watt misreadings

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Misreading Watt: The Scottish Psychoanalysis of Samuel Beckett Author(s): Martin Kevorkian Source: ELH, Vol. 61, No. 2 (Summer, 1994), pp. 427-443Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2873275Accessed: 27-04-2015 19:12 UTC

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MISREADING WATT: THE SCOTTISH PSYCHOANALYSIS OF SAMUEL BECKE7T

BY MARTIN KEVORKIAN

"It is well said," Poe says "of a certain German book that 'er lasst sich nicht lesen'-it does not permit itself to be read."' The figures in Beckett's Watt, as they move "slowly alone, like something out of Poe," move in a text that seems to prohibit certain kinds of reading.2 Hugh Kenner has noted that Watt's strangely crafted isolated elements resist pattern-finding and allegorization.3 Yet Kenner also notes that Beckett, far from presenting the reader with mute opacity, has laced the work with mannerisms and mechanisms that tempt us to struggle against this resistance: "The book repeatedly drives us to seek after patterns"; "The temptation to allegorize it is . . . strong." H. Porter Abbott locates Beckett's achievement in the "mock allegory" Watt obliges the dutiful reader to investigate. I will argue that a complementary model for Watt's interpretive tension emerges as we investigate how Beckett uses the writings of the German-trained Scottish psychologist Henry Jackson Watt. H. J. Watt, once his spectre is raised, furnishes the reader with ample new opportunities to read Beckett, ample new temptations to misread Beckett.

Jacques Lacan uses Poe's story, "The Purloined Letter," in part to argue that those before him have misread Freud. Today Lacan is often read, and no doubt misread, for his suggestions on how to read. One reading of Lacan indicates Lacan re-reads Freud in an attempt to recover the true radicalness of Freud's interpretive strategy, a strategy beyond signification. Freud, according to Lacan (as Shoshana Felman usefully represents him), dealt primarily with the path of the signifier, not the signified.5 In discussing "The Case of Poe," Felman concludes that "what poetry and psychoanalysis have in common" is that "they both exist only insofar as they resist our reading. "6 The revolutionary nature of Freud's discovery, for Lacan, "consists not-as it is conventionally understood-of the revelation of a new meaning but of the practical discovery of a new way of reading.

The interpretive strategy propounded by H. J. Watt springs from his mistrust of what had been "conventionally understood" to be "Freud's discovery." Though it would be foolish to ascribe all the subtlety of Lacanian thought to Watt, Lacan and Watt have a common ground based

ELH 61 (1994) 427-443 C 1994 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 427


on an irony of misreading. Watt and Lacan agree that a certain type of reading strategy is flawed: for Lacan, in terms of Poe's story, the analyst's mistake lies in the attempt to divine the hidden contents of the purloined letter. Ironically, the shared aversion to such a subcutaneous reading project leads Watt to criticize Freud, but leads Lacan to defend Freud. Watt accuses Freud of the sin that Lacan believes Freud never committed (Lacan attributes the transgression solely to Freud's errant follow- ers), namely, attempting to look beneath the signifier. In The Common Sense of Dreams, Watt seeks to free the analyst from what Watt sees as Freud's error:8

We now see that we can dispense with a number of the notions applied to dreams by Freud and others ... as scientific terms for these relations, which would imply that the conflict took some means of changing itself into the images and thoughts of the dream, so that while not actually apparent it might be virtually present, they are utterly misleading and perverse. One of these terms is symbolism. (CSD, 145)

In the name of dispelling the errors of Freud, Watt's "common sense" approach does not encourage, as Lacanian theory does, "a textual as opposed to a biographical approach."9 Watt's method is, in fact, biographical in nature; his plea is simply to focus on biographical meanings that appear so "plainly," "clearly" or with such "simple directness," as not to require any "analysis or explanation" (CSD, 56-57): 'We now see that the cryptic nature of dreams disappears when we view them as the solution of a conflict or the circumvention of reluctance" (CSD, 98).

Watt's works in English (earlier articles were published in German) appeared between 1909 and 1929; his work was thus roughly contempo- raneous with that of Freud and Jung, both of whose theories he criticized. Just as Lacan might say that Watt's criticism of Freud is mistaken, Dr. Emma First, a follower of Jung, similarly finds Watt guilty of misreading Jung: "Despite Jung's express warnings, some critics, e.g., Watt, made the mistake of thinking Jung claimed to have found, by his classification, the intrapsychical association. . . . Jung's classification is entirely logical-verbal . . . the outer classification cannot of itself settle anything about the inner conditions of the association; it does not, indeed, deal with the question."'10

Again the debate storms around the question of surface versus depth in interpretation. Watt appears to criticize Jung and Freud for seeking depth (traniscendence or the invisible signified); Jung's defenders-and more recently, Freud's-claim their hero sought no such thing, but

428 Misreading Watt


inspected only the surface of signifiers. Watt himself claims to look only at what is textually present in the report of a dream, rather than what may be "virtually present." Of course, all (Freud, Lacan, Jung, First, Watt) end with some sort of interpretive strategy, leaving a wake of uneasiness lest their interpretations seem mystically to engage in the hidden depths of meaning. This anxiety is familiar to those who enter the classroom of modernist literary study; Kenner's work, for example, is often held as exemplary for avoiding the variety of depths a critic may fall into: "In concerning itself with . . . structures discoverable in the work rather than the putative moods and messages naively attributed to the man, this book holds a unique place in the growing literature devoted to the phenomenon of Samuel Beckett.""

