FATIGUE AND DISGUST: The Addenda to "Watt"

Author(s): Chris Ackerley

Source: Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui, Vol. 2, BECKETT IN THE 1990s (1993), pp. 175-
188
Published by: Brill
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25781164
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 FATIGUE AND DISGUST:
The Addenda to Watt

The 37 Addenda to Watt represent, according to Beckett, precious and

illuminating material, and only fatigue and disgust prevented their
incorporation into the text.1 More prosaically, most of them represent
material considered by Beckett at some point in the genesis of Watt, but
partially deleted; and their partial presence is a problem. There have
been two significant studies of the Addenda, neither fully satisfactory. J.
M. Coetzee's 1969 Ph.D. dissertation offers a stylistic analysis of
Beckett's revisions, and is particularly valuable for its exact description
of the manuscripts and details of composition, but his treatment of the
Addenda is incidental;2 while Rubin Rabinovitz's "The Addenda to
Watt" (1984), though excellent in its elucidation of obscure literary and
philosophical references, takes no account of manuscript evidence.3
This study will recognise the best of both its predecessors, yet insist on
a theme that neither explores: Beckett's deliberate use of the Addenda to
evoke echoes of Watt's past and the stages of its composition.
For Watt is not a New Critical well-wrought urn. More simply, Watt
is not a pot. It is not. It is full of holes ? gaps and hiatuses, lacunae,
deliberate errors and contradictions. As Doherty has said, such puzzles
are meant to make the reader "less and less secure in any kind of
certainty... about the novel."4 So, a teaser presents itself: in an age in
which postmodernism is rampant, with a text so deliberately violated,
how can an approach to the purpose via discarded drafts restore
integrity? The inclusion of the Addenda within Watt precludes any
possibility of a finished or determinate quality to the novel as text, and
the Addenda themselves offer a challenge to the reader analogous to that
faced by Watt as he confronts the mystery of Mr. Knott. That is, they
invite us as readers and critics (that term of abuse in Waiting for Godot)
to partake in the ancient labours of witness and exegesis, knowing that
(like Watt) when we apply our scholarly blowlamps to open up the text
we may find it empty. I see no way around the problem, save to
acknowledge the critical urge ? the rational spirit, Beckett calls it in
Murphy, the need to scratch the spot that itches ? towards
interpretation, to try (like Watt) to get to the bottom of the mystery.
The Addenda, in relation to the text called Watt, thus constitute an
enigma of the deepest kind: they are the fossil records that bear witness
to earlier states of creation, and which, like all the records of the rocks,
pose insoluble problems for creationists. Perhaps, the more that is
learned of accidentals, the more substantial the mystery that remains?

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Or, to vary the adage, can the ring about the bath-tub be a sign of
significant absence? In a spirit of scepticism, then, I present my
findings.
Although the 37 Addenda may be divided into many categories,5 I
propose to deal with them in the order of the final text, treating each as
a separate entry but trying to sustain an ongoing argument. Most of the
information derives from the Beckett materials in the Harry Ransom
Humanities Center at the University of Texas at Austin, as catalogued
by Carlton Lake.6 I use his 157 to refer to the six magnificent
notebooks that constitute the autograph manuscript of Watt, and 158 for
the original typescript. References to "Coetzee" and "Rabinovitz" are
to the dissertation and chapter cited earlier; and those to the "Murphy
Notebook" are to the eclectic and mostly unnumbered pages of a large
notebook (MS 3000) held in the Samuel Beckett Archive at Reading
University.
***

ttl. her married life one long drawsheet: "Le

mondaine, of Enniskillen"; mother of James Quin
Knott), and wife to Alexander; a faded and d
passes away after the death of her fourth Willy, h
of sausage-poisoning), "half-heartedly pressing a c
what was left of her bosom, in the bed in which e
life appearing to her in retrospect as one long dra
the great regret of all who had known her." (1
drawsheet, e.g., that of a natal bed, is a sheet that
disturbing the patient; of Mrs. Quin's eleven ch
little Leda, Willy, Agnes, Lawrence, Prisca, Zo
James is the sole survivor.
#2. Art Conn O'Connery : the literary forbear of A
the "Second picture in Erskine's room" (see
Alexander Quin (in early drafts the picture was in
His premature death at the age of 81 either from h
on by the downfall of Parnell or of a surfeit of cor
was a loss to Rathgar (157, 2.7 & 158, 91-93). W
denotes a standard back-drop to a portrait, it is als
and champagne (Rabinovitz 156). Rabinovitz als
Chinnery (d. 1852) resided in Dublin during th
painted portraits and landscapes, while John J
portraitist active in Dublin between 1846 and 1858.

