Religious fundamentalists have added a recent layer of what is effectively censorship to a long-standing “anti-parrhēsic” tradition. Mostly parrhēsia is a rare commodity and lack of it points to deep-seated moral failure, cowardice, inauthenticity and bad faith. It may be difficult to distinguish between hate-motivated fascist groups who attempt to hijack the right to speak plainly and be heard on the one hand, and sincere and thoughtful spokespeople on the other. Much ethical agonizing goes into this problem. But the combined forces of the over-sensitive and the insensitive render much daily life highly inauthentic in schools, in the workplace, in politics and elsewhere. Most of us tacitly accept the necessity of lies and disingenuousness and yet it must also strike us as quite astonishing that we cannot get along without lies, that we choose to live (or believe we have no choice but to live) by suppressing honesty.
4.
The tragic arts
Awareness of failures on all levels is illustrated abundantly in religion, philosophy, literature and art. In this chapter I look at failure through the lens of many of our artistic and creative media, mainly poetry, drama, novels, visual art, film and comedy. Obviously this is a highly selective look. Interestingly, Plato was somewhat hostile to the arts, regarding them as glamorizing the illusory and impeding the search for truth. We know, however, from the Bible and many other sources that the arts in all their forms were always the chief means of reflecting on human misfortunes and provoking popular engagement with tragic themes.
In her extremely scholarly The Fragility of Goodness (2001), the philosopher Martha Nussbaum takes as her theme the “moral luck” that challenges the “aspiration to rational self-sufficiency” of so many early Greek philosophers and indeed poets. Greek tragedy, often differing sharply from contemporary philosophy, showed that bad things often happen to good people. Regardless of how good we strive to be, events outside our control can seriously knock us back. Even the most disciplined Stoics and others aspiring by the exercise of reason to be immune to adversity may be tested beyond their powers of endurance and brought low: this has often offended the sensibilities of philosophers such as Aristotle and Kant. However we arrange circumstances we cannot foresee all potential tests of fate, shocks and misfortunes, and this is the stuff of a great deal of literature and art. Furthermore, just as the virtuous may fall, so the deviant and undeserving may prosper. For example, the lifelong dissolute character may enjoy a long healthy life while the person observing all solid health advice may be susceptible to disease or early death. Whatever philosophical principles are adopted, the arbitrariness of moral luck can cut through them. As Nussbaum says, the good life is always vulnerable to moral luck. And it is just this element of chance and unpredictability that has engaged audiences for many centuries.
Arguably more than most philosophers, the pessimistic Schopenhauer has directly influenced novelists and dramatists such as Beckett, Chekhov, Conrad, Hardy, Mann, Proust, Tolstoy and Zola, among others. A small number of philosophers have also been novelists (e.g. Simone de Beauvoir, Camus, Iris Murdoch and Sartre), consciously exploring philosophical themes in fiction. I have used the word “tragic” here but we might remember that literature takes many forms, even among those exploring features of existential failure. Nietszche distinguished between Appollonian and Dionysian arts, the former characterized by sculpture, the latter by music, corresponding somewhat to dreams and drunkenness. Benjamin distinguished between Trauerspiel (the play of mourning, or melancholy) and tragedy, regarding the writer of the former as “sorrowful investigator” and melancholy as proceeding necessarily from the Fall (Pensky 2001). My concern here is with our longstanding melancholy legacy as a flawed species and numerous examples of personal, situational and global failures.
Discussing tragedy, Adrian Poole calls attention to the place of the fatal error and fatal flaw connoted by Aristotle’s hamartia:
Others translate hamartia more simply as “fault”, “mistake”, or “error”, And however much of a character’s propensity to error we read into the concept, the primary emphasis seems to be on the error itself, the fault committed. To take a mild example, it’s like a tennis serve that falls on the wrong side of the line (“Fault!”). To take a graver example, Philoctetes wanders off the beaten path and into a sacred shrine guarded by a snake, who punishes his “error”. (2005: 46)
As existentialist philosopher William Barrett has it, we collectively exist:
in a state of “fallen-ness” (Verfallenheit), according to Heidegger, in the sense that we are as yet below the level of existence to which it is possible for us to rise. … But, as happened to Ivan Ilyich in Tolstoy’s story, such things as death and anxiety intrude upon this fallen state, destroy our sheltered position of simply being one among many, and reveal to us our own existence as fearfully and irremediably our own“.