This avoidance of transcendent signification enjoyed an ascendance during the formation of what Friedrich A. Kittler terms "the discourse network of 1900": "In the discourse network of 1900, psychophysical experiments were incorporated as so many random generators that produce discourses without sense or thought. [Signification] is ex- cluded."'12 Kittler offers Gertrude Stein's 1896 psychological study in "automatic reading" as "a pretty experiment indeed, one made as if to dismiss hermeneutic reading. "13 Stein's subsequent literary output provides a powerful case of the amplified feedback between the schools of letters and sciences. The "rules of discourse" Kittler detects in her experiments belong to the same episteme that governs the experiments of Henry Jackson Watt and that Beckett later (Stein sooner) exploits.

The world of Beckett's Watt proclaims the cryptic and misleading nature of all reports (exemplified by Arsene's cynical anecdote applicable to "all information" [W, 46] ); but even misleading texts do lead, if not to signification, at least to other signifiers.'4 Several signifiers once used by H. J. Watt are "actually present" in Beckett's fiction, and I will argue that a conflict with H. J. Watt's writings is "actually apparent" in the irony of these textual references. Irony, according to one pragmatic definition, involves words being mentioned as though they were being used.'5 Beckett's borrowings from Watt are ironic in this way; Beckett mentions H. J. Watt's work and words but makes no more than apparent use of his compensatory notion of "common sense." Tracing Beckett's references to Watt, we find ourselves not so much scratching as polishing a well-worn surface of interpretive failure.

Henry Jackson Watt first appears in Beckett's work in Murphy, in a reference that takes us to the beginning of Watt's career and his training at the Wtirzburg school. Murphy's fourpenny lunch ritual involves a word association response game played with a waitress: after a "preparatory

Martin Kevorkian 429


signal," Murphy "paused to let the fore-period develop, that first of the three moments of reaction in which, according to the Ktilpe school, the major torments of response are undergone. Then he applied the stimulus proper."'16 Murphy, we learn, "had some faith in the Kflpe school. Marbe and Buhler might be deceived, even Watt was only human, but how could Ach be wrong?" (Murphy, 81).

At the Wiirzburg school, the all-too-human Watt studied under Oswald Kiilpe with Karl Marbe and Narziss Ach between 1902 and 1906, obtaining his Ph.D. for a paper on thought processes and "problem solving."'17 Watt also contributed to Ktilpe's experimental studies of word association response and "imageless thought." These studies challenged the idea (of Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Bradford Titchener) that images were the primary vehicles of thought, claiming instead that no imagery susceptible to introspection is necessary in certain tasks where thinking or judgment is thought to be required (the tasks centered on reading and writing, listening and speaking).'8

Beckett's Malone rather explicitly expounds this non-introspective mechanics of speech formation in Malone Dies:

I can say Up the Republic!, for example, or Sweetheart!, for example, without having to wonder if I should not rather have cut my tongue out, or said something else. Yes, no reflection is needed, before or after, I have only to open my mouth for it to testify to the old story, my old story.... And if I ever stop talking it will be because there is nothing more to be said, even though all has not been said, even though nothing has been said.'9

This Wiirburgian meditation-"no reflection is needed"-goes Watt, Ktilpe & Co. one better by denying reflection "after" as well as "before" verbal performance. Malone, moreover, declares a complete absence of hermeneutic content: despite an arbitrarily long stream of speech, "nothing has been said."

This speech analysis flows from Malone's pencil shortly after he notices that his window "sometimes looks as if it were painted on the wall, like Tiepolo's ceiling at Wiirzburg, what a tourist I must have been, I can even remember the diaeresis, if it is one" (MD, 235). Beckett, we suspect, remembers a bit more than a graphological nicety in association with this word -he may even construct Malone's transition from writing "W\irzburg" to writing "no reflection is needed" as deliberately excluding Malone's conscious reflection upon a connection between the two acts. Reading innocently, we find the actual mention of the word 'Wtirzburg" bears no proper reference to the WiIrburgian issues raised in the passage

430 Misreading Watt


that follows. Even as the signifier "Wiirzburg" appears, the immediate context leads us away from imageless word response toward the patron- age of Baroque imagery by German nobility (Tiepolo did go to Wiirzburg in 1750, but not to study psychology).20 Still, echoes of the earlier reference in Murphy to "Kiilpe" encourage us to press the play of psychological meaning further. Malone's testimony, which happens de- void of introspection, generally exemplifies the major Wtrzburgian assertion.2' The scenario described in Murphy clearly dramatizes the conditions of the word association studies behind this assertion. Beckett's Murphy, after carefully recreating the experimental context of subject expectation, confidently applies the "stimulus proper" and expects an immediate, unmeditated response.

Such is the quality of speeches delivered by many Beckett characters: stories are extracted, triggered by word associations, and responses are given without the possibility of the characters' deriving by introspection any idea of how the responses are formed. In Watt, Arthur (according to the story Sam relays from Watt) responds to Mr. Graves's complaints of impotence by recommending the Bando cure, which reminds Arthur of the story of Louit and Nackybal, which pours from Arthur's mouth against his will until he is too exhausted to go on: "If I tell you all this in such detail, Mr. Graves, the reason is, believe me, that I cannot, much as I should like, and for reasons that I shall not go into, for they are unknown to me, do otherwise" (W, 181). As predicted by the Wiirzburg response theory, Arthur's attempt at introspection leaves him unenlight- ened about the mental path of his fully-formed response. Kenner notes that later in Beckett's fiction, "communication becomes something extorted"; here Kenner gestures toward the threat of the Gestapo as a real biographical pressure.22 In Watt, extortion is less overtly threatening than in later works (for example, What Where, or Rough for Radio II), but Kenner notes that "pages out of Watt seem to have been written out in a trance of obligation, like some schoolroom imposition. "23 Even in Murphy the Kfilpe school response contains the hint of torture: "The torments of response are undergone" (M, 80).

