![]() The schlemiel may fail in reality but in fiction he is a hero. The beauty of this failure, strangely enough, gives the reader a broken kind of hope (but, at the very least, it is hope). The paradox of this character is that although s/he fails, his or her failure has a kind of beauty to it. ![]() Outlining a similar paradox, but with respect to the work of Franz Kafka, the German-Jewish thinker and literary critic Walter Benjamin argued – in his essay on Kafka and in a letter to his dear friend Gershom Scholem – that the “beauty” of Kafka’s works was the “beauty of failure.” These words, to be sure, can be applied to the schlemiel: a comic character that lives under the sign of failure. Because they are poetic, these Dylan lyrics seem to give a kind of beauty to failure and brokenness. One of Bob Dylan’s most quoted lyrics – from his song “Love Minus Zero” – addresses the paradox of success and failure: “She knows there’s no success like failure and that failure is no success at all.” The fact of the matter is that in our culture success has an aesthetic that goes along with it: while success is deemed beautiful by our culture, failure is deemed to be ugly. Success and failure – winning and losing – define our lives and how we think of ourselves. ![]()
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