… to discern the figure in the carpet. …It was invaluable training,” said Ryan Crocker in a recent interview at his college,” in how to think about complex foreign societies.”
But that Henry James short story, which Crocker “analyzed for my senior oral,” concludes with no figure found, its enigma intact.
We interpret stories; we tell stories. We chase down meanings and patterns and plots all our life -in some sense, this is our life – but we never solve the mystery, discern the figure. Tzvetan Todorov puts our rather brutally simple situation this way: “Narrative equals life, absence of narrative, death.”
Crocker’s storied, harrowing diplomatic career has ended, and, as some sort of result, he seems to have fallen apart, having been arrested for DUI and hit and run. Although named as dean of Texas A&M’s Bush School of Government and Public Service, he has not been much in that role. He left to take an ambassadorship, and, for next year, he’ll be a teaching fellow at Yale.
The life Crocker lived for decades pitched him forward from one byzantine, bloody narrative to another – an existence nightmarish, but engrossing and heroic. Now there’s the business of being an ordinary man with nightmares.