Abstract

This chapter explores the ways in which Giacomo Leopardi's presence in the manuscripts of Beckett's war-time novel Watt draws the text's Big House pastiche into a pan-European, pessimistic-Romantic tradition sceptical of logic and reason as fundamentally positive human qualities. In doing so, this chapter examines how Beckett's invocation of Leopardi is vital to an underlying political parody in Watt and its manuscripts that takes stock of the troubling relationship between Enlightenment rationality and the barbarism of European fascism.

Keywords: Samuel Beckett; Giacomo Leopardi; W. B. Yeats; Second World War; pessimism; Enlightenment

Samuel Beckett's novel Watt had a turbulent genesis. Begun during the Second World War, the novel went through several phases of composition, from scattered notes to at least two stages of heavy revision of both plot and characters. The Watt notebooks, held in the archives of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, evidence a writing process that both obsessed and frustrated its author.

Before the familiar Watt and Mr Knott entered the story, Beckett's tale centred on an Irish Big House in decline and the trials and tribulations of its owner, James Quin, the last of a long line of aristocrats whose family have succumbed to various ailments and illnesses. Beckett's turn in Watt and its preceding manuscripts to an ironic revision of the Big House novel during the war has been convincingly argued by scholars as a form of historical negotiation that works through the obsessions with order and hierarchy shared (in very different forms) between European fascism and the Anglo-Irish Ascendency ideology of the 1920s and 1930s, particularly as formulated by W. B. Yeats. In these readings, the ‘comic attack on rationality’ typically associated with Watt takes on subtle, interconnected political dimensions.

Crucial to the satire of the Big House that runs through the manuscripts and into the published novel is the pervading sense of emptiness at the heart of seemingly urgent matters, whether it is Quin's family decline or Watt's desperate attempts to uncover the puzzles of the Knott household. This is at its starkest in the manuscripts, where Quin is described as one hounded by ‘nothingness’ in his life, a condition that seems to derive in part from his lack of family but also from his failed attempts to educate himself in European literature and philosophy.