'The Humble/d' in Literature and Philosophy: Precariousness, Vulnerability, and the Pragmatics of Social Visibility

Literature’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; I will do so with reference to Guillaume Le Blanc and other contemporary philosophers (Bourdieu, Lecercle). As 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 favored, 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, the drug addicts, etc.).