The Failed Work

When you love the great work of an author or a composer, you should also love his or her minor works, however forgotten, half-formed and misconceived. In fact, they are deserving of a special love and attention because they can indicate something about the physiognomy of the author in question. The weaknesses they reveal – the way they miss the point – belong to the overall movement of ‘greater’ works. This, at least, is what I think when I read a book like Duras’s Yann Andrea Steiner, or watch Bergman’s The Serpent’s Egg. How poorly they ape the past successes of their author! But how marvellous that we have these imperfect works – that their creator, in her or his generosity, sent them into the world. Here, I am not commending the cult of personality to which Duras and, I think, Bergman succumbed (how else can I account for the cruelty of his remarks about his sister in The Magic Lantern?) No, it’s the very way their signature begins to break apart in the minor work – the way, indeed, the artifice trembles in its versimilitude. It almost falls apart – this is marvellous not because it is then that it is confirmed that the artist is as imperfect as I am, but because the great delicacy of the artist’s task reveals itself. To be strong enough to be weak – to endure the draft of inspiration, to hold her- or himself in the claim of the work, to allow, to the point of deformation, the particular book or film to realise itself – yes, this is impressive. But also to be weak enough such that strength – the power of form – does not obscure the heart of the tabernacle at the heart of the work: to preserve that weakness to the point that it overwhelms us through its very materiality, its unbridled force – this is the miracle that reveals itself in the ‘failed’ work.