On Late Style

If I free associate the words “late style,” the first things that come to mind are Beethoven’s late quartets; Tolstoy’s swing toward the religious; these increasingly interesting books we’ve been seeing from JM Coetzee after Disgrace; Philip Roth’s incredible recent fecundity, starting with his trilogy of books in the 1990s and continuing up through these recent volumes obsessed with bodily decay, the short-form, tiny-writing experiments of Walser’s we’re finally going to get to sample in English; Beckett, moving closer and closer to silence; Don DeLillo doing much the same; Finnegans Wake; and perhaps Kafka, who seemed to have had a late style for the majority of his career.

I think a lot of these associations wouldn’t have come to me before I started reading On Late Style by Edward Said, a collection of linked essays he was working on when he died in 2003. The book is his attempt to figure out what kind of aesthetic development accompanies old age (or, occasionally, the bodily and mental sensations generally associated with old age that can come upon the young for a variety of reasons). Said grounds the existence of such a thing as a late style on the basis that

we assume that the essential health of a human life has a great deal to do with its correspondence to its time, the fitting together of one to the other, and therefore its appropriateness or timeliness.

Thus, a late style is that which is timely to an artist whose body feels elderly.

Said doesn’t beat around the bush in blowing up the idea that a late style is going to be something serene or tranquil: for his very first example he takes Beethoven’s late quartets, among the least tranquil or conventionally beautiful music you’ll find on this side of twelve tone composition. Throughout this essay, Said draws on Adorno’s interpretation of said quartets and late style, remarks that spring from this portentous statement: “In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes.” A few pages later, Said elaborates on his interpretation of what Adorno means by this:

Not only do the notions of advance and culmination in Marxism crumble under his rigorous negative scorn, but so too does anything that suggests movement at all. With death and senescence before him, with a promising start years behind him, Adorno uses the model of the late Beethoven to endure ending in the form of lateness but for itself, its own sake, not as a preparation for or obliteration of something else. Lateness is being at the end, fully conscious, full of memory, and also very (even preternaturally) aware of the present. Adorno, like Beethoven, becomes therefore a figure of lateness itself, an untimely, scandalous, even catastrophic commentator on the present.

Essentially, Said is elaborating the idea that late style is an extreme form of exile for an artist. The examples that I’ve read thus far in the essays following this one show that this exile can be in a great many forms and be exile from a great many things; that is, the late style develops in counterpoint to broader historical and personal developments ongoing at the time.

On Late Style is a very rich book. It has some better and worse moments and it feels like the first few essays make the most penetrating analysis of late style–perhaps this has to do with the text was never being finalized by Said. But throughout the 2/3 I’ve read so far, Said consistently makes nuanced, precise observations of the texts he’s reading, and there are brilliant, ponderable remarks in each.

To end, I’ll leave you with the first movement of Beethoven’s 29th piano sonata, the so-called Hammerklavier, made during Beethoven’s late style and notable as his longest and most difficult to perform piece for the piano. An open-domain recording of the entire piece can be listened to here, and more information about this singular composition can be found here. (And of course, for a amazing reading of Beethoven’s final piano sonata–a reading that owes much to Adorno–read Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann.)

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