vacation reading: First an onion, then a peppermint, then another onion, then another peppermint
But if rumination is present at the level of content, it is, more significantly, part of the formal signature of Watt. In a number of significant sections the novel becomes tangled in evocations of permutation that force a hiatus in its forward movement. For it never gets to the bottom, to the narrative fundament, of particular problems – the seemingly infinite permutations of eating habits of the ‘increeping and outbouncing house- and parlour-maids’ (W 49), and the series of servants, pianotuners and dogs who pass through the system of Mr Knott’s house. The maid Mary, who is all ‘flying arms, and champing mouth, and swallowing throat’ (W 54), gorges food: ‘first an onion, then a peppermint, then another onion, then another peppermint, then another onion, then another peppermint’ (W 50), and so on, seemingly ad infinitum, or at least ad nauseum. For these moments of permutation are repetitiously rendered, are churned according to a kind of reverse peristalsis, and then abandoned.
The disorderedness of Mary’s eating, the text makes clear, is that it offers no time for digestion, no time for food to be held. It is worth quoting at length Arsene’s description of so-called ‘ordinary’ eating:
The ordinary person eats a meal, then rests from eating for a
space, then eats again, then rests again, then eats again,
then rests again, then eats again, then rests again, then
eats again, then rests again, then eats again, then rests again,
then eats again, then rests again, then eats again, then
rests again, then eats again, then rests again, then eats again,
then rests again, then eats again, then rests again, and in this
way, now eating, and now resting from eating, he deals with
the difficult problem of hunger […] Let him be a small eater,
a moderate eater, a heavy eater […] a coprophile, let him look
forward to eating with pleasure or back on it with regret or both,
let him eliminate well or eliminate ill, let him eructate, vomit,
break-wind or in other ways fail or scorn to contain himself as a
result of an ill-adapted diet or, congenital affliction, or faulty
training during the impressionable years […] the fact remains,
and can hardly be denied, that he proceeds by what we call meals,
whether taken voluntarily or involuntarily, with pleasure or pain,
through the mouth, the nose, the pores, the feed-tube or in an
upward direction with the aid of a piston from behind is not of the
slightest importance, and that between these acts of nutrition […]
there intervene periods of rest or repose.
It is striking that the putative ordinariness of eating descends so quickly into invocations of disorder, fetish, torture, and the incessance of failures of containment; nevertheless, what matters here is the determination that for eating to become ingestion rather than evacuation, there must be time for rest – time, in Walton’s model, for the experience of time itself. In formal terms, the normativity of a description of ordinary eating is also soon transubstantiated, transformed into an eccentric moment where narrative and language seem to be walking on the spot.
