‘The Humble/d’ in Literature and Philosophy: A Premise

1Literature’s special relationship to language and history allows it to move beyond mere documentary usefulness (itself an important cultural function), towards a more complex phenomenology of how historical situations and ideologies are/were experienced by different social agents. Given this premise, I intend to discuss various meanings of the ‘humble’ as an experiential category, in novels by Fay Weldon and Chris Cleave, and in two lyrics by British artist Marianne Faithfull and John Lennon; I will do so with reference to Guillaume Le Blanc1 and other contemporary philosophers.

2As suggested by the term ‘Humble/d’ in the title, my take on the idea of ‘humble’ is twofold: it implies both ‘being low in rank, being poor, destitute and underprivileged’ and ‘the experience (s) of being “humbled,”’ in the passive sense, i.e. the experience of forms of ‘humiliation inflicted by the socially and culturally favoured, and suffered by the socially and culturally disadvantaged in a classist society.’ I will address the question of how these two aspects of ‘the humble and the humbled’ have been jointly constructed during the past fifty years or so in British culture, and how they have been experienced, both collectively and individually, by variously marginal/ised subjects such as poor or impoverished single women, working class labourers and lowly workers, the unemployed, the homeless, the mentally ill, or the drug addicts. The selected fictional texts span a few decades in British contemporary history: from the 1970s to the beginning of the 21st century, and they have been chosen because they represent crucial economic and cultural changes as well as concomitant variations in the cultural perception and construction of ‘the humble.’

Philosophy Thinking ‘The Humble’

3Four closely interrelated concepts in the philosophy of Guillaume le Blanc provide interesting theoretical guidelines to the reading of literary texts in terms of ‘the humble.’ The concepts of ‘precariousness’ (précarité), ‘vulnerability’ (vulnérabilité), ‘social invisibility’ (invisibilité sociale), and ‘the dispossession of oneself’ (la dépossession de soi) are inextricably related, and all of them, I will argue, find their poetical correlatives in the novels and poems or songs I am discussing. If on the one hand, Le Blanc’s concepts become significant tools in the interpretation of certain literary works, on the other, the reverse is equally true, in the sense that literary texts prove philosophically relevant in understanding the multifaceted concepts of precariousness, vulnerability and social invisibility. Literature has often either anticipated the concepts of philosophy, or has refracted them in its own epistemological prism, thus increasing their complexity and depth, in specific ways and within specific historical configurations. This calls for a strategy of mutual reading between literary and philosophical texts, a gesture invited by the fact that the relationship between philosophy and literature has, for several decades now, been reposited in terms of a fruitful rapprochement, decidedly promoted by the philosophers themselves. Not only is Le Blanc also a novelist, but some of the most significant contemporary philosophers, such as Deleuze, Derrida, and Badiou, have consistently displayed their fascination with artistic literature,2 and most importantly, have acknowledged that literature ‘thinks.’ Never before has the interpretation and practice of literature been so clearly defined as a philosophical gesture: Deleuze the reader of Kafka, Woolf and Melville is one with Deleuze the creator of the concepts of ‘Minor Literature,’ ‘Haecceity,’ ‘the stammering of language’ and ‘becoming other.’ Badiou, himself a dramatist, invites us to ‘a thinking that is worthy of Pessoa’: far more than a rhetorical homage to the Portuguese poet, this statement points at the specific ‘knowledge of literature.’

4Le Blanc has formulated his central concepts notably in the line of Foucault, De Certeau and Deleuze, but his perception of norms— and their collective validation—can also be seen as resonant with what Bourdieu calls habitus3 and with the workings of ideology (sensu Althusser). Hence, the acquisition of social visibility, which intrinsically connotes ‘ordinary lives’ (sensu Le Blanc), is dependent on complex linguistic and political strategies—the ‘pragmatics’ alluded to in my title. Pierre Bourdieu and Judith Butler4 have highlighted the fact that the dynamics of social recognition cannot dispense with the efficacy of the performative, and that the power of the speech act depends on its being produced by an already recognized ‘authoritative/authorized’ speaker. Bourdieu and Jean-Jacques Lecercle5 have convincingly argued that meaning and force come to language from outside, from power groups and rapports de force, and Butler, after Bourdieu, has usefully underlined that even if the dynamics of social recognition involve power groups as purveyors of ideology, power groups are not immutable. In the line of Foucault’s critique of the Law and of its subjectivating power structures, Le Blanc rightly insists that things, works of art and subjects do not exist in themselves in a presumed limbo of objectivity, but undergo either the validation or the invalidation of social mechanisms. The philosophy of Le Blanc invites a questioning of the presuppositions on which values are perceived as collectively based, shared and normative, as normal and ordinary. Social invisibility is then the failure of certain ways of life (allures de vie) to become the object of collective or public recognition and validation. The invalidation is caused by the self-serving and self-preserving power of ‘the normal,’ which is proper to the social system at any given historical moment. The social visibility of any specific way of life is thus the result of a collective validation of such a way of being. Only ordinary lives are visible, and yet they are also vulnerable, in the sense that they are always at risk of falling out of the ideological frames.6

