What is it about?
Watt, Samuel Beckett’s “anti-logical” interwar novel, is generally recognized as a parody of the binary oppositions that underlie logical systems. This article moves beyond readings of Watt as a pastiche of logical positivism or as the sign of rationalism’s exhaustion to argue that the novel’s “glitches in logic” initiate a sensual poetics whereby sound-textures come to rival semantic sense.
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Why is it important?
The text of Watt does exploit the pitfalls of rational systems, particularly their tendency to elide the body and their inability to code for infinite numbers or emotions, but where the zeros and ones of binary code approach absurdity, different possibilities for meaning emerge.
Perspectives
Through references to bodily experience, desires, and ailments, as well as through associations of sounds and laughter, Watt, anticipating characteristics of Beckett’s later texts, emphasizes the body as necessary to the construction of meaning in language
Dr Amanda M Dennis
The American University of Paris
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This page is a summary of: Glitches in Logic in Beckett's Watt: Toward a Sensory Poetics, Journal of Modern Literature, January 2015, Indiana University Press,
DOI: 10.2979/jmodelite.38.2.103.
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