History is the heist of victors, and literature the haunt of the defeated. Victory finds pride of place in public annals, success demands elaborate attention from analysts, and formal felicitations are the exclusive preserve of winners. Dominated by the grand narratives of conquest, coronation, constitution and control, historical documentation is often by necessity an exercise in abstraction, an expansive overview that attempts to identify structures, trends, strategies and ideologies. It speaks about people without passing the microphone to them. Even when it works with memory and individual experiences as data, the intent is often to locate commonality and causality, to categorise and classify with neat comprehensibility.
While historiography has started meandering sluggishly to draw in marginal chronicles and chronologies, the literary arts have always pitched their camps by the banks of the unsung. For every grain of triumph garnered, unnumbered chaff of the ‘almost-did’, ‘could-not’, ‘would-not’ float off unnoticed. Artists follow close behind the steamrollers of time advancing to compact individual lives into charts and statistics. They pick up the discarded pieces, dust off the scraps, and store the shards carefully. These fragments are gleaned to celebrate the ordinary, to document the unremarkable, to shore up against the ruins of erasure and obliteration.
Those working by the way of words have, arguably, an advantage over other mediums in capturing candid soul selfies. The interiority of messy emotions can be plumbed best by the literary imagination. We tend to judge others through their achievements, but we evaluate ourselves through our intentions. Our constant inner monologues rationalise and justify our failures; our streams of consciousness script individual sagas where each of us is the main character. Very few of these narratives find pride of place in plaques and tableaux; almost all of us recognise our reflections in the slightly-tinted mirror of fiction.
These thoughts crystallised around a Bengali literary festival earlier this year that was themed on the concept of defeat. Delving into portrayals of the failed protagonist in Bengali writings in particular and world literature in general, it brought together sessions on how and why unsuccessful characters often command readers’ attentions and affections. In this context, the very notions of victory and defeat came under scrutiny.
The audience did not miss the wordplay that the English word, ‘hero’, meant a champion or winner, while the Bengali word, ‘hero’ (pronounced ‘heyro’), meant a loser. Now when most of us write our Bengali chat and text messages in Roman alphabet, the irony in the pun became the crux of the entire symposium. Literary characters who do not emerge victorious often become the true embodiment of heroism; in contrast, many who succeed through unethical modes fail to win hearts. The winner might take the prize — in battle, wealth, love, status — but the loser often walks away with our deepest sympathies and our abiding loyalties.
Even those who think that Bengali isn’t a language will probably not contest that the Bengali psyche seems to have a situationship with the concept of defeat. Its inclination to engage with failure has both been derided as ineffectual self-indulgence and feted for rich philosophical, emotional and artistic dividends. Very few communities may be called bedonabilashi — luxuriating in loss — with more aptness. One might look for the roots of this in historical events like early colonisation of their part of the country, the shifting of the imperial capital away from Calcutta, Partition, displacement and famine. Psychosocial factors like a self-critiquing intellect, disdain for financial enterprise, romanticising adversities may all be cited as compounding an ethos of inadequacy manifested through an aesthetics of melancholia.
But Nikhilesh, Apu, Bimala, Kalyani, Devdas, Herbert, Nandini must converse with characters who people the pages of Premchand, Manto, Markandaya, Murugan, Tendulkar, Ananthamurthy, among innumerable other notable names. From individual frustrations and familial crises to social discriminations based on caste, creed and gender, literary explorations of defeat with its attendant abandonment, disillusionment, suffocation and suffering find a myriad fictional faces in all languages.
One might state, in agreement with Mark Twain, that success is often a function of ignorance and confidence in equal measure. In our present cacophonous competition to tread every trend and bow for public approval for each exhibited moment of our lives, preserving the "noiseless tenor" of one’s way and waltzing to one’s own mindstrum certainly feel like true achievements. Being able to perceive personal goals beyond the one-prize-fits-all achievement mandate seems like an even more important win. This ‘dailyberate’ living for simple pleasures — “a small cabin” and “nine bean rows” — in itself constitutes meeting with “a success unexpected in common hours”. But lost heroes are often not the uncelebrated masses living away from “the madding crowd’s ignoble strife”; they are individualised by their very defeats.
In attempting to understand literary expressions of loss, the notion of active failure comes to the forefront. The defeat that literature explores is not passive surrender; it is the raging against the inevitable dying of the light. And if there’s no cure for the fact that we have to live out our "nasty, brutish and short" lives on an Earth which is hostile, inimical, indifferent at best, one of humankind’s greatest inquisitors of defeat, Samuel Beckett, urges us to carve meaning out of void as we fail again, and fail better.
Be it fall from divine grace, cyclical sufferings of karma, or the hamster-hoop of habit in godless absurdism, human existence appears bound upon a wheel of fire. Literature pauses in awe as the frail Lear lifts up his dearest daughter’s lifeless body to form a cross as his ripe response to the circle of burn and churn. At the crossroads holding a wheel stands the younger and stronger Karna, staring at death with foreknowledge and inevitability. Thundering through battlefields, the invincible Meghnad cannot escape being clouded by destiny at his most vulnerable moment. Perhaps it is this human helplessness that endears Hector, Achilles and Oedipus even when they fail in their endeavours. They win instead the ability to disrobe defeat of its shame as they step forward, like the battered, bare-breasted Dopdi Mejhen, the protagonist in Mahasweta Devi’s short story, “Draupadi”, to challenge empty triumph devoid of all glory.
There are no unqualified victories, and literature homes the dissonant narratives that are stopped from entering through the archways of history. The brief flights of jaunt and jubilation must come back to nest in the bleak reality of their terms and costs. Epic victories are built on brutality, loud headlines of neutralised enemy camps fail to account for their own expended resources, thrones are ascended after wading through slaughter.
This blur between success and defeat has always fascinated the literary imagination. Sometimes all one is left with is a limp to prove one has encountered the divine, like Jacob who fought a disguised angel and became known as Israel or the god-wrestler. To live by this righteous identity or weaponise it to play god oneself is the only true choice we have as humans. Whether one grapples with god or with the godless Absurd, in seeking the blessing of redemption or the reason to draw one’s next breath, the attempt itself is the end. The boulder is real, enormous, unforgiving. Literature waits for Sisyphus to start whistling a fresh tune as he begins to push it up the slope, again.
Debnita Chakravarti is Associate Professor of English at Shri Shikshayatan College