5The radicalization of précarité leads to social invalidation, particularly when the subject’s attempt at proposing alternative subjectivities through his or her own agency is not received by a social interlocutor to whom the narrative of one’s life is inevitably addressed. I am using the word ‘agency’ with some reservations (and for lack of a better one) to indicate the hardly translatable into English ‘mise en œuvre,’ the term used by Le Blanc to indicate a primary attribute of vies ordinaires. ‘Self-fashioning’ would also seem somehow adequate as an English translation of mise en œuvre, but again, not completely, for reasons that it would be extrinsic to this paper to outline,7 but which have to do with the fact that concepts cannot be transferred from one cultural context to another, let alone translated from one language to another, without undergoing a more or less radical transformation.

6My reading of Le Blanc’s L’Invisibilité sociale allows me to identify different registers of social invisibility, which I will apply to the construction of ‘the humble/d’: first, the impossibility of speaking (including silencing, censorship); second, the impossibility of being heard (shouting in the desert); third, the (ensuing progressive) denial of one’s humanity (because not in conformity with the interpellations of ideology); and finally, the radical social disqualification of being ‘without quality,’ of being insignificant, that is, socially invisible.

Literary Narratives Thinking ‘The Humble’

7Precariousness and social invisibility are the most frequent and eloquent positions assigned to the fictional characters in the literary texts that will be discussed here. In these literary narratives, I will trace the philosophical propositions I have offered above. My thesis is that the attitudes and gestures promoting invisibility can be an extreme form of ‘humbling,’ and the utterly ‘humbled’ is the one who is thus dispossessed of one’s life. The characters I shall be looking at are humble precisely in terms of the progressive de-semanticization and ‘precarization’ of their lives.

Problematic allures the vie and Normative Perceptions: Marianne Faithfull’s Vagabond Ways

8In Marianne Faithfull’s ‘Vagabond Ways’8 the subject’s attempt at defending an ‘un-ordinary’ (sensu Le Blanc) life is most clearly not received by a social interlocutor:

Oh, doctor please, oh, doctor please
I drink and I take drugs
I love sex and I move around a lot
I had my first baby at fourteen
And yes, I guess I do have vagabond ways
Yes, I guess I do have vagabond ways
Oh, doctor please, oh, doctor please
I think you’ve made a mistake
I’m fine and I don’t need people
You don’t understand all my choices
But yes, I guess I do have vagabond ways
Yes, I guess I do have vagabond ways
Please, don’t lock me up, please, let me stay free
If you let me go, I promise I’ll never come back
I’ll take a ship across the sea
I’m young and poor and yes I’m afraid
But I’ll stay myself and keep my vagabond ways
It was a long time ago
They took her child away and she was sterilized
She died of the drink and the drugs
And yes, I guess she kept those vagabond ways
Yes, I guess she kept those vagabond ways
Yes, I guess she kept those vagabond ways.

9The young woman who ‘drinks and takes drugs, loves sex and moves around a lot, who had her first baby at fourteen’ knows that the doctor ‘does not understand all her choices.’ Her vain plea: ‘Please, don’t lock me up, please, let me stay free’ expresses a lucid awareness of her own radically precarious position: ‘I’m young and poor and yes I’m afraid / But I’ll stay myself and keep my vagabond ways.’ She is asking to ‘stay herself’, she is asking the power structures embodied by the medical official to validate her own allure de vie. She honestly does not make promises she cannot keep and keeps her ‘vagabond ways’ down to her own self-destructive end (her only promise, that is, ‘I’ll never come back’ is a grim prediction). The institutional response intervenes against her right ‘to stay herself:’ ‘they took her child away and she was sterilized.’ The response entails a measure of protection, and is not necessarily entirely malignant, but clearly dispossesses the woman of her right to ‘stay herself’ at the symbolic level in which social meanings and validations are created. The hardly bearable psychological and ethical tensions of this story and the provocative complexity of this lyric are sustained by the song’s poetical dimension. The narrator’s concluding line: ‘And yes, I guess she kept those vagabond ways,’ and Faithfull’s magisterial interpretation, put a unique poetic force into that small word ‘yes,’ which unequivocally acknowledges the protagonist’s right to ‘stay herself’ against all forms of invalidation; this ‘yes’ also sarcastically addresses the smug attitude of any virtual nice and good reader or listener.

