‘Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit’, Beckett writes in his essay on Proust, published in 1931 (1965, 19). Each element of this metaphor, even the vomit, is a quote from Ivan Pavlov's studies on the digestive glands of dogs. Only their combination is Beckett's invention. The parameters of a typical experiment conducted at the Imperial Institute for Experimental Psychology in St Petersburg under Pavlov's direction are described in the following paragraph:

During the experiments, the dogs were chained to a scaffold. ¹ In one of them they were repeatedly injected with morphine, which, as Pavlov explains, produces ‘nausea with profuse secretion of saliva, followed by vomiting, and then profound sleep’ (Pavlov, 1927, 35). And in the end, Pavlov could formulate a simple law: ‘It is obvious that the different kinds of habits based on training, education and discipline of any sort are nothing but a long chain of conditioned reflexes’ (395).

In Beckett's reading, ‘the action of involuntary memory’, which, in Proust's novel À la recherche du temps perdu, ‘is stimulated by the negligence or agony of Habit’, is as ‘persistent and monotonous’ (Beckett, 1965, 35–9) as the repetitive pattern of Pavlov's experiments on conditioned reflexes.

About two decades later, in his novel Watt, ² Beckett returns to the problem of memory and habit, but under a different name and under different conditions. What was called habit is now a set of rigid rules, and the food to which the dog is chained is not his vomit, but a certain Mr Knott's leftover food, which does, however, have the consistency of vomit, as we will see. Among the title character's duties in Mr Knott's service are the following tasks. Every Saturday, he must prepare and cook a sufficient quantity of food ‘to carry Mr Knott through the week’. This dish is to be ‘served to Mr Knott, at twelve o’clock noon sharp and at seven p.m. exactly all year round’ (Beckett, 1970, 88). Watt's instructions are ‘to give what Mr Knott left of this dish, on the days that he did not eat it all, to the dog’ (91). And that dog's attendance is, finally, ‘required, not at any odd hour of the day or night that it might fancy to drop in, no, but between certain definite limiting hours, and these were, eight o’clock p.m. and ten o’clock p.m.’ (92).

While it may be true, as the first sentence of the whole passage states, that ‘Mr Knott's meals gave very little trouble’ (87), the disposal of his leftovers turns out to be a nightmare of complications for two reasons. First, there is ‘no dog in the house, that is to say, no house-dog, to which the food could be given, on the days that Mr Knott did not require it’ (91). Second, it is impossible to predict whether there will be leftover food on any given day, and if any, how much. Confronted with the randomness, or shall we, in reference to one of Beckett's earliest works, call it the ἐλευϑερία, ³ the absolute freedom of Mr Knott's eating ‘habits’, the dog has no chance of ever forming a habit regarding the consumption of the former's leftover food. Thus, instead of asking how a dog would respond to a series of identical stimuli, Beckett invents a scenario that comes remarkably close to the thought experiments which telecommunication engineers were conducting between the 1920s and 1940s, the time when Beckett started his book on Proust and finished his novel Watt. In a paper on ‘The Transmission of Information’, published in 1928, the radio engineer Ralph Hartley suggested that in order ‘to establish a measure of information in terms of purely physical quantities’, it was ‘desirable […] to eliminate the psychological factors involved’, and he continued as follows:

Like Mr Knott's appetite, Hartley's ball produces a time series of absolute uncertainty, or, to phrase it in terms of Claude E. Shannon's ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’, published in 1948, ⁴ a series of maximum entropy. And just like the engineers, Beckett is testing the capacity of an information channel. But instead of using a random number generator in order to get rid of ‘psychological factors’, he eliminates these factors by introducing the unpredictability of a human being's freedom. Instead of ‘an oscillographic recorder’ which ‘traces the received messages on a photosensitive tape’, he imagines a Pavlovian dog at the other end of the channel. And the object that is to be transmitted over this channel is not a series of voltages, but a special dish which duplicates, so to speak, the randomness of Mr Knott's appetite. It consists not of a carefully chosen set of ingredients, but of a hotchpotch of heterogeneous components: all kinds of meat, beverages, medicines, preservatives, but no sweets. And instead of being divided into subsets, which, in the traditional European cuisine, are to be kept apart from each other either within the space of the table or over the course of the meal, all of these ingredients are ‘well mixed together […] and boiled for hours, until the consistence of a mess, or poss, was obtained’ (Beckett, 1970, 87). It is a recipe for culinary entropy, or, to phrase it more concretely, for a dish that has the consistency of vomit.

