Conclusion: Equipment for Living
"As we cross Mutley plain, looking out of the window of the bus, W. speaks of his obsession with the great Hungarian plain. Béla Tarr spent six months visiting every house and every pub on the plain, W. notes. He said he discovered mud, rain and the infinite, in that order. Mud, rain and the infinite: nothing to W. is more moving than those words.
W. wonders whether we too have discovered the infinite in our own way. Our incessant chatter. Our incessant feeling of utter failure. Perhaps we live on our own version of the plain, W. muses. Am I the plain on which he is lost, or vice versa? But perhaps the plain is the friendship between us on which we are both lost, he says." (188)
A few pages earlier, Lars expresses a kind of fatalistic resignation about his and W.’s failure -- “but what chance did we have? … What could we have done, under the circumstances?” (183) -- that W. relates to the Hindu concept of “Moksha: the cessation of desire” (183). Discussing the damp and mould in Lars apartment, a controlling metaphor of the novel, W. works out this connection:
"‘It’s a kind of test for you, isn’t it, your damp?’ W. says. All I have to do is desire not to change it, W. says. All I would have to say is, The damp is eternal; I accept that now. That would be moshka, wouldn’t it?" (183).
Accepting failure and squalor, in other words, becomes in Spurious its own form of sublimity, its own kind of grace.
Turning to Samuel Beckett, whose famous formula “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” (Worstward Ho 101) has haunted our proceedings throughout this course, can also be instructive here. The graceful acceptance of failure expressed by W. in Spurious animates much of Beckett's work, never more clearly than in his short play Act Without Words I. This play features a man who is repeatedly “flung backwards on stage” (43) and tantalized by a carafe full of water and shade from a palm tree that, through a variety of theatrical conceits, constantly elude him. The action ends with the man “lying on his side, his face towards the auditorium, staring before him” (46) and refusing to reach for the carafe even as it once again is dangled in front of his face. The phrase “he does not move” (46) is repeated four times in this concluding stage direction, poetically emphasizing the man’s resignation. Act Without Words I, like Spurious and like Baudelaire and Carax, ultimately frames the embrace of failure as a movement of sublime assertion predicated on a politics of refusal. As S.E. Gontarski puts it:
"The climactic ending of the mime may signify not pathetic defeat, but conscious rebellion, a deliberate, willful refusal to obey. [...] Ironically then, the protagonist is most active, most potent when inert, and his life acquires meaning as it closes. [...] In his refusal to be driven by need, to devote himself to physical existence, [...] the protagonist has create a free, separate, individual self." (32)
Gontarski’s reading of the play’s ending effectively summarizes my work here to reread failed figures through the “fallen sublime”. The mime’s resignation for Gontarski “is not the banal dramatic image of defeat some critics have suggested, but a powerful if futile image of rebellion” (33). Failure here does indeed become a resistance strategy, the cost of this strategy measured in the negative effects (a hangover, a bad career, a mime dying of thirst) of failure itself.
Ultimately, I suggest that the sublime embrace of aesthetic, social and economic failure can be understood not only as a politics of refusal, but as a kind of self-possession: an equipment for living a fulfilling life without acquiescing to a late capitalist world. Failure becomes not a barrier to sublimity, but a point of entry into it. This, as I have suggested, implies a clear anti-hegemonic politics; as Judith Halberstam puts it in The Queer Art of Failure, a book whose project I feel is related to the “fallen sublime” I am investigating here:
"The queer art of failure turns on the impossible, the improbable, the unlikely, and the unremarkable. It quietly loses, and in losing it imagines other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being." (88)
Politically, the aesthetic and economic embrace of failure can be read as a utopian protest strategy; indeed, Bob Dylan’s “It’s a Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall”, which I quote as my first epigraph to set up the aesthetics and characters that are the object of this study, is famously and undoubtedly a protest song.
However, if the fallen sublime can be read as a political (and aesthetic) tactic for changing the world, it is perhaps more vital as a strategy for living in it. This, too, is a politics; one of resilience. In a late capitalist world increasingly designed to produce failure, it seems naive to dismiss the need for those who have fallen to be able to conceptualize their lives in a way that doesn’t consign them to misery and sorrow. The fallen sublime is such an aesthetic system; it finds beauty and rebellion in failure. I spoke last month about The Mekons. To quote a more contemporary punk band called Titus Andronicus, whose song “No Future Part Three: Escape from No Future” I quote in my second epigraph, “you will always be a loser / and that’s ok”.
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