Jim’s review of Watt > Likes and Comments
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'There will not be any understanding, only coping.'
The writing is trauma mind attempting to put its house in order a sort of taking up fragments & attempting to re-wire back to whole. what you told about the book resonated with me & my present project. there are lesser forms of trauma too I'm thinking depending on whether trauma was witnessed or endured first hand so there will be - I'm hypothesizing - greater or lesser intensities of repeats & sort of piles of things being sorted through . This is my take on it. Reading longside - that is being a willing companion during this process - can also bring up flashbacks. for the reader if that reader has had trauma. I think the book may be part of a healing endeavour. He was willing to share it in public so to speak. Brave. I'm thinking the book helpful to those who are trying to get some perspective on what's happening in the mind when trauma debriefing is attempted. Thank you J.
Thanks. And I think you're right, it can be understood as part of trauma narratives. I was just talking to a scholar of diaspora and trauma, and she reads both political and nonfiction literature (that is, literal, identifiable traumas, from politics and from private lives) and fiction to understand her subject.
I'm Googling "scholar of diaspora and trauma" to see what comes up.
it's interesting to hear the more recent arrivals tell traumas. It's a weird thing to be dealing with trauma issues I thought I'd more or less come to term with at much earlier times. However NOW is another world change going on - &maybe I'm doing a re-evaluation - as are other souls trying to figure things out. Certainly it behooves oneself to be cognizant of pressures etc. that could very well take the rug from under oneself. upshot is an increase of sympathy toward others as well as personal fears magnifying. My take on it anyways. Thank you J. as usual you pique my curiosity about art as well as the world. sending good vibes.
"I am baffled that a book as bizarre, as emotionally and affectively opaque, as formally unaccountable, as multiply wrecked and fragmented, as little in control of its logic, could ever come to be widely understood as a classic of the kind that attracts Nobel committees."
Jim, this made me laugh out loud, as did many of the quotes you chose here. And the bit about "as close to idiocy as literary criticism gets" -- hell yes, agreed. Again, I laughed aloud.
But that's not why I'm commenting. To me the pertinent aspect of Beckett's situation while writing Watt has nothing to do with the Gestapo; it's about his almost complete lack of hope that his work would be published. I doubt he ever felt that so sharply before or after Roussillon, and I think it helps account for the wilful, bizarre and perverse tone of what he wrote there. To me, then, the point is not that he was on the run from anyone, but that he was stuck in the virtual middle of nowhere having failed to make a living or a name for himself as a writer with no idea if or when he could leave or if, maybe, he might die there. A similar situation -- I think it was a throat tumour and its attendant fear of death? -- motivated the Molloy trilogy, but for me Watt is a free-er construction even than that. Granted its the freedom of a man in purgatory, but just for a glimpse of that freedom I'll endure purgatory, at least for the length of a novel.
"Strangest Book of the 20th Century" -- that is some kind of accolade.
Ben, thanks for that, and I think you're exactly right. The politics was only a marginal condition. By the way, I'm in touch with the person preparing the publication of the notebooks for Watt, which are illuminated with all sorts of marginal images; it is due out this year.
That sounds fascinating, really, but I suspect it’ll be prohibitively expensive for me (especially factoring in postage). I’ll watch out for it though. I hope you’ll be featuring it on your website.
Something -- perhaps an the scholarly apparatus -- will be online. I'll post about it when I hear. PS, think you might want to join the Arno Schmidt reading group when it starts in April/May? There may also be a group on Barthes's "Preparation for the Novel."
Great, thanks, I'll look out for your post.
Re Schmidt I think not at this stage. I've given up on Schmidt for now. In fact my reading in general has been poor -- infrequent and undisciplined. Lost in music and, for a few months there, my own writing. I haven't read Barthes for ages, but could more imagine a Barthes than a Schmidt phase in the near future.
Incidentally I have read the Sebald essay on Walser you mentioned in your Walser review. I remember I thought there was a touch of fetishisation about it though -- I sure am sick of that image of Walser dead in the snow -- and I wasn't impressed. I do, like Sebald, dispute the notion that Walser was genuinely mentally ill, and I like his interpretation of the asylum years. Beyond that I've forgotten the essay, unless it's also where he mentions "Kleist in Thun"? I felt vindicated when both Sebald and Coetzee singled out that story for special praise, as to me it had long seemed something singular and transcendent in Walser's ouevre.
On the subject of intermittent reading: have you read "Aesthetics of Resistance"? It's come up as a model for thinking about aesthetics and art history (the Pergemon Altar opening set piece, and the Raft of the Medusa), and I haven't yet found anything thoughtful on that subject except Jameson's essay. It strikes me as a generation late (i.e., it belongs back with the authors we're talking about), and inappropriately conservative about art, both visual and literary.
No I haven't read it and I can't tell if you're recommending it or warning me away from it! I'll take it as recommended with caveat and keep an eye out for it.
