No Symbols Where None Intended

             In “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus call for a reading practice that will attend to the surface, that which “insists on being looked at rather than what we must train ourselves to see through” (9). In doing so, they argue, we will “[accept] texts, deferring to them instead of mastering them or using them as objects, and [refuse] the depth model of truth, which dismisses surfaces as inessential and deceptive” (10). This new reading practice is set in opposition to “symptomatic reading,” a practice that seeks “a latent meaning behind a manifest one,” in which “the interpreter ‘rewrite[s] the surface categories of a text in the stronger language of a more fundamental interpretive code’ and reveals truths that ‘remain unrealized in the surface of the text’” (3). Such reading practices are epitomized in Frederic Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, in which Jameson argues “that only weak, descriptive, empirical, [and] ideologically complicit readers attend to the surface of the text” (5). This opposition between surface (or descriptive) reading and symptomatic reading depends on the political potential of a text—a potential that is either more or less manifest in what the text “insists” or is “repressed” by the text altogether. What, we may ask, happens when a text refuses to be political? What if a text presents symptoms if only to disqualify them altogether?

            Enter Samuel Beckett’s Watt. The critical history on Beckett has long established him as a vehemently apolitical writer—indeed, Peter Boxall, in “Samuel Beckett: Towards a Political Reading,” claims that

Beckett’s work has come to mark the far limits of apolitical writing. His perceived longing for silence, for voicelessness and placelessness, his indeterminate nationality, his relentless, ascetic refusal of all forms of belonging, his paring down of reference to the point that his writing seems barely to refer to the world at all, have all led critics to suggest that his writing constitutes an abdication from, a denial of, or an indifference to the political. (159)

We may ask, then, what work the opposition between surface and symptomatic reading does in relation to Beckett’s work—how useful is a supposedly symptomatic reading of Watt, for instance, a text whose last (and most infamous) claim is that there are “no symbols where none intended” (214)? This refusal to engage with depth models seemingly undercuts any critical attempt to identify latent material in the narrative (a term I use loosely).

            In my last three posts, I would like to think I have attended to the “surface” of Watt to the extent that such a practice seems possible. Indeed, I would argue that attention to the surface of Watt highlights the significatory preoccupations of the narrative, and brings to light (a depth model image) the text’s obsession with language and the seeming nothingness behind it. Perhaps the strongest case against symptomatic reading of Watt is the “Addenda” which follow the main narrative, which provide a seeming key to understanding the baffling narrative but, in reality, offer only more questions. I will include three instances of this “precious and illuminating material” to convey my point:

das fruchtbare Bathos der Erfahrung

faede hunc mundum intravi, anxius vixi, perturbatus egredior, causa causarum miserere mei

parole non ci appulero (213)

On the surface, these references seem (in the context of an English-language novel) to be literally quite meaningless. However, the dutiful reader (and Googler) soon finds that these references are attributable to Kant, Aristotle, and Dante respectively. Each of them provides more thematic reinforcement for the preceding narrative (“the fruitful Bathos of experience,” “In filth I entered this world, anxious I lived, troubled I go out of it, cause of causes have mercy on me,” and “I will add no words to embellish it”), though ultimately they refer to more traditional understandings of a world that are centered around the logos that Beckett has long abandoned. A surface reading, on the other hand, takes Beckett at his word—“no symbols where none intended.” Watt’s struggle to understand his objective reality (and ultimately Mr. Knott) proves fruitless, and Watt’s ability to appreciate meaning deteriorates into madness. (Our nagging symptomatic reading practices cannot help but read into the names—Watt is really an articulation of “what?” and Mr. Knott is little more than negation (“Not” or “Naught”) personified). Is that the whole joke? Did Beckett really write a 200-page novel about our always already fruitless attempts at making meaning, which in the course of the narrative provides countless red herrings for our desperately symptomatic reading tendencies? That’s what the surface seems to insist.