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#3. the Master of the Leopardstown Halflengths: the Master is one
Matthew David McGilligan, priest and artist, whose dissertation on the
Mus Eventratus McGilligani (the rat that swallowed the consecrated
host) appears in transubstantiated form in the novel (28). Sent to the
Eternal City, McGilligan pursues his priestly vocation until, in the
Doria Gallery, his eyes fall upon an object that opens them, "the
celebrated painting by Gerald of the Nights of a girl in her nightdress
catching a flea by candlelight." No less than Stephen Dedalus, he
becomes an Artist and a Master: of Leopardstown (location of the
Dublin race course), "perhaps because he daily passed the gates on the
way down from his house at Sandyford Cross to the offlicense at the
level crossing, and again on his way home"; and of half-lengths, or
portraits showing only the upper portion of the body, though at the time
of his unfortunate demise he was moving towards longer forms (157,
2.7 & 158, 93-107).
The story of how the Master got to Rome is worth the telling:

(...) the following question. If a rat maw or nibble a consecrated

host, does he gnaw or nibble the Reed Body, or does he not? If he
does not,what has become of the Body? If he does, what shall be done
with the rat?
To the first of these questions McGilligan replied that the rat did
indeed gnaw or nibble the Real Body, and this conclusion he
supported with quotations from the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas,
Saint Bonaventura, Peter Lombard, Alexander of Hales, the Four
Great Doctors of the West, the Four Great Doctors of the
Middle-West, Sanchez, Suarez, Henno, Soto, Diana, Concina, Devis,
O'Dea and others.
To the second question McGilligan contented himself with simply
replying that the Body being consubstantial with the Host, as much of
the former was in the rat as he had gnawed or nibbled of the latter,
and as much in the latter as he had not gnawed or nibbled thereof.
To the third question McGilligan replied that the rat, when caught,
should be pursued with all the rigour of the canon laws and pontifical
decrees, which delicacy forbade him to formulate, and whose
elucidation required a scholarship not possessed by him, & only to be
obtained, in his humble opinion, by a long period of tranquil study in
the Eternal City.
Pressed by a deputation composed of four lay coadjutors and a
professor oi the three vows to overcome his scruples and reveal the
difficulties that rose up in his mind in connexion with the chastisement
of the rat, McGilligan replied that he craved leave to withdraw to his
cell and there consider the matter with prayer and fasting. This being
readily ranted, McGilligan disappeared into his cell with a stale
turnover and a jug of fresh water, and there considered the matter
with such despatch that two hours later he was able to gratify the
deputation with the following statement: "Gintlmin, afther navin
considthered the matter from ivery angle, Oi foind its me jewity tew