Obviously, attempting to cover the issue of voice in Beckett's fiction in terms of experimental word association psychology gone mad clearly fails to "leave room beneath the swatter for all seven flies" (H. J. Watt's wonderful criterion for a triumphantly smashing interpretation [CSD, 40]).24 The full spectrum of Watt's work offers, if not a conclusive interpretation of Beckett, then certainly a variety of swatting imple- ments. We seek, after all, not the death of flies but rather a "new way of reading."



Most of the dreams H. J. Watt interprets have already been textualized by earlier analysts-Freud, Jung, W. H. R. Rivers; Watt simply quotes from their reports before offering his reading of their texts. His comments on the canon of textualized dreams may offer some consola- tion to those who struggle and fail to make interpretations stick to Beckett texts. Watt notes a common texture to the reports that the founders of interpretation have chosen to master:

The study of dreams is likely to set out from dreams that, owing to their clear and vivid character, have actually been reported with approximate completeness. Probably a far greater number of dreams that are complex and divagating, vague and dully slow, escape report. The attempt to record them is too discouraging. We are left with a mere jumble of tatters. (CSD, 2)

In the rare case of happening upon a "jumble" that has somehow escaped oblivion, H. J. Watt cautions that although the report of a dream may be "inadequate or inaccurate at any point, this . . . must never be taken as license to drive an awkward theory through a jungle of contradictory facts" (CSD, 2).

The data Beckett provides us with, and certainly that Watt provides Sam with, seem to coincide with that vast, divagating class of dreams that generally go unreported.25 The discouraging duty of recording the sometimes "dully slow. . . jumble of tatters" of Watt's experience seems to have fallen to Sam, and to Beckett. Although he propounds no sure theory for interpretation, H. J. Watt delineates a basic method (used by Sam) for handling Watt's story: "Moreover we have little reason to believe that the dream is a well-connected story," but "our first duty. . . [is] to fix it firmly down as a story, clear and sequential as far as it goes" (CSD, 16). Sam does put the sections of Watt's story into a chronological sequence, insofar as he is able (we learn this at the beginning of section IV (W, 215).

But Sam has understandable problems getting the story straight, because the way Watt has told Sam his story subverts any attempt at accurate recall. H. J. Watt wrote a book in 1909, "One in which he took no pride but which has proved to be probably the most popular of all his writings."26 This book, The Economy and Training of Memory, character- izes some of the specific challenges Sam faces. In discussing the process of learning a sequence of four terms, H. J. Watt emphasizes the importance of beginning with the correct order: "The second idea will thereupon recall the third and the fourth. . . . Care must be taken, therefore, to keep what has to be learned in its proper order . . .

432 Misreading Watt


especially the first time."27 Sam, although he does make an effort to restore order to the four parts of Watt's story, begins with the grave disadvantage of Watt's having originally told him the story "Two, one, four, three" (W, 215). This is just the beginning of the complications, because not only should the large sections be kept straight, and "not only must the sequence of words be correct, but it must be as correct as possible in every essential detail, pronunciation, and the like" (ETM, 45). Instead Watt presents Sam with a story whose sequence is disrupted on every possible level. Watt's "muffled" utterances to Sam at the asylum are delivered "back to front" (W, 164): Watt inverts the order of "the letters of the word," then "of the sentences in the period," then "of the words of the sentence together with that of the letters in the word," and he eventually mutters completely aleatory combinations of these various inversions (W, 168). Sam repeatedly (and with repeated qualifications) excuses himself: "Thus I missed I suppose much I presume of great interest" (W, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169).

H. J. Watt on memory may also speak to the dilemma of Beckett's reader when faced with what Sam is able to convey to us, with its exhaustive, repetitive permutability. H. J. Watt warns, "Do not multiply imagery unnecessarily" (ETM, 127); "Beyond a certain point [a point Beckett's text certainly surpasses] an increased number of repetitions brings no advantage, but produces only headache or a feeling of stupidity" (ETM, 42). A. Alvarez, in similar terms, responds to Watt: "The perverse self-destructiveness of Beckett's effort is obvious. Faced with page after page of minute logical alternatives, the reader, however admiring or determined, can in the end only skip."28

Beckett's willful violations of the "economy" of the reader's attentive energy are particularly Wattian (or anti-Wattian). Amongst his most important "rules" for memorizing, H. J. Watt insists upon "short sittings ... too short for fatigue" (ETM, 125). Reflecting on Arsene's exhausting story (W, 39-63), Watt was "inclined to regret" that "something had prevented him, perhaps his fatigue, from paying attention to what was being said and from enquiring into what was being meant" (W, 81). That something, as Alvarez notes, appears to be deliberate on Beckett's part. One imagines Beckett discovering H. J. Watt's handbook on memory and deciding to write Watt so as to render the reader powerless to remember anything beyond an unforgettable "headache or feeling of stupidity." For Watt himself, the inability to understand "what was being meant" begins with the simple difficulty of keeping in mind "what was being said."

