"Sir, he was dull," said Dr. Johnson of a famous poet, and explained: "He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him GREAT."

    Mr. Beckett's fame was established by that odd play, "Waiting for Godot"--not so much a play as a charade, in which the actors, instead of making believe they are real people, make believe they are symbols. Thus between 1954 and 1956 the author of several neglected though even odder novels (including "Watt," written in 1945) acquired three different publics that thought him GREAT. 

    The first group were the admirers who genuinely performed a critical judgment or an act of taste: these we cannot accuse of having been taken in by the New Tedium; for they are intellectuals who never tire of sly stories about how Existence precedes Essence, just as vulgarians never tire of stories about how men chase women; also, it somehow consoles them to hear that all of us are equally futile; and of course when they see a character on page or stage behave as no normal human being ever behaved in life, they at once recognize a symbol of the common lot of mankind. Other admirers were more simply seduced by vivacious acting. Others hated being left out of any advance coterie: the more impenetrable the play or novel, the more exclusive and desirable the club, so to speak. 

    Now that "Watt" is available here, the first kind of admirers will make it truly their own. The second kind will be exquisitely bored. The third kind will naturally infer from their own inability to discover what on earth Mr. Beckett is talking about, that this is indeed a significant novel. 

    Mr. Beckett's vision seems to be of a universe filled with cruelty yet empty of purpose, deformed yet ultimately formless. This is at least a paradox; it maybe a conflict. Perhaps the author's heart is crying out that God is unfair and his head is muttering that God does not exist, and he reconciles the two by blaming God for not existing. But as far as "Watt" is concerned, that is only a surmise. The story is very obscure, if it is a story. Watt, a red-nosed potbellied little old fellow of unknown origin and nurture, arrives at night at a great house and holds a mysterious conversation with the servant he is replacing; the economy of the house is a vastly elaborate, precise and disgusting ritual, and the master, Mr. Knott, is a kind of intangible autocrat, scarcely glimpsed ("as it were in a glass") and strangely mutable; one night, Watt suddenly comes upon his own replacement waiting in the kitchen, wordlessly drinks his milk and smokes his cigar, walks to the railway station and then collapses; and all this he later tells to the author, a fellow-inmate in an institution surrounded by wire fences. 

    This tale is infested with little allegorical shapes and tag-names. The arrangements of Knott's household have a theological air, for instance. One is tempted to think of Mr. Knott as "Mr. Not," like William Blake's "Old Nobodaddy aloft." One thinks of Watt as "What"--he has the personality of an interrogative pronoun--and this calls up the existentialist doctrine that Existence precedes Essence: in other words, we can say that Man is when we cannot say what Man is: in other words, here we are but our lives have no essential purpose. And calling Mr. Knott's gardener "Mr. Graves" is almost clear. 

    At other moments, however, Mr. Beckett seems to interest himself (if not all his readers) in technical metaphysics, and to worry out a combination of psychology and nominalism: "Looking at a pot, for example, or thinking of a pot, at one of Mr. Knott's pots, of one of Mr. Knott's pots, it was in vain that Watt said, Pot, pot. Well, perhaps not quite in vain, but very nearly. For it was not a pot, the more he looked, the more he reflected, the more he felt sure of that, that is [it?] was not a pot at all. It resembled a pot, it was almost a pot, but it was not a pot of which one could say, Pot, pot, and be comforted." One supposes this means there is no pot-essence and every pot is an individual, just as there is no essential humanity and every human being is imprisoned in his individuality. 

    Mr. Beckett's curious narrative technique robs such speculation of even such excitement as is left in it six hundred years after William of Ockham gave up the ghost. For while things happen in the book--there is no doubt of that--one somehow is never aware, so to speak, that there is any happening happening. Thought and life are held in a sort of murky and gelatinous stasis, with here and there an incident, like a cockroach in an aspic. The shrewd intellectual might object to Mr. Beckett on grounds that a man who is so fierce against Plato has no right to write allegory, even headless allegory. The plain reader will simply complain of boredom.