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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
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Akankshya Abismruta
Listen to This Article
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
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This new book asks what if there were no silver lining to failure?
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. Also read: Looking back at the intertwined legacies of Tagore and Ray 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. Also read: Book review: 'Heart Lamp' asks in whom women can really put their faith 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. 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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 Premium Akankshya Abismruta Listen to This Article 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
