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COPYRIGHT 1994 Johns Hopkins University Press
"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)
Again the debate storms around the question of surface versus depth in interpretation. Watt appears to criticize Jung and Freud for seeking depth (transcendence or the invisible signified); Jung's defenders--and more recently, Freud's--claim their hero sought no such thing, but inspected only the surface of signifiers. Watt himself claims to look only at what is textually present in the report of a dream, rather than what may be "virtually present." Of course, all (Freud, Lacan, Jung, Furst, Watt) end with some sort of interpretive strategy, leaving a wake of uneasiness lest their interpretations seem mystically to engage in the hidden depths of meaning. This anxiety is familiar to those who enter the classroom of modernist literary study; Kenner's work, for example, is often held as exemplary for avoiding the variety of depths a critic may fall into: "In concerning itself with . . . structures discoverable in the work rather than the putative moods and messages naively attributed to the man, this book holds a unique place in the growing literature devoted to the phenomenon of Samuel Beckett."(11)
This avoidance of transcendent signification enjoyed an ascendance during the formation of what Friedrich A. Kittler terms "the discourse network of 1900": "In the discourse network of 1900, psychophysical experiments were incorporated as so many random generators that produce discourses without sense or thought. [Signification] is excluded."(12) Kittler offers Gertrude Stein's 1896 psychological study in "automatic reading" as "a pretty experiment indeed, one made as if to dismiss hermeneutic reading."(13) Stein's subsequent literary output provides a powerful case of the amplified feedback between the schools of letters and sciences. The "rules of discourse" Kittler detects in her experiments belong to the same episteme that governs the experiments of Henry Jackson Watt and that Beckett later (Stein sooner) exploits.
The world of Beckett's Watt proclaims the cryptic and misleading nature of all reports (exemplified by Arsene's cynical anecdote applicable to "all information" [W, 46]); but even misleading texts do lead, if not to signification, at least to other signifiers.(14) Several signifiers once used by H. J. Watt are "actually present" in Beckett's fiction, and I will argue that a conflict with H. J. Watt's writings is "actually apparent" in the irony of these textual references. Irony, according to one pragmatic definition, involves words being mentioned as though they were being used.(15) Beckett's borrowings from Watt are ironic in this way; Beckett mentions H. J. Watt's work and words but makes no more than apparent use of his compensatory notion of "common sense." Tracing Beckett's references to Watt, we find ourselves not so much scratching as polishing a well-worm surface...
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