26 June About 40 pages into Watt you can see Beckett finally becoming Beckett. Now I’m really glad I took the trouble to read his prose fiction from chronological beginning to this point.
The previous novel, Murphy, now suddenly recedes fast into the past, into the “beginnings” phase of the development of this writer.
In Watt the narrative voice starts a paragraph with “Haw!” twenty-eight pages into the book (I’m using the new Grove collected so it is page 199 of volume I). And with that Beckett as we now know him has emerged. And he has his narrator even mark, remark, upon the shift by talking at ridiculous length about a shift, a change.
We could be super dramatic in lit crit fashion and say Here, here it is, the precise moment when Modernism shifts into Post-Modernism. I’m late to Beckett so I’m sure plenty of critics have already opined thusly about this long passage.
But in what did the change consist? What was changed, and how? What was changed if my information is correct, was the sentiment that a change, other than a change of degree, had taken place. What was changed was existence off the ladder. Do not come down the ladder, Ifor, I haf taken it away. This I am happy to inform you is the reversed metamorphosis. The Laurel into Daphne. The old thing where it always was, back again. As when a man, having found at last what he sought, a woman for example, or a friend, loses it, or realizes what it is. And yet it is useless not to seek, not to want, for when you cease to seek you start to find, and when you cease to want, then life begins to ram her fish and chips down your gullet until you puke, and then the puke down your gullet until you puke the puke, and then the puked puke until you begin to like it. The glutton castaway, the drunkard in the desert, the lecher in prison, they are the happy ones. To hunger, thirst, lust, every day afresh and every day in vain, after the old prog, the old booze, the old whores, that’s the nearest we’ll ever get to felicity, the new porch and the very latest garden. (203/204).
Watt says he once nodded to Mr Ash in the midst of a snowstorm on Westminster Bridge, a man he merely knew only enough to nod to. Ash digs his watch out of layers and layers of clothing and says “Seventeen minutes past five exactly, as God is my witness, remember me to your wife (I never had one), . . . A moment later Big Ben (is that the name?) struck six. This in my opinion is the type of all information whatsoever, be it voluntary or solicited. If you want a stone, ask a turnover. If you want a turnover, ask a plumpudding.” (205)
Cheery advice these days as we listen to too much news about oil prices and the economy and the bombing of Iran between the election and the inauguration. Etc.
