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Literary Review
THEORY
Creation and discovery
M.S. NAGARAJAN
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Said's book focusses on how authors' work and thought acquire a new idiom near the end of their lives.
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On Late Style, Edward Said, Bloomsbury, 2006, p. 176, £16.99.
In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes.
Theodor Adorno
LYTTON STRACHEY, the author of the widely-known biography Eminent Victorians, held the view that Shakespeare, during his last days, grew bored with life, bored with himself, bored with the wealth that he had accumulated through calculated usury; and this boredom is manifest in his last plays which do not fulfil the promise he had held forth in his early plays. Conventional scholars such as Tillyard and Dowden felt that Shakespeare grew mature with advancing years, and this maturity is reflected in the theme of reconciliation in his romances.
The way it ends
For Edward Said, the approach of the death of the artist gets into the writings in far too many ways to discover: what the reader perceives are what Adorno calls "fractured landscapes". Said demonstrates with a formidable density of details from writers (Thomas Mann, Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett) and classical musicians and composers (Beethoven, Glenn Gould,) that the works produced at the end of their creative lives stand in marked contrast to their earlier compositions: they do not resolve but contradict. One finds no redemptive message, no formal closure, no reconciliation, no grand synthesis, no transcendence. "But what of artistic lateness," asks Said, "not as harmony and resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction? What if age and ill health doesn't produce the serenity of `ripeness is all?' (p.7)"
Edward Said's (1935-2003) output is prodigious and incisive in quality. In 1995, he gave a hugely popular Graduate seminar at Colombia, on "Last Works/ Late Style". Battling Leukaemia, he put together the lecture notes of the course: his wife Mariam Said and friend Michael Wood completed the unfinished task, and have published this work, On Late Style posthumously. Said detects incoherence, lack of creative energy in the late-period music of the Austrian composer, Strauss. In the French dramatist Jean Genet, Said finds a kindred soul, for, he espoused the cause of the Palestinians. His works are "resources of hope". Beethoven's late works are "alienated and alienating". They repel audiences and performers because they are disjointed, lacking in cohesion. Speaking of the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, Said thinks that he broke the barriers of dead conventions that deaden the human spirit and established new ones, thus widening the horizons of music appreciation. Said sees literary modernism not as a movement of new thoughts ushering in a new style but as a "movement of ageing and ending".
Said acknowledges Adorno as his mentor. Said's title, On Late Style, is borrowed from Theodor Adorno, the German Marxist whose presence is felt in every page of the book. "Adorno was very much a late figure because so much of what he did militated ferociously against his own time... It is the zeitgeist that Adorno really loathed and that all his writings struggle mightily to insult" (p.23). Said commenced his forays into cultural and intellectual criticism in 1983 with his trailblazing book Beginnings: Intention and Method. It was all about beginnings — not origins — on which the author has full control. On Late Style is all about endings over which the author has no conscious control. Said has traversed a whole cycle as if to say, "in my beginning is my end".
New insights
In literary studies, the usual practice in Stylistics has always been to analyse the style of a work of literature in the context of the total oeuvre of the author's writings. Thus we have the examination of the fiction of Jane Austen, George Eliot and others. But none has so far conceived the idea of the human body in relation to aesthetic style. Said is the first to address the relationship between the realm of human nature and the realm of human thought. As he says, "I shall focus on great artists and how near the end of their lives their work and thought acquires a new idiom, what I shall be calling a late style"(p.6). In this sense, if in no other, Said's work is of a path-breaking nature. The merit of the work is that nothing is done speculatively: vast resources of evidence are marshalled and brought to bear on the texts, authors and ideas.
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