Trajectories of Precariousness and Dispossession: Fay Weldon’s The Heart of the Country

10Fay Weldon’s works are seminal in the exploration of the literary humble. In fact, her novels often illustrate the mechanisms of the construction of ‘the humble/d’ primarily along the gender divide. Emphasis repeatedly falls on the vulnerability of women in a society where male privilege is a cultural given, and thus remains socially unchallenged and mainstream. Weldon’s critique extends to institutional practices in medicine, law, education or the job market. A relevant example is provided by The Heart of the Country,9 a 1987 novel which opens with the representation of a middle class woman, Natalie, who has just been abandoned by her husband. The narrative develops by illustrating the psycho-social consequences of this, and of several other similar cases, up to a dramatic outcome of madness and death: the madness of the novel’s co-protagonist, Sonia, seems to be a byproduct of her destitution and social invisibility, and is, in turn, the cause of the death of Flora, yet another humble/d woman, because incapacitated and dispossessed. Sonia sets fire to a pageant sponsored by the WAEDA (West Avon State Agents and Dealers’ Association) to promote patriarchal and bourgeois values. Her gesture is unmistakably shown to be (self)-destructive, but it may be interpreted, in line with Le Blanc, as suggesting that there is a point of no return in the parable of social invisibility, a point at which one’s way of life is no longer re-claimed, and (self)-effacement prevails over any political design or personal aspiration to (well)-being.

11In The Heart of the Country the mechanisms of invalidation are primarily, but not exclusively, attributed to the rules of the Welfare State, which are bitterly criticized as deeply flawed and ideologically ambiguous. In fact, the DHSS is pictured as a mechanism of brutal social effacement rather than as a help to the underprivileged. The recipients of benefits are dispossessed of agency and self-respect, in other words, of what Le Blanc calls la mise en œuvre of one’s life. Natalie is denied both social recognition and personal freedom when she claims the benefits from the DHSS office: ‘And, of course, as I say, your husband may be back’. ‘I’m not sure I want him back,’ said Natalie. ‘If he can provide for you, the State won’t have to. There might not be quite as much picking and choosing as you suppose’ (Weldon 1987, 71). Likewise, needy women are denied the emotional satisfaction that comes from a full and serene love relationship:

We and a group of others were queuing outside the telephone on the green, with our coins at the ready, and Ros came out of the booth in tears. Ros had a boyfriend at the time they reckoned was supporting her, though he wasn’t; he could only just support himself and his beard. So they’d stopped her benefit. The DHSS don’t mind if men visitor stay until two o’ clock or even three, but four’s going a bit far, five smacks of early shift, and anything later means breakfast, and if it’s breakfast there’s hell to pay. They don’t begrudge us a spot of sex—it saves paying the psychiatrists’ bills later—it’s relationships they can’t stand. They reckon the ultimate obscenity is human affection. [. . .] We, the abandoned mothers of Britain, don’t deserve love. We had our chance and we muffed it. (Weldon 1987, 133)

12The logic of social invalidation here displayed, escalates dramatically towards the end of the novel and represents the cause of Sonia’s madness, despite her lucid understanding of the system’s ideological contradictions, and her generous attempts at social cooperation with other precarious women. The term ‘humble/d’ in this novel clearly spells loss of economic privilege and status, social disempowerment, personal marginalization and invalidation, and configures social insignificance as a form of punishment. The situation is illustrated through a studied parallelism between two formerly ordinary lives falling into radical precariousness, but reference to the lives of several other abandoned women in the British context of the late 1970s convincingly demonstrates that their cases of dépossession de soi are far from unique. What the novel suggests is, in fact, the pervasiveness of vulnerability in (late)-capitalist societies. As soon as her husband disappears from her ordinary and apparently stable family world (he is running off with a younger lover, and running away from financial misdeeds), Natalie is suddenly left emotionally wounded, impoverished, and facing unpredictable situations that foreground the full meaning of emotional, economic and cultural vulnerability. Her new life includes an alarming bank account statement, her children’s school fees, the cleaner and grocer’s bills and, above all, her incompetence to deal with the new coordinates that have disrupted her placid world. Her former ordinary life turns into a precarious life, especially since she does not have the means to interrogate and challenge the prevalent doxa and the normative frames (Bourdieu’s habitus) that define her social position solely in terms of ‘middle class woman/ wife.’10 Natalie is ill equipped to cope with, let alone contest or reverse her new précarité.

