Σάμιουελ Μπέκετ- Watt

In the summer of 1942, Samuel Beckett and his partner Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil fled their apartment in the German-occupied city of Paris. After more than a month on the run, including stints sleeping in parks and hiding in trees from Nazi patrols, they wound up in the town of Roussillon d’Apt, in the unoccupied zone. The couple had reason to fear for their lives. In Paris, both had been active members of a Resistance cell known as Gloria, which was compromised by the Nazis. Numerous members of the cell were arrested by the Gestapo, including Beckett’s close friend Alfred Péron, who was interrogated and eventually sent to Mauthausen concentration camp, in Austria. He died two days after the camp was liberated, in 1945.

Roussillon, in the rugged southeast of France, was a good place to hide, remote and inaccessible to heavy military vehicles. It was also relatively tolerant of refugees. Beckett and Dechevaux-Dumesnil rented quarters in a house on the edge of town and proceeded to wait out the war. It was a long and difficult wait. Beckett, prone to anxiety, suffered a mental breakdown. His biographers disagree on its severity, but there is no doubt that the trauma of his friends’ arrests, his escape from Paris, and his separation from the artistic and intellectual life in the capital—compounded by his guilt at being away from his family, especially his mother, during a time of war—all took a toll on him. Beckett passed his time playing chess, going for long walks, and working in a neighboring farmer’s fields in return for food. Later, he participated in low-level Resistance activity: storing munitions on his rented property and retrieving supplies and weapons dropped by Allied planes in the nearby mountains. He also labored on a novel, “Watt,” which he’d begun the previous year, in Paris, and which, he said, provided him “a means of staying sane.” Deirdre Bair, in her biography of Beckett, describes work on the novel as his “daily therapy.”

Beckett was thirty-six at the time, and perhaps best known in literary circles as one of James Joyce’s assistants. He had aided Joyce in the composition of “Finnegans Wake” and collaborated with Péron on a French translation of the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” section of the novel. His own literary production included a critical book on Proust, a collection of stories (“More Pricks Than Kicks”), and a novel, “Murphy,” which had garnered good reviews but modest sales. Once the war ended, Beckett would embark on the most productive and artistically significant decade of his career, writing “Waiting for Godot” and a trilogy of novels—“Molloy,” “Malone Dies,” and “The Unnameable.” These works are among the enduring expressions of the absurdity and estrangement of modern life. It can be argued that the seeds of that flowering were planted in “Watt,” and that those seeds were fertilized by Beckett’s experience of the war.

“Watt” seems to be the least loved and least read of Beckett’s major prose works, but I first lost myself in it more than a quarter of a century ago. I happened to be living in Paris when Beckett died, in 1989; an expatriate Irish friend, dismayed to learn that I was familiar only with “Waiting for Godot,” loaned me a copy of “Murphy,” setting off a yearlong immersion in Beckett’s books. “Watt” was among my favorites then, and I have found myself returning to it in recent months. The product of a brilliant mind reckoning with the brutal caprices of fascism, the novel now feels like much more than a curious entry in the Beckett canon. At its core, it’s an investigation into the fallibility of reason, an attempt to reckon with obscured truths and alternative facts.

Like much of Beckett’s work, “Watt” is funny and bleak and also uncompromising in its indifference to such readerly comforts as plot and accessibility. The novel follows its title character as he goes to work as a domestic servant in the home of Mr. Knott. Combine “Watt” and “Knott” and you get “whatnot,” and for some readers, assuredly, “Watt” will never be more than that: two hundred and fifty pages of mannered prose, showy vocabulary (“ataraxy,” “conglutination,” “exiguity”), syllogisms, lists, and Gertrude Stein-like repetitions and variations. But Beckett’s stylistic extravagance has a purpose: it illustrates the desperate lengths people can be pushed to by powers that behave arbitrarily, indifferent to human suffering.

Jon Michaud.

Διαβάζουν οι Jack Emery και Jack MacGowran.

[magdamagdacrysostomidou]

Προσωπικά μαλώνω με το τίποτα
Ασε με ανθρω πε μου δεν σε καταλαβαίνω.



Να πουμε Καληνύχτα τη λετε; Δεν αντέχω θελω να κοιμηθώ.
Καλο βραδυ καλο ξημέρωμα..❤

[Jiangos]

Τι να σε καταλάβουν ρε Σαμ? Αυτά είναι για ξυπνητούς φευγάτους!😉