In Partial Disgrace Read Free Page B

the master as on the mastered: is culture innate or cultivated? or both? Finally, if a new breed can only be the combination of old breeds, just as a new literature must come from a miscegenation of the old—what are we to make of ourselves? of humans? Are we just helixed bundles of parental genes, raised, hopefully, to maximize our strengths and minimize our weaknesses? or could we find a way back to understanding ourselves as we did in Genesis—before mind-body dichotomies, before mind-body-soul trichotomies—as unities, perfect merely by dint of our existence?
    To Newman, Freud’s psychology compartmentalizes our being—as if life were just a train of alternating appetites and suppressions—whereas Pavlov’s physiology coheres us as singularities, but as beasts. Newman alternately accepts and rejects these two conceptions, even while slyly offering a third: men are no better than dogs, and no better than locomotive engines—though they can become the worst of both, especially in the company of women. (Felix’s “three golden rules”: “1. Ride women high. 2. Never take the first parachute offered. 3. Never go out, even to church, without a passport, 1500 florins, and a knife.” Elsewhere he gives his son another trinity of “advice”: “1. Neither marry nor wander, you are not strong enough for either. 2. Do not believe any confession, voluntary or otherwise. And most importantly, 3. Maxime constat ut suus canes cuique optimus .”—which Newman glosses as “Everyone has a cleverer dog than their neighbor.”)
    In Partial Disgrace hunts its elusive prey through landscapes that resemble the Great Plains—if they’d been treated to their own Treaty of Trianon—through lessons in obedience theory (“‘The animal, like society, must be taken into liberality without quite knowing it,’” Felix avers), ethnologies of the nomadic Astingi, Cannonia’s sole surviving indigenous tribe (“They thought the Cossacks wimps, the gypsies too sedentary, the Jews passive-aggressive, the gentry unmannered, the peasants too rich by half, the aristocracy too democratic, and the Bolsheviks and Nazis too pluralistic. When cornered, they would put their women and children in the front ranks, and fire machine guns through their wives’ petticoats.”), lectures on art, music, theater, dance, and entr’acte harangues (“Cannonia and America had a special and preferential historical relationship, [Iulus] insisted, beyond their shared distaste for oracles and pundits, as the only two nations in History of whom it could be truly said that all their wounds were self-inflicted. And what could Cannonia offer America? The wincing knowledge that there are historical periods in which you have to live without hope.”).
    “History” appearing thrice in one sentence—and once even capitalized, Germanically? but what of that other word, “disgrace”? Grace is for the religious, disgrace is for the damned. Humans once hunted for sustenance, now they hunt for sport. To go through the motions of what once ensured survival, now purely for entertainment, is ignominious, but vital—the ignominy is vital. Even if the rituals have become as hollow as rotted logs, or as unpredictable in their ultimate attainments as the rivers Mze—Newman’s Danubes, whose currents switch from east to west to east—the very fact that we remember any ritual at all is enough to remind us too of a more essential way of being. Our various historical, racial, and ethnic selves are cast in a masquerade, which makes a game of integration. Yesterday’s work is play today, as contemporary life converts all needing to wanting. That’s why when the hound points and we squeeze the trigger, when we slit the knife across the quarry’s throat, we experience disgrace—a fallen estate, an embodiment of Felix’s Semper Vero, his ancestral holdings lost to laziness and debt. Agriculture has become a hobby for us millennials. Just like reading has, and writing.