In Beckett's novel, this dish is one of three variations on the theme of food. There is, first, the ‘consecrated wafer’, at the beginning of the text, which, if eaten by a rat, opens a can of worms for Thomist theologians (Beckett, 1970, 28–9). At the other end is the occasional ‘plumb young rat’, which Watt and his friend, the narrator, after having first fed it with all kinds of ‘tidbits’, end up feeding, ‘after its repast’, ‘to its mother, or its father, or its brother, or its sister, or to some less fortunate relative’ (155–6). In each of these two scenarios, an animal breaks one of the fundamental dietary laws of Western European culture. One, only humans are allowed to eat a consecrated wafer. And two, thou shalt not eat thy own kind and kin. But if the Creed of Chalcedon was right in stating that Christ ‘must be acknowledged […] in two natures’  ⁵ that ‘came together in one Person and one hypostasis’ (Denzinger, 2012, 109), ⁶ then rats and humans are not so different from each other as one might like to think. Rats eating their own relatives simply replicate what humans do when they celebrate the Eucharist, and humans celebrating the Eucharist are doing what rats tend to do.

Dogs, on the other hand, for whom Watt ‘had no love […], greatly preferring rats’ (115), stand for another dietary law that regulates the relation between humans and domestic animals. It is not about the restrictions on the use of food, but about its preparation: only animal feed can be indiscriminately mixed and mashed. And since this is exactly what happens to Mr Knott's food, it is only consequent that it ends up being served to the dog. And then, the following question arises:

Watt's answers to this question range between two extremes: a dog that would never find it ‘worth its while’ (94) to call regularly on Mr Knott's house because a random series of leftover food cannot trigger a conditioned reflex, and the prediction that ‘very likely very soon a real live famished dog as large as life was coming night after night as regular as clockwork’ (100), which Beckett, in a storyteller's sleight of hand, finally, fulfils. Between these extremes, that is, in the span between a probability of zero and one that the dog and the food will be brought together, Watt considers a series of intermediate solutions, each of which is characterised by an increase in complexity and hence countered by an increasing number of objections, and all of which are, finally, replaced by Mr Knott's own, radically different solution to the problem.

Solution number one: Find an ‘exceptional hungry or starving dog […] that for reasons best known to itself would have considered it worth its while to call at the house, in the manner required’ (94). Two objections: 1) ‘Chances of finding such a dog's existing were small’; 2) The likelihood of finding it, ‘if it did exist, were slight’ (94).

Solution number two: Select an ‘ill-nourished local dog […] to which with the consent of its proprietor all or part of Mr Knott's food might have been brought, by one of Mr Knott's men’ (75). Three objections: 1) Might this not be, for Mr Knott's men, too challenging a task?; 2) Was there ‘any guarantee of the dog's being in, when the man arrived?’ (75); 3) Was there any guarantee that the dog would be hungry at the exact moment of the man's arrival?

Solution number three: employ a messenger ‘to call at the house every evening at say eight fifteen o’clock in the evening on which food was available for the dog to take that food to the dog, to any dog, and to stand over that dog until it had eaten the food, and if it could not or would not finish the food to take what remained of the food to another dog’, etc. etc. (95). Four objections: 1) Was there ‘any guarantee that the messenger would indeed give the food to the dog’? (95); 2) What ‘would happen if the messenger […] failed to call on the house on an evening when food was available for the dog?’ (96); 3) Would the messenger be able to bring the pot back in time; 4) ‘But was a dog the same thing as the dog?’ (96).

Solution number four: ‘A man possessed of a famished dog might have been sought out, whose business brought him, accompanied by his dog, past Mr Knott's house every evening of the year, between the hours of eight and ten.’ In this case, the situation could be signalled to the passing man by means of alternating lights – red, ‘or perhaps better green’, to indicate the presence, and violet, ‘or perhaps better no light at all’, to indicate the absence of food for the dog (96). Five objections: 1) Does such a man exist?; 2) Can he be found?; 3) Might he not confuse the different signals?; 4) Might not Knott's servant make mistakes when setting up these signals?; 5) Might this not be, for Mr Knott's men, too challenging a task?

