Failure (The Art of Living)

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Failure (The Art of Living) Page 10

by Colin Feltham


  In the 1980s, in his poem “My Non-ambitious Ambition”, the rebel-rousing, hard-drinking writer Charles Bukowski complains about his discouraging father (who regularly referred to him as a bum): “and I thought, if being a bum is to be the/opposite of what this son-of-a-bitch/is, then that’s what I’m going to/ be”. He goes on to say “how beautifully I’ve succeeded”. Trite though it is to observe, many reject the model of success presented by parents and feel compelled to assert their own personality even if this means sabotaging the bourgeois success that awaits them. Interestingly, this kind of “script” is often regarded by some psychotherapists as unhealthily rigid, at least for the individual trapped in his or her own early protest against parental oppression.

  Philip Roth’s The Humbling tells the story of a distinguished American classical actor who in his early sixties has “lost his magic”; “the terrible thing happened: he couldn’t act … Instead of the certainty that he was going to be wonderful, he knew he was going to fail” (all this on the very first page). Simon Axler has lost it, he becomes depressed, is afraid he might kill himself and checks into a psychiatric facility. He then goes to live alone (his marriage ended), seemingly accepting his fate. But his new resigned existence is interrupted by a much younger woman with whom he begins an intense relationship, and his outlook brightens in many ways. But when she leaves him he plunges once more, and this time fatally, into despair leading to his shooting himself. After some contemplation he had decided that “the failures were his, as was the bewildering biography on which he was impaled”. Roth’s terse tragedy offers no particular lesson but it does uncomfortably remind us that even decades of success do not guarantee continuing success and happiness. Axler is well off, has enjoyed celebrity and achievement but cannot accept the loss of his talent, and love, in later life.

  Roth’s novel is not exactly self-referential and he is a good, imaginative storyteller generally, but his hero is an actor, a fellow artist. Many novelists are castigated for writing novels about middle-class novelists because they have lost touch with ordinary life and live sequestered from the experiences of everyday struggle. The early successes of some writers can lead entropically to later works that lack the earlier energy and originality. This might remind us of academics in so-called ivory towers, whose theories become ever more remote from the subjects they initially set out to understand and communicate. Perhaps it remains an open question whether it is “good for” artists and their audiences to be so divided, and whether it is inevitable that artists are part of a talented elite entertaining and educating the less talented.

  Of the visual arts, Lisa Le Feuvre, who draws on Kierkegaard and Ricoeur among other philosophers, says:

  Failure … takes us beyond assumptions and what we think we know. Artists have long turned their attention to the unrealizability of the quest for perfection, or the open-endedness of experiment, using both dissatisfaction and error as means to rethink how we understand our place in the world.

  (2010: 12)

  Her book contains numerous examples of artists actually courting and celebrating failure, partly as a route to serendipitous discovery and partly to subvert conventional views of success. As in Keats’s notion of “negative capability” we are reminded that doubt, uncertainty and unknowing are key aspects of art and life. Replication of the same old beautiful themes is what art perhaps once was but creativity means that new perspectives, methods and directions are always necessary. Interestingly, what is celebrated today as successful modern art would have been considered ugly, downright aesthetic failures two hundred years ago.

  Philosophers such as Bernard Williams, dwelling on the theme of moral luck, often focus on artists such as Paul Gauguin as examples. Gauguin left his wife and children in France to pursue his artistic aspirations in Tahiti. As it turned out (luckily), he became a highly successful artist and therefore in retrospect he is perceived as having redeemed his otherwise irresponsible actions. But if he had failed in his artistic bid, he might well have been perceived as a moral failure. We might say that moral luck and ill luck dog the lives of many artists and writers. Gaugin’s friend Vincent van Gogh achieved little success in his own lifetime and experienced much suffering, yet became posthumously highly successful: or rather his work did. Van Gogh’s Still Life: Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers sold in 1987 for a record £24.7 million and all his paintings now attract vast sums.

  It was in the context of success and failure that John Berger (1965) examined the career of Pablo Picasso. Picasso was probably the twentieth century’s best known artist. Unlike van Gogh and many other artists he did not suffer or die in poverty or obscurity. He seemed to embody the artistic genius, frequently changing subjects and styles in a lifelong prolific output. Berger suggests that Picasso was a noble savage and bourgeois revolutionary, torn between a bohemian and Marxist temperament and sympathies, and yet catapulted into great commercial success. His millionaire lifestyle gradually sealed him off from raw new experiences and had a negative effect on his art. However prolific and inventive he remained, he became a parody of himself. In many of his later paintings Berger sees evidence of Picasso including self-references, for example to a monkey mocking an old man near a beautiful woman. Picasso seemed the lifelong virile hero of art and life but was aware in such paintings that he was in fact an old man and somewhat ridiculous. If the artist is by calling an outsider and anarchist, then the successful artist, particularly the rich artist, is an object of suspicion. It is on just this point that financial speculation on the art market has raised serious doubts about today’s artistic values.

