[An excerpt from a recent paper on Samuel Beckett’s ever-popular landmark play “Waiting For Godot”, by the same author of Modern Death in Irish and Latin American Literature. As with those previous excerpts, we share this sample as merely another reminder of what can happen when we allow an LDS perspective to seep into our scholarship and thinking, whether we are conscious of it or not. In this particular instance, we recall how President Spencer W. Kimball purportedly said that “Remember is the most important word in the English language”–or presumably any language. We recall also how our own most sacred Sacramental prayers plead “that we might always remember Him,” since of course we are in ever-constant danger of forgetting entirely.
Indeed, when I was young, I was constantly flabbergasted by how quickly the various characters in the Book of Mormon would forget not only the miracles but even the utter catastrophes that would befall them, within their own brief lifetimes. But ever since 2020, I don’t wander anymore; it now strikes me as the most realistic touch in the Book of Mormon. Whosoever hath ears to hear, let them hear.]
[…] Beckett’s Waiting for Godot has long resonated in a wide variety of contexts of mass death, atrocity, erasure and disappearance. Emilie Morin has catalogued, for example, “the bilingual Hebrew-Arabic production directed by Ilan Ronen in Haifa in 1984” in Israel, “Susan Sontag’s 1993 production in Sarajevo” (Morin, 2014, p. 9) during the Bosnian genocide, a production staged “in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina” (Morin, 2014, p. 251) in 2007 New Orleans, and how the play “was banned in [Soviet-era] Czechoslovakia like other texts expressing views that the government did not support” (Morin, 2014, p. 246). The play’s performers and producers have intuitively understood the text’s political subtext, even as numerous 20th-century critics have not; as Patrick Bixby notes, Beckett’s works have been “routinely portrayed…as progressively relinquishing their tangential concern with social realism for an outright rejection of the external world” (Bixby, 2011, p. 4). Indeed, numerous critics of this era took as axiomatic James Knowlson’s claim that, “[Beckett] would draw…on his own inner-world for his subjects; outside reality would be refracted through the filter of his own imagination” (Knowlson, 1996, p. 329), and overall embraced “[t]he undialectical assumption that Beckett aspires to write without encumbrance from history and politics” (McNaughton, 2018, p. 2), reading him as monkishly drawing solely “on his own inner-world for his subjects” (Knowlson, 1996, p. 329). A rising generation of critics in the 1990s and 2000s would later challenge and overturn these ahistorical assumptions; yet even before this significant critical re-evaluation took place, Beckett’s most famous play was still persistently performed in “situations of political hardship and oppression” (Morin, 2014, p. 8). More precisely, whenever and wherever a large population is systematically silenced, trivialized, downplayed, ignored, erased and/or disappeared, Waiting for Godot has oft re-emerged like a ghost, haunting the peripheries as a sympathetic presence.
According to Andrew Gibson, that is in part because Waiting for Godot itself emerged from multiple contexts of large-scale erasure. In his Afterword to 2010’s Beckett and Ireland, Gibson argues that the specific historical and political factors that inform Waiting for Godot itself include Beckett’s adopted homeland of France, specifically during the post-Vichy period:
“Beckett wrote the play in late 1948 and early 1949; that is, in a climate of pompous Gaullist triumphalism…France was determined to purge itself brusquely of shame, thereby swiftly achieving historical amnesia. Gaullists were busily rewriting contemporary history, the emphasis falling on the supposed heroic character of the majority under Vichy. The official mythology stated that most Frenchmen and women had not just waited for Godot. They had actively liberated themselves” (Gibson, 2010, p. 188).
It was this revisionist sense of Gaullist triumphalism that celebrated some fictional, mass-populist anti-Vichy rebellion – so discordant with Beckett’s own experience with a chronically undermanned French Resistance (per numerous sources, less than 1% of the French population actually participated), whose scant members were always hiding in ditches and wearing ill-fitting boots, subsisting on squalid root vegetables, delivering meaningless encoded messages and perpetually waiting for nothing to happen – that Beckett wishes to disabuse in Godot, according to Gibson. In this reading, the Fourth Republic had attempted to erase the memory of France’s shame during WWII; Beckett in turn had parodied that erasure in Godot by never referencing the war directly, even as its most mundane details constantly allude to it.
