Eliot and Beckett’s Low Modernism: Humility and Humiliation, by Rick de Villiers

Rick de Villiers’s principal contention in Eliot and Beckett’s Low Modernism: Humility and Humiliation is that the work of both these writers evinces a concern with suffering and one of its possible effects, that is, “the extinction of personality” (2). For this reason, he begins his argument with a discussion of the ambivalent relation of humiliation to humility. In its secular, post-Enlightenment guise, humility is associated with humanist and rationalist notions of individual autonomy, the preservation of human dignity, progress, perfectability, and the betterment of society. So, although humility, in the context of the Enlightenment project’s emancipatory narrative, is premised on a recognition of the individual’s shortcomings and of universal limitations, it asserts “with equal force the inherent dignity of each individual” (11). From this perspective, humility cannot but eschew humiliation, which is aligned with a divestiture of human dignity and an erosion of notions of progress and human upliftment. What De Villiers shows, however, is that humility and humiliation were once closely affined, with the latter designating the personal act of self-abasement rather than the interpersonal act of degrading another person. Moreover, a corollary of humility, in this Christian tradition, is self-knowledge, which is understood to mean not only knowledge of one’s own weaknesses, but also of human fallibility. Indeed, it is the latter which inspires a negative self-regard and, with it, self-forgetfulness and self-lowering. In this connection, De Villiers cites Simone Weil’s reflection that “Once we have understood that we are nothing, the object of all of our efforts is to become nothing” (15). When humility and humiliation are aligned, knowledge translates into self-sacrifice.