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Critics who focus on the novel's epistemological concerns and philosophical implications tend to understate its status as a work of literary elegy, a work that mourns the passing of time and lyrically laments the brevity of

life. Watt's game with the embers in the kitchen fireplace is an epistemological game (he finds that if he covers the lamp with his hat the embers glow more brightly than when the room is properly illuminated; best results are not always obtained in the glaring light of rational enquiry) and yet the embers, after which Beckett would name a later play, are dwindling: finally "the ashes would not redden any more, but remained grey, even in the dimmest light." (37)

The novel is haunted by the notion of time. During the long discussion of the episode of the Galls' visit to tune the piano we hear that "Watt could not accept [such incidents] for what they were, the simple games time plays with space, now with these toys, now with those, but was obliged, because of his peculiar character, to enquire into what they meant." (71-2) The episode is certainly, as many critics have suggested, an epistemological essay on the folly of man's need to know, his need to deploy meanings. Nevertheless, in the sentence quoted, the apparently abstract notion of "the simple games time plays with space" is far from being a neutral description of a situation prior to the ascription of meaning. Games involving the interaction of time and space might suggest the value-free

sphere of Einsteinian relativity, and yet here, time plays with space, its toy, like a malignant deity acting the heartless child. Implicitly the game is a cruel one because the sentence alludes to the classical axiom of

tempus edax.

For a novel so apparently removed from the world of quotidian concerns. Watt keeps a steady eye on the clock:

"time, as time will, drew on" (145); "these moments have changed us [ . . . ] we are no longer the same now as when they began - ticktick! ticktick! - to elapse" (48); Mr. Ash tells Arsene it is seventeen minutes past five but "a moment later Big Ben [ . . . ] struck six" (44) . The nice processes of time are carefully monitored, as when, late in the novel. Watt's coat and hat are described:

It was to be observed that the colours, on the one hand of his coat, on the other of his hat, drew closer and closer, the one to the other, with every passing lustre. Yet how different had been their beginnings! The one green! The other yellow! So it is with time, that lightens what is dark, that darkens what is 1 i g h t .

It was to be expected that, once met, they would not stay, no, but continue, each as it must, to age, until the hat was green, the coat yellow, and then through the last circles paling, deepening, swooning cease, the hat to be a hat, the coat to be a coat. For

so it is with time. (217)

"centuries that fall, from the pod of eternity" (129). It is a novel of darkening skies and lengthening shadows (22,197), and one that features a moon "long past the full" and "waning, waning". Again and again we're reminded of the process by which "to dust thou shalt return". Mary's duster "fell from her fingers, to the dust, where having at once assumed the colour (grey) of its surroundings it disappeared [...]" (50). Mr.Graves, the gardener, is congratulated by Arthur for the way he " let [ s ] fall the seed, absent in mind, as the priest dust, or ashes, into the grave [...]" (180). The University grants committee retire from their bizarre meeting as though from a burial: "finally as from the filling grave, or with the loved one disappearing conveyance [ . . . ] slowly their sighing bodies they tore away" (194-5). The meeting as a whole has been punctuated by splendid mock-epic evocations of the coming night :

through the western window of the vast hall shone the low red winter sun, stirring the air, the chambered air, with its angry farewell shining, whilst via the opposite or oriental apertures or lights, the murmur rose, appeasing, of the myriad faint clarions of night

[...] Rose and gloom, farewell and hail, mingled, clashed, vanquished, victor, victor, vanquished, in the

An odd feature of the novel, and one that underlines its sentimentalising preoccupation with elegy, is its tendency to find opportunities for mourning even where loss has been averted. At the railway station, on the way to Knott's house. Watt bumps into a railway porter whose can rocks but does not fall. "This was a happy chance, for had it fallen on its side, full as it perhaps was of milk, then who knows the milk might have run out, all over the platform, and even on the rails, beneath the train, and been lost." (22) This is an odd aside, this mournful cry over unspilt milk. It finds an echo in the narrator's remarks about the fortuity of the stone hurled by Lady McCann landing on Watt's hat and the possibility that had it not "why then a wound had perhaps been opened, never, never again to close." (30) Watt's fear for the fate of the milk may also remind us of A 1 1 that F a l l , a mournful play in which "a little child fell out of the carriage [ . . . ] On to the line [...] Under the wheels" (CDW 199), and was lost.^^

In a transition that is characteristic of the novel the milk that had been so nearly lost is soon re-represented, not as a vulnerable and precious commodity, but as the object of a Sisyphean labour. There are two groups of cans

at either end of the station. "[The porter] is sorting the cans, said Watt. Or perhaps it is a punishment for disobedience, or some neglect of d u t y . "(24) The sorting is an analogue to the novel's tabulatory list-making; it can seem hellishly unending, but is undertaken lest anything " b e [ ] lost".

For Watt betrays anxiety in the face of ending as well as continuation, and the lists provide a vehicle for the expression of both these anxieties. The list seeks both to define and to defer final definition; it wants to be exaustive but dreads exhaustion. In Steven Connor's words: "always, mixed with a longing for the series to stop, there

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