"DELICATE QUESTIONS": Hermeneutics and Beckett's Watt

Abstract

I I am concerned here with a reading of Samuel Beckett's Watt, a text that signals Beckett's crucial turn into a fully mode of writing, a writing, that is, which thematizes, and ultimately parodies, the problematics of interpretation even as it offers itself in protracted seriousness as interpretable object. The process of reading through this thematization ? a process I call metahermeneutics ? ultimately places the reader in specular relation to Watt, ultimately compels the reader to balance his or her hermeneutic desire against the exigencies of Watt's own interpretive praxis. More concretely, this essay is an attempt to account in hermeneutic terms for the anxiety produced in the reading of this text, anxiety that arises in part by the reader's own self-conscious awareness of his/her proximity to the radical otherness of Watt, the parodic hermeneut. My method thus is to trace Watt's own processual hermeneutic through three interpretive scenes in order to suggest a number of things. First, by reading die modes of Watt's interpretive praxis against some specifics of Gadamerian theoria, I wish to trace the development of Watt's own hermeneutic, from its initial articulation as a kind of aporetic allegory, to its final status as a resigned acquiescence to the unreadable, the unnamable.1 Second, I am concerned with touching on the implications of Gadamer's notion of understanding as dialogue and to a reading of this text. He suggests that understanding occurs only as the interpreter makes his or her own the discourse of that which s/he attempts to understand. I want to suggest that Beckett heightens our awareness of understanding as through his manipulation of Watt. Beckett compels the reader ? in a process I call conferred appropriation ? into close proximity to a deliberately estranged discourse, compelling him to translate Watt's already specular language and ultimately to act, in Derrida's sense of