Yet Gibson also notes how many of these same elements of Vichy France have doubled as symbols of Irish history; he argues, for example, not only “the importance of carrots and turnips in […] in wartime France, where root vegetables often became the staple diet”, but also how “from the Famine to the early twentieth century, the turnip was Ireland’s second crop” (Gibson, 2010, p. 190). The turnips serve as a double-signifier for both wartime France and post-Famine Ireland. For that matter, the fact that the rural Irish town of Connemara is thrice name-checked by Lucky in his well-known Act I monologue would likewise indicate that Beckett is suggesting a post-Famine Irish countryside as much as a Vichy French one. From the carrots and turnips in their pockets, to the song Vladimir sings at the start of Act II about a dog getting beaten to death for stealing a crust of bread, to the way he angrily demands of the message-boy sent by Godot, “Does he give you enough to eat?” (Beckett, 42), Famine imagery permeates the play. Terry Eagleton has likewise argued that the “starved, stagnant landscapes of [Beckett’s] work…are also a subliminal memory of famished Ireland, with its threadbare, monotonous colonial culture and its disaffected masses waiting listlessly on a Messianic deliverance that never comes” (Eagleton, 2009). Seán Kennedy in turn also argues that Godot not only re-enacts the Famine landscape, but also its attempted erasure from public memory by those imperialists in power: “We must speak here of famine memory as opposed to any historical account of the Famine because what is at stake is not history but rather the myriad ways in which different classes and individuals in Ireland remembered (or chose to forget) the Famine as a function of their political and social ambitions”; Kennedy specifically singles out how “many of those affiliated with the Protestant Ascendancy tended to repress the event, enabling them to maintain a more benevolent view of their role in the lives of the Irish peasantry” (Kennedy, 2016, p. 110). In this reading, Beckett refuses to allow his fellow members of the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland to erase or white-wash their role in facilitating the genocide of the Irish Catholic peasantry during the Famine, nor co-opt that catastrophe for their own purposes – just as he simultaneously refuses to allow his fellow French compatriots to get too self-congratulatory during the immediate post-war period. Yet whether we are speaking here of post-Vichy France or post-Famine Ireland, in either case, Beckett is adamant in calling out the wilful erasure and revisionism of recent historical catastrophes by statist interests. Indeed, Waiting for Godot has resonated with audiences in such diverse locales as Palestine and Israel, Sarajevo, Prague, and New Orleans precisely because it also reflects these peoples’ own brutal experiences with mass-disappearance, governmental revisionism, and erasure.
Waiting for Godot not only sympathizes with the silenced and disappeared, but also implies that this disappearance is not complete, that in fact the dead still haunt us and disrupt us, not only in spite of but because of all our collective attempts to erase and ignore them. Such in fact is a central theme of the play, wherein the erased dead are never seen but everywhere felt on the stage. As Joseph Roach bluntly argues, “The natural-historical landscape of Godot is desolate but not empty. In addition to a tree with five leaves and a handful of the living […] it is thickly populated by disembodied voices. In other words, it is haunted” (Roach, 2002, p. 85), and we in turn as viewers and readers are haunted as well. Roach cites for example the following significant exchange between Vladimir and Estragon in Act II:
Estragon: All the dead voices.
Vladimir: They make a noise like wings.
Estragon: Like leaves.
Vladimir: Like sand.
Estragon: Like leaves.
Silence.
Vladimir: They all speak at once.
Estragon: Each one to itself.
Silence.
Vladimir: Rather they whisper.
Estragon: They rustle.
Vladimir: They murmur.
Estragon: They rustle.
Silence.
Vladimir: What do they say?
Estragon: They talk about their lives.
Vladimir: To have lived is not enough for them.
Estragon: They have to talk about it.
Vladimir: To be dead is not enough for them.
Estragon: It is not enough.
Silence.
Vladimir: They make a noise like feathers.
Estragon: Like leaves.
Vladimir: Like ashes.
Estragon: Like leaves. (Beckett 40)
Here, the empty stage of Godot is not empty but full: “They all speak at once,” “They make a noise,” they “murmur,” “rustle” and “They talk about their lives”. As Roach wrote of the city of Connemara’s role in Waiting for Godot: “Like the ‘abode of stones’ of which Lucky speaks in his thrice-repeated naming of Connemara […] rural Ireland is haunted by dead voices” (Roach, 2002). Though these dead are not visible on the stage nor to the audience, their influence is everywhere felt: “Where are all these corpses from?” asks Vladimir of the empty stage, to which Estragon responds cryptically, “These skeletons” (Beckett 54). The sheer fact that these dead have been literally erased from the stage only makes them all the more present, such that Vladimir can at one point exclaim “A charnel-house! A charnel-house!” (Beckett 55), as though the stage itself were a place piled with human skeletons – and charnel houses (which sprung everywhere across Ireland during the Famine) are always associated with violent deaths specifically. Again, Beckett re-enacts (perhaps even parodies) the tendency of both the British Empire and the complicit Protestant Ascendancy to ignore, erase or downplay the Famine by never showing the dead on stage explicitly, even as he continually calls attention to their continued presence and persistence. In fact, Beckett implicitly indicates that this failure to acknowledge the active presence of the dead may be the source of these characters’ paralysis and immobility.
