLA,
March 1971, 255-65.
11 Ibid., 265.
12 Proust, 71.
13 The art of poetry, 105. My emphasis.
14 Ibid., 105.
15 Hugh Kenner, Art in a closed field, Virginia Quarterly, Autumn,
1962.
16 The poetics of Paul Valery, 243.
17 Ibid., 244.
18 Ibid., 242.
19 Masters and friends, xviii.
20 The poetics of Paul Valery, 195.
21 Paul Valry, Monsieur Teste, Princeton, 1973, 12.