Embracing failure: die young, and leave a pretty corpse

Failure, you might think, is not the sort of concept that could be successfully rebranded. Think again. A slew of thought leaders, would-be gurus and cultural arbiters are currently trying to reassure us that failure is good, failure is natural and in fact, failure is success waiting to happen. 

The self-help market has discovered a new trope and is busy publishing books with titles like Learning From Failure: 11 Sure Fire Ways To Turn Your Worst Failures Into Your Biggest Success, and The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery. Bankers burnt out by the crash are resigning in droves from their high-pressure, low-satisfaction jobs to pursue alternatives that may be less prestigious but promise a better quality of life. Even the Duke of York is telling the youth that it’s fine to screw up because entrepreneurial spirit depends on weathering failure, while Radio 4’s The Value of Failure bought the major balls up to middle England with a series asking a sportsman, teacher, businessman and armed forces commander what failure had taught them. 

On the other side of the pond, American financial journalist Megan McArdle’s The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success draws on her own experiences of being dumped by her long-term partner just before their wedding, along with other humiliating knockbacks both micro and macro.

On this view, failure is merely ‘reculer pour mieux sauter’. It’s all nonsense of course. Failure is bad. It is terrible and painful and nobody likes it. It leads to more failure.

At this point, a brief cultural history of failure may be enlightening. It really starts to take off sometime in the 18th Century. As the world starts to look like a marketplace and commercial success becomes more of a possibility, failure becomes much more obvious too. Adam Rounce’s Fame and Failure  from late last year is a terrific study of the self-deluding Grub Street authors who are our first real models for failure – bitter, broke and enraged.

This is lesson one about failure: markets and measurements make it much easier to realise you aren’t doing well. This augurs badly for the age of social media: there are numbers attached to everything – friends, followers, page views... Your social life is now a commodity, and the chances are that fewer people want to buy it than N-dubz singer Dappy's (838k followers) or reality TV star Joey Essex’s (2.59m).

You are almost certainly always failing on quite a fundamental level. And you will almost always lie to yourself about the extent of your failure once you try to figure it out. What then? 

Stage two in the history of failure: Romanticism offered a way out at the start of the 19th Century. Reject the value system that measures everything commercially and make failure a rather glorious and glamorous thing; mythologise it, make it a thing to do elegantly. This is everywhere in Romanticism: Keats’s dismal commercial failure and diseased early death; Wordsworth’s lines on the poet and forger Chatterton “the marvellous Boy, /  The sleepless Soul that perished in his pride” (Chatterton's suicide made him a precursor of the 27 club; childhood De Quincey’s slide into drugs, crawling Soho with a child prostitute.

There could practically be a festival of literature based purely on the theme of failure. Failure becomes something glamorous and pleasingly sad. The all-things-must-pass lacrimae rerum note enters into things; ruins become the place to be (a brief reminder here to visit Ruin Lust at Tate Britain ).

Thus, lesson two: if no-one wants what you do, you can always strike a pose. You can even make a value system out of it: pretend that commercial success and popular acceptance are vulgar; that perhaps the people making millions are the real failures. 

By the time the Victorians turn up, failure’s a fetish. This, though, has all sorts of ugly consequences. The British, in particular, end up obsessing over dismal wastes of life: the Charge of the Light Brigade; General Gordon; Franklin’s expedition; Scott of the Antarctic. Then roll on to today, when miserable junkies still get treated as poètes maudits (we're thinking of the coverage of the death of poor Mark Blanco's death while at Pete Doherty's flat).

Lesson three: ignore lesson two. Failure is actually miserable. You can’t embrace it and can’t romanticise it; it has a dismal end. Scrounging alcoholics are on the whole rather charmless. 

So, everything is measured, which means failure is everywhere. You can’t avoid it, and can’t treat it as quite cool actually – that’s poisonous self-delusion. What’s left? Stare the thing squarely in the face, swallow its grim inevitability, maybe learn to laugh at it. There’s a fine canon of literature about failure – Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes , the long chronicle of Charlie Brown’s falling-short life in Peanuts, and always Beckett – and it’s a theme that’s been in the air lately: Christos Tsiolkas’s Barracuda , about a failed pro swimmer is getting rave reviews; and last year’s word-of-mouth literary hit was John William’s Stoner a lovely but largely forgotten novel about the disappointing life of a literary academic (in other words, a failure about a failure). And it’s also possible we’ll see a last stand from one of the great British failures – the late Sue Townsend may have left a new Adrian Mole before her death this month. 

So maybe it’s not as bad as all that… 

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