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 lay befower yis dem pints what rus up in me moind apops de
conclewision of me pore little taysis, doantcha know, swaypin tew
wan soide aich an ivery consideration owenly wan, viz., obayjence
tew me higherarsical sewpayriers, an thrustin yis'll kape me in moind,
doantcha know, varbe saypiens, viddylikeit:
"Pint wan: Wance yis'v cotta howlt on de rat, howwa yis ter know
wuddit be de roight rat yis'v cotta howlt on, ower wuddent it.
"Pint tew: Sewposin tis de roight wan, wud it be me jewity tew
adouer de bitta d'host what he's afther swallyin up.
"Pint thray: Sewposin tis me jewity so tew dew, what are yis tew dew
wid d'ould rat? Are yis tew burren him? Thin yis burren de Rale
Body. Are vis t'open him up an levvy it owit de bist way yis can? For
tew putt it back in de kieboworium, ower fer tew et it yerself, seeance
teenent?
"Pint fower: Sewposin yis doant ketch a howlt on d'ould rat unthil
afther what he's bane an - afther what he's bane - bane an done his
doolies, purissimavirgoemendacormeumetcarnemmeam, thin whire are
yis? Wuddit be me jewity -"
"McGilligan," said the 3-Vow-Man, "not another word, not a word
more. Join the Roman Holiday under the conduct of Brother
Carameluelis, departure Monday, Westland Row, 8 a.m."
#4. who may tell the tale: the words were once attributed to the author's
executrix, Madame Pomedur de Videlay-Chmoy ("Pompette"), 69ter
Rue de Vieux Port, Cette; a form formerly divine, recalling, in old age
and in solitude, the tale of an old has-been who might-have-been (157,
2.41 & 158, 119).
#5. judicious Hooker's heat-pimples: in the early drafts, "we" (the
narrator) meets Arsene and Eamon at the foot of the stairs, in a dark
passage-way (see #37); and there, the usual polite forms of greeting
having been exchanged, they remain some time with mutual affection
and content. Arsene comments: "You said that what warmed you to
Hooker was his heat-pimples and his habit of never looking a person
straight in the face, and that for these endearing traits you were willing
to forgive him the rest." (157, 2.65 & 158, 135). The reference (noted
by Rabinovitz 164) is to Izaak Walton's The Life of Mr. Richard
Hooker, the Author of those Learned Books of the Laws of Ecclesiastical
Polity (London: 1675); in which Walton, having sung the praises of
"Judicious Hooker," suggests that visitors to the Parsonage of Bourne
might find: "an obscure, harmless man, a man in poor Cloaths, his
Loyns usually girt in a course Gown, or Canonical Coat; of a mean
stature, and stooping, and yet more lowly in the thoughts of his Soul;
his Body being worn out, not with Age, but Study, and Holy
Mortification; and his Face full of Heat-pimples, begot by his unactivity
and sedentary life."

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#6. limits to part's equality with whole: the conversation noted above
takes the following turn (158, 145), the point being that the
mathematical relationship between life, experience and the lamentable
tale of error, folly, waste and ruin works for 0 and 1 but for nothing
else, but thereby confounds the Euclidean axiom that the whole is
greater than the part. I cite but a part of a greater whole:

"Then in your view" we said, "the lamentable tale of error, folly,

waste and ruin equals life equals life plus experience equals life plus
twice experience equals life plus thrice experience equals life plus
ninetynine times experience equals (if we face the facts squarely in the
face) any number of lives less one times experience equals any
number of lives less nothing times the sum total of two lives and any
old number of lives less one times experience all divided by two.
How awful." "Horrible" said Arsene, "horrible."
"And the prophetic strain?" we said.
"Down the drain" said Arsene.
"Or worse still" we said, "equals life equals life less experience
equals life times experience squared equals life times experience
cubed equals life raised to the power of any number of lives less one
equals life times the difference of experience raised to the power of
any number of lives and unity all divided by the difference of
experience and unity all divided by one." Arsene said nothing.
Surely you dont mean to suggest that" we said. "That would be
too appalling to contemplate."
"No said Arsene, raising his head and hanging it, "no, I wouldn't
go as far as that."
"There are limits to the part's equality with the whole" we said.
"Overstep them and chaos is bound to ensue."

#7. dead calm (...) to naught gone: the conversation then turns to "the
unconscious mind! What a subject for a short story," and the attempt to
go "perhaps deep down in those palaeozoic profounds, midst mammoth
Old Red Sandstone phalli and Carboniferous pudenda... into the
pre-uterine... the agar-agar... impossible to describe... anguish... close
eyes, all close, great improvement, pronounced improvement" (157,
2.81 & 158, 149). This is the Murphy experience of non-Newtonian
motion, the Malone experience of great tumult followed by calm,
present also at the birth of Watt.
#8. Bid us sigh (...): as Lawrence Harvey first noted,7 these lines are
from James Thomson's "To Fortune," but as used by Beckett they
anticipate the paean to the Seasons in the novel (47). His major change
is to drop Thomson's question mark, and thus turn the quatrain into an
imperative; as Rabinovitz notes (165), the speaker now seems one
weary of life and the world. In the drafts (157, 2.63 & 158, 135) the
verse gives a pause to the conversation between Arsene, "we," and