Despite the "regret" Watt feels about his seeming inability to recover Arsene's story, inexpurgable memory is also Watt's nagging enemy. When



it comes to questions and words, particularly his own, Watt wants to tidy a problem up and then "put the matter from him, and forget it" (W, 123), but once a conclusion is seemingly reached, "then it was too late, the words were said and could never be forgotten" (W, 124).29 Watt vacillates between regretting and taking comfort in this condition. H. J. Watt, discussing the "insoluble question" of "whether we ever completely forget anything" offers: "Those who have lost hope and take refuge in the past, as well as those who are fretful of the past and brood over it repentantly and complainingly, soon come to the conviction that nothing is really beyond recall" (ETM, 4, 5). This brooding refuge in past events seems a major preoccupation for the hopeless characters in Watt, their stories told and retold, albeit ill remembered. Watt, in particular, tells his story to Sam, like one reciting "a text, by long repetition become familiar" (W, 156).

Although unfailing memory may be Watt's occasional curse, this does not mean memory in Beckett's world is infallible. H. J. Watt, near the end of his handbook, tells the student to "Trust the memory" (ETM, 126). Yet as we have already seen, Beckett has deliberately sabotaged the various report/record/recall experiences constituted in the book for both the characters and for the reader. Sam is forthcoming about probable compounded imprecisions of his tale: "It is difficult for a man like Watt to tell a long story like Watt's without leaving out some things, and foisting in others. And this does not mean either that I may not have left out some of the things that Watt told me, or foisted in others that Watt never told me" (W, 126). Some of the impulse to foist and omit may be artistic, while some foisting and omission may simply arise from "failure, hesitation, or uncertainty in recall" which H. J. Watt attributes to "imperfect or disturbed associations" (ETM, 126). One gets the idea that for Beckett and his characters, "imperfect or disturbed associations" may in fact play a large role in what other writers might call "artistic inspiration." The unreliability of the memory will become a trope for fictional impulse in later works: the desiccated mind of the narrator does not so much imagine as ill remember. In Molloy, for instance, "remembering" replaces "imagining" in the stock qualification of a narrative's dubious truth value: "Perhaps I'm remembering things" (M, 8).

In Molloy, we have perhaps the strongest verbal remnants of H. J. Watt and the problems of memory. Beckett surrounds a passage that mentions the name "Watt" with two near-verbatim (though ironized) quotes from the Economy and Training of Memory. Yet at precisely the moment "Watt" enters the text of Molloy, the immediate context seems

434 Misreading Watt


to guide us away from the Scottish psychologist, and in fact even away from Beckett's earlier book and character.

In the sucking stones episode, we may compare Molloy's permutative performance-"to the right hand and the left, backwards and forwards. And deep down it was all the same to me whether I sucked a different stone each time or always the same stone, until the end of time" (M, 74)-to H. J. Watt's story of a man with a remarkable memory, one of whose "performances was to learn a series of three hundred figures by heart in fifteen minutes, or thereabout, and say them backwards, forwards, up and down, any way, at the end of time" (ETM, 34-35). Although Beckett has moved "the end of time" from fifteen minutes to mind-numbing eternity, and shifted from H. J. Watt's wonderment to Watt's weariness, not only the verbal patterns but the absurdity of permutation resonates between the two passages. In a more succinct reference several pages later in Molloy, Beckett serves up the rather generic cliche, immediately following "are not these significant facts": "Time will tell" (M, 80). Significantly, "Time will tell" is a heading for one of H. J. Watt's rules of memory, under which "uncertainty" is attributed to "imperfect or disturbed associations" (ETM, 126).

Between these two possible references to H. J. Watt, we find Molloy's somewhat disdainful complaint:

So there was no way of coming at my town directly, by sea, but you had to disembark well to the north or the south and take to the roads, just imagine that, for they had never heard of Watt, just imagine that too. (M, 76)

Looking above and below in the text (north and south, if you will, though you might not) we can hear echoes of H. J. Watt. Or, considering Beckett's penchant for oblique self-reference in passing, we might hear this passage ask, "Can you imagine anyone would try to navigate the text of Molloy without first reading Watt?"30 But the most logical referent for "Watt" in this context seems to be James Watt, inventor of the steam engine, harbinger of transportational progress.3' Because the inhabitants of Molloy's region have "never heard of [James] Watt," no train line serves the outlying ports, and the inconvenienced traveler is obliged to "take to the roads." Thus, though Molloy's meaning for "Watt" seems restricted here, there lurks the tantalizing possibility of other meanings that may have existed at other times, "A period of my life richer in illusions than the one I am trying to patch together here, I mean richer in certain illusions, in others poorer" (M, 76).



In Watt the name "Watt" is again ambiguous. Restricting ourselves to patterns discoverable within Watt, 'Watt" appears most likely to refer to, and function as, a question: "What?" Almost every sentence in the book seems to function as a question. In addition to Sam's consistent question- ing of his narrative assertions, many sentences that we would ordinarily think of as questions appear without question marks (this is also true of other works, for example, the quote from Molloy-"Are not these significant facts" [M, 80]): "Watt looked at the hat. Was it possible that this was his hat" (W, 26). Watt may himself be a question without a mark. Arsene, attempting to elicit his name, addresses him as "Mr. _ ?" (W. 48). The question, and its mark, predominates elsewhere. "The song that Erskine sang, or rather intoned, was always the same. It was:

"(W, 85). Sam's "purely mental faculties" are "properly so called of ?

