Edward W. Said, On Late Style

Edward W. Said, On Late Style, Vintage, New York, 2006

...even—in one opera at least—Mozart, where a sudden lateness, as distinct from maturity, produces, as we read in this book, “a special ironic expressiveness well beyond the words and the situation.” / This type of lateness is quite different, Said argued, from the unearthly serenity we find in the last works of Sophocles and Shakespeare. Oedipus at Colonus, The Tempest, and The Winter’s Tale are late enough in their way, but they have settled their quarrel with time. xxi (Michael Wood, Introduction)

“For Adorno,” Said comments, “lateness is the idea of surviving beyond what is acceptable and normal; in addition, lateness includes the idea that one cannot really go beyond lateness at all.” This is precisely what keeps us in time even when we seem to be out of time… xiv

…for all his deep interest in lateness and his awareness of the shortage of his own time, Said was not attracted by the idea of a late, dissolving self…Said wanted to continue with the self’s making, and if we divide a life into early, middle, and late periods, he was still in the middle when he died at the age of sixty-seven in September 2003, twelve years after the first diagnosis of leukemia. Still a little too early, I think he would have said, for real lateness. xviii

I published a book called Beginnings: Intention and Method about how the mind finds it necessary at certain times to retrospectively locate a point of origin for itself as to how things begin in the most elementary sense with birth (4)…Individually, the chronology of discovery is as important for a scientist as it is for someone like Immanuel Kant who reads David Hume for the first time and, he says memorably, is briskly awakened from his dogmatic slumber (4)…Beginnings of this sort necessarily involve an intention that either is fulfilled, totally or in part, or is viewed as totally or in part, or is viewed as totally failed, in successive time. And so the second great problematic is about the continuity that occurs after birth (4-5)…But there are also exceptions, examples of deviation form the overall assumed pattern to human life (5)…I come finally to the last great problematic, which for obvious personal reasons is my subject here—the last or late period of life, the decay of the body, the onset of ill health or other factors that even in a younger person bring on the possibility of an untimely end. 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. (6)

What if age and ill health don’t produce the serenity of “ripeness is all”? this is the case with Ibsen, whose final works, especially When We Dead Awaken, tear apart the career and the artist’s craft and reopen the questions of meaning, success, and progress that the artist’s late period is supposed to move beyond…It is this second type of lateness as a factor of style that I find deeply interesting. I’d like to explore the experience of late style that involves a nonharmonious, nonserene tension, and above all, a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness going against… 7

In fact, studies of the very late Beethoven seldom fail to make reference to biography and fate. It is as if, confronted by the dignity of human death, the theory of art were to divest itself of its rights and abdicate in favor of reality” (EM 564). Late style is what happens if art does not abdicate its rights in favor of reality. 9

What has evidently gripped Adorno in Beethoven’s late work is its episodic character, its apparent disregard for its own continuity. If we compare a middle-period work, such as the Eroica with the opus 110 sonata, we will be struck with the totally cogent and integrative driven logic of the former and the somewhat distracted, often extremely careless and repetitive character of the latter. The opening theme in the thirty-first sonata is spaced very awkwardly, and when it moves on after the trill, its accompaniment—a studentlike, almost clumsy repetitive figure—is, Adorno correctly says, “unabashedly primitive.” And so it goes in the late works, massive polyphonic writing of the most abstruse and difficult sort alternating with what Adorno calls “conventions” that are often seemingly unmotivated rhetorical devices like trill, or appoggiaturas whose role in the work seems unintegrated into the structure. 10

…as Rose Subotnik puts it, that “no synthesis is conceivable…the vestige of an individual human subject sorely aware of the wholeness, and consequently the survival, that has eluded it forever.” (11)…What Adorno describes here is the way Beethoven seems to inhabit the late works as a lamenting personality, then seems to leave the work or phrases in it incomplete, abruptly dropped, as in the opening of the F Major Quartet or the A Minor. The sense of abandonment is peculiarly acute in comparison with the driven and relentless quality of second-period works such as the Fifth Symphony, where, at moments like the ending of the fourth movement, Beethoven cannot seem to tear himself away from the piece. 11-12

For Adorno…lateness includes the idea that one cannot really go beyond lateness at all, cannot transcend or lift oneself out of lateness, but can only deepen the lateness. 13

