Brightly Moving Forward into a Future of Failure
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Matthew Loudon
Dr. Alexis Lothian
ENGL 985
19 November 2013
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¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 1 There is a video floating around on the internet wherein a group of parents, adults, are asked what they believe will happen in the future. Their answers are bleak, depressingly so, all variants of “there is no hope for our future; things have become too damaged; there is no way of fixing the world.” The video then allows us to see these same parents watching their children express their hopes and dreams for the future. The children respond exactly as you expect children to do: with hope and a firm belief that their future will be something bright. They will become doctors and artists and help people whenever they can. The video ends with an encouragement to the adult audience, stating that we must work to better the world if we want our children to get those happy endings.
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So by now, my readers are likely going “oh what a complete surprise, Matthew Loudon is writing about the hope for tomorrow and is no doubt going to be referencing a text that talks about how bright and sunny everything is going to be in the future.” The short answer is a simple yes, because that is what I am focused on doing as an academic, and that is what this course has helped me to firmly declare about myself, to the point where I have no qualms about repeating it. However, this time around, I want to take a step back and be slightly more analytical.
I return to Judith Haberstam’s work, because I absolutely loved it with the sort of academic love we reserve for the works that put us on our own academic paths. In particular, I wish to revisit and better exam a quote that I dropped near the tail end of an earlier post, placed near the end of Haberstam’s work on animating failure in the aptly titled The Queer Art of Failure. The quote reads as follows:
¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 “But along the way to these ‘happy’ ending, bad things happen to good animals, monsters, and children, and failure nestles in every dusty corner, reminding the child viewer that this too is what it means to live in a world created by mean, petty, greedy, and violent adults. To live is to fail, to bungle, to disappoint, and ultimately to die; rather than searching for ways around death and disappointment, the queer art of failure involves the acceptance of the finite, the embrace of the absurd, the silly, and the hopelessly goofy… let us instead revel and cleave to all of our own inevitable failures” (187)
¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 1 What I believe that this quote is doing is establishing a way of looking at the archive and looking at the academy that works contrary to what I perceive as being the mainstream view of academia. This works quite nicely with what Halberstam’s more blatant goal in constructing the work. Scle (being my gender neutral pronoun of choice for the complicated Halberstam) is outlining the alternative to the mainstream archive commonly owned by the queer community. Halberstam’s argument is essentially that the mainstream regards failure as, well, a failure, as something awful and inevitable that awaits us. Yet through her work, she outlines a slightly different variation, wherein the negative is valued as being important, something that can and should be reveled in. Failure, argues Halberstam as seen in this quote, is part of life, but the idea is to begin to revel in it, to cleave to it and express the joy that can be found in failure.
¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 1 Which strikes me as being wonderfully counter to the standard line of thinking in academia. It has been my experience, and I would wager that most academics would agree, that our field has a rather strong streak of negativity. There are countless articles and works pointing out the failure of the university as an institution and the inevitable future failures that await any fool who would wish to enter the world of academia. When I first entered the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, they treated me to a wonderful course that essentially ends with “and the world of academia is all fucked up and you are doomed to be nothing more than a cog in a machine, if you even make it that far.” Promising students are routinely told that they are entering a field wherein there are few jobs, few positions, and few bright, shining tomorrows. You can, say these promises, expect a lot of failure, a lot of oppression, and a lot of work.
¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 1 And in truth, a lot of what we study reflects this. Negative writings prevail in the Literary Canon (note the purposeful capitol letters here). The writings outlined in the course that inspired so many of these writings, Archives and Feelings, reflect that almost painfully. You only have to look a the titles: Lose Your Mother, The Queer Art of Failure, Depression: a Public Feeling, Ghostly Matters, to begin to see a pattern of sadness. Again, this prevails in the Literary Canon as well.Shakespeare’s tragedies are considered his finest works. Postcolonialism continually points out how the world has failed an entire segment of people, and with good reason, as it has (it also arguably champions for the recognition of these people, seeing its mission as moving forward and working to right the balance). It appears that most of the Great Works of Literature are written as a result of human sadness and suffering. I am certainly not going to argue that there is not a lot to be learned among them, and I fully intend to teach and study the tragedies.
¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 2 But I want to return to the videos I mentioned at the beginning of this writing. While we adults recognize the pain and suffering and seem to nearly wallow in it, we express a reluctance to exposing the younger generation to it. They need to experience all that is wrong with the world, but there is a desire to preserve their hopes, dreams, and optimism for as long as possible. Which is why most of the works with children as a target audience are of a happier strand. Even if we scare the kids, expose them to the failures that Halberstam outlined, we still give them a happy ending in the end. For we seem to want to preserve the idea of some bright and shining future for the children. This seems particularly true for animation, especially mainstream animation, which is the area in which I have positioned myself. For animated films and television programs are often the first media which we expose our younger generation to; they therefore work to express the beliefs that our culture, on some level, wants our children to possess and respect. I am likely repeating something I have reiterated earlier, possibly in my position statement, but I feel it is necessary to reiterate here, in a slightly more analytical light.
¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 1 As I end, I wish to bring in a comment written by Dr. Alexis Lothian, posted to one of my blog posts. She pointed out that: “he text you loved most was Halberstam’s Queer Art of Failure, which is all about valuing the negative. There’s something interesting here…” This was stated in result to my assertion of having an optimistic look at life, despite having experienced some rougher occurrences (it is in the critical memoir, for those who have access to all the writings). And the statement is certainly true: Halberstam’s work is the work I loved the most throughout this course, which, considering that the course exposed me to a brilliantly written graphic novel, a short story I intend on teaching, and some very rigorous looks into the archive that will continue to haunt me, is stating something. Yet it is the bright part of the Halberstam’s work that I cling to, that bit outlined in the quote selected for analysis in this writing. Living is failing; bad things happen to good people, but at the end, the field of animation showcases a brighter tomorrow for our children. This is the belief and the optimism that I have found and formalized throughout analyzing and writing in this course, and this is what is going to affect me the strongest as I continue throughout my academic career.
¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 1 (on an interesting side now: I finalized my dissertation project based off ideas generated while engaging the ideas and texts of this course and revisiting animated films I had essentially written off as “failures”)
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Works Cited
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Halberstam, Judith. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. Print.
Link to the video: http://www.upworthy.com/a-similar-question-is-asked-to-parents-and-then-their-kids-the-difference-is-kinda-stunning?c=ufb1
Dear Matt,
I love your title here. As we all are cautious about our future and we are working hard for a better one, your title makes me think what if we live to a future of failure!