Certainly, the themes of disappearance, revisionism and erasure in Waiting for Godot feel relevant yet again amidst the current aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time of this writing [2022], the mask mandates, school-closures, social-distancing protocols, and vaccination campaigns have already receded into a sort of mass-amnesia, as though none of it had ever happened, or even had much consequence. Even among those who most diligently followed public health safety protocols at the virus’s height, significant portions of the US population have regressed to pre-pandemic behaviours – unconsciously, almost instinctively. Unlike, say, 9/11 (which still receives regular mass-memorializations over two decades later) there have been no large-scale attempts to memorialize, mourn, or “never forget” the literal-million dead Americans that the pandemic left in its wake. Partly this is because, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic was simply never as cinematic nor visual a spectacle as 9/11 (for likely the same reason the Spanish Flu of 1918 evaporated from both public and critical consciousness in contrast to the Great War, despite the pandemic far eclipsing the war in total mortality). Yet, more damningly, it is also obvious that the million that were left dead by COVID could never be exploited to meet the insatiable demands of the military-industrial complex and the larger economy like the victims of 9/11 could be. The Twin Towers could be used to justify the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and provide a boost to a war-time economy; whereas the constant complaint of the pandemic lockdowns was of their negative impact on the economy. Hence their prompt erasure.
As Idelbar Avelar writes in The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning, “[m]arket logic absorbs even the documentation of disappearances and tortures as yet another piece of the past for sale” (Avelar, 1999, p. 22). As he argues it, the past in our modern economies – even our most atrocious past – must either consent to becoming but another product for sale, or be erased entirely from memory to make way for what will. Now, Avelar here writes primarily about the complicity of the post-dictatorial republics in South America’s southern cone – Chile, Argentina and Brazil – in perpetuating the neo-liberalizing projects forcibly imposed by their late-20th-century dictatorships. Nevertheless, his model can also be effectively applied to post-pandemic America, wherein our own neo-liberal economic order has privileged the maximization of economic productivity above all other human considerations – and markedly, this trend was predominant even in the earliest days of the pandemic, when there was a push from the White House to “re-open the economy” by the Easter 2020 shopping season.
Notably, the majority of those most bullish for a quick return to economic “normalcy” did not for the most part deny the coronavirus’s rates of infection or lethality per se (despite the quick proliferation of conspiracy theories to the contrary), but only argued that a certain percentage of mortality in the general population – the oft-repeated “2 or 3 percent,” or what would have added up to six to nine million American deaths (Holocaust numbers) suddenly thrown at once upon an already-overburdened healthcare system – was an acceptable trade-off for sustained economic growth (this was also, notably, the exact same pernicious logic deployed by the UK Parliament during the Irish Potato Famine – that a certain percentage of the Irish population could be sacrificed to preserve “free market” principles while the bumper crops were shipped to Great Britain under armed guard). As Texas Lt Governor Dan Patrick blandly quipped in April of that year, “There are more important things than living” (Stieb, 2020). The obvious rejoinder – that there are not – had apparently not occurred to him; for him and tens of millions more like him, the demands of economic productivity answered all concerns, and covered all sins. A proportion of all human lives had been deemed to be that Dickensian “surplus population”, extraneous and expendable, a floating population of the walking dead whose erasure could easily be justified in the all-important interests of maximizing economic production at all costs. Hence, for example, Midwestern meat packing factories that suffered COVID-19 outbreaks early in the pandemic were quickly declared “essential infrastructure”, all without any corresponding assurance that the infected low-wage workers therein would be provided with adequate protections or sufficient hazard wages; and when the infections and deaths inevitably occurred at those facilities, the White House notably responded by simply ceasing all reportage of the same altogether.
Nor were these attitudes limited to official government policy, as large swaths of the US population began notoriously flouting mask mandates and social-distancing policy in public areas, and even resisting vaccination once the COVID-19 vaccine became available; they, too, had determined that a certain percentage of the population was expendable in the cause of maintaining economic productivity. Less than two decades earlier, Cameroonian philosopher Achilles Mbembe had proposed the idea of the Necropolis, in order to describe those war-torn border regions in sub- Saharan Africa that had produced “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead” (40); yet in the early 2020s, it was the supposedly developed and industrialized United States that operated openly like a Necropolis, consigning similarly vast populations to a living death. Amidst the bland triumphalism of the post-pandemic “return to normalcy,” the million dead have been erased, forgotten, trivialized, repressed.
Yet as the continuing global supply chain crisis and record inflation – exacerbated by the millions dead and tens of millions stricken with the chronic exhaustion of long-COVID – that has occurred in the aftermath of the pandemic has again demonstrated, just because the dead have been erased, that by no means signifies that they are silent. One is not required to believe in the supernatural to see how these vast populations of the dead continue to wreak their havoc upon us, no matter how stridently we try to ignore them or silence them or segregate them away into a discrete and forgotten past. Like Vladimir and Estragon, we have short memories and a lost sense of time (recall how neither Estragon nor Vladimir can remember how much time has passed at the beginning of Act II). We, too, have been paralysed into economic immobility, due to our large-scale inability to properly acknowledge, grieve, mourn or honour the dead among us. […]