ENDPAPER
Literature of failure
BY PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
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Why do novelists and filmmakers seem reluctant to explore failure and its attendant emotions?
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FAILURE is the rarest theme in literature. There are just a handful of novels, plays and short stories on the subject of the unlived life. (It's a theme rare in cinema, too).
Searching for a literature of failure, I could only come up with Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes, Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra, John O'Brien's Leaving Las Vegas, Terrence Rattigan's The Browning Version and Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet.
Once in a way there is the odd book that visits conditions close to failure, like the recent anthology titled Mortification: Writers' Stories of Their Public Shame, a collection of 70 specially commissioned contributions by several contemporary writers: "true stories of public indignity celebrating defeat and humiliation".
Novelists and filmmakers seem reluctant to explore failure and its attendant emotions and baggage - self-pity, lovelessness, regret, addiction (sexual or substance abuse) boredom, a death wish, and self-destruction.
Wrenching adaptations
I'd like to look at two failure-themed plays, The Browning Version and Uncle Vanya, and their wrenching film adaptations. Terrence Rattigan's play is about a failed schoolteacher. Andrew Crocker Harris, a teacher of Latin and Greek, discovers in his last year that he has failed to inspire his students. Over the years Crocker Harris has buried his identity (and his bruised heart) in his devotion to the classics. In the play's most unforgettable moment, Tupelo, the only student who likes the curmudgeonly Latin teacher, gives him a farewell present — a lovingly inscribed ("God looks down kindly upon a gentle Master") version of Robert Browning's translation of "Agamemnon", and the teacher cries softly like "a well that's been dried up for 40 years." The British director, Mike Figgis has an honest, spare film adaptation (there's also a 1951 classic version with Michael Redgrave as Crocker Harris) of the play with Albert Finney (at his towering, traffic best) as the failed teacher.
Most stories of this genre — gifted, struggling teacher inspiring students — eventually have rousing scenes of self-congratulatory classroom sessions and an emotionally overblown climax with the teacher finally triumphing (like that piece of fakery, "Dead Poet's Society"). Not here, though: the only triumph at the end is Harris acknowledging to the entire school assembled to bid him farewell, that he has become a failure. The triumph is personal — he's had the courage to see that. Every time you think the story is going to do some heartstring-wringing, it piles up one more humiliation and defeat for its hero. And there's nothing even romantic about his failure — it's just ordinary failure.
There exits also a stunning filmed version of Uncle Vanya called, simply, "Vanya on 42nd Street". I saw it for the first time on video a year ago and was stupefied that this small masterpiece had gone unnoticed, even by movie buffs. Adapted by Andre Gregory and David Mamet and directed by Louis Malle, the production (filmed inside a run down movie theatre on 42nd street, Times Square) obliterates the distinctions between the artifice of theatre and life — the actors perform in their street clothes, with the audience a few feet from them. And as the film opens, the actors drift in chitchatting and before we realise it, the chitchat has turned into Chekhov. (Though the actors make it all look seamless and spontaneous, they spent three years rehearsing).
Great anguish
We leave the character of Vanya at the end, despairing that love and success will never be his. His great anguish is: how can he live out, day by day, the next bleak and empty thirty years of a failed life?
His gentle, heart-broken niece, Sonia — sitting by his side, sorrowing, because she has just found out (after years of longing and wondering) that the wonderful man she loved does not love her back — has this sudden, luminous, transcendent revelation: "What can we do? We must live our lives. Yes, we shall live, Uncle Vanya. We shall live through the long procession of days before us, and through the long evenings; we shall patiently bear the trials that fate imposes on us... and when our last hour comes we shall meet it humbly, and there, beyond the grave, we shall say that we have suffered and wept, that our life was bitter, and God will take pity on us and we will live a life of radiant joy and beauty. And we will look back on this life of unhappiness with tenderness. And we'll smile. And we shall rest to the songs of the angels, in a firmament arrayed in jewels, and we'll look down on and we'll see evil, all the evil in the world and all our sufferings bathed in a perfect mercy. And our lives grown sweet as a caress. And we shall rest. I have faith, Uncle, fervent, passionate faith. My poor, poor Uncle Vanya, you have never known what happiness was, but wait, Uncle only wait. We shall rest. We shall rest."
It is Uncle Vanya (more than any other work by this Russian master) that shows us why Chekhov is "the indispensable artist of the unlived life".
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