Misreading Watt: the Scottish Psychoanalysis of Samuel Beckett

Abstract

It is well said, Poe says a certain German book that 'er lasst sich nicht lesen'-it does not permit itself to be read.' figures in Beckett's Watt, as 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 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 poetry and psychoanalysis have in is that they both exist only insofar as resist our reading. 6 revolutionary nature of discovery, for Lacan, consists not-as it is understood-of the revelation of a new meaning but of the practical discovery of a new way of reading. 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