Glitches in Logic in Beckett's <em>Watt</em>: Toward a Sensory Poetics

Abstract

Watt, Samuel Beckett’s “anti-logical” interwar novel, is generally recognized as a parody of the binary oppositions that underlie logical systems. This article moves beyond readings of Watt as a pastiche of logical positivism or as the sign of rationalism’s exhaustion to argue that the novel’s “glitches in logic” initiate a sensual poetics whereby sound-textures come to rival semantic sense. The text does exploit the pitfalls of rational systems, particularly their tendency to elide the body and their inability to code for infinite numbers or emotions, but where the zeros and ones of binary code approach absurdity, different possibilities for meaning emerge. Through references to bodily experience, desires, and ailments, as well as through associations of sounds and laughter, Watt, anticipating characteristics of Beckett’s later texts, emphasizes the body as necessary to the construction of meaning in language.