Elena Spadini

I am where I am, I think, because I have failed (it happens that I am happy where I am, but that is not the point, nor does it reflect the amount of luck involved). Failure has shaped my professional profile: I could have ended up in very different places, I have not done this or that. I failed at things I really wanted: PhD positions, grants and so on. This was undeniably bad, at least at the time. When I was preparing a grant application, a colleague from the grants office told us all: if you fail, allow yourself time to grieve and to process. That was a good piece of advice.

In “L’art d’accommoder les restes” (a chapter of Logiques du brouillon, a classic of French critique génétique), Daniel Ferrer reminds us that a value judgement is made by the writer, when something is deleted and replaced by a better alternative, where ‘better’ is measured in artistic, ethical, political, commercial or other terms: ‘C’est parce qu’on juge que B est d’un certain point de vue “mieux” que A qu’on rature A et ajoute B’ (2011, 51).¹ In digital scholarly editing, a field of research I am active in, this notion is often neglected, or even unintentionally hidden. The emphasis in the last decades of digital editions, for good reasons of renovation, has been more on restoring the value of all variants and moving beyond the inaccessible ‘critical apparatus’ as a graveyard of deserted readings, as it has been called, than on representing what Ferrer calls ‘la véritable dimension axiologique de la genèse’ (2011, 51),² that is the dynamics of value between A and B.

This reminds me of a misconception about failure that can be exemplified by the misunderstanding of the ‘Fail better’ quote from Beckett’s Worstward Ho: no, failure is not always – and certainly not in Beckett’s work – a useful event on the path to success, as self-help books proclaim.³ It is just bad, something bad for which there would have been a better alternative, however better is defined (and this is obviously not Beckett, who focuses on the inevitable human condition of failure and does not venture into better alternatives).

But then what? What after asserting that failure is bad? We can look again at the creative process of writers to find some consolation and perhaps inspiration. I have recently been working on the Swiss author Gustave Roud (1897–1976), a writer, photographer, translator and literary critic. Roud’s diary is full of pages in which he doubts himself and hints at failure. He writes: ‘Mes phrases sont mortes. Ce n’est pas fatigue d’esprit, car dès le début j’ai senti cette sournoise résistance. Abandonner? Quel échec, quel aveu d’impuissance!’; ⁴ or: ‘Je viens de relire quelques poèmes de Penna, l’envie me prend de les traduire … Mais n’est-ce pas, par avance, l’échec certain? … il me reste une infime espérance de vaincre’.⁵ Apologies for helplessness are very common among writers, if not creators in general.

In his book On Writing and Failure, Stephen Marche recalls the many failures of famous writers. The opening sentence of an article in The Atlantic adapted from the book may sound familiar to more than one scholar:

English has provided a precise term of art to describe the writerly condition: submission. Writers live in a state of submission. Submission means rejection. Rejection is the condition of the practice of submission, which is the practice of writing. Rejection, not acceptance, is what defines the life of a writer. (2023c)

He even has a direct suggestion for academics: ‘The next time you’re rejected from some grant or some job, remember James Joyce in 1912’ (Marche 2023a). That year, Joyce failed to get a job as an English teacher at a technical college in Italy, a job he needed to pay his long overdue rent, while he also failed to get Dubliners published. How to fail better?, one is tempted to ask.

The new wave of talking and writing about failure (the ‘fail-lit’ of Lindsay Baker 2019), including this welcome anthology, hopefully contributes to a better understanding of failure as something very common, something that happens all the time – at least, it seems, in the professional lives of scholars and writers. As an early career researcher, I was surprised when a distinguished professor once told me: ‘You’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg: you don’t see the thousands of projects that are rejected all the time, but only the few that are successful’. This was enlightening for my younger self. The necessity and frequency of debugging in programming also points in the same direction, because a bug is definitely something bad, but it happens all the time, so that we say ‘programming is debugging’.

If failure is so common, we would do better to accept it as something bad but almost inevitable, and, as my colleague suggested, be prepared to grieve. What we do next is up to each of us, in that particular circumstance, in that particular moment: to return to the first person, when I fail, I want to find my better alternative, which might be to try again, or to give up, or something in between.

A note on the first person: overcoming failure, whether of a word, of a sentence or of an application, need not be a solitary activity. But again, it is up to us to decide who is right: in rejection letters I have found some remarks valuable and others less so. Of course, it is not always easy to tell, and my reaction and understanding change over time. In an interview for The Paris Review, writer Mary Robison talks about working with the famous and controversial editor Gordon Lish: ‘In “Yours,” a woman dies’, Robison says, ‘She wasn’t even sick in his version. I had to be fierce about that one. But there were times when I just squeezed my eyes shut and signed my name’.⁶ The interviewer goes on asking about the relationships between Gordon and Raymond Carver (Carver 2009, 990): ‘Ray knew he was right, but he was scared that if Lish vehemently thought his versions were better, then maybe they were better’. After failure, after submission and rejection, after careful consideration of feedback and reviews, we are free to choose the next step from the remaining alternatives.