A Study of the Imagination in Samuel Beckett's Watt

How do we hear ourselves first and foremost?
As endless singing-to-oneself and in the dance.

—Ernst Bloch ¹

I

Beckett's early commentators saw the negativity of his work as an expression of the existential impotence of the individual in the face of the world. It was said that Beckett stripped his characters of social and psychological reality, thus laying bare the void which lies at the core of being. By contrast, a later generation of commentators, influenced by poststructuralist philosophy, would reject any direct link between Beckett's work and social or psychological reality, preferring instead the notion that negativity is the expression of self-referentiality whereby the text endlessly reproduces and destroys itself. According to this view, literature is more a deconstructive meditation on the opaqueness of language itself than the representation of a complex reality by transparent means. Both of these perspectives are valid and indeed constitute the core of Beckett criticism as it stands today. However, it is arguable that too little has been made of the negativity so painstakingly presented by Beckett. The early critics are too ready to construe Beckett's work as an expression of the so-called human condition,while the poststructuralists accept too readily that such work is a language game.

It is possible to plot a middle course. I shall argue that Beckett's third novel, Watt, ² which marks the transition from the early works to the trilogy of novels, combines elements of Immanuel Kant's dynamic imagination as developed in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason,and the negative ontology of philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre. On its own, however, such a view is inadequate given the extent of linguistic reflexivity in Beckett. In Watt, Beckett supplements the consciousness-based understanding of the imagination with an exploration of the role of word, image, and music in forging the forms and figures of poetic understanding. It will be suggested that Watt is a sustained meditation on the dynamics of the generation of symbolic meaning and systems. It is important to note, however, that this does not imply a neo-Kantian revision of Beckett's work, where the logic of symbols would be brought in to replace Kant's logical categories of the under-standing. It must be recognised that Kant's transcendental imagination, viewed within the terms of the Kantian system itself, was considered an anomaly, an aberration. Beckett seizes on this with his own particular brand of glee, draws it down from its transcendental heights, and puts it to work in an exploration of the corporeal dimension of the generation of symbols. The transformation marked by Watt in Beckett's oeuvre is from a poetics that examines the body as object, to a form of expression that reflects on its own embeddedness in the body. Thus, Watt may be seen as a free-ranging exploration of the sensible and the intelligible worlds and the way they merge to constitute the dynamic of symbolic expression.

In preparing the ground for such an exploration, Beckett utilizes the sceptical method similar to that used by Jean-Paul Sartre in La nausée, where empirical objects, including the body, are reduced to their essential contingency. ³ According to Husserlian phenomenology, of which Sartre was a practitioner, such a reduction, or epoche, presents the world in its purest form, allowing the thinker to deduce the laws of consciousness from the specific nature of its representations. Not surprisingly, when the main character of Sartre's work, Antoine Roquentin, applies this method to everyday life, he is engulfed by nausea. Watt also has such phenomenological reduction thrust upon him. However, where Roquentin is able to extract a sense of redemption from his ordeal, Watt is saddled with a permanent diminution of comprehension wherein present experience slips rapidly into unintelligibility. Watt exists in a state of having lost not only contact with the sensuous world, but also...