Tuesday
In today’s post, I turn to narrative theory to understand why the country is not more appalled at Donald Trump using his official power to pressure a foreign government to dig up dirt on a potential opponent. Jorge Luis Borges is also instrumental in this endeavor.
The latest facts as we know them are appalling. Here’s Prospect’s Paul Waldman summing them up:
Let’s pause here to take stock. The president of the United States eagerly accepted help from a hostile foreign power in order to get elected in 2016. This June, he told ABC News that if a foreign power offered him help to get reelected in 2020, he’d accept it. And now he has admitted that he pressured a foreign government to dig up dirt on the family member of a potential opponent in order to help him get reelected.
To repeat: If that isn’t impeachable, what is?
New York Magazine’s Jon Chait thinks he knows why people aren’t screaming impeachment. Trump, he says, doesn’t fit into the conventional crime narrative:
Over the past two days, President Trump has drained most of the remaining mystery from the world’s least mysterious crime drama. In a series of comments to the media, the president casually revealed that yes, he had pressured Ukraine’s president to investigate Joe Biden, and yes, he had tied that demand to military aid.
An old editor of mine who once worked the police beat for a newspaper told me most murder investigations are solved with the police arriving at the crime scene to see a man holding a gun and weeping about why he did it. The political ecosystem, though, is not structured to handle such cut-and-dried scenarios. Concerns must be raised, hearings must be held, money must be followed.
Two narrative principles are at work here. One is that we must engage in sophisticated detecting to discover “whodunit.” The second, true of sophisticated narrative and beloved of mainstream journalism, is that one side can’t be all good and the other all bad. Both principles have been violated here, with Trump and his lawyer Giuliani openly confessing his crime and Biden proving to be totally innocent.
In “Death and the Compass,” Borges tells the story of a sophisticated detective who refuses to accept the facts that are staring him in the face. A Jewish scholar has been murdered in a hotel room and the local constabulary has leapt to a conclusion: the murderer, seeking to rob jewels from a dealer in the room next door, blundered into the wrong room and killed the scholar when he cried out.
“There’s no need to look for a Chimera, or a cat with three legs,” Treviranus was saying as he brandished an imperious cigar. “We all know that the Tetrarch of Galilee is the possessor of the finest sapphires in the world. Someone, intending to steal them, came in here by mistake. Yarmolinsky got up; the robber had to kill him. What do you think?”
We are so conditioned by the detective genre, however, that we dismiss this explanation, as does the sophisticated Lonnrot, who is modeled on Poe’s Dupin and Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes:
“It’s possible, but not interesting,” Lonnrot answered. “You will reply that reality hasn’t the slightest need to be of interest. And I’ll answer you that reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but that hypotheses may not. In the hypothesis you have postulated, chance intervenes largely. Here lies a dead rabbi; I should prefer a purely rabbinical explanation; not the imaginary mischances of an imaginary robber.”
In other words, Lonnrot is interested in a crime only if it is interesting. Trump has drained the drama from the mystery by confessing it, prompting various storytellers to attempt to complicate it.
In Treviranus’s subsequent frustration, I see that of the Democratic Party. Why can’t the case be closed and the House move on to impeachment, they wonder, given that everything is out in the open:
Treviranus answered ill-humoredly:
“I am not interested in rabbinical explanations; I am interested in the capture of the man who stabbed this unknown person.”
Lonnrot, however, plunges into a rabbinical analysis of the Torah.
It so happens that this case is like Trump’s business with Ukraine: what appears to have happened actually did happen. Treviranus is right that the murderer did blunder into the wrong room.
I won’t go into all the twists and turns of the story except to observe Borges departs from the genre and has his detective killed by the criminal. In other words, Lonnrot dies because of his sophistication. Before he is shot, however, he observes that even a straight line explanation can become a labyrinth.
He is referring to Zeno’s paradox, which argues that an arrow shot from a bow can never reach its target because, before it reaches the tree, it must travel half way there and, before that, half way again, and so on ad infinitum. Another version of the paradox is that speedy Achilles can never overtake a tortoise.
In other words, philosophers, poets, and overly cerebral detectives can turn even the most straightforward of paths into a tangle:
“I know of a Greek labyrinth which is a single straight line. Along this line so many philosophers have lost themselves that a mere detective might well do so too. Scharlach, when, in some other incarnation you hunt me, feign to commit (or do commit) a crime at A, then a second crime at B, eight kilometers from A, then a third crime at C, four kilometers from A and B, halfway en route between the two. Wait for me later at D, two kilometers from A and C, halfway, once again, between both. Kill me at D, as you are now going to kill me at Triste-le-Roy.”
“The next time I kill you,” said Scharlach, “I promise you the labyrinth made of the single straight line which is invisible and everlasting.”
He stepped back a few paces. Then, very carefully, he fired.
As if disproving Zeno’s paradox, the shot undoubtedly hits and kills Lonnrot. The Trumps and Scharlachs of this world don’t worry about narrative tangles.
In our desire for complex narratives, we risk overlooking the obvious and committing Lonnrot’s blunder. We also face similar consequences. If we don’t adjust and accept that what we see is what actually happened, Trump will pull the trigger.