The long and meticulous descriptions of the various solutions to ‘the problem of how to bring the dog and the food together’ (93), amount to a history of telecommunication media in nuce. At first, Watt assumes that a dog which has found food at Mr Knott's doorstep more than one time would acquire the habit of returning to that place again and again. Yet, since the rate at which Mr Knott's leftovers become available is too irregular to trigger a conditioned reflex, Watt considers another solution. Instead of expecting the dog to come looking for the food, one of Mr Knott's men is to seek out the dog and provide it with the food. Yet, since this may be too much of a burden for Mr Knott's men, Watt thinks of introducing a third party, a messenger who mediates between the food and the dog. While there is no doubt that this arrangement already meets the criteria of a telecommunication system, albeit a primitive one, it is important to note that rather than transferring information, this messenger would transport food, that is, a real object, or, in the terminology of economics, freight. And because it is uncertain what might happen to the food in this case, Watt finally decides to use signals instead of a messenger. As if building this system up from scratch, he envisions not one, but several possible options:

Both the man and the dog lift their eyes to the window where the light is displayed, but the dog takes a little longer because, for the animal, this light is neither a signal nor a symbol, but a stimulus that triggers a conditioned reflex only after having been repeatedly combined with the inborn alimentary reflex. The man, on the other hand, understands it immediately because, for him, the meaning of the light is defined arbitrarily, which implies that, instead of having a necessary or natural relation to its referent, the colour of this signal could be anything, red, green, violet, or no light at all. By considering all of these four options for a simple binary decision, and, thereby, rejecting the by now well-established convention of traffic signals, in which red means ‘stop’, and green means ‘go’, Beckett's Watt returns, as it were, to the origins of modern signalling systems, to a time in which the question of which colour should stand for which command was still undecided.

As Ernst Kapp notes in his Elements of a Philosophy of Technology, ‘the semaphore telegraph is now in service to the railway’ ([1877] 2018, 237). At around the time when the different versions of this early telecommunication medium were replaced by electrical systems, railway companies adopted the semaphore principle of optical telegraphy in order to facilitate the communication between the engine drivers and the signalmen in the stations and along the railroad tracks:

A signal of this type inspires Mr Tyler, a character in Beckett's radio play All That Fall, to a Shakespearean joke:

Yet, since semaphore signals are not visible at night, they had to be supplemented with oil lamps, which – depending on the position of the beam – would alternatively illuminate glass panels of distinctly different colours. The question was, which colours? I quote a compendium on telegraphy and signalling techniques from 1867:

There was an urgent need for clear and universal standards, and thus:

Because white light tends to outshine coloured signals, and because a signal appears white when one of its coloured glass plates is broken, its use was abolished altogether:

The requirements, which the British Board of Trade issued in 1892, ratified the elimination of white signals in a laconic clause: ‘On the new lines worked independently, the front signal lights to be green for all right, and red for danger; the back lights (visible only when the signals are at danger) to be white’ (Thomas Summerson & Sons, Ltd, 1904, 38). ¹¹ From railway systems, signals moved into traffic-jammed cities. About a decade before Nikolaus Otto's construction of an internal combustion engine, ¹² the railway engineer John Peake Knight installed the first traffic light in London to regulate the circulation of horse-drawn carriages:

After Edison's incandescent light bulbs had eliminated such risks, and after the necessary infrastructure of electrical grids had been constructed, traffic signals had a comeback in the early decades of the twentieth century. A US patent for a ‘Municipal Traffic-Control System’, filed by James B. Hoge on 22 September 1913, but only granted on 1 January 1918, proposes, among several other signalling techniques, ‘a method of arranging lamps of different colors adapted to be displayed in sets, each set comprising one lamp of a distinct color for each intersecting street’. ¹³ ‘The signal’ of this system ‘may be of any of the well-known types of electrically controlled signals in use in railway signaling systems’. ¹⁴ And it is equipped with two circuit closers, one for ‘pedal operation’, and another one ‘for convenient manual operation’. ¹⁵ Only two years later, on 12 January 1915, William Ghiglieri filed a patent application for a ‘Traffic-Signal’, which, instead of being operated by foot or hand, would be ‘working through a definite cycle automatically’. ¹⁶ Granted on 1 May 1917, the ‘invention […] consists of a rectangular shell […] in which are placed the displays […], these displays being arranged in pairs, the upper signals […] being preferably green, and the lower signals […] being preferably red’. ¹⁷

