Review of Rick de Villiers’ Eliot and Beckett’s Low Modernism

In the introduction to his book Eliot and Beckett’s Low Modernism: Humility and Humiliation (2021), Rick de Villiers describes the telling error of Samuel Beckett’s biographer, who asserts the influence of Eliot’s “Little Gidding” on Beckett’s early novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Despite the fact that Beckett’s novel was written ten years before Eliot’s poem, this error signals a link between the two works—“a fundamental belief in fallenness.” De Villiers writes: “For Eliot, it is mostly a question of one’s relation to God; for Beckett, it is a matter of selfemptying. Though of a similar species, the way up and the way down are not the same.”1 Allowing for their contrasting approaches, De Villiers sees notions of fallenness at the heart of subjectivity for both Eliot and Beckett, most evident in their respective treatments of humility and humiliation. Beyond the etymological link between these terms, De Villiers traces a notion of humility as a response to humiliation. Turning away from an Aristotelian, humanist notion of humility that smacks of virtue ethics and an assured sense of self, De Villiers reads humility and humiliation in Eliot and Beckett in more theological terms. While Beckett grounds subjectivity in the acceptance of affliction, Eliot finds it in the shame of original sin.