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 Eamon, "a situation delightful in itself, but tedious in every other
respect."
#9. Watt learned to accept, etc.: on the final page of Notebook 5 (157,
182), Beckett jotted down as a reminder to himself a number of details
to be included in the novel, though in practice none was, directly.
Instead, several (#9-#13 here) were chosen for enigmatic reasons to
become part of the Addenda. As Rabinovitz points out (163), this one
has to do with Watt's growing ability to accept the concept of
nothingness.
if 10. Note that Arsene's declaration gradually came back to Watt:
Beckett's instruction to himself, as recorded at the end of Notebook 5.
It perhaps marks the decision to have the tale told erratically through
Watt, a perspective not originally present.
#77. One night Watt goes on roof: this he does not do in the novel, but
in the drafts (157, 2.103 & 158, 81) Quin's house is described: "There
was a ground floor, a first floor, and a second floor. And access to the
roof was provided by a skylight in its midst, for those who wished to go
on the roof." The suggestion is similar to that Dream of Fair to
Middling Women, where Belacqua looks up to the night sky stretched
like a skin, and dreams of his head tearing a great rip in the taut sky, of
climbing out above the deluge, into a quiet zone above the nightmare.
#72. Watt snites: the word derives from the Anglo-Saxon snyton, to pull
or blow the nose. Beckett wrote in the manuscript: "Part IV. Watt
snites in his toilet paper." (157, 5.182). The word is eliminated from
the description of Watt's digital emunction (234-35).
ft 13. Meals. Every day Mr. Knott's bowl at a different place. Watt
marks with chalk: the drafts comment: "Out of sheer Schadenfreude
simply to annoy the table, Quin changed his seat at each repast. He
even carried this disposition so far, on days of ill-humour, as to change
his seat between courses." (157, 1.35 & 158, 23). Beckett has changed
"Quin" to "Knott," and introduced Watt by name. Watt's activity with
the chalk may reflect Horace's "Creta, an carbone notandi?" (Are they
to be marked with chalk or charcoal?), i.e., is he sane or mad? (Satires
2.3. 246). Quin's erratic ways anticipate the equally mysterious moves
of the later Mr. Knott.
#14. the maddened prizeman: in the novel, Arsene, who, but for the
boil on his bottom (46) might have been the recipient of the Madden
Prize at Trinity College. The bequest, named after its donor, Samuel
Madden (1696-1765), awards a cash prize to scholars who place well in
Fellowship examinations (Rabinovitz 164). In the drafts, Quin had a
butler-valet, Erskine, "pleasantly corrupted into foreskin by his closer
companions, and he was a Madden Prize-man, still facetiously known in

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 the academic circles which he had so long adorned as the Maddened
Prizeman" (157, 1.85 & 158, 67). Still earlier, the valet who was a
Madden prize-man had been named Arthur (157, 1.29 & 158, 8).
#75. the sheet of dark water...: in the earliest drafts, a silence in the
midst of a conversation between Quin and his valet, Arthur, concerning
Quin's difficulties in finding his way about the house, in particular the
location of the lavatories (cf. Watt, 203). Quin, about to descend the
stairs and meet a strange man (named Hackett), is listening to the empty
echo of his own words and the nothingness behind them (157, 1.31 &
158, 19).
#16 & #19. never been properly born... for all the good that frequent
departures out of Ireland had done him, he might just as well have
stayed there: testifying to one of the earliest impulses behind the novel,
Quin's sense of the nothingness of his own being (157, 1.85 & 158,
65):
The plain fact of the matter seems to be, that Quin had never been
properly born.
The five dead little brothers support this view, as do the five dead
little sisters.
His relatively great age, and comparative freedom from grave bodily
disease, confirm this conception.
For all the good that frequent departures out of Ireland had done him,
he might as well have stayed there.
The sentiment is one of Beckett's favourites: that from Caldern's La
vida es sueo: "Pues el delito major / Del hombre es haber nacido" (the
greatest sin of mankind is to have been born).8 It echoes his sense of
the unborn embryonic self, that etre manque of which he spoke to
Lawrence Harvey;9 and his fascination with the comment made by Jung
after one of the Tavistock lectures (1935), concerning a young girl
whose dreams of death revealed that "She had never been born
entirely."10
#17. the foetal soul is full grown: the themes of the unborn soul and
nothingness were more explicitly continued in the drafts (157, 1.71 &
158, 55): "The feeling of nothingness, born in Quin with the first beat
of his heart, if not before, died in him with the last, and not before.
And between these acts it waned not, neither did it wax, but its strength
at its beginning was as its strength at its end, and its strength at its
middle as its strength at its beginning. The foetal soul is full-grown
(Cp. Cangiamila's Sacred Embryology and the De Synodo Diocesana,
Bk.7, Chap.4, Section 6, of Pope Benedict XIV)." It is doubtful that
Beckett had read Francesco Cangiamila's Embriologia sacra (1745).