13In this novel the situation of abandoned wives11 and their precariousness is illustrated from different angles, that is, from the different points of view of each of the several characters who are experiencing it. It is worth noting that this is a privilege which literary mimesis enjoys over statistics, sociology, economics, and more broadly over the human sciences that aim at making a general point, rather than at insightfully examining and interpreting a variety of particular cases. The prevailing tone of Weldon’s novel is not, of course, diagnostic, it is sympathetic, but far from sentimental. Despite the light stylistic note which adds to the pleasure of reading, and despite the relatively plain language that contributes to enlarge the spectrum of prospective readers (from the lower middle class woman to the academic), The Heart of the Country offers a serious critique of the mainstream norms and attitudes that corroborate ordinary lives in the Britain of the 1970s and 1980s, precisely by relentlessly outlining the trajectory that leads from vies ordinaires to vies précaires. Unfortunately, as I have argued elsewhere,12 the novel does not provide a socially viable political project that would include the reconfiguration of norms which Le Blanc explicitly advocates. It does, however, voice a major feminist project, which had been gaining sociocultural impetus when the novel was written, and which Weldon unabashedly sustained.

Vulnerability and Resilience: Chris Cleave’s Incendiary

14Incendiary is a debut novel, published in July 2005 by the then journalist Chris Cleave.13 It is an epistolary novel, intradiegetically voicing the story of a low class woman who loses her young son and husband in a terrorist attack in London, and therefore decides to write a long letter to Osama bin Laden. By an uncanny coincidence, after being advertised with pictures and posters of a smoking London skyline, the launch party of the book was held the night before the actual terrorist suicide bombings in the London underground on July 7th, 2005. The borderline between fact and fiction instantly became blurred and in a few months the novel understandably became a world bestseller, published in more than twenty countries, despite the mixed reviews it received,14 some of which utterly negative. From a literary point of view, the book belongs to what we may call the ‘humble’ genre of popular fiction; indeed, it often resorts to cliché, such as the generally assumed unbound love of a mother, the sexual appetite of a young woman, the need of adult sex as an antidote to anxiety, the lower-classes addiction to commercial trash TV, their combative and even indomitable energy, their supposed resilience (itself an intrinsically ethically problematic concept, particularly if uncritically attributed to a low class woman like the protagonist of Incendiary). These clichés seem to belong to the popular genre insofar as they sustain a canonical appeal to the readers’ visceral sympathetic allegiance with the protagonist, rather than a critical questioning of complex situations and traumatic events. And yet, the novel is also sophisticated and captivating in the choice of the epistolary form, in its acute sensitivity to linguistic variation, including urban jargon and colloquialisms, and in its accurate portrait of urban complexities. Cleave’s sense of timely topicality is combined with his keen attention to the language used by the urban lower middle class to which his heroine belongs, so that her vernacular tones provide a convincing picture of the humble Londoners of the early 21st century. In this sense Incendiary can be recognized as being worthy of the great tradition of the English realist novel.15

15Moreover the novel provides a picture of urban precariousness in the age of terrorism, and in terms of both psychological vulnerability and resilience. The style of the opening lines is paradigmatic of the whole novel:

Dear Osama they want you dead or alive so the terror will stop. Well I wouldn’t know about that I mean rock n roll didn’t stop when Elvis died on the khazi it just got worse. Next thing you know there was Sonny & Cher and Dexy’s Midnight Runners. [. . .] My point is it’s easier to start these things than to finish them. I suppose you thought of that did you? [. . .] There’s a reward of 25 million dollars on your head but don’t lose sleep on my account Osama. I have no information leading to your arrest or capture. I have no information full effing stop. [. . .] I don’t want 25 million dollars Osama I just want you to give it a rest. AM I ALONE? I want to be the last mother in the world who ever has to write you a letter like this. Who ever has to write to you Osama about her dead boy. (Cleave 2006, 3)

