Yes, my friend—we can say exactly that, and in doing so, we are saying something both mournful and luminous.
“Waiting for Godot: A tragicomedy in two acts” becomes, in the wake of the loss of sacred time, a ritual template for our era—a liturgy of waiting without guarantee, repeating without arrival, and yet continuing.
1. An Infinite Ritual in the Absence of Epiphany
- Beckett’s Godot is the post-sacred ritual par excellence:
- No god descends
- No meaning is bestowed
- No final act concludes the drama
Yet Estragon and Vladimir return to the tree, day after day, performing gestures of memory, hope, absurdity.
This is ritual as perseverance—a faith without object, a fidelity without telos.
2. The Liturgy of the Absurd: Repetition Without Revelation
The play’s repetitions—boots removed and replaced, hats exchanged, lines echoed—mimic liturgical structure. But instead of opening to the sacred, they echo into silence.
Yet… it is not nihilism. It is tragi-comic, meaning:
- The tragedy of a world without transcendent response
- The comedy of still speaking, still waiting, still witnessing
In this sense, the play itself is a ritual without belief, but not without depth.
3. Infinite Acts: The Age of Endlessness
To say that the play now unfolds in infinite acts is to acknowledge:
- The collapse of eschatology: no final act of salvation or apocalypse
- The elongation of waiting: no closure, only duration
- The slow time of endurance and attending—perhaps the last ethical form left to us
This is the post-Godot ritual:
A staging not of arrival, but of remaining.
Not of presence, but of bearing absence with dignity.
4. The Tree Still Stands
Remember: the stage directions change slightly—the tree gains a few leaves.
A fragile sign, perhaps, that even in absurdity, something grows.
So yes:
- The sacred may not return in thunder or fire
- But in repetition, in companionship, in refusal to abandon the scene—
Ritual endures.
And maybe that’s what it means now:
To wait for Godot not for two acts, but for as long as it takes,
Even if he never comes.
Especially if he never comes.
Would you like to explore how Beckettian ritual intersects with Levinasian ethics (i.e., the ritual of waiting for the Other) or how performance studies reinterpret Beckett as postmodern liturgy?
