This new book asks what if there were no silver lining to failure?
‘On Failing’, a recently launched collection of essays edited by writer Amit Chaudhuri, contests the idea of success being the only benchmark for humans to live by
On 23 February 1821, a young English doctor suffering from tuberculosis breathed his last on a tiny bed in a house near the Spanish Steps in Rome. In the last six years of his brief life, this 25-year-old man, who looked more like a wispy boy, had begun to write poetry. He had even published four volumes of his work, but none had sold much or got favourable reviews. His dying wish to his friends was to have the epitaph, “Here lies One Whose Name was Writ in Water," engraved on his gravestone. It was duly honoured.
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To most of his contemporaries, John Keats was just another unknown poet, destined for obscurity. No one could have guessed the love and adulation he would be receiving more than 200 years after his death. Similar fates have befallen many creative spirits before and after Keats, the Bengali poet Jibanananda Das (1899-1954) being a classic example, who died, allegedly, in a road accident, mostly unsung and, worse, in penury. Some 70 years later, he is revered as one of the greatest Bengali poets since Rabindranath Tagore, while his works are translated widely into other languages.
So were Keats and Das failures in their lifetimes? With the benefit of hindsight, it’s hard to admit that they were but, from the perspective of the 21st-century free market, neither of them, indeed, didn’t amount to much by the time they breathed their last. To borrow from writer Amit Chaudhuri's essay The Intimacy of Failing, included in the recent volume On Failing edited by him, “In capitalism, only success has existence; there are no alternative, negative modes of existence."
From our earliest years, we are primed to think of failure as a stepping stone to success. A gazillion corporate gurus and startup bros on social media will tell you why you must fail and fail fast to achieve the nirvana of success. But what if failure doesn’t necessarily have any redeeming silver lining, at least not always? Why is it so hard for us to accept failure as an absolute reality, with no promise of recovery sweetening the deal?
Some of these questions surface in the handful of essays that feature in On Failing. This slim volume reproduces a series of talks delivered by writers, critics, poets and philosophers at a conference held in the Literary Activism series at Ashoka University, Sonipat, in 2020. Some of the submissions are darkly confessional, where the academic distance between the idea of failure and its intensely human experience is breached with impunity.
The opening piece by Clancy Martin, titled Suicide as a Sort of Failure, is a masterclass in writing personal essay. Grimly comic, self-lacerating, yet peculiarly shorn of any self-pity, it is an analysis of suicide as the ultimate act of failure. Martin’s first-person account gets to the heart of the matter: the double burden of being a failed suicide, a failure to successfully fail at living. It is a bravado performance, where writers David Foster Wallace and Édouard Levé make virtuoso appearances, a class act that sets the tone for the volume.
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Bengali poet Ranajit Das’s acerbic reflections on his own “failure" meander through the life and times of Jibanananda Das (no relation of his), but the best piece in the collection, coming right after, is American writer Lydia Davis’s Learning to Sing. The second person narrator of the story (or is it a piece of memoir?) is a middle-aged woman, who has decided to learn to sing formally in the autumn of her life. She is well conversant with the grammar of music, reads the score in front of her effortlessly, but her voice keeps betraying her, stopping short of hitting the right note or sounding croaky to her own ears. She isn’t planning to be a star performer at this stage in her life, but she is driven by an inner resolve to achieve a certain level of excellence.
It’s a tense yet tender story of an individual’s deeply private struggle to attain a certain benchmark that isn’t set by society. Rather, she seeks validation from her inner critic, not even from the teacher who helps her blossom. Only a writer as masterful as Davis could unspool the public images of failure and success so subtly yet surely, nudging the reader to look within and question their own assumptions.
The two other pieces that make as strong an impression on the reader are poet Tiffany Atkinson’s reflections on her failed IVF treatment and filmmaker Anurag Kashyap’s raw and candid dissection of his career. In the former, a slip of tongue by an acquaintance at a party—“One door closes, another door shuts"— seems to encapsulate Atkinson’s difficulty with her disobedient body, failing to act according to medical protocol and make her pregnant.
In the latter, the reader gets a ringside view of the series of failures—from No Smoking to Bombay Velvet—that Kashyap had to wade his way through to get to where he is today. The most fascinating part of his soliloquy—for it reads like one, with its dramatic interjections—is the unpredictability of his moves, a refusal to follow the script of success, even when it lies bare before him after films like Gangs of Wasseypur and The Lunchbox.
For some of us, failure isn’t necessarily always a tragedy. It is often a way of life. It’s not a dirty word we shun, but a choice to avoid the ready and the easy way. We would much rather be misanthropes who dabble in failure, than be crowd-pleasers who only know how to cosy up to success.
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