Paul Auster celebrates the humor of Samuel Beckett with a close-reading of a passage from Watt:
Watt conceived for Mr. Graves a feeling little short of liking. In particular Mr. Graves’s way of speaking did not displease Watt. Mr. Graves pronounces th charmingly. Turd and fart, he said, for third and fourth. Watt liked these venerable saxon words. And when Mr. Graves, drinking on the sunny step his afternoon stout, looked up with a twinkle in his old blue eye, and said, in mock deprecation, Tis only me turd or fart, then Watt felt he was perhaps prostituting himself to some purpose. …
I was 19 years old when I first read this paragraph, and I remember that it was the next sentence, the fifth sentence, that turned my growing laughter into a full-throated roar and convinced me that the book I was holding in my hands was the work of a master writer. “Watt liked these venerable saxon words.” It struck me then, and still strikes me now, as a perfect sentence. The crucial word is “venerable.” Think of all the other adjectives Beckett might have chosen: filthy, pungent, earthy, delightful, bawdy, resonant, blunt—the list is endless. “Venerable” avoids the obvious. It defies expectations with its dignity, its somber bow to tradition, to the long historical life of a language, and yet how funny it is, how deeply funny when you stop and think about it, to call “turd and fart” venerable, to call any word venerable, for that matter, and yet because “venerable” is therefore slightly off, and yet entirely apt at the same time, it is magnificent.
Auster remarks on the broader context of the work:
It is useful to know that Watt was written in France during the German occupation of World War II. On the run from the Gestapo, which had broken up the resistance cell in Paris that Beckett had belonged to—and led to the arrest, deportation, and death of his closest friend—Beckett found refuge in a small village in the South, where he spent the last two years of the war working as an agricultural laborer in exchange for food. He worked on the pages of the-never-quite-finished Watt at night. He said he wrote the book to keep himself from going insane. The novel itself often borders on the insane. But you laugh. Again and again, you laugh.
The Dish 