We can assume Beckett didn’t mean: try hard and you can win the French Open

Look here. I have just seen an inspirational poster featuring the opening lines of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground: "I am a sick man. I am a wicked man. An unattractive man." These words are superimposed over an image of two kittens in a bucket! I'll hang it next to the one that combines bits of Kafka with foals gambolling before a russet sunset.

I'm joking. But such imaginary artefacts would be no more bizarre than the tattoo currently resting on Stan Wawrinka's lower arm. The Swiss tennis player, in action this week at Wimbledon, chose an increasingly unavoidable quote by Samuel Beckett: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better." The most comically pessimistic of writers has inadvertently contributed a slogan to the positive-thinking mob.

This is not the most outrageous habitual misinterpretation of a literary quote. Too many of us have (when not shaking fists towards stray apostrophes) spent decades of our lives fuming about the misuse of a line from Romeo and Juliet in comic sketches. "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" does not mean: "Where are you, Romeo?"; it means "Why are you Romeo?" Is that clear? Fine. Well, don't do it again.

Literature vs baloney

The rise of “fail better” as an inspirational mantra makes the blood boil. The key word here is “fail”. There is no simple and unambiguous interpretation of the famous line from

Worstward Ho

. That’s what distinguishes literature from self-help baloney. But we can safely assume it doesn’t mean: try hard enough and you, too, can win the French Open.

In a 2014 article for Slate magazine, Mark O'Connell noted the quote's gradual rise from obscurity to hipster buzz to mainstream ubiquity. The tipping point surely came when Richard Branson, emperor of faux-hippy venture capitalism, commandeered it for an article on his own brilliance.

“From the playwright, Samuel Beckett, but it could just as easily come from the mouth of yours truly,” he contextualised. (Never trust a hippy. Never trust somebody who describes himself as “yours truly”.) The erosion of nuance is complete. The same tantric gauze that contains Deepak Chopra has enveloped a writer prized for his uncanny balance of precision and mystery.

The “fail better” phenomenon is connected to the contemporary need to extract life lessons from literature. It is no longer enough for books to tell stories, explore imagined lives or tease out complex philosophies. They must also help us to cope with the pressures of “everyday living”.

The self-help approach to literary analysis kicked up a gear with the formation of Oprah’s Book Club in the mid-1990s. Anybody who has read even a sentence about Oprah Winfrey’s early life should think twice before criticising her commitment or sincerity.

There is, moreover, no doubt the book club encouraged viewers hitherto uninterested in literature to grapple with some worthwhile volumes.

Unfortunately, the conversations were too often concerned with isolating the "message" in the novel under discussion. Well done, Count Tolstoy; you've told us a great deal about Russia in the Napoleonic era. Nice one, Mr Joyce: you've walked Leopold Bloom all about Dublin on a summer's day. But what's in it for me? How does this help me deal with escalating debt and a repulsive spouse?

Joyce Carol Oates, the distinguished American novelist, addressed this issue politely – but with much bafflement – after making an appearance on the show in 2002. After a discussion of We Were the Mulvaneys, her admired family saga, an audience member approached Oates and said: "If my daughter had read your novel she would not have committed suicide."

It would have been a great thing if the novel had managed to save a life. But Oates suggested this was not what the book was for. "They don't seem to perceive – nor do they wish to perceive – that this is a novel," she said of too many contemporary readers. "I think if they had, for instance, a class on Shakespeare's Hamlet, they would say: 'Gertrude is just like my mother; Hamlet's like my brother; Ophelia, that's my story.' " Once again: what's in it for me?

“Of course, one doesn’t want to dampen that enthusiasm,” Oates added.

Drained of fatalism

Oh well. If you think it works for you then, in some sense, it probably does work for you. Forget about the structure that once sat around the Beckett quote. Set aside the way in which fatalism has been drained to allow for self-actualisation (or something). On Wednesday evening,

Stan Wawrinka

did some first-rate failing. Despite losing 11-9 in the fifth set to Richard Gasquet, he contributed to the match of the tournament.

Not that Beckett would have noticed. He’d have been watching the cricket.