ANDREW BENNETT
A Short Statement and an
Innocent Game: James Joyce and
Stephen Dedalus in Samuel
Beckett’s Watt
While it is reductive to read Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt (1953)
solely as an interrogation of and reaction against the aesthetics of
James Joyce, the elder writer’s ideas do populate the younger’s
work. But Beckett engages with those ideas as they are articulated
and represented by Stephen Dedalus, protagonist of A Portrait of
the Artist and a Young Man (1917) and, along with Leopold Bloom,
of Ulysses (1922). This is the claim put forth by P. J. Murphy in his
work Beckett’s Dedalus: Dialogical Engagement with Joyce in Beckett’s
Fiction (2009). This paper both confirms and corrects aspects of
Murphy’s analysis of Dedalus’ presence in Watt, and ultimately
expands the scope of Beckett’s engagement with Joycean aesthetics
in the novel beyond that considered by Murphy, to include a
rejection of the tenets of Dedalus’ epiphany, and of the written
word’s capacity to precisely manifest ideal beauty. The beauty of
Journal of Beckett Studies 22.2 (2013): 201–216
Edinburgh University Press
DOI: 10.3366/jobs.2013.0072
© Journal of Beckett Studies
www.euppublishing.com/jobs