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Cangiamila (1702-63) was a Sicilian theologian, destined to obscurity
had not Benedict XIV cited with approval his theories on the foetal
soul. And it is equally unlikely that Beckett had read Benedict's De
Synodo diocesana libri tredecim (1748), a summa of ecclesiastical
traditions originating from the Synod of 1725, for his learned reference
is completely wrong: the reference to Cangiamila and to the problem of
uterine baptism may be found at XL.vii.xiii in that great tome, and
further discussion at VII.v.iv, in a tone not unlike that of the Messrs. de
la Sorbonne in Tristram Shandy I.xx. This pedantry is excessive, but
may illustrate the danger of apparently exact details leading into blind
alleys ? which is precisely the experience of Watt.
#18. sempiternal penumbra: the most celebrated use of "sempiternal" is
the "rosa sempiterna" of the Paradiso 30.124, but Dante uses it to
describe the light of Paradise in 1.76; in the drafts, the word is applied
ironically to the description of Mr. Quin's coal-hole.
#20. a round wooden table: this round mahogany table, described
extensively in the drafts, takes its point from its analogy to Quin's
round bed, which survives into the novel (207); the link being that first
in the bed and later, as a child under the table, "Quin began the fatal
journey towards the light of day" (158, 25).
#27. zitto! zitto! das nur das Publikum nichts merkel: It. & Ger. "Hush,
hush, so that the public may notice nothing." Noted by Rabinovitz (165)
as deriving from Schopenhauer's Uber die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes
vom zureichenden Grunde (Concerning the Quadruple Roots of the
Statement of Sufficient Ground), the context being a tirade against
German academics. This dictum is not noticeable in the drafts of Watt.
#22. on the waste, beneath the sky (...) Watt was rooted to the spot: a
passage that goes back directly to the sense of Nothingness (the sky
above, the waste below) which was Quin's first awareness and of which
his life partook. This Addendum thus expresses the primal scene of the
novel to be. The passage exists almost in this form in both manuscript
and typescript (157, 1.77 & 158, 61), the main differences being that
Quin/Watt is less the centre of consciousness (Coetzee 97), and his
relation to his soul-scape is introduced differently:

The something in whose midst this nothingness was situate consisted

of two things: the thing above, and the thing beneath. And the
distinction that Quin made bet following: the one was above, and die
other was beneath, Quin.
That before him, behind him and on all sides of him, there was
something else, something that was neither suprajacent sky nor
subadjacent waste, was not felt by Quin...

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 #23. Watt will not/abate one jot: the poem exists in the typescript (158,
205), in a form virtually identical save for initial capitalization, the
substitution of "Johnny" for "Watt," and the phrase "Naught's habitat"
in line 7 ("Knott" had not yet materialised). At this stage, the narrator
was a small man called Johnny, who visits Quin's establishment and
converses with Arsene in the hall (the lines of the eventual novel begin
to be discernible). The record of this meeting was to be published in a
book called A Clean Old Man, destined to become Book of the Week in
2080, the praises of which are sung in the leap-year song, "Fifty two
point two eight five seven one four two," in the novel transferred to the
indifferent mixed choir (34-35). For a good account of the poem as
metaphor of Watt's mental journey, see Rabinovitz (151-52).
#24. die Merde hat mich wieder: a parody of Goethe's "die Erde hat
mich wieder" (the earth has me again), from Faust 1.784, as Faust
listens to the choirs of angels and disciples, and hears their summons to
return to life. The macaronic "Merde" is recorded in the Murphy
Notebook, in a series of entries dating from 2/10/36, but does not
appear in the Watt manuscripts, though its link to both ditches and
heavenly choirs is obvious.
#25. pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt: translated by Rabinovitch
(166) as: "let those who used our words before us perish"; and
attributed to St. Jerome (his commentary on Ecclesiastes), who in turn
took it from Aelius Donatus (a grammarian of the fourth century), who
may have based it on a line from Terence. Beckett probably found the
phrase in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, attributed to an anonymous
author, but it does not appear in the drafts of Watt.
#26. Second picture in Erskine's room...: the portrait is that of Mr
Alexander Quin, father of James (see #2), and is presented this way,
with minor variations, in the drafts (157, 2.9-11 & 158, 93-95). Its
significance within the novel has been discussed by Heath Lees, who
shows how the manuscript change from the first inversion of C major to
the second creates the effect of "faint cacophony of remote harmonics
stealing over dying accord."11 The fragment also has the crucial
function of suggesting that Quin/Knott, like all around him, may equally
be serial (see #29). The major change from drafts to novel concerns the
movement of the painting from Quin's drawing-room to Erskine's
bedroom, apparently contradicting the observation (128) that the only
object of note therein was the enigmatic picture of the circle and the dot
(its dot?).
#27. like a thicket flower unrecorded: this echo of Gray's Elegy, "Full
many a flower is born to blush unseen," appears in the drafts (157,
3.155 & 158, 298) as part of an elaborate discussion about the mating

