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“The Personal System”-Samuel Beckett's Watt

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

John J. Mood
John J. Mood*
Affiliation:
Ball State University, Muncie, Ind.
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Abstract

Beckett's novel Watt portrays the titular protagonist in the midst of a world which has crumbled. Watt attempts to solace and comfort himself by constructing logically complete and correct mental systems. These systems are the famous lists, series, combinations, and permutations which constitute a third of the novel. Little attention has been paid to this major feature of Watt. A close examination, however, uncovers enough unobtrusive but real flaws (omissions, incorrect items) in these series and combinations to support the conclusion that these mistakes are deliberate. Thus, Watt's attempts at an internal personal system, and the personal systems themselves, are as unreliable as the external world.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 86 , Issue 2 , March 1971 , pp. 255 - 264
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1971

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References

Note 1 in page 264 Watt (New York: Grove Press, 1959). All references in the text are to this edition.

Note 2 in page 264 Phrase adapted from Ruby Cohn, Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1962), p. 68.

Note 3 in page 264 David H. Hesla, “The Shape of Chaos: A Reading of Beckett's Watt,” Critique, 6 (1963), 88–89.

Note 4 in page 264 Alvin Greenberg, “The Death of the Psyche: A Way to the Self in the Contemporary Novel, ”Criticism, 8 (1966), 9.

Note 5 in page 264 Germaine Brée, “Beckett's Abstractors of Quintessence,” FR, 36 (1963), 572.

Note 6 in page 264 Jacqueline Hoefer, “Watt,” in Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Martin Esslin (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), pp. 62–76.

Note 7 in page 264 Roy Walker, “Love, Chess and Death,” Twentieth Century (Dec. 1958), p. 536.

Note 8 in page 264 Alan Schneider, “Waiting for Beckett,” Beckett at Sixty (London: Calder, 1967), p. 38.

Note 9 in page 264 Martin Heidegger, What Is Philosophy ? trans, and introd. by William Klubackand JeanT. Wilde(New York:Twayne, 1958), pp. 23, 25; translation slightly altered.

Note 10 in page 264 P. 25.

Note 11 in page 264 See Hugh Kenner, Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study (London: Calder, 1962), p. 103.

Note 12 in page 264 Attributed to Bertrand Russell and quoted in R. O. Earl, “Matter and Mind,” Queen's Quarterly, 74 (1967), 140.

Note 13 in page 264 See Ruby Cohn, Samuel Beckett, pp. 90–91 ; Raymond Federman, Journey into Chaos: Samuel Beckett's Early Fiction (Berkeley and Los Angeles'. Univ. of California Press, 1965), pp. 101, 107; Kenner, Samuel Beckett, p. 101.

Note 14 in page 264 Hugh Kenner, Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), p. xvii.

Note 15 in page 264 Proust (New York: Grove Press, 1957), p. 59.

Note 16 in page 264 Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett, pp. 77–78.

Note 17 in page 264 Kenner, pp. 50–54.

Note 18 in page 264 Kenner, p. 81.

Note 19 in page 264 Kenner, p. 82.

Note 20 in page 264 Kenner, p. 83.

Note 21 in page 264 Kenner, p. 102.

Note 22 in page 264 Israel Shenker, “Moody Man of Letters,” The New York Times, 6 May 1956, Sec. 2, p. 3.

Note 23 in page 264 Beckett and Georges Duthuit, “Three Dialogues,” in Samuel Beckett, ed. Esslin, p. 17.

Note 24 in page 264 Shenker, “Moody Man of Letters,” p. 1.

Note 25 in page 264 Proust, p. 71.

Note 26 in page 264 I am indebted to George W. Polites for some assistance with the computation of the large combinations and permutations.

Note 27 in page 265 There are also some minor mistakes in the translations of the inversions by Ruby Cohn, Samuel Beckett, pp. 30910.

Note 28 in page 265 I should note that the footnote on p. 104 of Watt was the clue that began this search.

Note 29 in page 265 Richard N. Coe, Beckett (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1964), p. 20, in a generally rather perceptive essay, says that “Beckett. . . cherishes rationality above all things.” He could not be more egregiously wrong, whether he means rationality as applied to the external world or to the internal realm. This should be obvious from the devastating irony of this series of mistakes in Watt.

Note 30 in page 265 Additional corroboration comes from the Beckett manuscripts in the Samuel Beckett Papers Collection, Manuscripts Division, Rare Book Department, Olin Library, Washington Univ., St. Louis. Most of the Beckett material in that collection is of more recent vintage: new works or recent translations of earlier works. There were manuscripts for only Assez and Bing of the published prose in the original language of composition. (Some manuscripts of translations are included but they would not help in our present problem, nor would most typescripts.) There were also manuscripts of Le Dépeupleur, abandoned unfinished precursor of Bing. Thus, only these three among the prose works provide a glimpse of the original creative process at work, but they do contain items instructive for our concern. In the handwritten notebook where three early versions of Assez appear, a combination of the order of 23 (included in the published version) is neatly charted in the second notebook version. Believe me, it is only with the aid of charts that mistakes can be noticed, or, presumably, avoided or deliberately included. That Beckett does in fact use such charts clearly suggests that if mistakes such as those in Watt occur they are carefully planned. Indirect corroboration is also obtained by noting that considerable mathematical calculations appear in the Le Dépeupleur notebooks, suggesting the care with which Beckett approaches this aspect of his work and thus suggesting that any mathematical mistakes such as those in Watt are deliberate. Finally, the second and third of the six typescripts of Imagination Morte Imaginez have schematic drawings of the sphere and the man and woman in it (described in the published version by means of letters), showing Beckett translating from figure to text, just as I, when I first read that work long before I had seen a Beckett manuscript, found myself translating from letters into a figure in order to visualize the position of the couple. All of this adds up to an unshakable case for Beckett's control over his material, including that which is deliberately faulty. Incidentally, contrary to a number of reports, I found Beckett's handwriting eminently legible.

Note 31 in page 265 Beckett and Duthuit, “Three Dialogues,” p. 19.

Note 32 in page 265 “Three Dialogues,” p. 20; see also p. 21.

Note 33 in page 265 Coe, Beckett, Ch. iii, has attempted this in a way, but the study suffers from insufficient philosophical depth. See Martin Heidegger's discussions of das Nichts: “What Is Metaphysics?” in Existence and Being, trans. Stefan Schimanski, introd. by Werner Brock (Chicago: Regnery, 1960), pp. 325–61 ; and “The Way Back into the Ground of Metaphysics,” in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, trans., ed., and introd. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Meridian, 1956), pp. 207–21.

Note 34 in page 265 Quoted by Harold Hobson, “Samuel Beckett : Dramatist of the Year,” International Theatre Annual, No. 1 (London: Calder, 1956), p. 153.

Note 35 in page 265 “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce,” Transition (Paris), No. 16–17 (June 1929), p. 248; see also Beckett, Proust, p. 67.

Note 36 in page 265 Quoted in Tom F. Driver, “Beckett by the Madeleine,” Columbia University Forum, 4 (Summer 1961), 22.