(1961: 196)
John Calder (2001), presenting the plays, novels and life of Samuel Beckett as philosophy, combines notions of philosophy as fiction and failure as art, as well as inferring an ethic of Stoicism from Beckett’s work. In his view, Beckett regarded success and failure as “neither significant nor different, as they lead inevitably to the same end. Success is only a trap, offering a temporary and false security which can crumble away at any time”. Further, “there is neither fault nor shame in failure. The cause, more often than not … is accident … part of the chaos and general mess of all existence” (ibid.: 9). Beckett himself had said that for the artist “failure is his world” (quoted in ibid.: 138). And of course Beckett has left us, from Worstward Ho, with what has unfortunately become the tediously over-quoted “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
The American novelist Paul Auster (1998), in the first few pages of an autobiographical text, says that at one stage “everything I touched turned to failure. My marriage ended in divorce, my work as a writer foundered, and I was overwhelmed by money problems” (1998: 3); and “my relationship to money had always been flawed” (ibid.: 3). Of his warring and ultimately divorced parents, he says, “money was the fault line” (ibid.: 7). Then an aspiring writer enduring odd jobs, unlikely money-making schemes and poverty in a tragic admixture, Auster became an outstanding critical and commercial success on the international scene.
Back at the beginning, one of our very oldest works of literature is The Epic of Gilgamesh, thought to date from about 2000 BCE. In this poem from the Middle East the hero, Gilgamesh, is a powerful warrior who comes to love Enkidu, initially a rival. When Enkidu dies Gilgamesh is distraught and launches into a quest for immortality, which of course must fail. Also in the story are fragments about the guile of a woman, and a great flood. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, thought to date from the eighth century BCE, contain the themes of fate, homecoming, wrath, glory and honour, and adventure, travel, intrigue, a voyage to the underworld, disguise and personal weakness, respectively. Both include gods and heroes. The Bible too contains many stories of migration, war, heroes, morality, prophets and gods, rewards and punishments. All these literary sources suggest preoccupations with questing, mortality, agonizing, battles and hopes, righteousness and wickedness. All are dominated by male characters. Dante’s fourteenth century CE allegorical epic poem The Divine Comedy shows a Christian worldview of hell, purgatory and heaven characterized by themes of darkness, fear, deadly sins, self-indulgence, violence and malice, and love. Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth distils the all too human elements of vanity, envy and guilt, played out around the murder of King Duncan and the inevitable escalation of killing, of Macbeth’s own downfall and death. While we have clearly had great shifts across centuries of literature, an element of dissatisfaction, bewildered trauma, suffering and hope of redemption is rarely far away.
We are often told that humans are myth-making creatures. Clearly we are. We are told we need myths and stories. About this I’m less sure; or rather I want to know why so many of us apparently need them. After all, fiction is fiction, akin to deception, e
ven though we find it entertaining or morale-boosting. Aristotle asserted that all of us reach for understanding by our very nature:
It is because of wonder that human beings undertake philosophy, both now and at its origins … The person who is at a loss and in a state of wonder thinks he fails to grasp something; this is why the lover of stories is in a sense a philosopher, for stories are composed out of wonders.
