Brief Notes on Failure and Narrative
By Aaron Calvin
The most enduring image from the 2020 NBA Finals is not one of LeBron James or his younger co-star Anthony Davis as they dominated their way to the victory and basketball supremacy alongside the rest of the Los Angeles Lakers.
It is, instead, a picture of Jimmy Butler, with 16.8 seconds to play in Game 5, a game that he and his Miami Heat team would win. In the indelible image, Butler’s body is bent in exhaustion. He is still standing, but half bowed behind the goalpost where he has just caught himself after being fouled on his way to the basket. He is in this moment grasping at a moment of stillness before moving to shoot two free throws. These free throws will help ensure his team ekes out a win over the dominant Lakers in a series that the Heat will ultimately lose in the next game.
In this image, Butler’s hands droop over the barrier like flowering clematis; his face lies hidden between them. It is an emblem of exhaustion. His posture is reminiscent of so many depictions of Jesus falling beneath the weight of the cross on the road to Golgotha. In the parlance of the sports cliche, Butler “left it all on the floor.” Though he ultimately suffered defeat, his exhaustive and admirable attempt at victory earned him a defeat that was widely lauded as a noble and admirable one.
This was the narrative that formed around Butler’s defeat. Within the context of his personal career and the over-performance of his underdog team in the vacuum-sealed playoff event amidst the coronavirus pandemic, it was an undeniable triumph. But, as is often the case when it comes to the harsh dichotomy of winning and losing in an athletic setting, Butler may end up among the many world-class athletes to never achieve victory at the highest level. Even if this is the case, he will not be thought of as a “loser” in the traditional sense, but someone who never achieved the pinnacle of success in a team sport that demands more than individual excellence.
Failure is inextricable from the human experience, but is only made legible by narrative. Placing failure within a context of wider events makes the event of failure, for many, bearable. The easily parsed, distinct relationship between failure and success is part of why sports are conceptually appealing. A wide spectrum of failure is allowed; there are valiant fighters defeated in a team sport despite spectacular individual performances like Butler in the 2020 playoffs or LeBron James through most of the Golden State Warriors dynasty in the mid-twenty teens or any of the all-stars who had the misfortune of playing against Michael Jordan in the nineties; then there are those who just plain blow it, collapse, or even downright choke, ala the New York Knicks’ John Starks in Game 7 of the 1994 NBA Finals or the Houston Rockets’ 27 consecutively missed three-point shots in Game 7 of the 2018 Western Conference Finals.
But there is only one variety of winner: the person who dominates, who performs at a higher level both personally or, in a team sport like basketball, is joined and complemented by other exceptional athletes. They are declared the best, unequivocally. It is the reason why the debate over who claims the title of the Greatest of All Time basketball player endures. There can be no popular acceptance that Wilt Chamberlain or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or Michael Jordan or LeBron James played and succeeded in different eras or exhibited different strengths or bested incomparable foes.
In life, of course, failure contains an interminable level of gradation. Even worse, the failure suffered is often contingent upon uncontrollable forces. It is mostly random and indifferent to one’s desires. Success—conceptually, morally, fiscally—is fragile, amorphous, and untenable. Most of lived life exists within the clearing created in the wake of the dueling forces of desire and responsibility, neither of which are generally satisfied by the individual alone.
Literature, on the other hand, helps to address the incoherent failure of life by giving it a clear narrative framework to exist within. Failure, loss, defeat—this has long been considered necessary for the successful execution of plot. It generally arrives in the second of three acts and often serves to set the table for a satisfying denouement. Particularly in popular media like melodrama or anything involving superheroes, the failure event is often exaggerated so that the victory, in the end, feels all the more triumphant. Failure is made palatable, even acceptable and exciting, by narrative that assures conquest and success.
This makes a narrative that doesn’t assure or satisfactorily deliver victory and success still remarkable and, in turn, likely less popular. Audiences—consumers of narrative—prefer an uplifting story or, at the very least, a narrative that concludes with some level of satisfaction. Characters may be permanently altered by the events that transpired through their journey from the beginning to the end of the narrative, but not a little broken or unalterably worse or even totally ruined.
So it still offers a certain kind of thrill when failure is eschewed simply as a device to be used to create tension or further the conflict and made into something more central, when it is made not just as an inconvenience or a hitch, but an integral, unavoidable, and irreversible part of life. There are many works that do this and do this in an array of impressive, engaging styles, but I’ll take a moment here to examine just three of them.
Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is one novel consumed with failing. Its protagonist, Ishmael, fails to find satisfaction in normal life on land; he fails to keep the “damp, drizzly November” from his soul. A great deal of the book is spent in the cetology chapters, an initially puzzling through-line of the book in which Ishmael expounds at great length on the anatomy, behavior, and general substance of whales. Most of this information is scientifically inaccurate. Ishmael’s famous line in the chapter “The Prairie”—“I try all things; I achieve what I can” —should be understood in the context that Ismael’s achievements are few and far between. The entire mission that propels Ahab and The Pequod throughout the book is a doomed one. It ends in oblivion, as it was destined to, and as Ahab knew full well it would. Only Ishmael and his imperfect science is left to tell the tale.
