Watt (novel)
Author | Samuel Beckett |
---|---|
Country | France |
Language | English |
Publisher | Olympia Press |
Publication date | 1953 |
Watt was
Gestation
In the summer of 1945, Beckett gave the manuscript of Watt to his friend Leslie Daiken, in the hope that Daiken could find a publisher for it, but he failed to do so.[1] In 1950, an extract was published in the Dublin literary review Envoy.[2] The work was finally published by Maurice Girodias's Olympia Press in 1953.
A French translation followed in 1968.
Contents
Narrated in four parts, the novel describes Watt's journey to, and within, Mr Knott's house, where he becomes the
The novel concludes with a series of addenda, whose incorporation into the text "only fatigue and disgust" have prevented, but which should nevertheless be "carefully studied". These take the form of concepts and fragments apparently intended for the novel but not used.
Themes and context
who may tell the tale
of the old man?
weigh absence in a scale?
mete want with a span?
the sum assess
of the world's woes?
nothingness
in words enclose?
The character of Ernest Louit is only one of many satirical digs at Ireland contained in the novel. Others include the recognisably south Dublin locale and respectable citizenry of the novel's opening, Dum Spiro, editor of the Catholic magazine Crux and a connoisseur of obscure theological conundrums, and Beckett's exasperation at the ban on contraception in the Irish Free State (as previously remarked on in his 1935 essay "Censorship in the Saorstat").
Watt is characterised by an almost hypnotic use of repetition, extreme deadpan philosophical humour, deliberately unidiomatic English such as Watt's "facultative" tram stop, and such items as a frogs' chorus, a notated mixed choir, and heavy use of ellipsis towards the end of the text. The final words of the novel are "no symbols where none intended".
Beckett himself said that Watt was written in Roussillon as "just an exercise" while he was waiting for the war to end.
The manuscript has been described by S. E. Gontarski (in The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, 2004) as "the white whale of Beckett studies, a mass of documentation that defies attempts to make sense of it."
Beckett was dissatisfied with the novel as originally published, spotting "over eighty spelling and typographical errors" as well as the omission of an entire sentence on page 19.
References
- ^ "DAIKEN, Leslie (writer) Reference: MS 5647", reading.ac.uk, accessed 20 August 2021
- ^ "An Extract from Watt" by Samuel Beckett, Envoy, Vol. 1, No. 2, January 1950
- ISBN 0-226-06553-7
- OCLC 35837610.