Trying to Understand Endgame *

Abstract

The author explores the political and philosophical implications of Samuel Beckett's parodies of philosophies and forms, especially his disruptions of classical dramatic form, which history, he argues, had already evacuated of meaning. Beckett's oeuvre has many things in common with Parisian existentialism. It is shot through with reminiscences of the categories of absurdity, situation, and decision or the failure to decide, the way medieval ruins permeate Kafka's monstrous house in the suburbs. Pre-Beckettian existentialism exploited philosophy as a literary subject as though it were Schiller in the flesh. Dugout, a productive artistic force since Baudelaire, becomes insatiable in Beckett's historically mediated impulses. French existentialism had tackled the problem of history. In Beckett, history swallows up existentialism. In Endgame , a historical moment unfolds, namely the experience captured in the title of one of the culture industry's cheap novels, Kaputt .

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