 1953 Olympia Press edition | |
| Author | Samuel Beckett |
|---|---|
| Country | France |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Olympia Press |
Publication date | 1953 |
Watt was Samuel Beckett's second published novel in English. It was largely written on the run in the South of France during the Second World War and was first published by Maurice Girodias's Olympia Press in 1953.
In the summer of 1945, Beckett gave the manuscript of Watt to his friend Leslie Daiken, in the hope that Daiken could find a publisher for it, but he failed to do so. [1] In 1950, an extract was published in the Dublin literary review Envoy . [2] The work was finally published by Maurice Girodias's Olympia Press in 1953.
A French translation followed in 1968.
Narrated in four parts, the novel describes Watt's journey to, and within, Mr Knott's house, where he becomes the reclusive owner's manservant, replacing Arsene, who delivers a long valedictory monologue at the end of section one. In section two Watt struggles to make sense of life at Mr Knott's house, experiencing deep anxiety at the visit of the piano tuning Galls, father and son, and a mysteriously language-resistant pot, among other incidents. In section three, which has a narrator called Sam, Watt is in confinement, his language garbled almost beyond recognition, while the narrative veers off on fantastical tangents such as the story of Ernest Louit's account, to a committee at Beckett's old university, Trinity College, Dublin, of a research trip in the West of Ireland. The shorter fourth section shows Watt arriving at the railway station from which, in the novel's skewed chronology, he sets out on a journey to the institution he has already reached in section three.
The novel concludes with a series of addenda, whose incorporation into the text "only fatigue and disgust" have prevented, but which should nevertheless be "carefully studied". These take the form of concepts and fragments apparently intended for the novel but not used.
who may tell the tale
of the old man?
weigh absence in a scale?
mete want with a span?
the sum assess
of the world's woes?
nothingness
in words enclose?
The character of Ernest Louit is only one of many satirical digs at Ireland contained in the novel. Others include the recognisably south Dublin locale and respectable citizenry of the novel's opening, Dum Spiro, editor of the Catholic magazine Crux and a connoisseur of obscure theological conundrums, and Beckett's exasperation at the ban on contraception in the Irish Free State (as previously remarked on in his 1935 essay "Censorship in the Saorstat").
Watt is characterised by an almost hypnotic use of repetition, extreme deadpan philosophical humour, deliberately unidiomatic English such as Watt's "facultative" tram stop, and such items as a frogs' chorus, a notated mixed choir, and heavy use of ellipsis towards the end of the text. The final words of the novel are "no symbols where none intended".
Beckett himself said that Watt was written in Roussillon as "just an exercise" while he was waiting for the war to end.
The manuscript has been described by S. E. Gontarski (in The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, 2004) as "the white whale of Beckett studies, a mass of documentation that defies attempts to make sense of it."
Beckett was dissatisfied with the novel as originally published, spotting "over eighty spelling and typographical errors" as well as the omission of an entire sentence on page 19. [4] A corrected text edited by C. J. Ackerley was published by Faber and Faber in 2009. Ackerley removed many errors that appeared in previous editions.
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish novelist, playwright, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. A resident of Paris for most of his adult life, he wrote in both French and English.
Waiting for Godot is a play by Samuel Beckett in which two characters, Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo), engage in a variety of discussions and encounters while awaiting the titular Godot, who never arrives. Waiting for Godot is Beckett's translation of his own original French-language play, En attendant Godot, and is subtitled "a tragicomedy in two acts". The original French text was composed between 9 October 1948 and 29 January 1949. The premiere, directed by Roger Blin, was on 5 January 1953 at the Théâtre de Babylone, Paris. The English-language version premiered in London in 1955. In a poll conducted by the British Royal National Theatre in 1998/99, it was voted the "most significant English language play of the 20th century".
Alexander Whitelaw Robertson Trocchi was a Scottish novelist.
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The Ginger Man is a novel, first published in Paris in 1955, by J. P. Donleavy. The story is set in Dublin, Ireland, in post-war 1947. Upon its publication, it was banned both in Ireland and the United States of America by reason of obscenity.
Olympia Press was a Paris-based publisher, launched in 1953 by Maurice Girodias as a rebranded version of the Obelisk Press he inherited from his father Jack Kahane. It published a mix of erotic fiction and avant-garde literary fiction, and is best known for the first print of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita.
Maurice Girodias was a French publisher who founded the Olympia Press, specialising in risqué books, censored in Britain and America, that were permitted in France in English-language versions only. It evolved from his father’s Obelisk Press, famous for publishing Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. Girodias published Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, and works by Samuel Beckett, William S. Burroughs, John Glassco and Christopher Logue.
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Merlin was an avant-garde English-language literary magazine published in Paris. Seven issues were released between 1952 and 1954. It published the work of Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, Christopher Logue, Pablo Neruda, and Jean-Paul Sartre, among others. Merlin's politically loaded literature and discomforting stories contributed to the publication's reputation as one of the most serious and experimental post-war English-language magazines.
For the song "That Time" by Regina Spektor see Begin to Hope
Mercier and Camier is a novel by Samuel Beckett that was written in 1946, but remained unpublished until 1970. Appearing immediately before his celebrated "trilogy" of Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, Mercier et Camier was Beckett's first attempt at extended prose fiction in French. Beckett refused to publish it in its original French until 1970, and while an English translation by Beckett himself was published in 1974, the author had made substantial alterations to and deletions from the original text while "reshaping" it from French to English.
Cascando is a radio play by Samuel Beckett. It was written in French in December 1961, subtitled Invention radiophonique pour musique et voix, with music by the Franco-Romanian composer Marcel Mihalovici. It was first broadcast on France Culture on 13 October 1963 with Roger Blin (L'Ouvreur) and Jean Martin. The first English production was on 6 October 1964 on BBC Radio 3 with Denys Hawthorne (Opener) and Patrick Magee (Voice).
All That Fall is a one-act radio play by Samuel Beckett produced following a request from the BBC. It was written in English and completed in September 1956. The autograph copy is titled Lovely Day for the Races. It was published in French, in a translation by Robert Pinget revised by Beckett himself, as Tous ceux qui tombent.
Stanley E. Gontarski specializes in twentieth-century Irish Studies, in British, U.S., and European Modernism, and in performance theory. He is a leading scholar of the work of Samuel Beckett, and is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University.
A.J. Con Leventhal was an Irish lecturer, essayist, and critic.
Leslie Herbert Daiken was an Irish-born advertising copywriter, editor, and writer on children's toys and games, in his youth in the 1930s a poet active in leftist politics and editor of the duplicated circular Irish Front.