16The style is more nuanced than it would seem at first sight. The passage is direct, sincere, funny enough to avoid the pathetic, yet sad, even grim and appropriately adequate to express the post-traumatic condition of the protagonist. The prose is fluid, the phrasing repetitive, at times torrential, oral, marked by the use of capitalized phrases (mostly intertextual references to news headlines or to commercial slogans), by lack of a correct punctuation, so that the text ‘sounds’ more like a phone call (or a mobile text message) than a formal letter. And yet, the prose is sophisticated in both metaphorical richness and stylistic accuracy because it reports the language in which the daily life of the socially humble protagonist is lived, and the tone of a sensitive trauma survivor.

17A unique poetical image may suffice to reveal the impact of her devastating loss, while avoiding melodramatic tones: ‘Stop making boy shaped holes in the world’ (Cleave 2006, 4). The metaphor of the shaped hole is the poetic and most effective objective correlative of her trauma: ‘I want you to feel that hole in your heart and stroke it with your hands and cut your fingers on its sharp edges’ (Cleave 2006, 4).

18Another striking image is used to picture the divide between the privileged and the underprivileged in the city, and reveals the acute class awareness of the protagonist: ‘I saw the video you made Osama where you said the West was decadent. Maybe you meant the West End? We aren’t all like that. London is a smiling liar his front teeth are very nice but you can smell his backteeth rotten and stinking’ (Cleave 2006, 4). The irony in juxtaposing ‘The West’ and ‘The West End’ suggests that the have nots see the haves as decadent, but also that they take pride in the struggle to be ‘presentable,’ a successful gesture in terms of resilience, self capacitation, and mise en œuvre of their lives, to use Le Blanc’s phrase:

My family was never rotten poor we were hard up there’s a difference. We were respectable we kept ourselves presentable but it was a struggle. I don’t mind telling you. We were not the nice front teeth or the rotten back teeth of London and there are millions of us like that. The middle classes put up web sites about us. If you are interested Osama just put down that Kalashnikov for a second and look up chav pikey ned or townie in Google. (Cleave 2006, 4)

19It is worth noticing that ‘chav’ ‘pikey’ ‘ned’ or ‘townie’ are terms that define some of the urban types in the 2005 social fabric. If you follow the narrator’s invitation and do google these terms, you find that they are mostly derogatory, and even terms of ethnic abuse against the Irish and the Romani Gypsies. However, they are used by the heroine as plain terms of self-definition. The protagonist uses these terms neutrally, denotatively (matter-of-fact) rather than connotatively (as symbols), and clearly not with the political intention of appropriating the terms of abuse in order to reverse their offensive meaning (sensu Judith Butler 1997). The heroine applies these labels to herself and her condition with nonchalance, suggesting that their use is widespread among the humble, who have no use for the euphemisms of a hypocritical political correctness. The novel is probably suggesting that political correctness is perceived by the lower classes as just one of the many sham gestures of the (upper) middle class, a snobbish strategy of concealment of actual social discrimination. In fact, the humble display a knowing irony against the postures of the new upper and middle class economic jargon. Notice the sarcasm displayed in the mimicry of the jargon of estate agents:

My husband and my boy and me lived on Barnet Grove which is a road that goes from Bethnal Green to Haggerston. There are 2 kinds of places on Barnet Grove. The first kind are the very pricey old terraced houses. The estate agents call them Georgian Gems With Extensive Potential For Conversion To Fully Appointed Executive Flats With Easy Access To The City Of London And Within a Stone’s Throw Of The Prestigious Columbia Road Flower Market. (Cleave 2006, 5)

20The humble suspect the term ‘empowerment’ in this classist society:

[. . .] at least our flat was warm and clean and it was ours. It was an e-council flat which is to say we owned it. Which is to say we didn’t have to struggle to pay the rent. We struggled to pay the mortgage each month instead there is a difference and that difference is called EMPOWERMENT. (Cleave 2006, 5)

21The haves’ snobbism is a threat to the legitimate pride of the have nots, and the disdain between the ‘toughs and toffs’ is mutual. The former despise the latter for their arrogance and false pretense. The toffs display an ingrained attitude of superiority and condescension, humbling the underprivileged while taking advantage of them. The heroine, who takes one of the toffs, Jasper Black, as lover is keenly aware of their vulgar and smug attitude:

