ABSTRACT
Northrop Frye and Jean Baudrillard underpin Stephen Watt's account of the politics of Beckettian drama, which consists, he proposes, in its unmasking of the determining and limiting discursive formations of contemporary Western capitalist culture. The extract argues against Georg Lukacs, that there is a socio-historical context to Beckett's plays, in so far as they invoke the systems of 'symbolic, discursive and institutional power' by which contemporary Western society is constituted. The 'logic' manifests itself time and time again in Beckett's plays, revealing its ideological genesis in class-consciousness, prestige, the family, and other all-too-familiar values and institutions. One political or social critique within a Beckett play is located in the ideological value attached to the commodification and encoding of objects in Happy Days, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and others. Beckett is presented as engaging in a political deconstruction of the binary nature/society, which shows as complementary and mutually reinforcing aspects of capitalism in its mass-market mode.