Beckett, who was still a child when these patents were issued, belonged to a generation of people who witnessed the spread of traffic signals, as we know them today, all over the world in their lifetime. But the title character of his novel Watt goes even further back. Unlike the traffic lights invented during Beckett's early years, the light Watt ends up lighting for Art, Con, and the dogs Kate and Cis is not powered by electricity. It is a ‘standard oillamp’ (Beckett, 1970, 47, 115) of the type used in railway signalling systems from the mid-nineteenth well into the first decades of the twentieth century (Derr, 1897, 35–7). ¹⁸ And even the idea of using alternating lights is, finally, abandoned. If a single light, so Watt's conclusion, were to represent the presence of the food, then ‘no light at all’ would suffice to indicate its absence. The question of the signal's colour would be solved, any redundancy would be eliminated, the system would be stripped down to its most basic level, and the amount of information it would convey, measured in binary digits, would drop from one to zero:

But the light would still serve as a conventional sign for the man, and – after having been combined with the food often enough – as a stimulus for his dog.

Compared to Watt's reflections on the problem of how to bring the dog and the food together the ‘solution that seemed to have prevailed’ (Beckett, 1970, 98), according to Watt's investigations and conjectures, is even more convoluted. It involves not just one, but a whole kennel of dogs, and not just one, but a whole extended family of guardians ‘attached firmly for good’ to Mr Knott's house ‘by a handsome small initial lump sum’, ‘a liberal annual pension’, ‘occasional seasonal gifts’ and ‘well-timed affectionate words’ (99). The purpose of this institution is to guarantee a continuous stream of guardians and their dogs who and which, over generations, will call every evening at Mr Knott's house to take care of the food left over from his meals. While this is, without doubt, the most efficient and perfect solution of the problem, it is also the most brutal, if not to say totalitarian one. It is based on the fact that a whole ‘impoverished family’ (100) is ‘attached firmly for good and all in block, their children and their children's children, to Mr Knott's service’ (99), and that the dog is exposed to a treatment that is nothing less than torture. Seldom ‘left off the chain’ to prevent them from ruining their appetite somewhere else, and forced to either remain famished or to eat ‘a pot of food so nourishing, and so copious, that only a thoroughly famished dog could get it down’, the ‘dogs employed to eat Mr Knott's occasional remains were not long-lived, as a rule’ (112). If the brutality of Pavlov's experiments consists in the application of such painful stimuli as ‘acid’ or ‘very powerful electric shocks’ to the dog's skin (Pavlov, 1927, 252, 344), then Beckett's novel shows that the rigorous rituals of a deadening routine, on which such experiments are based, constitute another, and equally monstrous, form of cruelty.

What forces the dog to come ‘night after night as regular as clockwork to Mr Knott's backdoor’ (100), is neither a habit nor a conditioned reflex, but the arbitrary command that the leftovers of Mr Knott's food be given ‘to the dog’, and the elaborate coercive system of guardians and chains that had to be established in order to fulfil it. Thus, it is not the dog which, as Descartes had claimed for animals in general, operates ‘according to the disposition of [its] organs’, like ‘a clock’ (Descartes, 1985, 141), ¹⁹ but a human's tyrannical command that turns animals into ‘many kinds of automatons, or moving machines’ (139) – killing them along the way. From Descartes to Pavlov, and even in the novel À la recherche du temps perdu, ‘the Proustian Discours de la méthode’, ‘the erratic machinery of habit and memory’ (Beckett, 1965, 39) is not a natural given, but an effect of powerful human will. What Pavlov's experiments reveal is not the nature of the dog, but the result of its domestication, the trace of its having been subjected to the laws of a human house (domus) and the commands of its master (dominus).

While the rigorously structured organisation, by means of which the dog is, as it were, chained to the remains of Mr Knott's food, does not include a telecommunication system, a rudimentary form of signalling crops up within its context, nonetheless. It is a result of ‘Watt's refusal to be present when the dog ate the food, and of the measures he was obliged to take, as a consequence’ (Beckett, 1970, 115). As he puts the food ‘outside the door, on the doorstep, in the dog's dish’, he lights ‘a light in the passageway window, so that the doorstep would not be in darkness, even on the darkest night’ (114). Although not intended to serve this function, very dim, only visible from a short distance, and only displayed for ‘three quarters of the year’, because it is not needed ‘in the height of summer’ (114–15), this light indicates the presence of the food to the twins Art and Con, the guardians of the dog. A simple light, only meant to illuminate Mr Knott's back door, turns into a signal for the man, and, again, after having been repeated often enough, into a stimulus for the dog. Out of Watt's withdrawal from the scene, and his decision to put a light in the passageway window instead, emerges the first glimmer of a primordial telecommunication system.