Aside from the footnote elaborately detailing the travails of the Lynch family, this book is annoying to the extreme.
Thomas Bernhard accomplishes the same absurd repetitive rhythms, but with a sense of musicality in the German language. Beckett incorporates some musicality in Trilogy, in both the French and English versions (albeit he only translated the last two). Watt is sadly lacking and--to me--merely a cumbersome linguistic exercise by a bored man in exile who, if born two generations later, would have found a niche as a computer programmer. As it stands, WATT holds the reader in complete contempt.
Ah, here I think you're wrong. Watt doesn't have much to do with boredom: it's a desperate book. And as for contempt: I have an interest in books that hold readers in contempt (I'm running a reading group on Arno Schmidt's "Bottom's Dream," and I finished a year-long group on "Finnegans Wake"). I find it interesting when books do that: but "Watt" doesn't. It is written in extremis, by an author who can barely compose himself enough to write at all. It isn't contempt, it's wildness.
I'd have to revisit a Beckett biography to either agree or disagree. I did pick up a first edition of WATT at the Seattle Book Fair two years ago, so it is the last Beckett that I have reread. And, predictably, I hated it. Beckett can be so funny; in this case, he fell short. I will never reread WATT again. "WHAT, not read WATT?!"
As for the contempt; I do find it necessary for the author not to hold the reader in contempt, an opinion I share with most of my writer friends (I am not a professional writer). The Not Holding In Contempt Rule is one reason I so actively dislike David Foster Wallace. I hated Infinite Jest, excepting the section on tattoos and rehab, which are completely brilliant. As a very well-educated reader, I kinda take it personally if an author is just being esoteric or trying to disengage. Or being a show off with vocabulary.
As an aside, I was in a Finnegan's Wake reading group (years ago in NYU MA program) and also--two years back--would read a copy aloud while stationed on a ship at anchor in Saipan as Third Mate. I think there is a difference between being experimental and very aural (Joyce) with a masterful sense of the connections between languages and just being smarmy and a show off DFW.
I do love your essays and agree with you most of the time. Certainly our tastes overlap where it benefits me to follow you. And stumbling on readers and writers like you is why I am now addicted to Goodreads. Where we disagree (Freedom and Franzen), I can see why and can easily accept the difference of opinion. As a rule, I am only posting a review of a book I just read, unless I had an old one laying around. I do reread my favorite books, quite a few of which are on your Read pile. And I will post a review for everything I read or reread now.
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'There will not be any understanding, only coping.'
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The writing is trauma mind attempting to put its house in order a sort of taking up fragments & attempting to re-wire back to whole. what you told about the book resonated with me & my present project. there are lesser forms of trauma too I'm thinking depending on whether trauma was witnessed or endured first hand so there will be - I'm hypothesizing - greater or lesser intensities of repeats & sort of piles of things being sorted through . This is my take on it. Reading longside - that is being a willing companion during this process - can also bring up flashbacks. for the reader if that reader has had trauma. I think the book may be part of a healing endeavour. He was willing to share it in public so to speak. Brave. I'm thinking the book helpful to those who are trying to get some perspective on what's happening in the mind when trauma debriefing is attempted. Thank you J.
Thanks. And I think you're right, it can be understood as part of trauma narratives. I was just talking to a scholar of diaspora and trauma, and she reads both political and nonfiction literature (that is, literal, identifiable traumas, from politics and from private lives) and fiction to understand her subject.
I'm Googling "scholar of diaspora and trauma" to see what comes up.it's interesting to hear the more recent arrivals tell traumas. It's a weird thing to be dealing with trauma issues I thought I'd more or less come to term with at much earlier times. However NOW is another world change going on - &maybe I'm doing a re-evaluation - as are other souls trying to figure things out. Certainly it behooves oneself to be cognizant of pressures etc. that could very well take the rug from under oneself. upshot is an increase of sympathy toward others as well as personal fears magnifying. My take on it anyways. Thank you J. as usual you pique my curiosity about art as well as the world. sending good vibes.
"I am baffled that a book as bizarre, as emotionally and affectively opaque, as formally unaccountable, as multiply wrecked and fragmented, as little in control of its logic, could ever come to be widely understood as a classic of the kind that attracts Nobel committees."Jim, this made me laugh out loud, as did many of the quotes you chose here. And the bit about "as close to idiocy as literary criticism gets" -- hell yes, agreed. Again, I laughed aloud.
But that's not why I'm commenting. To me the pertinent aspect of Beckett's situation while writing Watt has nothing to do with the Gestapo; it's about his almost complete lack of hope that his work would be published. I doubt he ever felt that so sharply before or after Roussillon, and I think it helps account for the wilful, bizarre and perverse tone of what he wrote there. To me, then, the point is not that he was on the run from anyone, but that he was stuck in the virtual middle of nowhere having failed to make a living or a name for himself as a writer with no idea if or when he could leave or if, maybe, he might die there. A similar situation -- I think it was a throat tumour and its attendant fear of death? -- motivated the Molloy trilogy, but for me Watt is a free-er construction even than that. Granted its the freedom of a man in purgatory, but just for a glimpse of that freedom I'll endure purgatory, at least for the length of a novel.
