'Watt': logic, insanity, aphasia

Style, Fall, 1996 by Michael Beausang

The shadow of Holderlin hangs over Samuel Beckett's Watt: the speech of a madman, focus on the Oedipus myth, and direct allusions to the poet. Among the poetry fragments quoted in German in the novel, we find, "von Klippe zu Klippe geworfen/ Endlos in . . . hinab." This is a slight modification of Hyperion's "Song of Fate" (Wie Wasser yon Klippe/ Zu Klippe geworfen/ Jahrlang ins Ungewisse hinab: "Like water flung down/ From cliff to cliff,/ Yearlong into uncertainty"). The poem "Dieppe" that Beckett wrote directly in French in 1937 is strongly influenced by "Der Spaziergang." In addition to its literary appeal, Holderlin's work may have interested Beckett because of the role that madness played in the work and life of the German poet. Watt is to the domain of logic what Holderlin is to poetry. Imagination and thought serve only to connect us directly to what is beyond madness. Holderlin, a schizophrenic, questions Sophocles's Oedipus Rex, and finds a man on a quest for impossible knowledge. This foreshadows Watt and his obsessive concern with rationalization. Oedipus goes beyond the limits. He penetrates the secret of the Sun God Apollo and is punished. This transgression corresponds to the behavior of a madman. No wonder that he meets with failure in his desire to become a "limitless creature" and that this failure ends in an "infinite separation" (grenzenloses Scheiden). His interpretation of the oracle gives the clue to his excess, and inescapably brings about the change from rationality into irrationality, which Holderlin describes in Empedocles's case as "the moment when the organic impinges upon me" ("Grund zum Empedokles" [1799], Werke 4: 159).

In terms of his passionate interrogation of truth, Watt resembles that other metaphysician par excellence, Sophocles's Oedipus. At once investigator and object of investigation, Watt relies on ontological and epistemological knowledge to cross the uncertain ground of his own self-doubt. Despite the scant success of his efforts, his very approach moves us from the one who "knows" (ioda) to the one who has "swollen feet" (oidein), to mention two of the more common etymologies of the name Oedipus. As the investigation continues, his misadventures reveal a state of psychological crisis comparable to that of his Greek predecessor. Among the Addenda of the novel, we find, for example, the phrase "Watt's Davus complex (morbid dread of sphinxes)" (251). The allusion here is to Davus sum, non Oedipus; in other words "I am not a genius like Oedipus." In fact, Beckett seems to have been partly inspired by the symbolism and myths associated with the king of Thebes, just as Alain Robbe-Grillet, giving us a Wallas Oedipus in Les Gommes, emphasized the parallel between the first detective and a contemporary inspector.(1)

According to a quite persistent tradition, Oedipus's blindness is due to the intervention of the Sun God Apollo who thereby punishes the person who has sinned against the light. As it happens, Watt evokes the god on several occasions. In the beginning of the novel, we find an allusion to Daphne's metamorphosis into a laurel tree (44). This goddess, who is a symbol of truth for the Greeks, and whose sacred tree appeared in oracular rites and Apollonian divinations, finds her rightful place in a novel centered around the quest for knowledge. Besides, the laurel appears again, even more obviously, in the Addenda where Arthur relates that an old man has identified an "extraordinary plant" as a hardy laurel. By way of gloss, he notes in his own journal, "Thanked God for a small mercy. Made merry with the hardy laurel" (252-53). The humor contaminates the myth: a divine metamorphosis of a woman into a tree gives away to a reverse metamorphosis of a tree into a woman, and finally, with the topic of immortality as a pretext, Daphne is superseded by the two uncontested masters of Hollywood vaudeville, Laurel and Hardy.

Apollo avenged himself on Oedipus, Daphne, and the Lycians; these are three known cases of summary punishment. The story goes that Latona wanted to give her children something to drink and that Lycia's peasants opposed her taking the water from their land. Confronted by the Goddess's obstinacy, they stirred up slime from the bottom of their pond and polluted their water. Thereupon she cursed them, shouting, "May you live forever in your pond!" As a result the Lycians were changed into frogs that "still tire out their nasty tongues squabbling with one another" (Ovid, Metamorphoses 6.313-18).

This theme of transformation as punishment underlies metaphysical questioning in Watt. Mr. Knott, for example, is never identical to himself, "for one day Mr. Knott would be tall, fat, pale and dark, the next thin, small, flushed and fair, the next sturdy, middlesized, yellow and ginger, and the next small, fat, pale and fair" (209). He escapes all observations, and this pursuit of continued metamorphosis allows Beckett to turn to account an identity quest where the phenomenon of alloiosis [alteration] underscores obstacles and a series of stages to overcome. The "transformation punishment" formula conjures up the idea of life as a pensum [task] imposed on man by somebody unknown for reasons unclear. It is also difficult not to see Sisyphus in the porter who wheels milk cans up and down the platform, a kind of repetition accomplished in the most total indifference. A parable of the absurd, and we are told at the same time that it is "punishment for disobedience or some neglect of duty" (26). Watt fails to resolve the issue: he follows his Oedipal destiny without recognizing that the "change in continuity" is nothing more or less than a "change into nonsense."