“‘Wild and unintelligible:’ Making Sense of Beckett’s ‘unreadable’ Watt:” Anna Teekell, assistant professor, Department of English, Christopher Newport University

Written in “dribs and drabs, on the run” while Samuel Beckett was hiding from the Nazis as part of the French Resistance, Watt, his last English-language novel, bears the scars of its traumatic composition in its hysterically disordered language. Stan Gontarski has called the resulting manuscript “the white whale of Beckett studies, a mass of documentation that defies attempts to make sense of it,” and the same might well be said of the published novel, a disarranged – or deranged – text that constitutes a trace of Beckett’s wartime experience.

This talk maps the history of the novel: composed in secret, seized by both UK customs and the Paris vice squad, finally published after eight years, and banned in Beckett’s native Ireland. The galley proofs of the novel are housed in the Olin Library. In tracing the novel’s journey from wartime France to Washington University, this talk offers a way to read this famously “unreadable” book through the lens of the trauma its language encodes.

Talk delivered at "What is the Word: Celebrating Samuel Beckett" colloquium in Olin Library at Washington University. See http://omeka.wustl.edu/omeka/exhibits... for more.