Failure, Tragedy, & Comedy, (and a little about “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”)

I had intended to write last week about Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but I failed. Or, maybe to be more specific, I got distracted by the idea of failure. Let me explain.

Having read them one after the other, it occurred to me that A Midsummer Night’s Dream begins on much the same note as Othello, with a daughter defying her father’s choice for her husband in favor of the man she truly loves. In this case, it even seems more likely the play will end tragically: the laws of Athens mandate that the daughter, Hermia, will either be locked away from the world, put to death, or marry the suitor her father wants. Meanwhile, her friend Helena, loves the intended suitor, who can’t hardly stand her.

But, of course, it doesn’t go that way at all. The play is light and frothy and funny- the model of a “romantic comedy” because, in love, often everything goes wrong and we love the wrong people, or the right people for the wrong reasons, and it’s funny. I mean, particularly when it’s happening to other people. We all know the Mel Brooks line:

Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die

Very similarly, Aristotle said one of the differences between tragedy and comedy was that tragedies happen to great people, while the figures in comedies tend to be ordinary schmucks like us. So the stakes are lower, at least for everyone else except us.

And maybe we could say that a great many classic stories are about failure- comedies are about low-stakes failure, while tragedies are about failure with the highest stakes. In comedies, there are absurd failures- of ambitions, understanding, even of love- and everything works out okay in the end anyway. Another distinction- comedies can end happily. In spite of failure.

Failure is an inescapable part of human life. We just can’t help it- our ambitions nearly always outstrip what is possible. And, you know, we’re told young that everything is possible- we just have to find something and stick to it throughout our life and we’ll be successful. This is sort of the ideal in Liberal Enlightened societies: you’re free to develop yourself and decide “what you want to be” when you grow up. (Unless you’re poor, as Oscar Wilde would point out) Also, while you’re at it, find your True Love and stick with them. Easy, right?

Except, what if you don’t figure out the things you’re required to figure out until it’s too late?

Probably the greatest essay on the modern experience of not knowing who you are until you find out, and failing to find out, was Seymour Krim’s “For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business,” an essay that probably does qualify as brilliant (ironically enough). Krim has reached the age of 51 and tried everything, every role that seemed to suit him, and they were never enough. Or, he was never enough. He never quite did it. And so, Krim writes for those “who have never found the professional skin to fit the riot in their souls.” He’s reached the point where it’s time to stop dreaming and “make do” and it feels, to him, like he’s failed at the American Dream. Yet, what can you do? His dilemma, in one of those all-time great sentences:

“One life was never quite enough for what I had in mind.”

And I would say it’s like this for all of us. There’s two aspects of this dilemma, really: in the first place, modern society sets us up to “succeed” or “fail” based on our own inner resources. What I mean is, for most of us, it’s not a situation where we’re set up in the family business, set to run the family farm, expected to do some thing in particular. Instead, we’re meant to find out what would “fulfill” us, which is no small order.

And then, the second aspect, and maybe the more significant one, is something Krim gets at in who he addresses the essay to: all the people who have “failed” and, as he says, never really been the subject of an essay before. A lot of us fail in life, and have to take account of it alone, basically. Who speaks for the common fuckup?

Another hero of mine, George W. S. Trow, writes about this in his book My Pilgrims Progress. He riffs on Arno Gruen’s difficult observation “that culture, in recent decades, has taken on a life of its own, without reference to the people it is supposed to protect.”

Now, there’s two parts of that, too. The part about culture taking on a life of its own is something Trow had covered in his masterpiece, Within the Context of No-Context, and maybe it’s best to return there. Next, though, he gets into the idea that culture is supposed to “protect” people. From what? From failure. Which as Trow points out, is a universal experience.

Because 99.9 percent of all human projects fail. This one wants to be a doctor, but it doesn’t quite happen. That one wants to be a writer, and it never quite happens. So-and-so announces that he’s going to move to California and never quite moves. A handsome young woman says that no man is good enough for her except a certain kind of man, and she doesn’t get that man; she gets some other sort. It just happens. There are too many of us, and our youthful ambitions are too unrealistic: 99.9 percent of us fail in the height of our ambition, and at some point, early or late, we know it.

So, Trow thinks it happens to a lot more of us than Krim does. A minor quibble. What’s key, for both of them, is it happens to us alone. Trow again:

Well, we don’t have that (protecting culture). People fall off the high wire invisibly. There is no net; they crash. They pick themselves up, secretly, in the quiet of their own mind, having had to face some near infinite pain about delusion, and about lack of protection, about abandonment, about no one being there, about nothing being there; and they crawl away from their accident, and when at last they stand up again, if they do, they’re a little deformed. And that’s a lot of us now.

Incidentally, that’s not a bad description of why our politics are so vicious now. I don’t know if Krim ever read Trow, or vice-versa. But Trow is talking about exactly the same thing here: failure is treated as a sort of secret shame, something embarrassing and private, when it’s really damn near universal. I really hate to point out, though I feel compelled to, that Krim eventually killed himself, while Trow was already losing his mind when he wrote My Pilgrim’s Progress.

Because, at long last, here’s the point: culture is what tells us it’s okay to go through this. It’s okay to fail. It’s okay to love the wrong person and realize too late. It’s okay that your ambitions outstrip what’s possible. It need not be tragic. It’s maybe even a little funny. In retrospect.

The truth is that one life is far too short a span of time to make sense of something as complicated as being alive.

And so, having failed again to write much about A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I ask what are YOU reading, writing, playing, pondering, watching, creating, or dreaming about coming to fruition this weekend?