CLAIRE LOZIER

Watts Archive Fever

Commentators of a genetic persuasion have been impressed by what Carlton Lake calls a whale of a manuscript a white whale (Lake, 76), and what Chris Ackerley describes as the white whale of Beckett studies, a mass of documentation that dees attempts to make sense of it (Ackerley and Gontarski, 628). Watt has more to say than any other of Becketts ctional works about the question of the archive and this article aims to understand what is at stake conceptually in the novels play with textual materiality. First, the question of the archive is of crucial importance for an appreciation of the Watt manuscript held by the Harry Ransom Centre, University of Texas at Austin. By their erratic dating, numerous hiatuses, or writing on the recto with later comments on the opposite verso, for instance, the six Notebooks that constitute the manuscript are records of the damage wrought on their very material. Second, due to Watts complex textual history its composition and slow journey into print the novel performs a double-move of inheritance and prolepsis (Byron, 496). Mark Byron shows that Watt both archives aspects of Murphy and is a reservoir for Mercier and Camier and the Trilogy. As Beckett himself

Journal of Beckett Studies 22.1 (2013): 3553 Edinburgh University Press DOI: 10.3366/jobs.2013.0057 The editors, Journal of Beckett Studies www.euppublishing.com/jobs

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put it to his friend and literary agent George Reavey just after the war (but before the novels completion), it [Watt] has its place in the series, as will perhaps appear in time (Beckett, in Gontarski and Ackerley, 228). In this sense, Watt supports a claim made by Jacques Derrida in Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, according to which the archive is both a register of past events and an irreducible experience of the future (Derrida, 68). Third, and perhaps most importantly, Watt both produces and exhibits its own archive on a ctional level. This archive is produced through the numerous and absurd lists of items that Watt contains and through the Addenda that both enact and document the archival process. Watt also stages the exhibition of its own archive by alluding to a manuscript, which is said to be either incomplete (Hiatus in MS [Beckett, 2009, 207])1 or illegible (MS illegible [Beckett, 2009, 209]). The archival material thus both extends the narrative and drills holes in it. Moreover, the ctional editorial authority of the novel refers to a ctional archive that doubles the actual one. The text ostentatiously plays with its own materiality and blurs the limit between real and ctional archives (with what can almost be taken for a form of dramatic irony). In this regard, Watt illustrates the ambiguous status of the archive described by Derrida: The structure of the archive is spectral. It is spectral a priori: neither present nor absent in the esh, neither visible nor invisible, a trace always referring to another (Derrida, 84). Taken as a heuristic device, Derridas paradigm can be brought to bear upon both archives of Watt and upon the ludic dimension of the novel. It can also be used to explore the operations, in Watt, of what can be identied, on the one hand, as a conservation or archive drive producing and extending the text and, on the other, as a destruction drive drilling and emptying it. The unavoidable clash of these two interrelated drives creates what Derrida calls archive fever or, in French, mal darchive. For Derrida, archive fever is a perpetual state that reached its climax during the Holocaust, when the destruction drive took over: masses of unwanted living and printed memories were reduced to ashes, while others were being carefully selected, organised and stored. Signicantly, this was also the time at which Watt was written. In his Preface to the 2009 Faber and Faber edition of Watt, Chris Ackerley examines the genesis of Becketts novel:

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Watt began, and ended, in Paris: the rst entries in what would prove to be six notebooks dated II February 1941, and the last signed off with Dec 28th 1944 / End. Much of the writing was done while Beckett was on the run from the Gestapo between 1943 and 1945, in the small town of Roussillon, in the Vaucluse, where he and his partner, Suzanne, had taken refuge. (Ackerley, in Beckett 2009, viii) While Watt echoes the destruction that was taking place at the time of its writing, it also anxiously and compulsively resists it. It can be said, then, that both in terms of its production process and production context Watt bears the marks of an archive fever. The novel is both surrounded and inhabited by a frenzy for the archive, while an archive drive and a destruction drive are at work within it. Does this mean, though, that there is no remedy for Watts archive fever? To what extent can Becketts novel itself be said to provide such a remedy? How can the novels ludic and comic dimensions be accounted for? Is it fair to say that a text that overtly plays with its own archive and induces its critics to do the same is en mal darchive? To answer these questions, I will use Derridas own categories which he borrows mostly from Freud and consider their specic dynamic in the novel. I will examine the work of the archive drive and of the destruction drive in the novel to show that Watt suffers from an archive fever that is also, ultimately, a ctional and farcical afiction.