The meta-narrative surrounding Melville’s novel only bolsters its claim to one of history’s great failure narratives. Its current stature in the pantheon of American literature stands in contrast with how poorly the novel was reviewed initially and even mostly ignored. Melville died in such obscurity that the New York Times barely noted his death while misspelling the name of his definitive work. There’s an alluring appeal to this kind of tale, a sort of Van Gogh Effect, where an artist’s genius is so undeniable that—though it was denied them in life—the proper renown, respect, and recognition is eventually bestowed upon the artist and their art in the grander historical narrative.
Of course, Melville—author of Bartleby, the Scrivener, a novella dedicated completely to the high art of refusal—understood well the usefulness of failure. Typee and Omoo—his early oceanic travelogue novels that were not nearly as allegorical and complex as Moby Dick and a great deal more rollicking and bawdy—were commercial successes. He progressively turned away from the accessible through his career and purposefully produced more challenging works even as he descended into obscurity and poverty. In the final phase of his working life, in the midst of the Civil War, he even got really into writing poetry.
The idea that Melville was a commercial failure in lifetime but received justice after his death is a simple and compelling one. The truth, that he was a commercial success but produced increasingly challenging work and became unfashionable later in his career before this work was championed by writers and artists after his death, is a bit more complex. It all depends on the narrative framework that gets applied.
John Williams’ Stoner, another novel somewhat neglected in its time and revived in a Renaissance of sorts (it has become very popular in Europe) a half-century later, dwells in failure. Tim Kreider described the book in a 2013 New Yorker article as the antithesis of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Not a romantic tale of wealth and beauty built on a deceitful façade that all falls apart in the end, but instead an elegiac mining of a somewhat unremarkable middle-American life. “Stoner ’s protagonist is an unglamorous, hardworking academic who marries badly, is estranged from his child, drudges away in a dead-end career, dies, and is forgotten: a failure,”
Even Cormac McCarthy’s infamously bleak post-apocalyptic father-son novel, The Road, ends on a hopeful note, offering the reader a crumb of solace amidst the dreariness of humanity’s near-end. Stoner is truly an unrelenting bummer. There is, however, such beauty in William Stoner’s struggle, in his pain and suffering, his devotion to language and literature that gives shape to it all. The novel ultimately presents Stoner’s life of quiet desperation with measured acceptance, a life without despair but also absent of any kind of self-justification.
Failure is transformed in narrative when it is examined with openness and clear-sightedness, often the result of writing that challenges how people are encouraged to think of failure in the broader culture. The systems of capitalism that frame the living, modern world often allow for only certain narratives about failure. Above all things, failure must be useful, these systems demand. Failure is allowed, but only if it’s learned from and pushes you further in pursuit of success (this is also a common cliché found in sports). There’s a pervasive inability to accept the things that failure often is: random, indifferent, constant, meaningless, predictable, and often highly recurrent.
So when a novel comes along that challenges the popular modes towards failure, it feels unique and even revelatory. The late, great Jade Sharma’s excellent Problems is one such novel. The novel’s narrator, Maya, fails at being all the things you are taught you should want to be. She’s a narcotics addict. She’s cheating on her husband but not for any very good reason. She’s lazy, and often willfully cruel. Her voice electrifies the narrative, her brazen willingness to be all these things unapologetically feels almost decadent, an illicit treat compels the reader to consume more.
As Lauren Holmes puts it at the beginning of her New York Times review of the book, “a novel about a heroin addict shouldn’t be this much fun to read.” But Problems is even more than that. It epitomizes a certain kind of failure narrative; it is a total, gleeful refusal to value what people are told they should value or feel bad in the ways people are told they should feel bad.
These three novels, though different in a number of ways, have in common a refusal to narrativize failure in traditionally acceptable frameworks. There’s a shared inability to conform to the mandate that failure must be mitigated by success or, at the very least, some kind of manufactured solace. That inextricably human space between the real and desired is, in many ways, the very essence of what life is and what makes it interesting. This is what makes literature and other forms of narrative art that attempt to consider it without the many impediments and comforts often erected to protect people from their own thoughts and feelings so important.
Failure will always be more interesting than success and will forever remain essential to narrative. Narrative will also remain an essential tool in making failure both personal and societal understandable, but only in the narratives that challenge accepted depictions of failure does its true nature become fully visible.
Aaron Calvin is a writer living in Iowa. He is a student in the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA for Fiction and Non-Fiction and online editor at Assignment Magazine.
