The Ghosts of the Disappeared: On Re-Reading Waiting for Godot and Aura “Post”-Pandemic

Abstract

Given how rapidly the still-ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has receded from the public consciousness since 2021, the time is ripe to revisit how Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Carlos Fuentes’s Aura inform our present historical moment, particularly since both texts are concerned with the large-scale disappearance, erasure and repression of the mass-dead by statist economic interests in the wake of national traumas – post-Vichy France and post-Famine Ireland in the case of Beckett, and the French Intervention and the Spanish Conquest in the case of Mexico. Yet these two seminal works are not only concerned with how statist interests erase their dead, but how these same dead continue to haunt, influence and impact these same nations despite – or even because of – their erasure. As we are once again recognizing in our own “post”-pandemic moment, just because the dead have been erased, that by no means signifies they are silent.