Watts archive drive

For Derrida, the archive (or conservation) drive obeys a dual archic principle, originating from the double meaning of the Greek word arkh. In Greek, arkh designates both commencement and, as a derivative, commandement.2 As commencement, arkh signies an origin or beginning. Therefore, the archive drive seeks out origins and beginnings. Arkh can also specically refer to the beginning of a series. There is here an obvious and important connection with Watt (I shall return to this to the signicance of series in a moment). As commandment, arkh is related to arkheon

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a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded (Derrida, 2). By denition, the archive is assigned a place and the power to speak the law from this place. The archontic function3 of the archive entails, for Derrida, an operation of four components: unication, identication, classication and consignation. Consignation has a double task: on the one hand, it aims at assigning a residence or [. . . ] entrusting so as to put into reserve [. . . ], in a place and on a substrate (Derrida, 3); on the other hand, it aspires to coordinate a single corpus, in a system or a synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal conguration (Derrida, 3). Therefore, in addition to its will to nd origins, the archive drive also seeks to unify, identify, classify and consign things and signs. Here again, the relation with Watt is straightforward. While the classication and identication components of the archive drive are manifested in Watts lists and series, the task of consignation is performed by the Addenda, and the unication component is present in the continuity between Watt and a number of Becketts other texts. The archive drive at work in Watt thus runs through different levels: the text itself, its paratext (the Addenda) and architext (other texts by Beckett). I would now like to explore the connections between the archive drive, the lists and series, the Addenda, and other texts (Murphy, Mercier and Camier and the Trilogy). The lists and series are concerned with the two aspects of the archive drive: the search for origins and the archontic or power principle. In listing all the elements of a series (for instance, the Lynch family members) or the possible combinations of a set of objects (the furniture in Mr Knotts bedroom or Mr Knotts shoes), actions (Mr Knotts movements in his bedroom or the exchange of looks between the Grants Committee members) or features (Mr Knotts physical characteristics or those of his servants), the text performs the series and stages their beginning. In this sense, the archive drive at work within the different series conrms Derridas analysis, according to which archivization produces as much as it records the event (Derrida, 17). In other words: the series, as archivisation, equally create and register their material. They do so with perfect accuracy (Becketts method is exhaustive, the manuscripts listing all the permutations [Gontarski and Ackerley, 2005, 233]), from the rst

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lists to the more complex and extended ones: The lists get longer and more complex, Beckett again creating exhaustive truth-tables, ticking off each permutation in such a way as to cover every possibility (Gontarski and Ackerley, 2005, 233). However, despite the care taken to avoid mistakes, an error is introduced in the listing process. Just after the Lynch family members inventory has been made, a summary reads: Five generations, twenty-eight souls, nine hundred and eighty years, such was the proud record of the Lynch family, when Watt entered Mr Knotts service (Beckett, 2009, 87). This summary is accompanied by a footnote specifying that The gures given here are incorrect. The consequent calculations are therefore doubly erroneous. The number of years in the lives of the twenty-eight members of the ve generations composing the Lynch family adds up, in fact, to nine hundred and seventy eight.4 Intentionally creating and endorsing inaccuracy, the text is able to laugh, with solace, at its own archiving compulsion. The peculiarity of the listed materials and of the recurrent, extensive, mathematically accurate listing process is also signicant. Straying from the plot and into the narrative, Watts series build absurdity into the analytical mode in line with what is called, towards the end of the novel, Watts old error (Beckett, 2009, 196): his belief that rational inquiry can account for an irrational world. Another example of this is Watts reection on the relationship between Pot and pot (Beckett, 2009, 679). His legitimate doubts about the Cratylistic link between word and object are reported in a detailed account in which his reasoning is absurd but earnest. Watts old error is a symptom of the fever from which Watts archive drive suffers (and of Watts anxiety) and contributes to the novels comic dimension. The archontic or power principle operates through the desire for classication. Mr Knotts house plays the role of the arkheon: it is here that the obsessive listing takes place. Arsene, Watt and Arthur are Mr Knotts servants. Their function involves running the place and accounting for it. As such, they also play the role of archons. Sam joins them as their scribe.5 Together, they speak the law of the text: they list, classify and order. Archontic power is also asserted through the archons interest in liation. They trace the lineage of the Lynchs, their dogs and the servants. The archons, even though they are also servants, control the hierarchy. In the