  We say that everyone has a novel inside them. It is true that each of us has a slightly different story to tell. But each of us, aside from our prosaic external events, harbours an unexercised hero, murderer, adventurer, rapist, suicide, great lover, martyr, or some combination of these. However, those who fan the aspirations of the not very talented masses by encouraging the common ambition to become a novelist, actor, entertainer, sportsperson (and, these days, counsellor) are surely acting irresponsibly. Very few people can make it in these professions; the failure rate is high, employment scarce and the competition frankly ridiculous. Such aspirations chime with the sentiment that everyone can be famous for fifteen minutes, or be “famous for being famous”, as in the case of vacuous celebrities. Yet the fantasy is an important element in capitalist societies, in which people must have constant hope of success with which to motivate themselves. It is also an important hope for the most oppressed and disadvantaged, yet at the same time it is clearly logically faulty. While Barack Obama became the first black president of the USA, the overwhelming majority of poor black and white citizens will never attain any significant power at all.

  Another interesting side of the failed novelist or actor scenario is this. Publishing is a commercial enterprise and publishing staff are professionals. Bombarded with the scripts of new novels by aspiring novelists, publishers make rapid but presumably skilled decisions and reject most of these, identifying the few that show real promise. However, as we know, this often isn’t true. Books that turn out to be runaway bestsellers have quite often been rejected earlier by other publishers. These include Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Kon-Tiki, Dubliners, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, We Need to Talk about Kevin, Lorna Doone, Gone with the Wind and, of course, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. A certain element of randomness rules in the world of commerce. It is a fantasy, and flimsy logic, to imagine that talent will always win out. It is not only goodness that is fragile but natural justice too.

  One of the saddest examples is the novel A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, who committed suicide, partly due to the failure to get his book published. His mother subsequently promoted it, it was published in 1980, has been critically acclaimed and won the Pulitzer Prize. Much more common are countless examples of books that fail to sell many copies, sometimes regardless of how good they are, the market being fickle. This is true of theatre an
d film too, where box-office successes may be “critical failures” and vice versa.

  Our human characteristics include a vigilant consciousness, a constant awareness of fragility and entropy, and seeking meanings, solutions or distractions. We might see religion, the arts, media, sport, entertainment, travel and tourism, the internet, fashion and general consumerism as part of the same complex of psychologically needed myths and stimuli. None of these are vital in the sense that securing food, housing, companionship, sex and safety is vital. But they do appear to be emotionally vital in so far as we need emotional symbols, assurances, soothing and catharsis. However, they are all in the subjective domain and they appeal to the masses in a way that science does not. Bookshops are full of fiction and non-fiction, as if fiction is primary, and book sales reflect this. Television too reflects some need for substantial distraction, and the small screen has carried across to the pervasive world of the internet.

  In addition to the mass popularity of literature, we have an industry of literary criticism, also based essentially on subjectivity. All of us are amateur critics of the arts and media. I read or half-read some novels and think that they fail to engage me, or they don’t speak to me. I may sometimes condemn them as rubbish. But when something is hailed by critics and endorsed by sales or viewing figures as brilliant, I may pause to think that if I don’t “get it” I may be a failure as an aesthetic judge. Indeed, I am not interested in most sports, or conceptual art or opera, or religion, and I wonder if this is a flaw or limitation of mine. However, we can see in certain examples that subjective judgements prevail here. In many religions the media, dance and frivolity are regarded as sinful. Philosophers disagree over the meaning and value of the arts, Plato being famously sceptical about their worth but Aristotle dwelling quite a bit on aesthetics in his Poetics. There is also considerable debate about the merits of so-called high art versus trashy media arts, about the spiritually uplifting nature of art versus its opiate effects, and about the status of the artist as genius or mad. John Carey’s What Good are the Arts? works through such issues, reminding us that Sartre, for one, “puts the case that the literature of the past is irrelevant, dead, and only for losers” (2005: 175).

  It may be my aesthetic or emotional failing (or simply my subjective bent) not to appreciate much the art gallery, theatre, sports stadium or church. But certainly some films, books and music can move me emotionally and edge me into new insights, and television and other ephemeral media can distract and inform me. Where I believe the arts fail us is in luring us into transient states of emotional and aesthetic uplift that we then take to be the heights of true experience. In other words, the aesthetic and emotional become symbolic substitutes for enlightenment, for penetrating our false and troublesome human consciousness. The arts complex joins religion, politics, psychotherapy, indeed all institutions, in losing its original inspiration via gradual corruption. It is a tragedy that so often the best minds of our species – Socrates, Aristotle, Jesus, the Buddha, Shakespeare, Picasso and many others – leave a legacy of misunderstanding, imitation and institutionalization, or rather that we fail to grasp and embody their insights. Even sadder is the possibility that the vast majority of us are so immersed in our sedimented false consciousness that we shall never be liberated from it.

  In his somewhat bleak but seminal book Very Little … Almost Nothing, Critchley agrees that “it is no longer clear what counts as a work of art and how a work counts” (1997: 154) and quotes from Beckett’s Molloy the phrase “a form fading among fading forms” For Critchley, Beckett’s work resists and partly mocks philosophical analysis, and yet philosophers such as himself, Theodor W. Adorno and Stanley Cavell find Beckett highly inspiring. Critchley wants to assert that in Beckett we find not the meaninglessness of existence but a successful portrayal of modern human confrontation with meaning. Literature is, in Beckett’s words, “a long sin against silence” (quoted in ibid.: 167).

