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concept of distinguishable worth. He is engaged in a uselessness that defies the expectations of evolutionary beasts. He is engaged in the process of becoming nothing.
In manifesting such a character, Beckett raises some of the same questions that pile migration hopes to raise. Why, for instance, does it matter how many zinc products we possess? Why don't we get to dance bare-footed anymore? Where could you possibly plug in another broadband connection? What will you do with your old car/reclining chair? Who is in charge of making sure that we forget to sleep in perpendicular lines? When will change become so rapid that it freezes plastic? How are we going to live another day in this planet full of fake decisions and imaginary processes when there are waterfalls of hidden thought jumping beneath our feet? Similarly, Watt is a novel of confused dislocations and deranged disclosings. Beckett cyclically compounds mundane variables upon themselves until a pile of impractically coerced words surrenders to the dead static of a forgotten pile. Reading pages upon pages of the possible permutations of furniture arrangement in Mr. Knott's bedroom, the style of footwear sported by Mr. Knott, or the manner in which committee members may most efficiently look at one another, Beckett brings to light the galvanized stasis that imitates movement in capitalism (see Underwater Fireworks chapter). At the same time he is highlighting the often overlooked stasis of an environment – like that of a pile. Watt stagnates. Watt is the unmoved pile, a mirror forever reflecting its own uselessness.
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Watt makes no judgments about the reality presented to him. He bases his analysis of all he encounters upon the criteria at his immediate disposal. In this sense he is absurdly logical, or rather a confused logician. In his world everything is a unique and separate entity. There are no pre-conceived notions. Connections to parallel or perpendicular stimuli do not register within the mind of Watt. His world isn't connected along a linear matrix of correspondence. Cause and effect, causation and correlation – these concepts are foreign if not altogether inverted in the eyes of Watt. Often Watt is unsure what he has encountered, in these cases he makes no inferences of worth, just lives with the ambiguity of an uncertain world.
In the last pages of Watt, a fleeting entity begs of Watt, “Who are you, what do you want?” Watt can no better answer this question than capitalism can provide sustenance and equality for the 6.3 billion curious entities that populate our ionosphere. Watt is the ultimate individual. His outlook on the world shields him form the subjective arrows of the outside. His experiences are not unique in that they are dissimilar to men of his particular aspect, but in the way he internalizes them. Watt holds dear the fragility of meaning that describes so much of the world that we are not allowed to control. Under our current economic system, fragility is seen as weakness. Something fragile is liable to break, or so goes the common understanding of the word fragile. Rather than thinking of a broken object as irreparably damaged or harmed, though, we may think of it as an entirely new object, a re-purposed object. In this sense the fragile object is not a liability, but an asset, quickly adaptable to change. Understanding that fragile objects are apt to frequent |
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