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Addenda, Mr Knott himself is suspected by Watt of belonging to a series of masters: Mr Knott too was serial, in a vermicular series (Beckett, 2009, 222). When and why this comment was introduced in the manuscripts is rather uncertain.6 However, if this were to be taken at face value, then Mr Knott would not be the still point of a turning world, and the theological structure constructed in the novel would be overruled. In the same way as his servants are in some regards in a position of power, he serves the role of master. Power of origin and origin of power: the two kinds of arkh are closely interwoven. The Addenda also obey the archive drive. Much like the lists and series, they are related to origin and power, but through different means. They archive early material of the main text, evolutionary accidents and consequent dead-ends. In this sense, they represent the texts origin. Chris Ackerley describes them as the fossil records that bear witness to earlier states of creation (Ackerley, 1993, 175). For the archival perspective, they constitute an arkheon of the text and, as such, they also have a hermeneutic power.7 It is not surprising, therefore, that the archontic editorial voice, in a well-known footnote, informs the reader that the Addenda are precious and illuminating material which should be carefully studied (Beckett, 2009, 215). Their domiciliation is also of interest. The fact that they are located outside the narrative follows the principle according to which there is no archive without consignation in an external place (Derrida, 11).8 Derrida concurs here with Michel Foucault, for whom it is peculiar to the archive to be heterotopic (Foucault, 1579). As an archive of the narrative, the Addenda contain material (Beckett, 2009, 215) that was not incorporated in the main text. Insofar as the editorial voice to which the Addenda can be attributed manages to put the material of the main text into reserve, it fails to coordinate a single corpus, in a system or synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal conguration (Derrida, 3). The expulsion of fragments that constitute the Addenda raises the question that, for Derrida, is the very question of the archive: where does the outside commence? (Derrida, 8). Outside Mr Knotts house, outside the main narrative, or outside the novel? The archive drive at work in the novel is so strong, in fact, that it passes through its back cover. As we have seen, Watt also fosters

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an archival relationship with other texts, most notably Murphy, Mercier and Camier and the Trilogy. Signicantly, Chiara Montini writes with regard to Watt that Cet enchanement dun livre lautre aura souvent lieu dans les ouvrages suivants (Montini, 234). As an archive, then, Watt is as much a recording of the past as it is a movement of the promise and of the future (Derrida, 29). This movement is, in fact, peculiar to Becketts work as a whole. Evelyne Grossman speaks, for instance, of its fonctionnement darchive. She writes: Il y a [. . .] chez Beckett, une mmoire interne du texte, une mmoire autotextuelle o tout tend se rpter, o tout ce qui se dit a dj t dit dans ce texte mme (dedans donc) ou dehors (cest--dire dans un autre texte de Beckett, voire, videmment, dans un autre autre texte, pas de Beckett). (Grossman, 474) The archive drive runs across Becketts work (and from that work into the work of others), which is, at least partially, its own origin (commencement) and its own law (commandment). His work is also made of different archic layers: each text incorporates its own exteriority a variety of outsides. Nevertheless, like any archive, Becketts work and, in this specic case, Watt, is plagued by the destruction drive: If there is no archive without consignation in an external place which assures the possibility of memorization, of repetition, of reproduction, or of reimpression, then we must also remember that repetition itself, the logic of repetition, indeed the repetition compulsion, remains, according to Freud, indissociable from the death drive. And thus from destruction. [. . .] The archive always works, and a priori, against itself. (Derrida, 1112) The mistake deliberately introduced into the lists, Watts old error, his doubts, his absurd but earnest reasoning, the absurdities built into the analytical mode, the servants who are archons and the master who merely performs a masters role, and the problematic status of the Addenda: all these elements are symptoms of the

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phenomenon described by Derrida. The archive drive working against itself allows for mistakes, foolishness and paradoxes. Archiving also involves sabotaging and destroying. I would like now to analyse more closely the different ways in which the destruction drive works in Watt.