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 possibilities between Irish Setters and Palestine Retrievers, to produce
exactly the right kind of famished dog; leading to an enormous spectacle
mounted (as it were) by the Lynch family, charging spectators for
admission; and climaxing in speculations as to where such customs may
have originated (Eire? Pelasgia? the Hardy country?); only to conclude:
"Nothing is known, as far as can be ascertained... Did it, as age
succeeded age, and misery changed name, die only to revive, revive
only to die, perhaps several, perhaps many, perhaps very many times?
Or in unbroken sequence never cease, but in its being steadfastly stand
fast, with greater vigour now and now with less, somewhere eternally
and never nowhere, from its inception to the present time, and like a
thicket flower unrecorded?" The final phrase remains, appropriately, as
token of an episode that must blush unseen.
#28. Watt's Davus complex (morbid dread of sphinxes): another detail
cited in the Murphy Notebook which does not appear in the drafts of
Watt. From Terence's Andria, 194, where a slave quips: "Duos sum,
non Odipus" (I am Davus, not Oedipus), as he feigns ignorance of
amorous matters. Rabinovitz notes (159) that Beckett had earlier used
the phrase in a review of the poetry of Denis Devlin (transition 27
[April-May, 1938] 289-90), attacking "the go-getters, the gerry
manders, Davus and the morbid dread of sphinxes, solution clapped on
problem like a snuffer on a candle, the great crossword public on all its
planes." The allusion thus forms a defence of the enigmatic in art,
hinting at what Schopenhauer often called "the riddle of the world."
#29. One night Arthur came to Watt's room: perhaps the most important
of the Addenda, in that it encapsulates many of the earliest details from
the Watt notebooks and touches lightly upon the novel's central themes.
The episode, with minor variations from manuscript to typescript, is
present in all the early drafts (157, 1.21-25 & 158, 11-13). It deals with
an encounter between Quin and an old man in Quin's garden, and
incorporates some of the dialogue later given to Mr. Hackett in the
novel. A revised version, with the crucial final addition of the reference
to the Knott family and its serial nature, exists as part of a later
typescript (157, 5 n.p.). The passage anticipates Watt's encounter with
Knott in the garden (145-46); permits the wonderful joke about the
passing shrub, or bush, which proves to be a hardy laurel; and offers a
further arabesque upon Beckett's favourite theme of relative
immortality: that expressed in Proust (21) as the whisky's grudge
against the decanter, and in "Draff as the words of the rose to the
rose, that "No gardener has died, comma, within rosaceous
memory."12 The serial theme, which was to be so central to everything
in Watt, was a surprisingly late development.

