On Failing

The Literary Activism project began in 2014 with a series of annual symposia with Ashoka University. The aim was to create a space for the kind of discussion on creativity that we don’t usually encounter in the mainstream. Writer and academic Amit Chaudhuri wrote the mission statement and reached out to other academics, novelists, poets, translators, and publishers, offering them the opportunity to speak on the subject in a way that they probably wouldn’t in other contexts. An escape hatch of sorts, for those who don’t quite fit into the demands of modern publishing or modern academia that are increasingly driven by visibility, self-promotion, and what one writer refers to as “arithmetic success.” In 2023, the Literary Activism imprint came into being as a collaboration between Ashoka University and Westland Books. The imprint publishes books on literature in English and in translation from other languages. 

Among the five books that we have from the series, we have just finished reading On Failing. Edited by Amit Chaudhuri, this is a collection of eight essays and one short story that explore the idea of failing and its various forms. Not just as the opposite of success but as something in itself, "pure failure" as some of them call it.

Chaudhuri writes about "conspiring 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 that we can have the freedom to be non-viable.” Convoluted as that sounds, this resonated with me.

Re-reading the Lydia Davis short story Learning to Sing in this context was illuminating - the story is a subtly humorous interrogation of failure, in which the writer/narrator upon joining a neighbourhood singing group, finds her voice distressingly thin and weak and when things don’t improve with many vocal lessons and even medical intervention, the narrator must make peace with this shortcoming and perhaps find a way to enjoy the act of singing, imperfectly but with joy. 

The essayists approach failing from diverse, and thought provoking, perspectives. Sumana Roy writes about Satyajit Ray’s films and his process - I was struck by her description of his film Kanchenjunga in which the mountain “fails” to reveal itself after an entire day’s waiting by seekers; she writes that failure was something Ray was always conscious about in his film-making, whether it had to do with failing light or various other factors potentially going awry, and this awareness impacted the end result and his aesthetic, many times positively.

Tiffany Atkinson writes about biological failure (the trauma of failing after multiple IVF cycles, to have a child) as well as political failure (Brexit). Ranajit Das writes humorously and self-deprecatingly of his own obscurity as a poet despite having written poetry for several decades, in the end making an argument for the creative solitude an artist needs.

Amit Chaudhuri’s piece is brilliant and personal, a slice of family history - the story of his father who became the CEO of a large multinational, juxtaposed with that of his maternal uncles, who were each creative and brilliant and yet failed to attain any degree of academic or professional success - the brothers were the sort who would spend an entire morning arguing about which was the superior fruit - the mango or the orange. And when Chaudhuri’s father recalls this, there is a hint of annoyance but also accommodation and indulgence - one feels it’s not quite such a useless thing, to discuss the relative merits of fruit - that theirs was an education not linked with success but with desire. 

In his conclusion, Chaudhuri writes that “for my failure to exist now, I must invent ways of succeeding slightly. I test the temperature from moment to moment, because it is important to check the conditions that make it possible.” 

This is recommended for anyone who would like a nuanced exploration of failing, and some perspective on the constant and seemingly non-negotiable pursuit of success that seems to define our times.