On Failing: Where the quiet complexities of failure take centre stage

Through an eclectic collection of essays spanning subjects from suicide to physiology, On Failing creates space for failure to exist-without forcing life lessons down anyone's throat

ON FAILING

Editor: Amit Chaudhuri

Publisher: Westland

Pages: 124

Price: ₹399

  Literary Activism is a project that began in 2014 with a series of annual symposia. The project aims to create a space for creative and critical discussions and intervention beyond commercial publishing, literary festivals and traditional academia. It brings together numerous national and international poets, novelists, translators, artists, journalists, scholars, filmmakers and publishers.  On Failing, edited by Amit Chaudhuri, is a collection of eight essays and one short story presented at the fifth symposium in February 2020.

 

On Failing, as is evident from its title, explores the concept of failure and the space (or the lack thereof) it occupies today. In the mission statement, Mr Chaudhuri describes the relationship between creative practice and the necessity of failure. He writes, “…we might conspire to succeed only to a degree that’s necessary for us to fail: because we know that it’s only by failing that we can produce viable work, and only by succeeding to some extent we can have the freedom to be non-viable. Failure has not only no dignity in the post-free market world we inhabit; it has no legitimacy, no vocabulary for self-appraisal.” The contributors include Tiffany Atkinson, Michel Chaouli, Ranajit Das, Amit Chaudhuri, Sunetra Gupta, Anurag Kashyap, and Lydia Davis. The essays are neither academic nor commercial. They are likely to interest the reader on account of the writers’ creative approaches to locate failures.

 

The collection begins with an immersive essay by Chancy Martin, “Suicide a Sort of Failure”. Mr Martin narrates the experience of waking up in a hospital after a failed suicide attempt. He uses Suicide, a novel by the French writer and photographer Édouard Levé to explore the self-irony and self-mockery of a suicidal person, the selfishness of the act, and cowardice at committing and failing at it. Without judgement, he holds space for suicidal people to be seen and understood.

 

In “Description of a Poet’s Failure”, the Sahitya Akademi winner Ranajit Das humorously explores the lack of fame in his long poetic career. He says, “…any long-standing obscurity of a poet gradually becomes a kind of fame in itself — a very stubborn, cultish, underground fame, which is always dreaded by celebrity-poets! Because this kind of clandestine fame is rumoured to have a direct link with immortality of art.”

 

Tiffany Atkinson, Sunetra Gupta and Anurag Kashyap reflect on their experiences of failure. Ms Atkinson, giving a new spin to a cliche in her essay titled “One Door Closes, Another Door Shuts”, notes, “...between the door that closes and the door that shuts there is time and space, an impasse, where forward momentum, the narrative of the meaning of one’s life is momentarily suspended. In this space perhaps the feelings of failings can at least be detached from the pragmatic, and I am wondering what can happen there.” Ms Gupta looks at a similar space as pure failure, something that’s not allowed today in these free-market times when not only self-help books but the higher education institutions seek “to guarantee success and inure you to the various (minor) failures you might meet along the way.”

 

Mr Kashyap talks lucidly about the cycles of failures after success throughout his career in filmmaking. “Success always comes when you’re not working for success. And failure always comes when you’re working for success,” he says. In a similar vein, Sumana Roy explores the concept in Satyajit Ray’s essays on his filmmaking in which he reiterates that failure, always unexpected, leads to something better than what was planned. She does so by focusing on one of the most important requirements of filmmaking — light.

 

In a lyrical story written in the second person “Learning to Sing”, where the “you” wants to learn singing but often cannot find the perfect tone and pitch and is often critical of herself, Lydia Davis beautifully showcases the relationship between childhood, criticism, and seeking perfection as an adult. Her essay highlights that being bold enough to pursue what you like, despite being bad at it, often attracts people’s admiration.

 

In the concluding essay “Failing and Falling”, Michel Chaouli explores Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s intriguing theories on the difference between animals, who move by necessity, and humans, who move by choice, to explore the concept of falling. Fichte posits that a human toddler aspires to walk on two feet by falling multiple times despite being adept on all fours but animals don’t experience such a choice. From this comparison in the physiology between animals and humans, Mr Chaouli notes, “The ignorant may regard that fall as a failure when in fact it is an index of your achievement.”

 

On Failing  creates space for failure to exist without the intent to impose life lessons down anyone’s throat. Ranging from the subjects of suicide to physiology, it provides an eclectic collection of essays that will invigorate the readers’ mind. Today, when tech-bro podcasts ring loud on every platform on the internet with guaranteed mantras for success, these distinct voices provide respite for people in creative practice, allowing them to sit with their failures for a while. Or as Amit Chaudhuri, in “The Intimacy of Failing”, suggests, “One doesn’t joke about success in this silly way because we don’t own it, success rules over us from a distance. Failure is ours, it will never desert us.”

The reviewer is a creative writer based in Sambalpur