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 #30. Watt looking as though nearing end of course of injections of
sterile pus: this cheerful vision appears nowhere in the notes or
manuscripts, but may echo the innocculation of anthropoid apes hinted
at in Murphy.13
#31. das fruchtbare Bathos der Erfahrung: Ger. "the fruitful bathos of
experience." The sentiment derives from Kant's Prolegomena zu einer
jeden zukiinftigen Metaphysik die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten kdnnen
("Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to
Present Itself as a Science"), in which Kant attacks a reviewer who had
misunderstood his earlier work. Kant uses "Bathos" in its Greek sense
of a deep place, in contrast with "High towers, and metaphysically tall
men like them, round both of which there is commonly a lot of wind";
and suggests that the citation can easily be misread (as Beckett perhaps
intended) in terms of the more usual Greek and German "Pathos," or
suffering (Rabinovitz 166 & 173). Kant is arguing that only in
experience is truth, but in the Murphy Notebook he is associated with
the tag: "omnis determinatio est negatio" (every determination is a
negation), which may point towards Watt's via negativa.
#32. faede hunc mundum intravi, anxius vixi, perturbatus egredior,
causa causarum miserere mei: L. "in filth I entered this world, anxious
I lived, troubled I go out of it, cause of causes have mercy on me."
Said by Beckett in the Murphy Notebook to be the dying words of
Aristotle; as John Pilling first noted, the source of the observation is
Lemprire's Classical Dictionary, under the entry for "Aristotle"14; the
unusual form ("faede" for "foede") appears there. As Rabinovitz notes
(164), the "cause of causes" suggests Aristotle's prime mover.
#33. change all the names: in the manuscript (157, 3.62), the
instruction is written: "Walterize selon p. 81," i.e., change all the
names, e.g., from "Walter" to "Vincent"; and in the passage that
follows Beckett does so. The reference to p. 81 is to p. 162 in the
Austin foliation, Beckett numbering only the rectos of his notebooks.
The note thus encapsulates a moment of metamorphosis in the history of
the text.
#34. descant heard by Watt on way to station (IV): there is no mention
of such a descant in the novel. Originally (despite the "IV"), it was
included in the drafts at a much earlier point, and attributed to a
"Distant Mixed Fifth-rate Choir" (157, 2.34-35 & 158, 115), as heard
by those waiting in Quin's passage-way for anything "of note." In the
Notebook, Beckett also plays with a version in French.
#35. parole non ci appulcro: It. "I will add no words to embellish it."
As Susan Senneff first noted,15 this derives from Dante's Inferno 7.60,
the irony being that Virgil, by describing the corruption of avaricious

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 cardinals, is unable to remain silent. In the drafts (157, 3.84), the
phrase appeared near a song (or duet) to be sung (or chanted) by
Erskine and Watt (or Johnny, as he then was) after they have prepared
the poss of Mr. Knott (as by then he was). And the words of that song,
so bravely sung, are the celebrated ones from Voltaire's Candide: "O
che sciagura d'essere senza coglioni!" (oh what a shame, to be without
balls), as said by the eunuch before the beautiful maiden. The sense of
the writer as eunuch, yet unable to keep silent, is perhaps implied.
#36. Threne heard by Watt: one of the few Addenda with a direct
relation to the final text; cf. the footnote on p. 33: "(1) What, it may be
enquired, was the music of this threne? What at least, it may be
demanded, did the soprano sing?" Senneff analyses the "annoying
monotony" of the threne in terms of its musically nonsensical qualities
and in relation to Watt's movement from naught to silence, his
severance from the world of meaningful sounds (Senneff 144-49). As
Heath Lees notes, the appearance of the music in the Addenda is itself
tortuous, some editions (Olympia, Grove and Italian) presenting the
complete sentence of introduction with the music; others (Calder,
Swedish and Spanish) retaining the sentence but omitting the music; yet
others (Minuit and German) omitting both; and the Norwegian
translation retaining both but "correcting" mistakes of key and
time-signature (Lees 7). No music appears in the galleys, and in the
complete versions fatigue and disgust may have inhibited the rendering
of all four parts.
#37. No symbols where none intended: I should like to jump backwards,
to the place in the text at which Watt thinks about Arsene (80), and
wonders what has become of the duck. The duck. The question that
every reader who is not a gentle skimmer must surely ask is, what
duck? This is the first and only mention of such a bird:

Watt thought sometimes of Arsene. He wondered what had become of

the duck. He had not seen her leave the kitchen with Arsene. But then
he had not seen Arsene leave the kitchen either. And as the bird was
nowhere to be found, in the house or the garden, Watt supposed she
must have slipped away, with her master.