You could tell straight away Jasper Black had no business being in the East End. He was one of those types who fancied a spot of Easy Access To The City Of London Within a Stone’s Throw Of the Prestigious Columbia Road Flower Market. The Sun calls them SNEERING TOFFS. Usually they live about 3 years in Bethnal Green or Shoreditch then move to the suburbs to be with their own kind. [. . .] You turn around one day and they’ve upped sticks and gone and all you’re left with is this fading smell of Boss by Hugo Boss on your nice T-shirt and a Starbuck where the pie shop used to be. (Cleave 2006, 12)

22The humble/d narrative voice eloquently names the upper-middle class predatory gaze and derogatory attitude, especially towards women (‘chavettes’) in the East End. In one episode the chavette’s intradiegetic voice registers the humbling perpetrated on her by three men at the pub, in an apparently ordinary situation:

Including him there were 3 SNEERING TOFFS on Jasper Black’s table it didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to spot them. I was looking at Sky trying not to catch their eye but I could feel them looking up from their pints and giving each other these little secret grins on account of I was a bit of local colour. Like it was ok I was wearing a Nike T-shirt and trackie bottoms but they’d preferred it if I’d been dressed as Pearly Queen or maybe the little match girl from Oliver The Musical. If they’d been just a little bit more pissed they’d probably of taken a photo of me on their mobiles for those websites I told you about. (Cleave 2006, 12)

23In this passage the toffs’ male gaze is not only turning the woman into an object (sensu De Lauretis16 and Laura Mulvey17), but activates the strategies that re-signify the dress and appearance of a chavette in terms of debasing humiliation.

24Chris Cleave’s multi-layered picture of London in the days of the terrorist bombings of July 2005 confirms a dichotomous divide (both economic and symbolical) between social entitlement and deprivation, between the humble and the humbled. In relation to Weldon’s novel discussed above, it may be worth noticing that the urban, rural and immigrant lower classes depicted in Cleave’s novels18 do not suffer the malfunctioning of the DHS but suffer instead the alienation and incapacitation deriving from the essential dismantling, in just a few decades, of the Welfare State altogether.

25My next text hopes to demonstrate that courage combined with a mature political awareness provides a decisive resistance against precarization and against the social effacement of one’s life.

Precariousness and Resistance: John Lennon’s Working Class Hero

26If in Cleave’s heroine resilience is due to the capacity of adaptation after trauma, to intelligence, courage and energy in facing crisis, in John Lennon’s ‘Working Class Hero’19 these same qualities are combined and strengthened by the protagonist taking a consciously political stance:

As soon as you’re born they make you feel small
By giving you no time instead of it all
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all.
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.
They hurt you at home and they hit you at school,
They hate you if you’re clever and they despise a fool
Till you’re so fucking crazy you can’t follow their rules.
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.
When they’ve tortured and scared you for twenty odd years
Then they expect you to pick a career,
But you really can’t function you’re so full of fear.
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.
Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV
And you think you’re so clever and classless and free,
But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see.
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.
There’s room at the top they are telling us still,
But first we must learn how to smile as we kill
If we want to live like the folks on the hill.
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.

27The hero is fighting précarité and invisibilité by proposing an alternative subjectivity to the one invited by classist norms. His social interlocutor is the reader or listener of the song, to whom the narrative of his life is addressed for validation, against the invalidation orchestrated by the social system in which he finds himself—and which is likely to be similar to the one of the readers. The ‘working class hero’ is aware of the attack against his social visibility: ‘As soon as you’re born they make you feel small’. But he rejects the original social disqualification ‘being small,’ that is, Le Blanc’s equivalent of being ‘without quality’. The mise en œuvre of his life will defy this humbling process and even overcome humility altogether, in the (presumably self-appointed) role of hero. This is the alternative subjectivity and allure de vie that demands validation. Moreover, the song subtly interrogates the normative system. In fact, the classist ideology interpellating the hero, ‘their rules,’ conceals a number of social double binds: ‘They hate you if you’re clever and they despise a fool/Till you’re so fucking crazy you can’t follow their rules.’ ‘When they’ve tortured and scared you for twenty odd years/Then they expect you to pick a career.’ The political and philosophical overall message implies that the ‘working class hero’ goes from the incapacity of following the rules—out of fear and confusion—to the capacity of actively contesting them. It is a case of mise en œuvre of one’s life in Le Blanc’s terms, a successful attempt to counter precarization and invisibility.

