QUAQUA

Abstract

This is the first book devoted to a comparison between Eliot and Beckett, so the publishers proclaim. Aside from an introduction and conclusion, the book is composed of six chapters alternating between Eliot and Beckett, each devoted to a single work: ‘Eeldrop and Appleplex’, More Pricks Than Kicks, Murder in the Cathedral, Molloy, ‘East Coker’, and How It Is. These form three pairs, addressing ‘the affective, the ethical and the aesthetic’. That is to say, the first two are about embarrassment as an emotion, the second about the moral value attached to humility and humiliation, and the last about how humility can appear not just in the portrayal of a particular character, but also in the structure and presentation of a text itself. The volume is more concerned with theoretical issues than empirical ones. The allusions and relations that de Villiers treats are largely found in prior scholarship and are acknowledged as such. When something new is brought to light, it is overtly marked, for instance the ‘two overlooked sources’ proposed for ‘Eeldrop and Appleplex’ (Purgatorio XVI and Charles Péguy’s ‘De Jean Coste’). ‘This study offers a theory of mimetic humility by involving modernist literature in the conception of a virtue that has almost exclusively been defined by theology, philosophy and medieval studies.’ Given that literary theory is Continental philosophy applied to literature, it is unclear that the distinction between de Villiers’s book and what has come before is as significant as his words suggest, but the emphasis on humility and the juxtaposition of the two authors’ philosophical and theological interests is new. De Villiers sees the twinned words humility and humiliation as central to understanding both Beckett and Eliot and as points of departure for illustrating their many differences. This is the ‘low modernism’ of the title.