Adorno’s prose violates various norms: he assumes little community of understanding between himself and his audience; he is slow, unjournalistic, unpackageable, unskimmable (14-15)…its form exactly replicates its subtitle—reflections from damaged life—a cascading series of discontinuous fragments, all of them in some way assaulting suspicious “wholes,”…To work through the silences and fissures is to avoid packaging and administration and is in fact to accept and perform the lateness of his position. 15

Above all, late style as exemplified by Beethoven and Schoenberg cannot be replicated by invitation, or by lazy reproduction, or by mere dynastic or narrative reproduction, or by lazy reproduction, or by mere dynastic or narrative reproduction. There is a paradox: how essentially unrepeatable, uniquely articulated aesthetic works written not at the beginning but at the end of a career can nevertheless have an influence on what comes after them. 17-18

What we see is Adorno constructing a breathtakingly regressive sequence, an endgame procedure by which he threads his way back along the route taken by Lukacs; all the laboriously devised solutions volunteered by Lukacs for pulling himself out of the slough of modern despair are just as laboriously dismantled and rendered useless by Adorno’s account of what Schoenberg was really about. Fixated on the new music’s absolute rejection of the commercial sphere, Adorno’s words cut out the social ground from underneath art. For in fighting ornament, illusion, reconciliation, communication, humanism, and success, art becomes untenable. (18-19) …Adorno’s descriptions of [late-style Beethoven and Schoenberg] are models, paradigm, constructs intended to highlight certain features and thereby give the two composers a certain appearance, a certain profile in and for Adorno’s own writing… 19

I think it is right therefore to see Adorno’s extremely intense lifelong fixation on third-period Beethoven as the carefully maintained choice of a critical model, a construction made for the benefit of his own actuality as a philosopher and cultural critic in an enforced exile from the society that made him possible in the first place. 21-22

What affects us about Cosi is of course the music, which often seems so incongruously more interesting than the situation Mozart uses it for, except when (especially in the second act) the four lovers express their complex feelings of elation, regret, fear, and outrage. But even at such moments the disparity between Fiordiligi’s assertion of faith and devotion in “Come scoglio” and the genuinely frivolous game she is involved in deflates the noble sentiments and music she utters, making that music seem both impossibly overstated and sensationally beautiful at the same time—a combination, I think, that corresponds to Mozart’s feeling of unsatisfied longing and cold master. Listening to the aria and seeing the hubbub of serious and comic elements jostling one another on the stage, we are kept from wandering off into either speculation or despair, obligated to follow the tight discipline of Mozart’s rigor. 71

Identity is what we impose on ourselves through our lives as social, historical, political, and even spiritual beings. The logic of culture and of families doubles the strength of identity, which to someone like Genet who was a victim of the identity forced on him by his delinquency, his isolation, and his transgressive talents and delights—is something to be resolutely opposed. Above all, given Genet’s choice of sites like Algeria and Palestine, identity is the process by which the stronger culture, and the more developed society, imposes itself violently upon those who, by the same identity process, are decreed to be a lesser people. Imperialism is the export of identity. / Genet therefore is a traveler across identities, the tourist whose purpose is marriage with a foreign cause, so long as that cause is both revolutionary and in constant agitation. 85

Genet is like that other great modern dissolver of identity, Adorno, for whom no thought is translatable into any other equivalent, yet whose relentless urge to communicate his precision and desperation—with fineness and counternarratival energy that makes Minima Moralia his masterpiece—furnishes a perfect metaphysical accompaniment to Genet’s funeral pomp and his scabrous raucousness. 86

For all his geniality Strauss too was a late-style exponent in his last works, retreating into an elusive mix of eighteenth-century instrumentation and deceptively simple and rarified chamber expression designed to outrage his avant-garde contemporaries as much as his local and by-now-uninteresting audiences. 93

…Adorno, Strauss, Lempedusa, and Visconti—like Glenn Gould and Jean Genet…The one thing that is difficult to find in their work is embarrassment, even though they are egregiously self-conscious and supreme technicians. It is as if having achieved age, they want none of its supposed serenity or maturity, or any of its amiability or official ingratiation. Yet in none of them is mortality denied or evaded, but keeps coming back as the theme of death which undermines, and strangely elevates their uses of language and the aesthetic. 114

The virtuoso, after all, is a creation of the bourgeoisie and of the new autonomous, secular, and civic performing spaces (concert and recital halls, parks, and especially built palaces of art to accommodate precisely the recently emergent performer and not the composer) that had replaced the churches, courts, and private estates that had once nurtured Mozart, Haydn, Bach, and in his early years Beethoven. 118

