Near the beginning of each term, I tell
my writing students that they’re all going to fail. It’s a rhetorically
charged claim; a few students giggle or snicker, clearly uncomfortable,
and then everyone grows pretty silent. And then I tell them that I don’t
really mean fail in the traditional, F-on-the-transcript-and-uncomfortable-calls-home
sense (sometimes there’s more uneasy laughter here); I mean that
writing is always the practice of failure. Most things that are
valuable, worthwhile, or offer anything like real meaning are developed
through long patterns of failure. I construct an x-and-y coordinate
plane on the whiteboard and draw in a sweeping exponential curve that
levels out right at the horizontal axis: the limit at Y = 0. And I say,
look: this line will get closer and closer and closer to the axis over
time, but it’s never going to get there. That, I claim, is what it’s
like to learn to write.
My students who decide to stick around academia in some capacity
post-graduation eventually realize, as I am, that living and working and
studying in the academy is also a practice of failure. Rejection can be
as frightening for a Ph.D applicant or article-writing professor as for
a lovestruck student. It’s the middle of December as I
write—application season, the season of submission. Hopeful undergrads-
and grads-to-be are filling online forms’ blank fields, pressing SUBMIT,
and bedding down into anxious hibernation for a few months.
Having filed my sixth and final application a few days ago, I write
from the thicket of those feelings. And I’ve noticed that the
well-meaning encouragements offered by friends, family, and beleaguered
letter-of-recommendation writers echo the advice I give to my students,
figuring failure as part of some long process: the necessary, though
admittedly painful, antithesis of the personal dialectic. Hooray, goes
the thinking, for personal growth, the fuel for which is failure, dry
and ready to burn.
But I wonder if treating failure as the kindling for the future fire
of success is to miss the point, to accede too readily to the gospel of
growth and the bootstrappy forward-march-towards-progress narrative that
fits too easily into the cultural paradigms that invent fictions like
the welfare queen and tell my students to either major in STEM or
starve. What happens when we think about failure as something else?
Something meaningful and important, a thing-in-itself? ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/on-david-foster-wallaces-obsession-with-failure/
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