Beckett's Radical Ecology

In my last post I wanted to emphasize the extent to which Beckett presents a potentially subversive view of language through the narrative trajectory of Watt. This week I want to consider how Beckett’s subversion of language can be applied more broadly to the novel as a whole—indeed, I would suggest that the subversion becomes the very aesthetic principle by which the novel operates. In Cronon’s essay on “wilderness” he highlights the extent to which the concept was shaped by ideas about the sublime and the frontier, two concepts that revolve around a firm distinction between inside and outside. Both concepts depend on a very particular form of distanciation—an experience of sublimity hinges on the observer being far enough away to not feel horrified at the natural phenomenon, yet close enough to perceive its beauty. Thus the observer relishes in the safety of being outside of the Nature that is so beautifully horrifying. The “frontier,” too, depends on the perception of perpetually open-space, one in which the “rugged individual,” the epitome of the “deep subject,” can define him or herself against the external environment. In Watt, Beckett challenges these inside/outside distinctions by placing his protagonist in a series of interstitial places in the narrative. In doing so, Beckett ultimately undermines the most basic assumptions (the coherent self, a linear experience of time, meaning writ large) that underlie such dualistic distinctions.

Last week I discussed the passage in which Watt observes a pair of piano repairmen, “Galls father and son,” and laments the complete breakdown of signifying systems to the point where they develop “a purely plastic content, and gradually [lose], in the nice processes of [their] light, [their] sound, [their] impact and [their] rhythm, all meaning, even the most literal” (57). From this point on Watt is unable to interpret the meaning of any significatory system (language in particular), and stands apart from his external reality in the interstitial spaces between discrete objects. The narrator does concede that “what distressed Watt in this incident of the Galls father and son, and in subsequent similar incidents, was not so much that he did not know what had happened, for he did not care what had happened, as that nothing had happened, that a thing that was nothing had happened, with the utmost formal distinctness, and that it continued to happen” (60). Here Watt glimpses the nothingness that underlies systems of signification, and is distressed not that he can no longer be comforted by meaning, but that he still experiences nothing as something. It is not until the conclusion of the novel that Watt is able to abandon meaning altogether, and is “free, free at last, for an instant free at last, nothing at last” (166). This equation between freedom and nothingness seems to be the logical extension of Cronon’s argument (albeit to the absolute extreme), as Watt finally dissolves all of the inside/outside distinctions that allow for signification and experiences the bliss of nothingness.

Beckett’s vision of radical ecology is, in the end, completely inaccessible—indeed, Watt’s dissolution into the text is only made possible by his inhabiting the space of the text in the first place. Beckett does, however, provide one point of identification with Watt, as he includes a series of “addenda” after the narrative which he describes as “precious and illuminating material [that] should be carefully studied,” and that “only fatigue and disgust prevented its incorporation” (205). The reader is then left to occupy the space between the main narrative and the wildly enigmatic “addenda” material, which includes notes to “change all the names” (213) and explains that there were “no symbols where none intended” (214). By forcing the reader to occupy this space, Beckett provides a glimpse at the extreme middle ground that Watt occupies (and that Cronon advocates for), and forces us to question (if only for a moment) what underpins our systems of meaning.