? ?~~~~~~~~" (W, 169; these perhaps refer to the five canonical messengers of curiosity: What, Where, When, How, and Why). As we know from Murphy, "In the beginning was the pun" (Murphy, 65). Beckett's word play surfaces early in Watt with Mr. Hackett's fascination with Watt, whose name he does not know: "He did not know either what it was that so intrigued him. What is it that so intrigues me, he said, . . . [no question mark follows]" (W, 17). In short, Beckett gives us ample reason to suspect 'Watt" is "What," though perhaps less reason to suspect what "Watt" is.

Ironically, even H. J. Watt's theories of "auditive memory" may be employed to privilege "What" as a likely reading for "Watt." Those who rely upon auditive learning, as Sam must in the initial step of hearing Watt's "impetuous murmur" (W, 156), "will often make errors in spelling which originate in the resemblance of the sound of two words, writing 'the hold thing' for 'the whole thing"' (ETM, 89; other examples also focus on the difficulty of distinguishing "wh").32

To posit H. J. Watt's presence in Watt, we must fall prey to the particular interpretive weakness of Beckett's Watt: "This fragility of the outer meaning had a bad effect on Watt, for it caused him to seek for another, for some meaning of what had passed" (W, 73). H. J. Watt clamors for us to shun this temptation to look elsewhere than at the surface: "If anyone declares that I am dreaming about something that

436 Misreading Watt


has not appeared in my dream, he is talking nonsense" (CSD, 3). H. J. Watt might, perhaps, forgive us for a particular venture into the depths, this remembering of his name beside Beckett's. Although he claims "symbolism" to be "utterly misleading and perverse" he seems to allow room for names to externally signify, albeit vaguely:

[A symbol] is not the same as a name, of course, in which no transferred scheme of relations need be present at all, whether it may happen to be present or not. Even if it is present in rare cases, its presence is sooner or later entirely ignored. (CSD, 145; "For they had never heard of Watt, just imagine that" [M, 76].)

Descartes (whose name appears in early Beckett poetry, for example, in "Whoroscope") has not been ignored in Beckett criticism.33 H. J. Watt has a special case of Cartesianism and entertains some thoughts that flirt with Occasionalism. H. J. Watt's works consistently concern themselves with the division between "pure psychology" and "pure physiology," which must be formulated separately, yet always with the hope of agreement: "Mind and matter are so very different realms . .. no logical device has yet succeeded in removing the division between the world of the mind or phenomena and the world of matter or reality. The more we study the two in relation to one another the more definite the traces we find of a parallelism."34

Hugh Kenner, as A. Alvarez notes, has already observed the comic effects, "the deliberate witty pedantry" that may be traced back to Beckett's interest in Descartes and Geulincx.35 Alvarez agrees, but remains troubled that this connection "does not explain why a style that begins as a more or less charming eccentricity so swiftly degenerates into real madness."36 After his time at Mr. Knott's, why does Watt head for the asylum? If we examine what H. J. Watt calls "the history of the dream" (CSD, 19), "common sense" should make the plot "apparent." Henry Jackson Watt was "Late Consulting Psychologist to the Glasgow Royal Asylum," as we learn from the byline to The Common Sense of Dreams. This asylum was H. J. Watt's final resting spot, the place he called home after a brief stint as a civilian prisoner in Germany during World War I, from which he "never quite recovered. "7 The outer meaning of Watt is so fragile; how easy it is to yield to the notion of Watt as a warped biography of H. J. Watt.

To succumb thus to the "fragility of the outer meaning," one must fall prey to the desire that drives the character Watt "to seek for another" inner meaning: "The most meagre, the least plausible, would have satisfied Watt, who had not seen a symbol, nor executed an interpreta-



tion, since the age of fourteen, or fifteen" (W, 73). The particular context of this interpretive crisis bears closer inspection, since its "bad effect" seems a turning point in Watt's trajectory toward madness; Sam repeatedly suggests that the Gall visit, which generates the crisis, "resembles" and emblematizes all that happens to Watt at Mr. Knott's (W, 72, 80). Adam Goldgeier has pointed out that the Gall name (particularly following Franz Josef) is intimately associated with the foundation of phrenology.38 The phrenology connection seems to have generated the talk in Watt of "face values" and the danger of looking beneath the skin: "Some see the flesh before the bones, and some see the bones before the flesh ... and some never see the flesh at all, never never see the flesh at all" (W, 73). But can we ascribe any significance to the fact that the Galls have come to repair the piano? The first of the "Examples of Dreams Interpreted" (chapter 2) in The Common Sense of Dreams, opens with a very brief account of a man who "dreamt I was playing the piano . .. a thing I cannot do at all" (CSD, 56). In the height of common sense, H. J. Watt immediately and confidently declares, "Nothing here calls for analysis or explanation."39 Ironically, it is a simple piano event in Watt, one requiring no analysis or explanation whatsoever on Watt's part, that drives him to distraction in his futile attempts to execute an interpretation. We may think of the musical notations in Beckett's addenda to Watt, followed by the rule that Watt has, at the cost of his sanity, ignored: "No symbols where none intended" (W, 254).

