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Friday
I recently came across a reference to “Chekhov’s gun” in an article reporting on the threatened government shutdown—which appears increasingly likely as MAGA House Republicans renege on a previous budget agreement, squabble with other Republicans, and refuse to let anything go forward. The allusion gives me a chance to revisit the Russian’s author’s first play, The Seagull, which features the gun he may have been thinking of.
To be sure, there are ways to work around Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and the other 14 or so MAGA extremists, but any compromise could set off Chekhov’s gun. MSNBC’s Hayes Brown uses the image to explain why House Speaker Kevin McCarthy can’t simply put together a coalition of Democrats and less extreme Republicans and pass the budget both parties agreed to last spring:
But even that strategy would require more political courage than McCarthy has displayed to date. Keeping the government open with Democratic votes would likely trigger the Chekhov’s gun that’s been sitting on the House dais since he first won the speaker’s gavel: a motion to vacate the chair, aka a vote on whether to remove McCarthy from the speakership.
Here’s some background: In January McCarthy agreed, in exchange for the MAGA votes he needed to become Speaker, that they could vote at any time to have him removed. His agreement was unprecedented, leaving him vulnerable as no previous speaker has been. Chekhov, meanwhile, once wrote to a colleague that one “must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off.” He elaborated further in another letter:
Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.
If the current GOP imbroglio were a Chekhov play, the “motion to vacate” would be introduced in the first act of McCarthy’s speakership and eventually get fired in the last. And even if it never got fired, spectators would always be aware that it could be fired, which would add to the drama.
Maybe “sword of Damocles” would be a more apt allusion in McCarthy’s case. To communicate to his courtier Damocles what it was really like to be king, Dionysius I of Syracuse (so the legend goes) suspended a sword a single horse’s hair, point down, above the throne and invited Damocles to sit there. Forget the glory and the luxuries that go with being king, in other words. This is what it’s really like.
But such a sword works just as well as a gun in Chekhov’s scenario. A playwright should not put it in the play unless it is going to play some kind of role.
In his MSNBC article, Brown notes that McCarthy has “all but dared” Gaetz to “file the freaking motion” if he’s serious about it—in other words, to fire the gun—but doesn’t think the Speaker’s “newfound bravado will hold up for long.” In any event, having been introduced, the motion to vacate is now an integral part of the ongoing action.
Chekhov’s most famous use of his principle occurs in The Seagull. There we see aspiring writer Constantine Treplieff, in Act II, enter with a rifle, which he has just used to shoot a gull. Treplieff is in love with Nina, who is in love with a writer Treplieff regards as a rival. By shooting the gull, Treplieff shows how he himself feels shot down.
As it turns out, he is not the only rejected “gull” as there are three others, but Chekov’s rule decrees that we will see Treplieff’s gun again. In fact, by the beginning of Act III we learn that he has used it in a suicide attempt, and by the end of the final act we hear the shot as he succeeds.
The difference between those frustrated lovers and Speaker McCarthy is that they are governed by tragic longings. As George Saunders writes of Chekhov and other Russian masters (I wrote about this yesterday), they show that “every human being is worthy of attention and that the origins of every good and evil capability of the universe may be found by observing a single, even very humble, person and the turnings of his or her mind.”
Chekov’s greatness is such that he probably could find complexity even in McCarthy. Without such artistic treatment, however, the Speaker seems little more than a power-obsessed but straw-filled puppet who dances reflexively to whatever MAGA tune is playing.