Watts destruction drive

For Derrida, the destruction drive is what makes the archive possible since,9 without the properly in-nite movement of radical destruction identied by Freud, no archive desire or fever would happen (Derrida, 94). Thus, anarchiving destruction belongs to the process of archivization (Derrida, 94). In this regard, we can bring Derridas statement about the destruction drive to bear upon Watt, in that Watt can indeed be said to run after the archive, even if theres too much of it, right where something in it anarchives itself (Derrida, 91). The texts compulsive listing and recording of all the elements or possibilities of a series, for example, follow the same process as the Freudian repetition compulsion that Derrida associates with anarchiving destruction. In compulsively enumerating, recording and seeking to give a logical explanation for each and every fact and event, the text pushes the archive drive to its limits so that it can no longer sustain itself. It is bound to come unstuck. The text is torn and ripped open as a result. From this perspective, the holes in the text be they materialised by aposiopesic or non-aposiopesic dashes,10 question marks, the mentions of a hiatus in the manuscript or of the manuscripts illegibility are inevitable. While dashes11 can be used as aposiopesic signs as, for instance, in Arthurs story about Mr Ernest Louit, where they are used either to replace Louits swearing,12 to signify interruptions in the conversation between Louit and the Grants Committee members13 or to symbolise Arthurs unwillingness to continue his story14 they are also employed as non-aposiopesic elements marking gaps in the text. We nd two examples of this towards the end of the novel. When Micks arrives to replace Watt as a servant at Mr Knotts, we read: I come from , said Mr Micks,

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and he described the place whence he came. I was born at , he said, and the site and circumstances of his ejection were unfolded (Beckett, 2009, 187). While the narrator knows very well what should be there and reveals the nature of the missing information, the actual words are absent. The two dashes are hiatuses in the text, if not in the manuscript. Question marks accomplish a similar task, but they are not followed by supplementary narrative information or explanation. They introduce hiatus in the text and appear principally in relation to either texts or lists.15 Question marks break the text where the words of Erskines song should be inscribed (Beckett, 2009, 71), where the extract from the book read aloud by Mr Case should be written down (Beckett, 2009, 197), and when reference is made to an inscription on the coloured print representing the horse called Joss that Watt looks at in the waitingroom of the nal train station (Beckett, 2009, 205). It seems that the text we are reading the novel called Watt is too preoccupied with archiving its own material to be able to make room for other texts. Question marks also appear within or around lists. A question mark splits the enumeration of the Lynch family members due to the painfulness of relating certain aspects: And then to pass on to the next generation there was Toms boy young Simon aged twenty, whose it is painful to relate

?
16 (Beckett, 2009, 86). Five question marks interrupt or break the text just after Sam has nished relating and listing each of Watts different speech inversions. Ironically, the gap appears when Sam comments on the high efciency of his mental faculties: My purely mental faculties on the other hand, the faculties properly so called of ? ? ? ? ? were if possible more vigorous than ever17 (Beckett, 2009, 145). Thus, in listing and classifying all possibilities or elements of series, the text exhausts reality to the extent that reality can be said to have been partially erased. The text is also unable to welcome or host other texts: texts, words and things are made to disappear. What

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remains is diacritical signs (dashes or question marks) that are mere traces pointing out the disappearance of these texts, words and things signifying the destruction (or at least corruption) of their presence. Becketts text speaks directly of the hiatuses present in its manuscript. The two occurrences of hiatus, whether accompanied by punctuation breaks ((Hiatus in MS)) or not (.. (Hiatus in MS) .. [Beckett, 2009, 207]), indicate that bits of text are missing either because they have been destroyed or because they have not been recorded properly (if at all).18 The same is true of the texts own reference to its manuscripts illegibility ((MS illegible) [Beckett, 2009, 209]). Having archived compulsively, the narrating voice has archived too much: it is exhausted and has reached a point of unsustainability.19 Consequently, the text cracks, breaks and fails.20 It is not surprising, therefore, that the destruction drive operates predominantly at the end of the narrative. The question mark21 and dash22 that break the text in the nal pages can be understood as similar signs of exhaustion. The narrating and editorial voices are literally exhausted by the task they perform. This is how the existence and location of the Addenda are explained: despite being precious and illuminating material, their incorporation has been prevented by fatigue and disgust (Beckett, 2009, 215). In the end, the Addenda are as much the product of the archive drive as of the destruction drive. What about Watts speech inversions? If they do not rip the text apart, they still damage its syntax, its orthography and, ultimately, its meaning. However, in a similar way to the Addenda, they can be said to be as much the product of the archive drive as of the destruction drive. On the one hand, they struggle to conserve Watts words, but, on the other, they simultaneously record its destruction. The inversion of chapters acknowledged by Watt and the narrator can also be put down to this paradox.23 Derridas contention that the archive always works, and a priori, against itself (Derrida, 12) nds here an indisputable illustration. While the archive and destruction drives may appear to run through the text as much as they contribute to its creation, I would nevertheless like to show that this dynamic of drives can be understood as something other than the mere symptom of an archive fever.