From the very beginning of his career, H. J. Watt expresses anxiety about the inherent difficulties of interpretation. In an explanatory footnote to an English translation of his Ph.D. thesis Watt voices his desire that, "It will also be good if the impression gains ground that experimental psychology is an intelligible and exact science and not a mere play with dreams."4O Faced with the bankruptcy of theoretical approaches, he places his hope in the sheer efficacy of systematic method: "The great advantage of experimental method is, that it enables us, by grouping of data ... to overcome the insufficiency of our direct introspection."'41 By his final book some twenty-five years later, we find Watt somewhat defeated in his positivism about "exact science" but still clinging to "experimental method." In The Common Sense of Dreams, he falls back on method to allow himself to play with dreams, although he seems aware of the futility of his enterprise:

So we revert to the problems of psychoanalysis. In spite of the scientifically repellent characteristics of many treatises, the persistent reader begins to feel the "technique" it induces. He gains the conviction that "there is something in it": and it then becomes

438 Misreading Watt


necessary to try to set that out in terms acceptable to men of good sense. (CSD, xiv)

It is this sort of empty methodological "good sense" that is the refuge of Beckett's Watt-and a good portion of his madness.

Watt, somewhere along his persistent way, has begun to feel that though one cannot really explain anything, a certain systematic "technique" might help one to discover whatever "something" it is that may be "in it." Watt endorses, for instance, the good sense of Spiro: "Here then was a sensible man at last. He began with the essential and then, working on, would deal with the less important matters, one after the other, in an orderly way" (W, 27). Throughout Watt, this methodological approach often appears coupled with a memorization mandate. Several scenes proffer a methodized memory as the necessary, if empty, stratagem for forestalling disordered idiocy or simulating miracled genius. The multi- plied difficulties of Louit's examining committee all stem, Arthur or Watt or Sam has suggested, from an inexcusable "lack of method" (W, 178), which could be remedied by implementing a numerical rule of order to "be carefully committed to memory by members of the committee" (W, 179)42 Nackybal, Louit's prime exhibit before the committee, deceives the non-methodized examiners in kind: he neither has powers of true mathematical insight nor of miraculous divination, but merely memo- rizes "by heart" a set of rules as his "method of cube-rooting in his head" (W, 198).

Watt's own adherence to a species of H. J. Watt's "good sense" constrains his actions toward the ridiculous. Much as H. J. Watt knows psychoanalysis won't wash and yet persists in trying to conform it to a logical system, Watt wears both his socks on the foot that is too small for his shoe and none on the other foot-all this "in vain.... But logic was on his side, and he remained faithful" (W, 219). Watt's fidelity to the dictates of logic proceeds, as always, from a consideration of combinatory possibilities: he chooses "this distribution of his socks, in preference to the other three" (W, 219).43 H. J. Watt's prescription for overcoming insufficiency, a sort of method method, is all Watt holds in reserve, whether corrective cobblery or canine care stands to be reckoned. To Knott's intricate dog-feeding conundrum, Watt applies an exhaustive systematic approach (W, 91-100; 111-17). Successive hypotheses are alternately patterned against the attendant objections to each, with a final solution emerging "that seemed to have prevailed" after a tabular tallying of all "solutions" and "objections.""4 Yet this hard-won semblance of resolution fails to enlighten:



But once Watt had grasped, in its complexity, the mecanism [sic] of this arrangement ... it interested him no more, and he enjoyed a comparative peace of mind, in this connexion. Not that for a moment Watt supposed that he had penetrated the forces at play . . . or obtained the least useful information concerning himself, or Mr. Knott, for he did not. But he had turned, little by little, a disturbance into words, he had made a pillow of old words, for a head. (W, 117)

We may grant Watt a moment of uncertain sleep, if only as the occasion to note a final correspondence between Watt's waking obsessions and H. J. Watt's description of the dream work. Here then, H. J. Watt's psychoanalysis of Beckett's Watt:

Nearly every long dream ... is really a series of solutions, each of which is abandoned or rejected after some reflection. As soon as one is proposed or merely tried by the wandering fancy, considerations arise that make it untenable and another is sought. (CSD, 121)

Such a process, we may note, does not imply the attainment of a tenable solution. For Watt, who ceaselessly pursues untenable solutions without the presumed somnial refreshment of H. J. Watt's hypothetical dreamer, the only closure proceeds from exhaustion.

University of California at Los Angeles

NOTES 1 Edgar Allan Poe, "The Man of the Crowd," The Norton Anthology of American

Literature, 3d ed., 2 vols. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1989), 1:1412. Poe's title character is never alone, and the narrator's attempts to read him fail.

2 Samuel Beckett, Watt (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1953), 196. Watt was written in 1945, and first published 1953 (in France). All quotations from Watt come from the Grove edition and will be cited hereafter in the text by page number, abbreviated W.

3 Hugh Kenner, A Reader's Guide to Samuel Beckett (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 76, 79.

4 H. Porter Abbott's chapter on the "imitative form" of Watt appears in his The Fiction of Samuel Beckett (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1973), 56-74. Abbott systemati- cally demonstrates the lengths to which Beckett goes to create "mock allegory in its most extreme form. It mocks not only the material but allegory itself" (70). Beckett, Abbott argues, achieves his effects by relying on the "esoteric intelligence" of the scholar, trapping him into becoming a kind of "super Watt," since Watt's "intelligence is the source of all his woe." For Abbott, the scholar holds one advantage over Watt: the scholar may chose to laugh (71).

5 Shoshana Felman, Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987), 44. Support for this emphasis on the signifier has been garnered from Freud's analogy of a dream to a rebus: in this model, we need only look at the pieces of the puzzle that are present, rather than trying to look beneath them for what is absent.

