Never, Never Again to Close

In Bodily Natures, Stacy Alaimo stresses that “ecocriticism must develop modes of analysis that do not continue to emphasize the ‘disjunction between text and world,’ but instead reveal the environmental traces within all texts” (8). Here “environmental traces” can be read as “material traces,” as she notes that “‘the environment’ is not located somewhere out there, but is always the very substance of ourselves” (4). Later she praises post-structuralism for its refusal “to delineate the human, the cultural, or the linguistic against a background of mute matter,” and emphasizes that “Nature, culture, bodies, [and] texts all unravel into a limitless ‘force field of differentiation’” (14). In this last post, I would like to use trans-corporeality (and all of its related concepts) to bring together a few of the different arguments I’ve made about Watt this quarter. Indeed, I would like to think that all of my posts have centered on a core set of concepts, and that trans-corporeality provides a way of thinking about Watt in all its de-familiarizing strangeness.

            From the outset of Watt, Beckett constantly reminds you that you are not only reading a novel, but are quite literally holding a book. Early in the narrative we get dialogue from Mr. Hackett: “Tired of waiting for the tram, said¹ Mr. Hackett, they strike up an acquaintance."

^{And then, at the bottom of the page:
"1} Much valuable space has been saved, in this work, that would otherwise have been lost, by avoidance of the plethoric reflexive pronoun after say" (8).

What kind of novel (after the nineteenth century) has footnotes? I would suggest that by placing a footnote into an otherwise straightforward (at least up to this point) narrative, Beckett is inscribing an “environmental” or “material” trace into the novel. The fictive wall is broken—we are holding a book that talks about its own materiality. Later we are given similar cues that we are holding a material artifact:

And it is to be supposed that God, always favourable to the McCanns of       ?      , guided her hand, for the stone fell on Watt’s hat and struck it from his head, to the ground. This was indeed a providential escape, for had the stone fallen on an ear, or on the back of the neck, as it might so easily have done, as it so nearly did, why then a wound had perhaps been opened, never again to close, never, never again to close, for Watt had a poor healing skin, and perhaps his blood was deficient in         ?         . (32)

These gaps in the narrative are not, like the footnotes, explained in any paratextual way. Instead, as we learn in the third part of the novel, they are likely the result of the fact that the novel is being dictated by Watt and narrated by a man named Sam (see last week’s post), who are decidedly destabilized as reliable narrators in almost every conceivable way. What we have, then, is yet another reminder that the text and our body-holding-the book-exist in the same space—that we are no longer able to get lost in the fictionality of the novel (if that was ever truly possible) and instead are as possibly unstable as the text itself.

            Now Watt is certainly not the only book that foregrounds its own materiality (see Danielewski’s House of Leaves, a “novel” about haunting that engages a physical reading experience and becomes a monster in itself). However, Watt leaves so many gaps in the narrative that it is almost impossible to feel any sense of wholeness upon completing it (if that is indeed a prerequisite of fiction). Instead, Watt acts as a sort of wound that can “never, never again [close]”—an artifact that effaces failure, ignorance, fragmentation, and loss to such an extent that you cannot imagine feeling separate from its failures, and cannot feel safe with any stable meaning again.