  Chris Waitts’s film A Complete History of my Sexual Failures (2008) is a documentary of his own failed relationships, portraying him as a hapless, deadpan, almost schizoid character. He probes for possible reasons for his failures (immaturity, self-absorption, lack of commitment, chaotic behaviour, impotence, etc.) until he realizes emotionally on talking with his most loved ex-girlfriend that he has failed to appreciate his opportunities. At that point he fortuitously meets a new woman, wacky like him, and failure looks at last like turning to possible happiness. This is one of those funny (to some) but also very sad films suggesting that a sustained honest encounter with one’s own emotional failings may yield real insights. I found myself crying at the end of it, as I did when I read Roth’s Everyman and Sebastian Faulks’s Human Traces. Different stories and their treatments touch each of us differently but we might wonder at our common susceptibility to being moved and influenced much more by spiritual and artistic phenomena than by difficult scientific and philosophical texts.

  The critically successful film Magnolia (1999) portrays a number of interwoven scenarios – including child sex abuse, marital strife, undue parental pressure on a child, extreme misogyny – that demand emotional and ethical reactions from viewers. Mike Leigh’s realist films similarly demand a reaction. In Another Year (2010) the action takes place around a comfortably off, slightly smug middle-aged couple (she is a counsellor). By contrast Ken is a sad drunk, Mary is an all-round failure who also drinks to excess, and Ronnie is an expressionless, inarticulate widower. Superficially they are all friends, but over an excruciating dinner we can see that Ronnie’s and Mary’s losers’ worlds are far away from the successful world of the middle-class, happily married, graduate couple (and their professional son and his girlfriend). It’s difficult to decide whether mere moral luck, education and class separate them or if Mary in particular has unskilfully or wilfully fucked her life up in contrast to the virtuous couple. In Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves (1996), however, it is easy to see the lead character Bess as a beautifully innocent martyr to the cold and wicked moralism of Scottish clergy and peers. The causes of global catastrophe are unknown in the film The Road (2009, adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s novel) but utterly bleak failure including cannibalism impinges on all, with the protective father and his son hopefully and fallibly “carrying the fire” for civilized human values.

  Many films have effectively shown that systemic social failures (slavery, sexism, racism) can be, have been and need to be opposed, and those kept in failure positions need to become aspirational, not to endlessly bemoan their fate of being held in a failure position by their oppressors. This is broadly true of films as various as Spartacus, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Educating Rita, Freedom Writers and Slumdog Millionaire. In the genre of popular catastrophe movie, The Towering Inferno indicted the failure of builders to adhere to regulations for high-quality materials and The Day After Tomorrow showed prophetically that failure to heed early warnings of climate change may lead to large-scale disaster and human deaths.

  Many of the examples of failure given in this book are about men and by men. As a small adjustment, consider briefly Meredith Broussard’s The Dictionary of Failed Relationships (2003). Written by twenty-six contemporary young female writers, this book amusingly and sometimes painfully covers a wide range of relationship failures, reminding us just how common these are, especially in our early years of hope, flirting and courtship. Fantasy, misjudgements and outright mismatches, clumsy gropings, violence and more: this is the stuff of failed couplings, much of it even well before the chronically tedious marriage or bitter divorce.

  While failure is usually portrayed in dark terms, it also has a lighter side. Indeed, failure is at the very core of slapstick comedy. Things going visibly wrong, people falling over, getting hit and run over are the ingredients of much silent film but also of a great deal of contemporary comedy. Social failure, faux pas, domestic farce: these all form the contents of much film and many television programmes. So-called reality television permits us to look close
ly at personal failings, interpersonal clumsiness and failed social skills, and many seem fascinated by the spectacle. Popular, loved American comics, such as those by Harvey Pekar and Robert Crumb, show vivid autobiographical failures with work, health and relationships: the graphic counterpoint to the glossy American dream.

  Or take a cartoon book such as You are Worthless, which might read as a dangerous incitement to self-hatred but is very funny as it draws on satire of the self-help industry and on negative probability:

  Try another role-model exercise: Picture someone you look up to who is very rich, good-looking, successful, and loved by everyone. Now slowly count to one million, because that’s how many years in which you will never be as rich, good-looking, successful, or loved as that person.

  (Pratt & Dikkers 1999: 6)

  So, the arts and media frequently chart our failures. They demonstrate that human existence is shot through with tragic events, unpredictable and uncontrollable forces and often absurd situations. Artists and writers themselves often remain economic failures, except for the lucky few who sometimes deservedly and sometimes by fluke or absurdity or capitalist distortion become rich celebrities. The arts reflect the human condition but perhaps, as Plato argued, they also fail us. There is melancholy in the intuition that lives do not end happily ever after, as in some novels, and that many lives are low-level tragicomedies. There is also an important, underdeveloped critique of art in the likes of Bertolt Brecht’s anti-individualist drama and poetry: for all its aesthetic striving and anarchistic posing, most art is arguably a political failure.

 

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