Beckett's Watt — the graphic accompaniment: Marginalia in the manuscripts

Abstract

Samuel Beckett's Watt, his last English novel, is a hallucinatory tour de force of dark whimsy, a quest novel with neither quester nor object, a tale of madness and comic inconsequence played out in the mind of an elusive narrating persona. Its action begins in Dublin with the introduction of the quirky Mr Hackett, who, in the course of a conversation, is identified with a seedy ex-university man named Watt. It is Watt whom we follow on a journey to the house of a Mr Knott where he encounters a servant who gives him his instructions, cedes him his job and leaves. The first of Beckett's God figures, Knott is distant and mute (as is Watt for most of the book) and distinctly odd. In time, like his predecessor, Watt completes his service and leaves, turning up in the garden of an asylum, where he recounts his tale in a variety of twisted ways to a man called Sam whom we may assume is Hackett. The novel is of course more concerned with procedures and rhetorical turns than with this narrative line, from which I have omitted a multitude of details, but the summary may help situate the argument that follows for those who have not read the book.