I shall propose, though, is an account of Gould’s work that places him in a particular intellectual critical tradition, in which his quite conscious reformulation and restatements of virtuosity attempt to reach conclusions that are normally sought out not by performers but rather by intellectuals using language only. 121

Gould eschewed distorted effects that he thought typified the requirements of a stage presence, where one had to catch and retain listeners’ attention in the fifth balcony. So he escaped the stage altogether. But what was this an escape into, and where did Gould think he was going? And why was Bach’s music so specifically central to Gould’s intellectual trajectory as virtuoso? 122-123

…he had undertaken a long-standing, volubly stated, and restated rejection of what he called “vertical” romantic music, music that, by the time he began in earnest his career as a musician, had already become the highly commercialized and accepted staple of the piano repertory featuring the kind of manneristic pianistic effects that most of his performers (especially of Bach) avoided strenuously…added substance to Gould’s unusual virtuosic enterprise offstage so to speak. / And indeed the hallmark of his playing style as he continued to produce it, in the complete privacy of the recording studios that he inhabited late at night, was first of all that it communicated a sense of rational coherence and systematic sense, and second, that for that purpose it focused on performing Bach’s polyphonic music as embodying that ideal. 124

Gould’s Bach playing bears the inflections of a profound—and often objected to—idiosyncratic subjectivity, yet is paradoxically presented in such a way as to sound clear, didactically insistent, and contrapuntally sever, with no frills. The two extremes are united in Gould as, Adorno says, they were in Bach himself. 126

To put it simply, this is exactly the kind of Bach that Gould chose to play: a composer whose thinking compositions provided an occasion for the thinking, intellectual virtuoso to try to interpret and invent, or revise and rethink, in his own way, each performance becoming an occasion for decisions in terms of tempo, timbre, rhythm, color, tone, phrasing, voice leading, and inflection that never mindlessly or automatically repeat earlier such decisions but instead go to great lengths to communication a sense of reinvention and reworking of Bach’s own contrapuntal compositions. Dramatically the sight of Gould actually doing and acting this out gives an added dimensions to his piano-playing (130)…What Gould seems to be attempting here is a full realization of a protracted and sustained contrapuntal invention, disclosed, argued, and elaborated rather than simply presented, through performance. Hence his insistence throughout his career that they very act of performance itself had to be taken out of the concert hall, where it was limited to the implacable chronological sequence and set program of the recital order, and planted in the studio where the essential “take-twoness” of recording technique (one of Gould’s favorite terms) could be submitted to the art of invention (repeated invention, repeated takes) in the fullest rhetorical sense of that term. 130-131

In enacting it on the piano, the performer aligns himself with the composer, not with the consuming public, which is impelled by the performer’s virtuosity to pay attention not so much to the performance, as a passively looked at and heard presentation, as to a rational activity being intellectually as well as aurally and visually transmitted to others. 132

…one does not feel at the end of The Bacchae and Iphigenia the same sense of reconciliation and closure often found in earlier tragedies. Partly because of his relative lateness, Euripides uses his plays to repeat, reinterpret, return to, and revise his somewhat familiar material… 139

When, after having devastated Thebes and the house of Cadmus, Dionysus discloses himself, there is, I believe, an appallingly unique force in his words of self-revelation, as if he is perfectly prepared to go on playing with, harassing, and finally destroying the mortals who have slighted (but not seriously wronged) him. Euripides is as much the poet of that sadism as he is the melodist of Iphigenia’s victimhood, her advocate against Agamemnon’s ghastly tricks and macho insistence. 140

It is as if Cavafy’s basic poetic gesture were to deliver meaning to someone else while denying its rewards to himself: a form of exile that replicates his existential isolation in a de-Hellenized Alexandria… 146

Mann’s Death in Venice was published in 1911, and so within his oeuvre the work is a relatively early one, all the more paradoxical for its autumnal and even at times elegiac qualities. Britten came to it at a late point in his life and career… 149

Unlike Mann, whose ironic mode undercuts any simple moral resolution of Aschenbach’s experience, the narrator constantly employs a morally judgmental rhetoric, which some commentators (she cites T. S. Reed) want to associate with Mann’s failure of nerve: having conceived the tale “hymnically,” he now wants to resolve it “morally,” with the result, says Reed, that the tale is ambiguous in a bad sense, uncertain of its own meaning, disunited. / Like Cohn, however, I prefer to view the novella’s apparent moral resolution as answering to the narrator’s own needs and not to Mann himself, who scrupulously maintains an ironic distance from the narrator. 150