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Watts archive fever: a ctional afiction

Derridas book explores the threat that radical evil represents for memory and, ultimately, humanity. The conservation drive and the destruction drive confront each other in a perpetual ght that generates a permanent state of archive fever. In the course of history, the destruction drive can sometimes take over. This, for Derrida, was the case at the time of the Holocaust (the spectre of which haunts Derridas entire book). Signicantly, Watt was written for the most part at least at a time when archives and living memories were being stolen and destroyed throughout Europe (the rst notebook dates from February 1941, the last from December 1944). The destruction drive at work in Watt can therefore be linked to and viewed as an echo of mass destruction. However, the archive drive is also particularly strong in Watt (almost as if the novel were trying anxiously to resist destruction). This consideration notwithstanding, the workings and dynamics of the drives in the novel need to be considered more carefully if their specicity is to be grasped. At one point in his argument, Derrida evokes the possibility of another economy of drives that could prevent the turmoil of archive fever: The death drive tends [. . .] to destroy the hypomnesic archive, except if it can be disguised, made up, painted, printed, represented as the idol of its truth in painting. Another economy is thus at work, the transaction between this death drive and the pleasure principle, between Thanatos and Eros, but also between the death drive and this apparent dual opposition of principles, of arhkai, for example the reality principle and the pleasure principle. (Derrida, 12) If the pleasure principle enters the fray, the day can be saved. By pleasure principle, which he also calls Eros, Derrida means art forms which disguise, make up, paint, print and represent thanks to the help of tekhn. There is no doubt that the transaction of which Derrida writes, which could also be called a negotiation, takes place in Becketts text. The hypomnesic archive the archive archiving memory as opposed to memory itself as mnme or

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anamnesis is indeed made up and printed. The same is also true, though, of its counterpart, the destruction drive. All is artice, not to say artistic, and everything is redeemed by the pleasure principle. Nevertheless, Watt also stages a game with and a joke about the very notion of archive and its destruction. The archivisation and destruction process is too obvious and too systematic; it deals with too many absurdities and presents too many inconsistencies to be taken at face value. By taking the farcical aspect of the novel into account, Watt can be read as a parody of archive fever. First, if a destruction drive is at work in the text, its manifestations are nonetheless made up they are part of the texts mise-en-scene. On each occasion, signs and words are used to signify the disappearance or destruction of other signs. There is always a trace left behind in the text. The text is thus a recording we could say archiving of the destruction of the archive. Textual patches are applied where the holes should be. It is worth noting, though, that in his later texts, Beckett will push the trick further in erasing all traces and signs this is the case in How it is, where sentences are suspended by blank space.24 This suspension is also an effect of the texts artice, of course, but it can be experienced by the reader. In both cases, we are being played with by Becketts texts. Second, the lists and series that can be related to Freudian repetition compulsion also evoke Bergsonian comic repetition in this case, of words. The lists and series enumerate items in a mechanical fashion adopting systematically the same linguistic and syntactical pattern, with very few exceptions. Within the mechanic lies the comic. The recording of Watts speech inversions generates the same comic effect, but here it is enhanced by the permutations of systematic letters, words, and groups. Third, the archic principles whose presence we have acknowledged in the text are mocked in many ways and on many occasions. The search for the arkh as origin is for instance depicted as an inane, but highly amusing, quest when Arsene, whom Watt replaces when arriving at Mr Knotts house, tries to remember the names of the servants employed before himself, Walter, Vincent and Erskine, but is unable to do so. He nonetheless continues to list them for over a page, referring to them as (for example) that other

