‘On Failing’ is an unflinching look at the many shades of failure

Literary Activism is a project that began in 2014, with a series of annual symposia. The project, edited by writer Amit Chaudhuri, explores the liminal spaces obliterated by mainstream literary activities and academia. A website in 2020 and an institutional home in 2022 at Ashoka University’s Centre for the Creative and the Critical helped to consolidate and publish.

‘On Failing’, a collection of eight essays and a short story, is a thought-provoking and highly nuanced exploration of the many shades of failure. Not as a counterfactual to success or as a self-help book, but an unflinching look at failure, without blinking. The tone of the essays varies from philosophical and creative to stark and introspective. In one fell swoop, personal history and rigours of the creative process are melded with existential angst. Be it a poet’s inner world crisscrossing with political upheaval to a filmmaker’s travails, multiple perspectives unveil layer by layer, examining what failing can mean to different individuals at different times.

Clancy Martin, a professor of philosophy, writes in ‘Suicide as a Sort of Failure’ that suicide makes us uncomfortable because it is a very public confession of failure as well as “displaced murder”. Strangely, being happy and thinking of suicide is not incompatible as the writer ends on a life-affirming note — staying alive by itself is a heroic feat.

In ‘One Door Closes, Another Door Shuts’, Norwich-based poet Tiffany Atkinson links the deeply personal journey of aborted attempts at becoming pregnant and the trauma of failed IVF cycles to a deep-rooted sense of failure. Biological trauma is juxtaposed with the political failure of the Liberals in the UK, demonstrating the manner in which failure at different points in life acquires new meanings.

Novelist Amit Chaudhuri’s essay, ‘The Intimacy of Failing’, is a class apart. Delicately, like a classical musician, he reconstructs family history and posits it against notions of success and failure, not only in material pursuits but in creative and literary journeys as well. His maternal uncle Radhesh was supported by Chaudhuri’s father in all his endeavours. It is the tolerance of idiosyncrasies that enables us to accept an aberration apart from what is perceived as a correct way.

Acceptance of oneself is also vital. The only short story, ‘Learning to Sing’ by Lydia Davis, showcases singing lessons as a metaphor for navigating life. Like the protagonist, we all try to strike the right note by striving for perfection and focus only on the final outcome, the stage performance. What matters is singing without dissecting the imperfections of one’s voice, like the old lady in the group who sings unabashedly, undeterred by age or arthritis.

Along with navigating death and life, the essays also dwell on the creative process. ‘Some Spontaneous Reflections on Failure’, the text of a brief talk given by Anurag Kashyap, recaps the writer-director’s life and cinematic voyage as a series of glorious failures that are seen as a big success when put together. Stark honesty and raw, unfiltered emotion mark his essay and the interview with Amit Chaudhuri.

Writer-epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta’s essay ‘Failure: A User’s Manual’, is a study in incisive critique. Failure is viewed as a state in relation to success, as pure failure as well as a process. There are also some exceedingly practical uses of failure that Gupta finds liberating as these enable multiple options.

The shift from text to Q&A format ruptures the flow of reading, as does a poem that springs up in the middle of a philosophical treatise. The change in registers and tone requires active reader participation. Like a quick change artiste, the reader too has to shift gears to ensure active engagement.

Living in this age of success ensures that all-important success is courted, chased, deified and celebrated. Success is no longer the fruit of achievement but the difference between existence and obliteration. Consequently, the successful and the unsuccessful are both marked by desperation. A must though tough read, ‘On Failing’ is unique as it helps to remove the blinkers of success-obsessed thinking.

— The reviewer is a senior journalist

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