This is a truly magnificent fossil, in a state of perfect preservation ? a

reference explicable only if one goes back to the manuscripts (158,
185), to the encounter between the narrator (Johnny Watt, who refers to
himself as "we") and two bipeds: one featherless, a maddened
prize-man named Arsene; the other feathered, an India Runner Duck
named Eamon (see #5-#8). A long conversation ensues, in the darkened
hallway of Mr. Quin's house, of which this is the conclusion: on the

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uttering of the sentiment, "Each in his own way, all are in the dark," a
match is struck, and burns bravely, until its fire reaches the fingers and
it is dropped; whereupon "it continued for a little while bravely to burn,
till it could burn no longer, bravely or otherwise. Then it went out."
But in that brief light, things are revealed: "the passage and the stairs,
all as we had left them, and the dark in which we were, each in his or
her own way, and Eamon and Arsene and the passage and the stairs and
the bells and the newell ? and we." It is all too easy: a little light in
the big dark; a feathered and featherless biped; a dark passage;
purgatorial stairs; the hints of eucharist in distant bells, rung by Watt to
tell Quin that his meal is ready, or by Quin, to tell Watt that he might
clear away. But "we" remains in the dark. In a context so insistently
demanding symbolic interpretation, in the presence of details so often
used to translate consciousness into meaning, the only thing Watt can
say is: "No symbols where none intended."
This is indeed an Addendum, a final word, one that embodies both its
origins and its own contradictions, and thus goes to the very heart of
the novel. According to St. Augustine, we cannot know what God is ?
we can only know what He is not. Watt's ancient error is to presume
otherwise. And what of us, as readers? Our way of knowing what is
not, logically implies the necessity of knowing, so that in turn one may
know what is not. This impossible paradox, I believe (quia absurdum
est), is built into that final assertion about non-intended symbols, into all
the Addenda, and into the novel itself, in that the text provokes us into
grappling with it symbolically, rationally, even as it mocks our attempts
to do so, our quest ? for what?
Chris Ackerley

NOTES

1. Samuel Beckett, Watt (New York: Grove Press, 1959), p. 247.

2. J. M. Coetzee, "The English Fiction of Samuel Beckett: An Essay in Stylistic

Analysis," diss., U of Texas at Austin, 1969. Many of the details concerning
Watt were published in "The Manuscript Revisions of Beckett's Watt,"
Journal of Modern Literature 2 (1972): 472-80.

3. Rubin Rabinovitz, "The Addenda to Watt," Ch. 11 of The Development of

Samuel Beckett's Fiction (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1984), pp. 151-75. An
earlier and thinner version of the chapter was published in Samuel Beckett: The
Art of Rhetoric, ed. Edouard Morot-Sir (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P,
1976), pp. 211-23.

4. Francis Doherty, Samuel Beckett (London: Hutchinson, 1971), p. 19.

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 5. The different organisation of the Addenda in the galley proofs of Watt (at
Washington University, St. Louis) suggests that the rough grouping is more
important than the particular order (saving the final "No symbols where none
intended"). Beckett indicated on the proofs the final sequence of the "textes,"
and only then added the introductory footnote ("The following precious and
illuminating material..."). In this essay I have numbered the fragments from
#1 to #37 in the published sequence, and have resisted the temptation to note
that 37 is the smallest integer not specifically mentioned in the Bible.

6. No Symbols Where None Intended: a Catalogue of Books, Manuscripts, and

Other Material Relating to Samuel Beckett in the Collections of the Humanities
Research Center, selected and described by Carlton Lake (Humanities
Research Center: U of Texas at Austin, 1984.)

7. Lawrence Harvey, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton: Princeton UP,
1970), p. 391.

8. Quoted from Beckett's essay on Proust (1931; rpt. London: John Calder,
1965) 67, but derived in turn from Schopenhauer's The World as Will and
Representation (1819); a continuity that might be described as: Calder ...
Schopenhauer. Proust .. Beckett.

9. Harvey, p. 247; as cited by Rabinovitz, p. 168.

10. Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
Jovanovich, 1978), p. 209.

11. Heath Lees, "Watt: Music, Tuning and Tonality" (Journal of Beckett Studies
9, 1984): 5-24; an article which offers fascinating insights into the paradoxes
of Watt.

12. As has been frequently pointed out (e.g., Rabinovitz, p. 154), this sentiment at
the end of "Draff" (More Pricks than Kicks [1934; rpt. London: Calder and
Boyars, 1970], p. 204) derives from Diderot's "Le reve d'Alembert," in
which the rose acknowledges the immortality of the gardener ? as perceived
by her limited vision.

13. Samuel Beckett, Murphy (New York: Grove Press, 1938), p. 5.

14. John Pilling, Samuel Beckett (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976), p. 79.

15. Susan Senneff, "Song and Music in Beckett's Watt" (Modern Fiction Studies
10, 1964): 144.

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