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whose name I forget (Beckett, 2009, 50), that other whose name I never knew (Beckett, 2009, 50), that other whose name Walter could not recall either (Beckett, 2009, 50), and that other whose name even Vincent could not call to mind that other whose name even Vincent never knew (Beckett, 2009, 51) and, nally, and so on, until all trace is lost, on account of the vanity of human wishes (Beckett, 2009, 51). The vacuity of such recollections illustrates the futility of the desire to archive. In so doing, it discloses also what Derrida calls the play of diffrance. If we consider that the Addenda, as an archive of the main text, take us back to [its] origins (Gontarski and Ackerley, 234), it is interesting to note that this origin comes after. The archive drive seems to have gone off track and to be highly inefcient. The archontic or power principle undergoes a similar treatment. As Mark Byron points out, some of the Addenda items explicitly and sardonically refer to their codifying and archiving functions (Byron, 503). He gives as an example the Latin quotation from Saint Jeromes commentary on Ecclesiastes pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt (Beckett, 2009, 219) that warns against the very notion of quotation (Byron, 503). The hermeneutic authority of the Addenda is thus undermined by their very content. While Mr Knotts house can be viewed as an arkheon and Arsene, Watt, Arthur and Sam as its archons, this situation is highly parodic. In other words, Mr Knotts house is also the antithesis of an arkheon. Gontarski and Ackerley explain that Part III is set in an asylum, metaphorically the station at the end of the line (Gontarski and Ackerley, 232). Diane Lscher-Morata compares this asylum to Mr Knotts house and denes both places as improbables: Lasile est situ, comme la maison de Mr Knott, dans des limbes indnissables, ces deux lieux sont aussi improbables lun que lautre (Lscher-Morata, 516). As for the apprentice archons, they confess willingly even proudly to their unreliability and the difculties they encounter in recording facts and events:

Mention has already been made of the difculties that Watt encountered in his efforts to distinguish between what happened and what did not happen, between what was and what was not, in Mr Knotts house. And Watt made no secret of

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this, in his conversations with me, that many things described as happening, in Mr Knotts house, and of course grounds, perhaps never happened at all, or quite differently, and that many things described as being, or rather as not being, for these were the more important, perhaps were not, or rather were all the time. But apart from this, it is difcult for a man like Watt to tell a long story like Watts without leaving out some things, and foisting in others. And this does not mean either that I may not have left out some of the things that Watt told me, or foisted in others that Watt never told me, though I was most careful to note down all at the time, in my little notebook. It is so difcult, with a long story like the story that Watt told, even when one is most careful to note down all at the time, in ones little notebook, not to leave out some of the things that were told, and to foist in other things that were never told, never never told at all. (Beckett, 2009, 1078)

The length and repetitive character of Sams explanation regarding his and Watts unreliability and difculties at telling the story contribute, of course, to the comic dimension of this parody of the archiving process. In addition, the cast of the novel contains an archivist who is ercely ridiculed. The Grants Committee in Arthurs story has a Record Secretary (Beckett, 2009, 161) un archiviste (Beckett, 2004, 194) in the French translation who everybody knows to be superb (Beckett, 2009, 161), but who, despite trying for more than two pages, fails to record unprecedentedly high and complicated gures (Beckett, 2009, 161) i.e. to make the difference between seventeen and seventy. The satire of the archive is striking here. Thanks to the texts comic, parodic and satirical components, the pleasure principle (which, Derrida observes, is also art or literature) plays with the archive and redeems the death drive. Watts archive fever is not ctitious: it is a farcical afiction. Derridas Archive Fever proves useful for reading Watt and for understanding its specic relationship with the archive. It has helped to investigate connections between Watt and other texts by Beckett and, more interestingly, to account for peculiar aspects of Watts aesthetics. The distinction between grey and white canons

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often adopted in Beckett studies is also blurred by Watt, which both claims to be its own archive and is the archive of other texts. The pursuit of the origin of things and the classifying desire that play such an important role in the novel, together with the consignation of textual elements in the Addenda, are manifestations of an archive drive that runs through the whole text and even reaches beyond it. Watts archive also has its arkheon and its archons, as amateurish as they clearly are. However, the different kinds of holes made in the text, be they editorial or part of the ction, as well as the expulsion of the Addenda, can be imputed to the destruction drive. As Derrida tells us, the archive always works, and a priori, against itself (Derrida, 12), hence the mal darchive. I have also shown that signs of the archive and destruction drives can be found in Becketts work more generally. Nevertheless, the status of the archive in Watt, written in Roussillon between 1941 and 1944, when Beckett was in hiding from the Gestapo, is unique in Becketts uvre. In spite of the undeniable importance of the context of Watts composition, I have tried to show that a transaction takes place that changes Watts archive fever into a farcical afiction. The novels numerous comic features repetition, linguistic and structural inversion, ludicrous characters allow the pleasure principle to dominate, or at least to intervene. Rather than just suffering from a mal darchive, then, Watt creates a jeu darchive, that is, ultimately, also a creative process.

