Watt//Pot//Knott

            The plot of Samuel Beckett’s Watt is simple enough:  an aimless man called Watt stumbles upon an estate in the Irish countryside, becomes the butler for the estate’s owner (Mr. Knott), and generally loses his mind (see previous posts). Beckett wrote the novel while hiding from Nazi forces in occupied France, and years after its publication dismissed the novel as “an exercise” that allowed him “to keep in touch.” This dismissal has had a serious impact on the novel’s critical history, and lead many critics to agree that the novel presents not so much characters in a plot but various linguistic permutations that eventually empty language of meaning. I would argue, however, especially in light of Derrida’s “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” that this dismissal of the novel as a linguistic exercise actually highlights the fact that the novel itself dramatizes the play and deferral of significatory systems. Thus we no longer see the emptiness of Watt and Mr. Knott as a failure of characterization on Beckett’s part, but as the necessary condition for understanding how meaning is made in any system.

I have already discussed Watt’s dismay at watching the “Galls father and son” fix a piano (you may think I am making a big deal out of one passage from a novel but it is almost the only concrete event that happens in the whole novel). The fallout from this event is, for Watt, the complete failure of signification. We see this dramatized most especially with language, such as in the instance of Watt and the pot (get it? “Watt” rhymes with “pot” rhymes with “Mr. Knott”). The narrator explains that the pot    

resembled a pot, it was almost a pot, but it was not a pot of which one could say, Pot, pot, and

be comforted. It was in vain that it answered, with unexceptionable adequacy, all the purposes,

and performed all the offices, of a pot, it was not a pot. And it was just this hairbreadth departure from the nature of a true pot that so excruciated Watt. (64-65)

Here the arbitrary nature of language comes to the foreground, and Watt is characterized as a lamentably “deep subject” who mourns the “hairbreadth departure from the nature of a true pot.” His need for stable signification, or, as it is later characterized, “semantic succour,” is “so great that he would set to trying names on things, and on himself, almost as a woman hats. Thus of the pseudo-pot he would say, after reflection, It is a shield, or, growing bolder, It is a raven, and so on” (66). Here, Watt cares not so much for “true” signification as much as any signification at all—indeed, we learn later that this disorienting experience in interstitial spaces (see “Beckett’s Radical Ecology” from last week) actually allows Watt to enjoy the experience of nothingness. The narrator explains that Watt did not “[long] at all times for this restoration, of things, and for himself, to their comparative innocuousness,” but that “there were times when he felt a feeling closely resembling the feeling of satisfaction, at his being so abandoned, by the last rats” (67).

                This transition from the need for “semantic succor” to “a feeling closely resembling the feeling of satisfaction” seems to me to reflect a shift from Derrida’s “saddened, negative, nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauistic side of thinking” to the “Nietzschean affirmation, that is the joyous affirmation of…a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation” (292). Indeed, Mr. Knott comes to stand in alternatively as the elusive Transcendental Signified—that center that will bestow meaning and rein in the play of elements in a system—and precisely as the “noncenter” to the system, which opens the freeplay of language infinitely. The narrator explains that “Watt suffered neither from the presence of Mr. Knott, nor from his absence,” and that “this ataraxy covered the entire house-room, the pleasure-garden, [and] the vegetable-garden” (170). Watt’s “ataraxy,” or “freedom from mental disturbance” (thanks wiktionary!) ultimately allows him to excuse himself from all systems of meaning to the point of insanity—a final point which underlines the hesitant tone of Derrida’s conclusion, which gestures at the “formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity” (293) that is, in every sense, unimaginable for those of us still trapped in the old metaphysics game.