In Partial Disgrace Read Free

trilogy of novels— The Prisoner of Zenda , The Heart of Princess Osra , and Rupert of Hentzau —characterizing it as a German-speaking, Roman Catholic absolute monarchy. Despite it being perpetually in the midst of dissolution, that dissolution would mean only, paradoxically, more ground. Even as class, ethnic, and religious tensions threatened conflict, territory was taken at every compass point. War could not destroy it, peace could not bore it—every dark passage, be it to throneroom or dungeon, met intrigue along the way. Ruritania’s annexations only acquired for it more names, as if noble honorifics: Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire expanded it northeast toward Russia and called it Zembla; George Barr McCutcheon’s Graustark hexalogy expanded it southeast to the Carpathians; in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Mad King , it’s located east toward the Baltics, as Lutha; in John Buchan’s The House of the Four Winds , it’s a Scandinavian/Italian/Balkan mélange called Evallonia; Dashiell Hammett, in one of only two stories he ever set outside the States, had his nameless detective, the Continental Op, meddle in the royal succession of Muravia; Frances Hodgson Burnett further clarified the cardinalities by positioning her Samavia “north of Beltrazo and east of Jiardasia,” names that should be familiar to every good mercenary as demarcating the borders of “Carnolitz.” Newman called his Ruritania “Cannonia”—a toponym echoing the martial ring of “cannon,” with the authority of “canon.”
    Cannonia
    Still, to map Cannonia 1:1 onto Pannonian Hungary might be to misunderstand how Newman regarded place: to him, books could be just as physical as cities. The trashed palace of pages he left behind recalls the setting of another unfinished project: Kakanien, the wry appellation of Austro-Hungary in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities . Though Kaka is German juvie slang for “shit,” derived from the Greek prefix meaning “shitty”—if “calligraphy” is beautiful, “cacography” is ugly—Kakanien is also a pun on K und K , the Empire’s abbreviation for itself: kaiserlich und königlich , “Imperial and Royal,” indicating Austro-Hungary’s dual, dueling, crowns. Musil’s remains the prototypical modernist confusion—a book so coterminous with life that it could end only outside its covers, with the death of its author, or The Death of the Author (Musil was stopped by a stroke at age sixty-one, having completed only two of the projected three volumes).
    Newman had always known his only option was what he called “postmodernism”—a knowledge that assuaged his yearning for “modernism,” which was itself a balm for earlier aches. Though he’d always idealized the man in full, he was fated, was aware he was fated, to montage, sumlessness, pastiche. Ruritania will forever be trapped in the clockwork gears of the turn-of-the-century, but by the time another century was about to turn, the drive to synecdochize all of Europe in Vienna, or in a Swiss sanatorium (as in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain ), or even in the sci-fi province of Castalia (in Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game ), had forsaken history for dystopia. If utopia was “no-place,” dystopia—cacotopia—was Anglo-America: Brave New World , 1984 , Fahrenheit 451 , Lord of the Flies , A Clockwork Orange . Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard. By the 1980s—when Newman was first surveying Cannonia—the genre goons were at publishing’s gates, and they proceeded to divide and conquer: “literary novelists” would take care of the totum pro parte —“the whole for the parts”—in an effort to maintain the ideal of an artwork that could still mirror all of reality; while the pop hacks who hadn’t yet traded the page for TV and film would concern themselves with the pars pro toto —“the parts for the whole”—in an attempt to acknowledge that reality had sprawled beyond any consensus, exceeding the