Social Validation and the Magic of Names and Accents: Fay Weldon’s Darcy’s Utopia

28A significant last example in this discussion of the humble is Fay Weldon’s Darcy’s Utopia.20 The narrative voice is that of the protagonist of the novel, Eleanor Darcy, who is interviewed by two journalists, a man and a woman, who wish to report her husband’s financial theory, ‘Darcian Monetarism,’ to their respective readers. Hugo Vansitart’s readers are familiar with the financial pages while Valery Jones’ are a female audience chiefly interested in the personal aspects of Eleanor’s narration. In fact, we learn that Eleanor is now left alone because her husband has been jailed as a consequence of his utopian proposal of encouraging inflation until ‘we cease to be a money economy altogether’ (Weldon 1990, 43). As Eleanor unfolds her story, she admits having cut through rigid class partitions thanks to her marriages. The ‘progress’ is signaled in the changes of her own name: from ‘Apricot,’ when a working class child, to ‘Ellen,’ a middle class wife, and lastly ‘Eleanor,’ an upper class wife. She candidly—but with an interesting awareness of sociocultural dynamics in a classist world—admits: ‘Names are magic, believe me. Better be out of love as Eleanor Darcy than Ellen Parkin. The Ellen Parkins of the world love only once, and if it goes wrong give up’ (Weldon 1990, 20). Class consciousness is part of the ‘habitus’ of the society she lives in. Accent and social status, but above all accent and social validation are indissolubly joined (My Fair Lady, is, of course the archetypal text of this issue). The hypocritical denying of this socio cultural norm does not fool the protagonist who clearly knows from her own experience that names and social attributes are of the greatest importance. This apparently frivolous lady comes to a conclusion that a philosopher like Bourdieu would appreciate: ‘The class distinctions we employ, you would maintain, are descriptive, not pejorative. [. . .] Tell that to employers, boyfriends, doctors, the dinner party hostess’ (Weldon 1990, 55–56). The ingrained snobbism that sustains discrimination in the Britain of the 1980s is such a mainstream attitude that even the less privileged are not immune from it. A character tellingly comments: ‘We don’t mind being poor just so long as there’s someone poorer than us. Snobbish to our boots straps’ (Weldon 1990, 40). Against the obtuse gesture of the have nots who like to ‘brush up against’ the haves who despise them, Apricot’s father, a working class player in a band, lucidly voices the enjeu of his own precariousness:

A private party: mostly Rolls Royce dealers: five hours’ practically non-stop playing: family favourites only: raised eyebrows if the band took a brake; stale ham sandwiches and bright yellow orange squash the only meal provided, part of the deal, and ten pounds for the whole band divided by five. Not enough. The guests drank champagne. The men wore dinner jackets: they brayed; the women evening dress and squealed. The band wore dinner jackets too, the girl singer more jewels than the lady guests [. . .]. It was a joke played by the haves against the have-nots. You don’t work for money, the haves conceded, all you want is to be near us in order to become us. So dress like us for an hour or so: come close, come closer: brush up against us if that’s what you want. We’ll dance to your tune the happier, syphon off your magic the better. Then take your money and go. Back to your hovels. (Weldon 1990, 32)

29In Le Blanc’s Vies ordinaires, vies précaires we read that: ‘La critique philosophique est nécessairement connectée à la critique sociale. [. . .] [L]a critique sociale a pour fin la transformation sociale du monde, tandis que la critique philosophique vise d’abord la transformation des représentations du monde’ (Le Blanc 2007, 249). This statement suggests that philosophical critique and social critique are the hallmarks of both the philosophical and literary texts we have been discussing, given their relevant narrative topicality and timely attention to sociocultural and ideological change. Le Blanc, Weldon, Faithfull, Lennon and Cleave acutely suggest that a critical awareness of the dominant ideology is a prerequisite to a questioning of apparently ‘natural’ norms and that the normative is often the result of privilege.

30I hope to have shown that literature has been able to carry out a complex and hopefully, transformative, diagnosis of the present, to which Le Blanc’s philosophy also aspires. Literature has voiced and is still voicing the concepts of precariousness, vulnerability, social invalidation and invisibility while Le Blanc’s philosophy adds a new critical depth to the interpretation of literature and to our articulation of the concept of ‘the humble.’