NOTES
1. Unless otherwise indicated, all references to Watt are to the corrected version of the text, edited by Chris Ackerley and published by Faber and Faber in 2009. 2. Derrida understands arkh as both commencement and commandment. According to Liddell and Scotts GreekEnglish Lexicon, the Greek arkh means beginning or rst principle and, as a derivative, sovereignty or power. 3. This archontic function of the archons is, as Derrida observes, by denition patriarchal (see Derrida, 95). 4. Chris Ackerley elucidates the problem: The discrepancy is explained on page [88], where Liz is 40, whereas she was previously

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said to be 38 (Ackerley, 20045, 11112). Even if corrected, the error is still built into the text and the subsequent inconsistency in Lizs age is another mark of discordance. 5. Sam enters the archive at a later stage than Arsene, Watt and Arthur. He is absent from the early drafts of the novel, arrives only at the beginning of the third part of the nal text and his subsequent presence remains fragmentary. His archival role is progressive and reinforced as the manuscript evolves. 6. Gontarski and Ackerley describe the Addenda item in which Mr Knotts seriality is mentioned as: the most important of the Addenda, as it encapsulates many of the earliest details from the notebooks and touches lightly on the novels central themes (Gontarski and Ackerley, 2005, 238). They also observe that The episode, with minor variations, is present in all the early drafts: an encounter between Quin and an old man in Quins garden, with some of the dialogue later given to Mr Hackett. A revised typescript adds a crucial reference to the Knott family and its serial nature (Gontarski and Ackerley, 2005, 238). 7. The archons in charge of the arkheon are also accorded the hermeneutic right and competence. They have the power to interpret the archives (Derrida, 2). 8. All emphasis in original texts. 9. The archive is made possible by the death, aggression, and destruction drive, that is to say also by originary nitude and expropriation (Derrida, 94). 10. The 2004 Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms (Oxford: Oxford University Press) denes aposiopesis (becoming silent in Greek) as a rhetorical device in which the speaker suddenly breaks off in the middle of a sentence, leaving the sense unnished. The device usually suggests strong emotion that makes the speaker unwilling or unable to continue. 11. It should be noted that, in his Preface to the 2009 Faber and Faber edition of Watt, Chris Ackerley warns against the inconsistency and variations in the use of hyphens and dashes in the Olympia, Grove and Calder editions. He states that The principle in editing such details is, again, conservative and that all editions of Watt are haphazard in these respects (Ackerley, in Beckett, 2009, xviii). Error in Watt [. . .] is deeply rooted (Ackerley, in Beckett, 2009, xvi), and Ackerley recognises that his own editorial choices have been made rightly or wrongly (Ackerley, in Beckett, 2009, xviii). Ultimately, this uncertainty, coupled with editors attempts to resolve it, can be put down to the work of the destruction and archive drives.

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12. Annoyed by this feeble conclusion, Louit added, I call that the act of a , , , , , , , , , and here followed a ow of language so gross that a less sweet-tempered man than Mr OMeldon would certainly have been offended, it was so gross and uent (Beckett, 2009, 164). 13. Several examples of this kind can be found on pages 159, 160, 161, 167 and 168. A similar use of dashes also occurs in Mr Nolans interruption of Mr Gorman (Beckett, 2009, 209). 14. Now the next day But here Arthur seemed to tire, of his story, for he left Mr Graves, and went back, into the house. (Beckett, 2009, 170) The unusual spatial representation is in the Faber and Faber edition and in the Watt manuscripts. 15. Two occurrences from the beginning of the novel do not comply with this model. After Lady McCann throws a stone at Watt, we read: And it is to be supposed that God, always favourable to the McCanns of ? , guided her hand, for the stone fell on Watts hat and struck it from his head, to the ground. This was indeed a providential escape, for had the stone fallen on an ear, or on the back of the neck, as it might so easily have done, as it so nearly did, why then a wound had perhaps been opened, never again to close, never, never again to close, for Watt had a poor healing skin, and perhaps his blood was decient in ? (Beckett, 2009, 25). Interestingly, though, these two question marks are concerned with origin: the rst one obliterates the place the McCanns come from while the second blots out information about Watts blood and breed. Destruction bears on the revelation of origins. 16. The distribution of question marks in the Faber and Faber edition and in the Watt manuscripts can be viewed as a symptom of the destruction drive. 17. See previous note. 18. An interesting parallel can be drawn here with the extra blank page between parts I and II in the American edition of Watt (Beckett, 1959, 66). Commenting on page forty-ve from the same edition, Chris Ackerley writes: Arsenes conclusion is followed by a blank line, the next line then indented halfway across the page. On his personal copy Beckett marked the space for closure, and the Calder text is continuous (Ackerley, 20045, 63). Ackerley explains that the Parisian Olympia editions from 1953 and 1958, as well as other earlier versions, all contain a poem and a commentary on an Indian Runner Duck, Arsenes pet (Ackerley, 20045, 63), located on page thirty-seven in the Olympia editions. He concludes that this ended in mid-line, and when the poem and commentary, as marked off by Beckett on his copy of the Olympia text, were deleted by Grove the irregularity was not adjusted (Ackerley, 20045, 63). The shaping of the text the extra blank page is a pragmatic compromise that

