Samuel Beckett's Watt: the carnival and the mad

Abstract

This thesis is an analysis of the novel Watt using many of the concepts and terms of Mikhail Bakhtin. In Watt we will see that the multiplicity of discourses are structured to create an aesthetic which expresses the active relation between madness and comedy in Beckett's writing. I will be using Bakhtin's ideal of the multi-languaged carnivalistic novel as the starting point in the investigation of Beckett's use of the novelistic discourse. I will also be drawing from a variety of Bakhtin's other writing about stylistics, novelistic aesthetics and the carnivalesque. Beckett, however, develops a radically different ethical value for his use of comedy, madness and the grotesque from Bakhtin's notion of the carnivalistic novel which has a far more celebratory emphasis. This ethical value that Beckett has is based on the idea of failure and its expression through the many discourses within the novel. In the novel madness has at it basis as the failure of the individual to be able to act in terms of the conventions of his or her environment. As a result of this Beckett uses his knowledge of the symptoms of schizophrenic language disorders to create stylizations of social discourses which reflect the failure of language as a form of madness and solipsism of the individual. Beckett also makes the link within this stylistic process with the forms and structures of comedy, which have at their basis the deliberate performance and imitation of both physical and mental failure. The mental failure is demonstrated through a wide variety of linguistic techniques as well as in the use of the comic routine. The physical failure is expressed through images of the grotesque. Beckett re-enters the long tradition of the connection between madness and the carnivalesque. In terms of the creation of a novelistic discourse there is a multiplicity of discourses which all have move towards what Bakhtin called the "monological". These discourses all have a tendency towards failure. As a result the novel is created out of an heteroglossia of disjunct discourses. This is an ironically darker side to the internal dialogism than that hoped for by Bakhtin.