440 Misreading Watt


6 Felman (note 5), 51. 7 Felman, 23. 8 Henry Jackson Watt, The Common Sense of Dreams (Worcester: Clark Univ. Press,

1929); cited hereafter as CSD. The long-lived Scottish Common Sense tradition origi- nated with such figures as Thomas Reid in an eighteenth-century appeal to objectivity and normative morality and against "the idealism of Berkeley, the negations of Hume, and the quasi-materialism of Locke"; see Terence Martin, The Instructed Vision: Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and the Origins of American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1961), 4. Martin, in his argument on the pressures behind "The Haunted Mind" in American fiction, describes how Hawthorne, Poe, and others, "strove for true imaginative creation against the pervasive restrictions of the Common Sense philosophy and esthetic" (149). We may find in Watt's writing the remnants of "the safe, stabilizing, and conservative spirit of Scottish realism [that] made it attractive in early America" (4), as Watt-in The Foundations of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1919)- reassures us that "the mere postulation of a material thing as the bearer of volumes and orders and their coincidences and overlappings seems to bring a special comfort to the mind" (vii). And we may find in Beckett's Watt an unsettling of that tenuous security in the named object: "It resembled a pot, it was almost a pot, but it was not a pot of which one could say, Pot, pot and be comforted" (W, 81).

9 Felman (note 5), 46. 10 C. Jung, et al., Studies in Word Association (London: William Heinemann Ltd.,

1918), 409. I note in passing that J. D. O'Hara "is writing a book about Samuel Beckett's uses of Schopenhauer, Freud and Jung"; this information accompanied O'Hara's review of Beckett's recently published Dream of Fair to Middling Women (The New York Times Book Review, 13 June 1993, 11).

11 Flap copy on back cover of Hugh Kenner, Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1968).

12 Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1990), 229. David E. Wellberry's Foreword hails Kittler's study for establishing "a positive research program for a post-hermeineutic criticism" (xii).

13 Kittler (note 12), 226. 14 Mr. Ash detains Arsene on a blustery evening to answer a question Arsene has not

asked: "[He] said, Seventeen minutes past five exactly, as God is my witness, remember me to your wife (I never had one), let go my arm, raised his hat and hastened away. A moment later Big Ben (is that the name?) struck six. This in my opinion is the type of all information whatsoever, be it voluntary or solicited" (W, 46).

15 Dan Sperber and Deidre Wilson, "Irony and the Use-Mention Distinction," in Radical Pragmatics, ed. Peter Cole (New York: Academic Press, 1981); cited by John Freccero in Dante: The Poetics of Conversion (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986), 108.

16 Samuel Beckett, Murphy (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1957), 80; Murphy, Beckett's first published novel, was written and originally published in 1938. All quotations from Beckett's Murphy come from this edition and will be cited hereafter in the text by page number, as Murphy. Tyrus Miller has recently brought to my attention the research of Jean-Michel Rabate, who reads the relevant passages of Gardner Murphy's 1929 textbook, An Historical Introduction to Modern Psychology, against the portions of Murphy cited here; see Rabat6's essay, "Quelques figures de la premiere (et derniere) anthropomorphie de Beckett," in Beckett avant Beckett: Essais sur la jeune Beckett (1930-1945) (Paris: P.E.N.S., 1984), 139.



17 Kittler (note 12) takes Narziss Ach's 1905 study of "meaningless syllables (excluding the syllable ach, unfortunately), to which subjects . . . were to respond with meaningless rhymes" (220) as paradigmatic of "the discourse network of 1900." For a synopsis of Watt's research, see Chamber's Encyclopedia (London: International Learning Systems Corpo- ration, Limited, 1973). H. J. Watt's interest in "problem solving" re-surfaces in Watt in such passages as the discussion of the "mecanism" (W, 117) of the arrangement of how food is to be distributed to Mr. Knott and the dog. Watt composes a mock treatise in which he methodically derives "the manner in which this problem had been solved" (W, 93).

18 Encyclopedia of Psychology, ed. Raymond J. Corsini, 4 vols. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1984), 2:185; 3:465.

19 Samuel Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1965), 236. All quotations from these novels come from this edition, abbreviated as follows: Molloy, M; Malone Dies, MD.

20 Beckett employs an analogous trick of misdirection in Molloy with a reference to "Watt" himself, as we will see below.

21 Malone claims, and in a way demonstrates, that thoughts, however introspective, often pointedly fail to make transparent the mechanism of response involved in moving from one statement to the next.

22 Kenner (note 3), 72. 23 Kenner, Samuel Beckett (note 11), 23. 24 Benjamin Braun suggested to me the connection between Watt's metaphor and the

tale of "The Brave Little Tailor." In the fairy tale, the tailor must deliver repeated blows to drop all seven drosophila, as he "beat them mercilessly" with a duster-his efforts lack the surgical precision Watt demands of a conclusive interpretation. Only at the moment the tailor textualizes the heroic deed (literally, by embroidering the boast "Seven at a blow" into the textile of his sash) does he create the fiction that all seven flies fit beneath the stroke of a single swat. Moreover, the textualized boast becomes the subject of repeated and humorous misinterpretations by those reading the tailor's girdle and believing him to have slain seven men. This misinterpretation proves so powerful that even when the tailor reveals the his true identity-while talking in his sleep-his false reputation as a fearsome warrior prevails.