(Nussbaum 2001: 259)
Wonder is not the same thing as being at a loss or failing to grasp something. My conjecture is that this sense of loss and needing to understand has particular roots that we can link with the earliest literature and its themes. Perhaps prototypical literature and the arts arose around a time of significant migrations, loss of home, wars and deaths, when human consciousness became acutely aware of matters not being axiomatically happy. The creation of myths about heroes, gods and God seems to fit a pattern of seeking reassurance in narratives that could embody explanations when scientific knowledge was slight and anxieties were high. Stories may contain philosophies; even today fiction is vastly more popular than philosophy. But fiction is also more popular than science. Fiction, drama and poetry evidently meet a deep emotional need, just as religion does. But what is it about human beings, about human consciousness, that found and finds existence in itself some sort of failure or insufficiency? Presumably animals do not feel this way. Human beings in love, in action and in mystical union do not feel they are failing to grasp something. Is it only human beings with too much surplus time and thought, and too little absorption in necessity, who fail to grasp “something”?
In his poem “Burnt Norton”, T. S. Eliot included the memorable lines “human kind … cannot bear very much reality” and “dessication of the world of sense”. Did our language-heavy consciousness sever us from direct experience; did it fail us? Did that which distinguished us from animals and launched our amazingly complex civilizations simultaneously become perhaps our gravest flaw?
How does each of us come to meaningful literature, when we do? In my own adolescent angst, finding life dry, difficult and rather pointless, it was reading certain texts at school and the accidental discovery of certain authors that brought me out of dire misery. I was indeed at a loss and failing to grasp something. Variously, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, George Orwell and Dylan Thomas all gave me a sense, however fuzzy, of others grappling seriously with life’s failures. Very few real people of my acquaintance seemed to engage in such thoughts, religion seemed too fantastical and its scriptures too removed from the present, and most philosophy far too abstruse to be helpful. But some poetry and novels pointed the way or reflected the being at a loss and in a state of wonder. Only much, much later did any science and history start to answer some of my burning questions.
Both as an adolescent and now I find myself very busy-minded, flitting from one preoccupation to another. I puzzle over difficult aspects of life, I search for answers, I engage in various projects, and I have struggled to find peace and meaning in jobs and relationships. W. B. Yeats’s “I have attempted many things/And not a thing is done” captures some of the sense of being at a loss, one’s disappointed heart forever distracting from one’s best efforts.
Eliot’s The Waste Land, published in 1922, conveys much of the aridity of modern life:
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
We studied this at school for an A-level exam and it hit me in two ways. First, what Eliot seemed to be saying (behind many obscure references) was that modern life was some kind of failure: urban life, work, marriage and sex were all disappointing, and death hovered over everything. But second, how was it that such a poem, apparently so critical of our way of life, was being held up as an example of great literature by the mainstream school system? Were we expected to remain detached about it, and not be personally, emotionally affected? Should one praise the state education system for exposing young people to challenging literature, or suspect it of not actually getting it: that is, that some of us might be depressed by it or stimulated to serious protest?
I left school at eighteen and my first job in the “Unreal City” required me to walk over Blackfriars Bridge and sit in a tiny office doing utterly soul-destroying bureaucratic work. Since no one can control for subjective associations and reactions, I can report that lines from Dylan Thomas echoed in my head at that time; Gaugin’s example of self-exile also featured there; the films Lord of the Flies (1963), If (1968) and Zabriskie Point (1970) all played a part in my mistrust of society and its grown-ups. The nuclear threat and Vietnam featured prominently around that time, as did the student riots in Paris in 1968. Countercultural politics, drugs, art and literature were all part of the ferment of a rejection of a society that appeared to be a manifest failure: materially rich but failing to nurture the human spirit.
Awareness of and protest against materialist values was evident well before the 1960s, however (indeed, recall the Cynics from well over 2,000 years ago). In 1949, Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman had its premiere. It remains a classic study of failure at several levels. Its main character, Willy Loman from Brooklyn, is at sixty-three fired from his sales job of thirty-six years. He has been struggling with work and debt, having accidents and, his wife finds, planning suicide. Like many others he can be perceived as being failed by the American consumerist dream that pushed so many into unrealistic aspirations that entailed high mortgages and debts and ended up simply exhausting them, breaking their morale. Willy is disappointed in his two sons, neither of whom is a success: one flunked maths at school, a failure that dogs him; the other is described by their mother as a “philandering bum”. So this extremely sad play ends in Willy’s death and haunting themes about a flawed, dehumanizing capitalism and its brutal competitiveness, a somewhat deluded, failed salesman and the transgenerational transmission of flaws (the “sins” of the fathers). Willy is truly finished, washed up, and we are faced with difficult questions about causes and casualties.
