This series of fine prints invokes the last novel that Samuel Beckett wrote in English, Watt. The literary manoeuvres Beckett explores in that book find what he himself called, an “unsatisfactory” fictive embodiment in its narrative. But his displacement of conventional novelistic priorities allows the book to operate as an exercise in form and a formal play with classic modernist themes (i.e. rationalism, negation, etc). Among its most distinct motifs are the long lists of choices faced by the main character, Mr. Watt. The scale and structural repetitiveness of these lists present hyper-exaggerated combinations of choices by reducing each option to a permutative unit held between a tightly strung syntactical pattern:
“As for his feet, sometimes he wore on each a sock, or on the one a sock and on the other a stocking, or a boot, or a shoe, or a slipper, or a sock and boot, or a sock and shoe, or a sock and slipper, or a stocking and boot, or a stocking and shoe, or a stocking and slipper, or nothing at all. And sometimes he wore on each a stocking, or on the one a stocking and on the other a boot, or a shoe, or a slipper, or a sock and boot, or a sock and shoe, or a sock and slipper, or a stocking and boot, or a stocking and shoe, or a stocking and slipper, or nothing at all ... ”
Mr. Watt is the consistent ‘He’ through my series. Each of my three prints intervenes in a quoted list from Watt. Using shallow parsing – a technique of linguistic analysis – I reduce the language tokens that represent the possible choices implicated by three simple actions (wearing, finding, and moving) to their grammatical function (as noun, adjective, etc.). The three resultant poems switch the reader’s attention to the slight nuances in Beckett’s connective patterns – the conjunctions, punctuation, etc:
“As for his feet, sometimes he wore on each a noun, or on the one a noun and on the other a noun, or a noun, or a noun, or a noun, or a noun and noun, or a noun and noun, or a noun and noun, or a noun and noun, or a noun and noun, or a noun and noun, or pronoun adverb. And sometimes he wore on each a noun, or on the one a noun and on the other a noun, or a noun, or a noun, or a noun and noun, or a noun and noun, or a noun and noun, or a noun and noun, or a noun and noun, or a noun and noun, or pronoun adverb ... ”
The uniform layout of the prints 'undesigns' the iconic book cover of the John Calder edition of Watt by appropriating its tripartite structure, bottom-up information flow, colour-scheme, and font set.
The prints have since been translated and editioned in French by the Centre d’livre de artistes (Saint-Yrieix-la-Perche), 2011.