25 I do not suggest that Beckett was in the business of reporting dreams; rather, his reporting of whatever it is he reports defies conventional interpretation as H. J. Watt saw it. Of course, Beckett's data, unlike the "greater number of dreams" did not go unreported, nor have they been ignored by interpretation. Quite to the contrary, Kenner noted on the occasion of Beckett's eightieth birthday the phenomenal ability of Beckett's writing to compel critics to write books: "Beckett can invade your mind with a single phrase ... there are likely more words written about Sam Beckett than about any other living man. I'll refrain from estimating how many of them make profitable reading. The point is, they all seemed necessary writing" (Historical Fictions [San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990], 289).

26 Cited from Shepherd Dawson's brief biographical sketch preceding The Common Sense of Dreams (note 8), ix.

27 H. J. Wells, The Economy and Training of Memory (London: Edward Arnold, 1909), 44; cited hereafter as ETM. I thank James Goodwin for reminding me of Beckett's attention to memory in his early study of Proust, and in particular Beckett's paradoxical claim that "Proust had a bad memory. . . . The man with a good memory does not

442 Misreading Watt


remember anything because he does not forget anything"; Beckett, Proust (New York: Grove Press, 1931), 17.

28 A. Alvarez, Samuel Beckett (New York: The Viking Press, 1973), 37. 29 The predicament of the reader may be implied here as well: try as we might, it seems

impossible for us to innocently re-approach the text after a false start that Beckett has lured us into. The residue of a promising attempt at transcendent interpretation haunts subsequent attempts to read.

30 To paraphrase Gilbert Sorrentino, "Beckett's later works sometimes read like extended footnotes to earlier works. If you haven't read the earlier stuff, Beckett sort of says, 'Too bad"' (Beckett Seminar, Department of English, Stanford University, 7 November 1990).

31 The much-commented comedy of Watt's mechanical motions may have as much to do with James Wattian mechanization as with Cartesian dualism. I owe my observations about the industrious industrial presence of James Watt in Watt to Michael Tratner.

32 Beckett also leaves room for the orthographic confusion of homophones: in "I haf taken it away" (W, 44), "haf" seems to represent "have."

33 Samuel Beckett: Collected Poems 1930-1978 (London: John Calder, 1984), 1-6. Descartes's name appears throughout the mock scholarly "NOTES" Beckett provides, of which, a sample: "Ren6 Descartes, Seigneur du Perron, liked his omelette made of eggs hatched from eight to ten days; shorter or longer under the hen and the result, he says, is disgusting" (5).

34 H. J. Watt, The Sensory Basis and Structure of Knowledge (Methuen & Co., 1925), 2. 35 Alvarez (note 28), 36. 36 Alvarez, 36. 37 Dawson (note 26), x. 3 Adam Goldgeier, Beckett seminar, Department of English, 8 October 1990, Stanford

University. 39 H. J. Watt takes this opportunity to make another jab at Freud, quoting Freud's

symbolism of the piano: "'The piano itself is only a stairway, since it has a scale. There is no series of associations which cannot be adapted to the representation of sexual facts.' Yes, very likely" (CSD, 58). The quotation from Sigmund Freud may be found in The Interpretation of Dreams (New York: Macmillan, 1913), 257.

40 H. J. Watt published an English summary of his thesis, "Experimental Contribution to a Theory of Thinking," in the London Journal of Anatomy and Physiology 40 (1905- 1906): 257-66; the explanation quoted appears on page 257. Watt's thesis is Experinmentelle Beitrage zu einer Theorie des Denkens (Leipzig: W. Engelman, 1904).

41 Watt, "Theory" (note 40), 266. 42 The word "committee" in Beckett seldom strays far from its early etymological

association with madness. The committee, according to a 1765 OED listing, is the party into whose charge a lunatic or idiot is committed.

43 Watt's count of four possibilities, in this particular example, is unusually low. As many as eleven distributions exist if the socks are considered distinct, and either or both may be discarded; without these two provisos (distinctness and discardability) only three distributions appear.

44 Much valuable space has been saved, which otherwise would have been lost, by avoidance of a final enumeration of all possible objections to all possible solutions tendered in this essay.



Article Contentsp. 427p. 428p. 429p. 430p. 431p. 432p. 433p. 434p. 435p. 436p. 437p. 438p. 439p. 440p. 441p. 442p. 443

Issue Table of ContentsELH, Vol. 61, No. 2 (Summer, 1994) pp. 211-471Front Matter [pp. ]Coming to Terms: Thomas Elyot's Definitions and the Particularity of Human Letters [pp. 211-230]"Arden Lay Murdered in that Plot of Ground": Surveying, Land, and Arden of Faversham [pp. 231-252]"The Adoption of Abominable Terms": The Insults that Shape Windsor's Middle Class [pp. 253-278]Edward IV's Secret Familiarities and the Politics of Proximity in Elizabethan History Plays [pp. 279-315]Mackenzie's Man of Feeling: Embalming Sensibility [pp. 317-340]Conspicuous Consumption: White Abolitionism and English Women's Protest Writing in the 1790s [pp. 341-362]The Politics of Family in the Pickwick Papers [pp. 363-379]"A Wilde Desire Took Me": The Homoerotic History of Dracula [pp. 381-425]Misreading Watt: The Scottish Psychoanalysis of Samuel Beckett [pp. 427-443]Bakhtin in African American Literary Theory [pp. 445-471]Back Matter [pp. ]

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