Reflections: Lovely Revenants

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Below is an excerpt from Samuel Beckett’s quirky novel, Watt, which I recently finished reading. This particular passage struck me in an odd way, making me aware, for the first time in a long time, of a mental gizmo I’ve intermittently recognized as part of my own apparatus.

The excerpt from Watt is lifted from one of the last few pages of the novel. The novel’s plot is too minimal to require much of a summary by way of setting up a context for the passage to be quoted. Most of the book is, in fact, much like this passage: a noting of mental events, often so fleeting and so experientially “disembodied” that they would go almost unnoticed under normal circumstances. The circumstances in Watt are, however, seldom “normal.”

Briefly, then, at the beginning of the novel, we see the character Watt setting out for new employment in the home of a Mr. Knott (“Not?”), a personage who sometimes (as when he walks in his garden) might strike us as some kind of a “God” figure (or Knott, as the case may be). One apparently holds the position towards which Watt (“What?”...”Wot?”) is travelling, until one day another man comes, unannounced, to take one’s place. Then it is over.

Toward the end of the story, Watt’s replacement has arrived, and he has therefore set out by night, carrying with him the two valises that he carried when he first embarked for Knott’s house, sometime in the indefinite past. He has now arrived at the train station, just as the night station master, his shift over, is about to lock up. After some deliberation, the night man decides that Watt may be admitted to the station to await the dawn arrival of the day man, so long as Watt remains locked in the Waiting Room. And so, in the Waiting Room Watt...waits:

Part of the waiting room was faintly lit, by light from without. …The waiting room was empty of furniture, or other objects, as far as Watt could see.
[…]
Whispering it told, the mouth, a woman’s, the thin lips sticking and unsticking, how when empty they could accommodate a larger public than when encumbered with armchairs and divans, and how it was vain to sit, vain to lie, when without the rain beat down, or the sleet, or the snow, with or without wind, or the sun, with greater or lesser perpendicularity. This woman’s name had been Price, her persona was of an extreme spareness, and some thirty-five years earlier she had shot, with colors flying, the narrows of the menopause. Watt was not displeased to hear her voice again, to watch again the play of the pale bows of mucus. He was not displeased either when it went away.

It took me a minute to realize what is going on here. The disembodied presence of a woman named “Price”—a person from Watt’s distant past—has for no readily apparent or causally-related reason, manifested, and is phantasmagorically explaining to Watt why the Waiting Room is devoid of furniture. Watt can “see” her familiar lips as she “speaks” and “hear” her ghostly voice.

This passage made me realize that my own soul is haunted by such female presences who float up from the submerged past to deliver instructions such as “Squeeze from the bottom!” when I pick up the toothpaste tube. Or, who chant “Home again, home again, diggy-diggy!” as the car pulls into the driveway at the end of a trip.

Just as they are familiar to Watt, so these presences are familiar to me; yet they wax uncanny, if consciously contemplated. Why, for instance, did Beckett choose to name this female apparition that comes to Watt “Price?” Is it not because of the price that these lost relationships demand of a man’s soul? Is the price not those points subtracted by the referee, Necessity, for what we must now consider to have been our unforced errors? Is this not the price we pay for having played and lost? And does this all not explain my fondness for the Steve Earle song, I Still Carry You Around, a stanza of which laments:

You’re with me everywhere I go
xxxIn my heart and in my soul
Down every road, no matter where I’m bound
xxxI still carry you around.

I think so. Yes, I do. And it has also occurred to me now, thanks to Beckett, that I had once fictively described this mental phenomenon myself, in a story entitled, Solitude. To wit:

But I had already gone too far. Inadvertently, I had strayed too near the crushing gravitational pull of that merciless black hole. For I heard a voice, a soft, barely audible, whisper of a voice, distinctly female, though disembodied, that said quite clearly, “Want to smell something funky?” And simultaneously I saw, wavering before my mind’s eye, the vision of a lovely, ghostly little hand; a hand that had slipped through the tiniest crack in the ramparts of memory; a hand that extended an index finger freshly withdrawn from the very fundament of my physical being to emerge redolent of the forbidden aroma of erotic misconduct.

If you have come with me thus far, I invite you now to see and hear a video of I Still Carry You Around here, and/or to read my story, Solitude, in its entirety, here. You deserve no less.
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