What is a Watt?

In “Style, Inc.” Moretti presents a “modest example of what quantitative stylistics [can] do: take those units of language that are so frequent that we hardly notice them, and show how powerfully they contribute to the construction of meaning” (156). His “units” of choice, in this case, are of course titles, and through his analysis he examines “some strategies by which titles point to specific genres” (136). The most interesting titles to me (working with Beckett) are titles that use the protagonist’s name (indeed, Beckett almost exclusively names his prose after the protagonist: Murphy, Watt, Mercier and Camier, Molloy, Malone Dies, and even The Unnamable). Moretti notes that this choice “was not inevitable” (147), and, like all of the titular choices Moretti quantitatively analyzes, contributes to the meaning of the novel in a very distinct way. Indeed, Moretti highlights that the introduction of abstractions “made titles meaning-ful: nothing but meaning, as if the essence of the novel had been distilled and purified of all narrative contingency.” These abstractions “made readers look for a unity in the narrative structure” (151) in a different way than the titles which use character names.

In trying to force Moretti into a dialogue with Beckett’s Watt, I realize that I do not necessarily take issue with quantitative stylistics per se, and indeed will base my reading of Watt on many of the insights from Moretti’s essay—I do, however, hope to show that quantitative stylistics (in this instance at least) will inevitably need a smaller scale reading of individual works to make its insights meaningful at all. Watt, as always, seems like the perfect novel to achieve such a task.

In Moretti’s assessment, Watt would fall under the category of “character name” (see: Emma, Roxana, Mrs. Dalloway, etc.)—which would be mostly true. I would argue that Watt becomes an abstraction as soon as it becomes a character name, and that throughout the novel Watt is systematically stripped of the traditional characteristics of a protagonist. Early in the novel, before the introduction of Watt, two characters at a train station, Mr. Hackett and Tetty Nixon, slowly perceive the presence of what will become the “protagonist” of the novel:

[the train] moved on, disclosing, on the pavement, motionless, a solitary figure, lit less and less by the receding lights, until it was scarcely to be distinguished from the dim wall behind it. Tetty was not sure whether it was a man or a woman. Mr. Hackett was not sure that it was not a parcel, a carpet for example, or a roll of tarpaulin, wrapped up in dark paper and tied about the middle with a cord…But Watt moved no more, as far as they could see, than if he had been of stone, and if he spoke he spoke so low that they did not hear him. (11-12)

Here Watt straddles the line between subject and object, foreground and background. Not only can Watt “scarcely…be distinguished from the dim wall behind [him],” but his gender is ambiguous and Mr. Hackett is unconvinced that he is not in fact a “parcel…wrapped up in dark paper and tied about the middle with a cord.” In the context of Moretti’s argument, the title Watt would inevitably draw readerly attention to Watt as the protagonist—here, those expectations are resoundingly upset. As you can see from previous posts, Watt gains little else through the novel in terms of characterization, and instead becomes another discrete unit in the signifying system of the novel. I also noted in a previous post that the name “Watt” itself seems like a perversion of the question “What?,” which is itself an abstraction that gestures toward a lack of knowledge rather than a concept that would focus readerly attention and interpretation.

                For me, the profound ambiguity of the seemingly innocuous title Watt would be entirely lost in a quantitative study. If Moretti’s project hopes to have any critical traction at all, it seems as though it needs to always ultimately defer to the study of a single work, rather than treating works (which, whether it be the titles or anything else, are composed of language) as self-evident, superficial data points.