Regarding the ‘general technique’ (Pavlov, 1927, 19) of his experiments, Pavlov explains:

And describing the wide range of stimuli to which the dogs were exposed within this environment Pavlov writes: ‘Various conditioned alimentary reflexes were established in the dog, namely, to tactile stimuli, visual stimuli, and different auditory stimuli (sound of a buzzer, metronome, a noise, and numerous pure tones)’ (148–9). Other stimuli used in Pavlov's institute include a ‘whistle’ (77), ‘electric lamps’ (79) and ‘the loud buzzing of an electric bell’ (27, 34), which, in the English translation, is also called ‘a buzzer’ (27). ²⁰ By being subjected to these stimuli, which are explicitly defined as ‘signals’ (23; emphasis in original), the dogs were literally hooked up to a telecommunication channel.

Compared to this level of technical sophistication and variation Watt's experiments are extremely primitive. The dog is only exposed to visual, not to auditory stimuli, and these signals are not powered by electricity, but by an old-fashioned oil lamp. Yet, the electric bell that is so blatantly absent from Watt's long meditations on the problem of establishing a firm and secure connection between the dog and Mr Knott's leftover food, returns, as if it had been repressed for too long, in the immediate aftermath of these meditations: ‘Sometimes in the night Mr Knott pressed a bell that sounded in Erskine's room, and then Erskine got up and went down’ (Beckett, 1970, 120). By shifting the focus from the dog to Mr Knott's servant Erskine, Beckett seems to replicate the argument that is formulated in the title of the last one of Pavlov's lectures on Conditioned Reflexes, ‘The experimental results obtained with animals in their application to man’ (1927, 395–411). But the bell whose location and purpose Watt is trying to determine is more appropriate for the stimulation of a dog than for the purpose of communicating with a man:

According to this precise description, the bell in Erskine's room is neither a ‘trembling or vibrating bell’ (Allsop, 1889, 30–1) nor a ‘polarized bell’ (Shepardson, 1917, 318) of the type common in early telephones, but a ‘single tone bell’ (Allsop, 1889, 32–3), an old-fashioned device that only produces a short ‘ting!’, not the buzzing sound reported in Pavlov's lectures. And Watt's relation to this bell is not that of a Pavlovian experimenter who uses electrical methods or pneumatic transmission for stimulating the animal as well as for registering the corresponding reflex response, but rather that of such an experimenter who is cut off from these transmission channels and barred from entering the space of the objects he is trying to study. It is as if he were locked into one of the isolated research rooms of Pavlov's institute, unable to communicate with the objects of his investigations while, at the same time, being forced to witness the activities of one of his colleagues and not being able to make sense of them. All he knows is that, at the sound of the bell, Erskine gets up and goes down (Beckett, 1970, 120). Left with nothing but an auditory stimulus Watt can only speculate who is pressing the button of the bell. And since there are only two candidates, there are only two possibilities: either Mr Knott is calling Erskine, or Erskine is activating the bell himself, and if so, then he might be doing it in order to trick Watt into believing that his getting up at the sound of the bell is not a conditioned reflex, not a habit, but an act of his free will. It is as if Erskine were simulating the workings of a telecommunication system by sending signals down to ‘the kitchen chimney’ (119) for Watt to interpret. There is no way of knowing what the case might be, and when Watt, finally, gets into Erskine's room, he does not find a solution to the riddle, but a new enigma in its stead:

At the beginning of a long mediation on the relation between these two geometric objects ²² Watt wonders ‘if they would eventually pause and converse, and perhaps even mingle, or keep steadfast on their ways, like ships in the night, prior to the invention of wireless telegraphy. Who knows, they might even collide’ (129). In 1865, James Clerk Maxwell predicted the existence of electromagnetic waves that travel through space at the speed of light (Maxwell, 1865). In 1888, Heinrich Hertz proved their existence (Hertz, 1888). And on 27 March 1899, Guglielmo Marconi transmitted the first wireless message across the English Channel, about seven years before Beckett was born. And Beckett was in his early teens when the first radio programmes were broadcast. He grew up and lived in a world in which signals could travel not only through and around the atmosphere of our tiny planet earth, but through ‘boundless space’ and ‘endless time’ (Beckett, 1970, 129), a world of universal connectivity. And thus, the long meditations on stimuli and signals in his novel Watt are a search for lost time, a time in which signals were just being invented and in which the absolute solitude of an Odysseus on his raft was still possible, a time in which radio, the medium that Beckett would soon use so efficiently to broadcast the soliloquies of his lonely characters, had not yet been invented.