At Call & Response this week, both Tom Arthur and Scott Benhase stress the need for Christian leaders to experiment with new ideas and practices -- to allow themselves to fail in order to improve.
This need to risk failure struck me while reading an essay on one of my favorite contemporary authors, the late David Foster Wallace. The essayist said this of Wallace’s breakthrough novel “Infinite Jest”:
“I remember well enough to know it's not a trick of hindsight, hearing about and reading Infinite Jest for the first time…and the immediate sense of: This is it. One of us is going to try it. The "it" being all of it, to capture the sensation of being alive in a fractured superpower at the end of the twentieth century. Someone had come along with an intellect potentially strong enough to mirror the spectacle and a moral seriousness deep enough to want to in the first place. About none of his contemporaries—even those who in terms of ability could compete with him—can one say that they risked as great a failure as Wallace did.”
At the end of the essay he says this of Wallace’s last novel, “The Pale King,” that was left incomplete at the time of his death:
"Wallace's work will be seen as a huge failure, not in the pejorative sense, but in the special sense Faulkner used when he said about American novelists, 'I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.' Wallace failed beautifully."
Only Faulkner could turn a phrase like that. It makes failure seem oddly enticing, and experimenting, strangely beautiful.
Benjamin McNutt is the editor of Call & Response. You can follow him on Twitter at @benjaminmcnutt.
