AccessMyLibrary provides FREE access to over 30 million articles from top publications available through your library.

Misreading 'Watt': the Scottish psychoanalysis of Samuel Beckett.

ELH

| June 22, 1994 | Kevorkian, Martin | COPYRIGHT 1994 Johns Hopkins University Press. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan.  All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)Copyright

"It is well said," Poe says "of a certain German book that 'er lasst sich nicht

lesen'--it does not permit itself to be read."(1) The figures in Beckett's Watt, as they 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.(4) 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 Freud's 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 "what poetry and psychoanalysis have in common" is that "they both exist only insofar as they resist our reading."(6) The revolutionary nature of Freud's discovery, for Lacan, "consists not--as it is conventionally understood--of the revelation of a new meaning but of the practical discovery of a new way of reading."(7)

The 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 on an irony of misreading. Watt and Lacan agree that a certain type of reading strategy is flawed: for Lacan, in terms of Poe's story, the analyst's mistake lies in the attempt to divine the hidden contents of the purloined letter. Ironically, the shared aversion to such a subcutaneous reading project leads Watt to criticize Freud, but leads Lacan to defend Freud. Watt accuses Freud of the sin that Lacan believes Freud never committed (Lacan attributes the transgression solely to Freud's errant followers), namely, attempting to look beneath the signifier. In The Common Sense of Dreams, Watt seeks to free the analyst from what Watt sees as Freud's error:(8)

We now see that we can dispense with a number of the notions applied to dreams by Freud and others . . . as scientific terms for these relations, which would imply that the conflict took some means of changing itself into the images and thoughts of the dream, so that while not actually apparent it might be virtually present, they are utterly misleading and perverse. One of these terms is symbolism. (CSD, 145)

In the name of dispelling the errors of Freud, Watt's "common sense" approach does not encourage, as Lacanian theory does, "a textual as opposed to a biographical approach."(9) Watt's method is, in fact, biographical in nature; his plea is simply to focus on biographical meanings that appear so "plainly," "clearly" or with such "simple directness," as not to require any "analysis or explanation" (CSD, 56-57): "We now see that the cryptic nature of dreams disappears when we view them as the solution of a conflict or the circumvention of reluctance" (CSD, 98).

Watt's works in English (earlier articles were published in German) appeared between 1909 and 1929; his work was thus roughly contemporaneous with that of Freud and Jung, both of whose theories he criticized. Just as Lacan might say that Watt's criticism of Freud is mistaken, Dr. Emma Furst, a follower of Jung, similarly finds Watt guilty of misreading Jung: "Despite Jung's express warnings, some critics, e.g., watt, made the mistake of thinking Jung claimed to have found, by his classification, the intrapsychical association. . . . Jung's classification is entirely logical-verbal . . . the outer classification cannot of itself settle anything about the inner conditions of the association; it does not, indeed, deal with the question."(10)

Related articles from newspapers, magazines, journals, and more
Freud lands anti-obesity brief.
Newspaper article from: PR Week (UK) August 1, 2008 700+ words
...sparked controversy by choosing Freud Communications - whose clients...major anti-obesity campaign. Freud was this week appointed for...campaign co-ordinator Richard Watts said: 'The Government has...of the good that it can do. Freud and the Government have to show...
Marketer / El cerebro de Einstein.(Negocios)
Newspaper article from: Reforma (México D.F., México) June 13, 2003 700+ words
...Boys, Paulina Rubio, Alejandro Fernndez, Sigmund Freud, Adal Ramones, Beethoven, Pancho Villa, Luis Miguel...especies, les contaremos de Wagner, Da Vinci, Mozart, Freud, Darwin, Jung, Watts, Jess, Miguel Angel, Renoir y otros. Y no faltar...
Psychology and religion; classical theorists and contemporary developments, 4th...
Magazine article from: Reference & Research Book News February 1, 2008 700+ words
...eight well known individuals and another four movements not associated with particular name. William James, Freud, Jung, Maslow, Alan Watts, Erich Fromm, feminism, and neuroscience are among them. ([c]20082005 Book News, Inc., Portland...
Lit by a 40-watt bulb: Michael Bywater enters the sad world of a self-made...
News wire article from: Europe Intelligence Wire October 26, 2002 700+ words
...of the inner suburbs, of buses and upstairs rooms and 40-watt bulbs; and, above all, of hopes that never quite come to...gown and am received by the Provost as the woman who disproved Freud." Her mother wrote movingly, late in life: "I know that...
Freud's religion: Oedipus and Moses. (Sigmund Freud)
Magazine article from: Religious Studies Friedman, R.Z. May 1, 1998 700+ words
...annexation of Austria in 1938, Sigmund Freud and his immediate family fled their native...London. Secure in his new surroundings, Freud decided to publish Moses and Monotheism...in Imago in 1937).(*) Moses was not Freud's first book on religion, but it was...
Sigmund Freud's Christian Unconscious.
Magazine article from: The Catholic World Burke, Mariann May 1, 1995 700+ words
The anti-religious character of Freud's writing is well known. In Sigmund Freud's Christian Unconscious Paul C. Vitz, professor...other side of the coin. He claims that not only was Freud obsessed with the religious problem throughout his...
Freud: Conflict and Culture - Essays on His Life, Work, and Legacy.(Review)
Magazine article from: Afterimage Saint Jacques, Jillian May 1, 1999 700+ words
...1998 274 pp./$26.00 (hb) "Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture" is a comfortable...films, manuscripts and notes scrawled in Freud's manic German.(1) Section one...Years," is familiar material. A youthful Freud poses stoically with his fiancee Martha...
Freud's Wishful Dream Book.
Magazine article from: Victorian Studies Elmer, Jonathan January 1, 1997 700+ words
...been argued for some time that Sigmund Freud's hold on our culture's modes of interpretation...staying-power of his ideas. Whether Freud's influence is baleful or beneficent...contribution to this ongoing discussion, Freud's Wishful Dream Book, is itself openly...
Freud's Literary Culture.(Review)
Magazine article from: Journal of European Studies BISHOP, PHILIP December 1, 2000 700+ words
Freud's Literary Culture. Graham Frankland...260. [pound]35.00. In a letter to Freud of 2907, Jung wrote that 'every properly...letter to Lou Andreas-Salome of 1919, Freud described Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory...
Freud-Jung conflict recalled in 'Sabina'.
News wire article from: UPI Perspectives Winship, Frederick M. February 18, 2005 700+ words
...father-son relationship between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung that ended in conflict is...Victor Slezak as Jung, Peter Strauss as Freud, and Adam Stein as a colleague of Jung...especially extraordinary characterization of Freud as a paternal figure. Based on Spielrein...
For more facts and information, see all results
©2009 Gale, a part of Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
About us | FAQs | Contact us | Privacy policy | Terms and conditions
Other Gale sites: Encyclopedia.com | HighBeam Research | Acquire Content | Books & Authors | Goliath | MovieRetriever | Smart QandA