"Strangest Book of the 20th Century" -- that is some kind of accolade.
Ben, thanks for that, and I think you're exactly right. The politics was only a marginal condition. By the way, I'm in touch with the person preparing the publication of the notebooks for Watt, which are illuminated with all sorts of marginal images; it is due out this year.
That sounds fascinating, really, but I suspect it’ll be prohibitively expensive for me (especially factoring in postage). I’ll watch out for it though. I hope you’ll be featuring it on your website.
Something -- perhaps an the scholarly apparatus -- will be online. I'll post about it when I hear. PS, think you might want to join the Arno Schmidt reading group when it starts in April/May? There may also be a group on Barthes's "Preparation for the Novel."
Great, thanks, I'll look out for your post. Re Schmidt I think not at this stage. I've given up on Schmidt for now. In fact my reading in general has been poor -- infrequent and undisciplined. Lost in music and, for a few months there, my own writing. I haven't read Barthes for ages, but could more imagine a Barthes than a Schmidt phase in the near future.
Incidentally I have read the Sebald essay on Walser you mentioned in your Walser review. I remember I thought there was a touch of fetishisation about it though -- I sure am sick of that image of Walser dead in the snow -- and I wasn't impressed. I do, like Sebald, dispute the notion that Walser was genuinely mentally ill, and I like his interpretation of the asylum years. Beyond that I've forgotten the essay, unless it's also where he mentions "Kleist in Thun"? I felt vindicated when both Sebald and Coetzee singled out that story for special praise, as to me it had long seemed something singular and transcendent in Walser's ouevre.
On the subject of intermittent reading: have you read "Aesthetics of Resistance"? It's come up as a model for thinking about aesthetics and art history (the Pergemon Altar opening set piece, and the Raft of the Medusa), and I haven't yet found anything thoughtful on that subject except Jameson's essay. It strikes me as a generation late (i.e., it belongs back with the authors we're talking about), and inappropriately conservative about art, both visual and literary.
No I haven't read it and I can't tell if you're recommending it or warning me away from it! I'll take it as recommended with caveat and keep an eye out for it.
Aside from the footnote elaborately detailing the travails of the Lynch family, this book is annoying to the extreme.Thomas Bernhard accomplishes the same absurd repetitive rhythms, but with a sense of musicality in the German language. Beckett incorporates some musicality in Trilogy, in both the French and English versions (albeit he only translated the last two). Watt is sadly lacking and--to me--merely a cumbersome linguistic exercise by a bored man in exile who, if born two generations later, would have found a niche as a computer programmer. As it stands, WATT holds the reader in complete contempt.
Ah, here I think you're wrong. Watt doesn't have much to do with boredom: it's a desperate book. And as for contempt: I have an interest in books that hold readers in contempt (I'm running a reading group on Arno Schmidt's "Bottom's Dream," and I finished a year-long group on "Finnegans Wake"). I find it interesting when books do that: but "Watt" doesn't. It is written in extremis, by an author who can barely compose himself enough to write at all. It isn't contempt, it's wildness.
I'd have to revisit a Beckett biography to either agree or disagree. I did pick up a first edition of WATT at the Seattle Book Fair two years ago, so it is the last Beckett that I have reread. And, predictably, I hated it. Beckett can be so funny; in this case, he fell short. I will never reread WATT again. "WHAT, not read WATT?!"As for the contempt; I do find it necessary for the author not to hold the reader in contempt, an opinion I share with most of my writer friends (I am not a professional writer). The Not Holding In Contempt Rule is one reason I so actively dislike David Foster Wallace. I hated Infinite Jest, excepting the section on tattoos and rehab, which are completely brilliant. As a very well-educated reader, I kinda take it personally if an author is just being esoteric or trying to disengage. Or being a show off with vocabulary.
As an aside, I was in a Finnegan's Wake reading group (years ago in NYU MA program) and also--two years back--would read a copy aloud while stationed on a ship at anchor in Saipan as Third Mate. I think there is a difference between being experimental and very aural (Joyce) with a masterful sense of the connections between languages and just being smarmy and a show off DFW.
I do love your essays and agree with you most of the time. Certainly our tastes overlap where it benefits me to follow you. And stumbling on readers and writers like you is why I am now addicted to Goodreads. Where we disagree (Freedom and Franzen), I can see why and can easily accept the difference of opinion. As a rule, I am only posting a review of a book I just read, unless I had an old one laying around. I do reread my favorite books, quite a few of which are on your Read pile. And I will post a review for everything I read or reread now.