We might pause here to consider certain perennial philosophical themes. There is some conceptual entropy at work in getting from the proposed good life of early Greek philosophers to the consumerist dystopia of modernity. The concept of happiness is distorted over time, it becomes a mere right and ends in the superficial hedonism so ubiquitous today. The concept of authenticity, of being true to oneself, falters and fails across time, so that individuals end up chasing it as a chimera, as yet another elusive goal. The examined life deteriorates into the ridiculous ritual of long unproductive years on the analyst’s couch, Woody Allen-style, and the mesmerising jargon that accompanies it.
We can compare two short classic novels for themes of failure: Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich (originally published in 1886) and Camus’ The Fall (published in 1956). What these have in common is a male lead character who is an outward success, in both cases quite prominent in the legal profession. In the first, Ivan Ilyich works very hard to elevate himself in society and career, and to marry suitably. He is convinced he has made all the right moves and yet he is haunted by a sense of failure, is not much loved, and, following an injury, he falls ill and dies a lingering death at forty-five. In The Fall, Camus’ Jean-Baptiste Clamence retires from Paris to Amsterdam and muses ironically on his success in life. He enjoys his professional success, his standing, and his success with women. Ivan has done all that might be expected of anyone, and yet to no avail. His life amounts to being simply inauthentic and quickly forgotten; he is easy to replace. Jean-Baptiste is not outwardly a failure at all, yet examines himself and confesses to myriad acts of inauthenticity. We might say that both have lived a lie. Yet millions still aspire to such career successes and so-called respectability, and presumably some of them are happy with what they achieve, find love, and do not die with a sense of being mystified.
&n
bsp; Let us not ignore that phenomenon whereby failure is romanticized or ironically converted into its opposite. In fashion we can see hobo-chic, for example expensive designer jeans manufactured to look attractively old and torn. Much of the successful career of Charlie Chaplin, who became extremely rich, rested on his portrayal of tramps, for which he was much loved. The English novelist Walter Greenwood was a clerk in a textile firm in Salford. His Love on the Dole, published in 1933, in times of great poverty, became a best-seller that some compared with Dostoevsky and many saw as an indictment of failed capitalism. Greenwood’s novel was successful in the USA and also became a play, and he was awkwardly propelled into fame and wealth. I recall reading it with great approval during a period when I was young, unemployed, depressed and without love.
Partly echoing early Greek Cynics but also inspired by Zen Buddhism and existentialism, the beatniks of the 1950s included beat poets, novelists, artists and musicians who rejected bourgeois society and its aims. Influenced by French poets and dramatists such as Antonin Artaud and Arthur Rimbaud, and also Americans such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, writers such as William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac adopted a style in their art, dress and behaviour that conspicuously rejected mainstream norms of the time and place. The beats were seen as beat, beaten down, tired, but also as upbeat and beatific. Ginsberg’s famous poem “Howl” begins with the line “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness”. Regarded as failed citizens, disloyal to the American dream of materialism and progress, they saw society as failing real human needs. The beats may be seen as forerunners of hippies, punks and later anarchists and anti-capitalists who continue to regard mainstream society as flawed beyond redemption. Philosophers like Marcuse, critiquing the alienating “one-dimensional society” in the early 1960s, argued that “‘Romantic’ is a term of condescending defamation which is easily applied to disparaging avant-garde positions, just as the term ‘decadent’ far more often denounces the genuinely progressive traits of a dying culture than the real factors of decay” (1991: 63). Again we see the problem of determining who is at fault, the dissenting individual (or movement) or mainstream society, perhaps with the only possible answer being both and neither.
Failure (The Art of Living) Page 9