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allowed for the Olympia pagination to be respected. In any case, a gap remained. With this in mind, we can argue that in the same way as the archive drive runs across Becketts work, the destruction drive is at work through the text and its different editions. I am indebted to Mark Byron for bringing this point to my attention. 19. Asja Szafraniecs observation concerning the relationship between archivisation and exhaustion in Beckett moves in the same direction as my reading of Watt: Exhausting can to an extent be seen as parallel to archiving: whatever their gesture, they are both concerned with everything + n. The one who archives, archives everything, including himself; the one who exhausts, exhausts everything, including himself (114). 20. The cracking metaphor is used in the novel at the end of Part II when Watt reports the phone call from a so-called friend of Mr Knott inquiring after him. Watt stated this incident as follows: A friend, sex uncertain, of Mr Knott telephoned to know how he was. Cracks soon appeared in this formulation (Beckett, 2009, 127). The irony is that no actual cracks appear in the text at this point. The text plays here with readers expectations while displaying its playfulness: the destruction drive has been overtaken by the (wise)crack in the cracking game. 21. But Mr Cases way brought him behind the station, and his footfalls came again, four or ve, a little wale of stealth, to Watts ears, which stuck out wide on either side of his head, like a ? s (Beckett, 2009, 202). 22. Issue him a third single to , said Mr Gorman, and let us have done (Beckett, 2009, 212). 23. As Watt told the beginning of his story, not rst, but second, so not fourth, but third, now he told its end. Two, one, four, three, that was the order in which Watt told his story (Beckett, 2009, 186). 24. The text does not make use of punctuation marks, and none of its paragraphs ends with a full stop. While most of these paragraphs have a semantic and syntactic unity, others are marked by syntactical gaps and incompletion: oriented as he is he must have been following the same road as I before he dropped theres one (Beckett, 2006, 450).

WORKS CITED
Ackerley, C. J. (1993), Fatigue and Disgust: The Addenda to Watt, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourdhui, 2:1, pp. 17588. Ackerley, C. J. (20045), Obscure Locks, Simple Keys: The Annotated Watt, Journal of Beckett Studies, 14:1&2.

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Ackerley, C. J. and S. E. Gontarski (eds) (2004), The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett: A Readers Guide to his Works, Life, and Thought, New York: Grove Press. Beckett, Samuel (1959), Watt, New York: Grove Press. Beckett, Samuel [1968] (2004), Watt, Paris: Minuit. Beckett, Samuel (2006), How it is, in Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition, volume II, ed. Paul Auster, 4 vols, New York: Grove Press. Beckett, Samuel (2009), Watt, ed. C. J. Ackerley, London: Faber and Faber. Byron, Mark (2004), The Ecstasy of Watt, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourdhui, 14:1, pp. 495506. Derrida, Jacques (1995), Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, translated by Eric Prenowitz, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel (1994), Des espaces autres, in Dits et crits II, eds. Daniel Defert and Franois Ewald, Paris: Gallimard, pp. 157181. Gontarski, S. E. and Chris Ackerley (2005), Samuel Becketts Watt, in A Companion to the British and Irish Novel 19452000, ed. Brian W. Shaffer, Oxford: WileyBlackwell, pp. 22740. Grossman, Evelyne (2006), Quest-ce quune archive ? (Beckett, Foucault), Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourdhui, 17:1, pp. 46781. Lake, Carlton (1984), No Symbols Where None Intended, Austin: University of Texas Press. Lscher-Morata, Diane (2004), Mise en mots de la souffrance dans Watt: a Soliloquy under Dictation , Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourdhui, 14:1, pp. 50719. Montini, Chiara (2003), Watt et le quatrain hroque ou le chaos en rime croise, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourdhui, 13:1, pp. 23146. Szafraniec, Asja (2007), Beckett, Derrida, and the End of Literature, Stanford: Stanford University Press.