Читать книгу The Production of Lateness - Rahel Rivera Godoy-Benesch - Страница 12

Indeed, why should we ‘bother’ to write about late style? Why should we discuss it and argue about it? Why define what it entails; why even use it as a simple label for ageing artists’ works? With these questions, the probably most famous literary quote about labelling comes to mind, a passage from Shakespeare’sShakespeare, William Romeo and Juliet: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet” (2.2.1–2). This is what Juliet argues when she justifies her fondness for Romeo, who belongs to the wrong aristocratic family. Yet, Juliet’s attempt to diminish the importance of names is driven by passion. The critic’s work, however, should be stripped of emotion. Hence, any discussion of old age art must begin with a sober examination of its “names,” the terms that denote the phenomenon. Is it ‘late style,’ ‘old-age style,’ or just ‘latenesslateness’ that we believe to spot in works that were written, painted, or composed at a late stage in an artist’s career? Juliet would not mind the name as long as the ‘product’ satisfied her taste, and, likewise, critics could be tempted to laud late art without careful examination. But can there really be a ‘product’ without a concept attached to it? The roses that we recognize as such, the ones that smell sweetly, the ones we plant in a garden or tie into a bouquet or paint on a canvas, are species that have been bred over centuries, if not millennia, with the aim to make some desired features more salient. There are, of course, also non-bred, ‘natural’ roses, for example the rosa canina, the most common European wild rose, whose fruit is known as rose hip. Hardly anybody would think of this simple flower, though, when asked to think of a rose. Thus, when we describe the sweet smell and the appearance of a rose, we describe an artificially created aesthetic concept that has been imposed onto nature, and which is consequently reproduced by nature.

A similar development can be observed with regard to the concept of late style. Bred in art historyart history, musicologymusic and literary criticism, late style has become a critical commonplace, and consequently a rule of creative production itself (McMullan and Smiles, Introduction 3). As Gordon McMullanMcMullan, Gordon has persuasively shown, late style, as it is perceived today, originated as a critical concept based on the “biological thought of certain German romantic philosophersphilosophyromanticism” (2) and was imposed on Shakespeare’sShakespeare, William late plays in the second half of the 19^th century, for instance by the Irish critic Edward DowdenDowden, Edward (16).1 As a result of the pervasive critical discourse of lateness, “at least in Anglophone culture, […] writers [would] self-consciously […] look to Shakespeare for precedents for their own late work” (5). The rose bred in theory had begun to reproduce itself independently within literature. Yet, this is not to say that late style is a natural result of the physical reality of ageing. Rather, it is a socialsocial discourse product. In other words, authors develop a late style because they know that the concept exists. They are influenced less by their own ageing than by the scholarly and popular discourses about late-life creativity.

The history of critical receptionreception has generated distinct ideas of old-age art and late-life creativity. Shakespeare’s Prospero, Monet’sMonet, Claude water-lily paintings, and Beethoven’sBeethoven, Ludwig van Great Fugue have come to stand for late style in literature, paintingpainting, and musicmusic, respectively. Theodor W. Adorno’sAdorno, Theodor W. seminal work on BeethovenBeethoven, Ludwig van around the middle of the twentieth century took the concept out of its critical niche and made it popular, and Edward SaidSaid, Edward certainly added further recognition to it half a century later. Yet, as is the case with Juliet’s rose, however much one foregrounds the sweetness of its smell and the beauty of its bloom, one cannot help noticing the thorns, too. The theory of old age art seems to be caught in restrictive and simplifying binaries: the declinedecline or culmination of the artist’s skills; the foregrounding of either deathdeath or continuitycontinuity in his or her works; the conflict between subjectivitysubjectivity and conventionconvention in their production. One could continue: art vs. reality, nature vs. historyhistory, and resignation vs. rebellionrebellion are further oppositions against which products of old age creativity can be gauged in a structuralist manner. Indeed, Linda HutcheonHutcheon, Linda and Michael HutcheonHutcheon, Michael, in their article “Late Style(s): the Ageism of the Singular,” caution against such clichés and ask: “[H]ow useful is this entire unstable concept of late stylelate style when it can be defined in such contradictory fashion […]?” (10).

Indeed, if one analyzes texts by ageing authors with these binaries in mind, Hutcheon and Hutcheon’s statement that “[c]ritics find […] what they seek to find” (9) becomes all too true. It should not be too difficult to come up with a description of a certain artist’s late phaselate phase, and, if inclined, one can draw parallels between artists and thus arrive at a set of late-style universalsuniversal late style. One might discover, for instance, that the ‘roses of late art’ are usually paler than fresh ones, that they grow longer (or more, or fewer) thorns, that their stems are thinner or thicker and their leaves of a darker or lighter green. What one does not learn, however, is why this is so. As long as one works with such binary oppositions – even if just using them as opposite poles of a cline along which to place particular works of art – one will gain little insight into the forces that shape the production of late style. From the point of view of ageing studies, particularly its philosophicalphilosophy and sociological branches, old age art is relevant mainly because it is an indicator of underlying assumptions about old age creativity, that is, the belief systems that condition late style in the first place. In other words, the late rose’s appearance is of interest because it should show us why it grew in this particular way. This is a question that has largely remained unexplored.

In 2016, Oxford University Press published a collection of essays titled Late Style and Its Discontents, which outlines the different ways in which late-style concepts in music theorymusic, art historyart history, and literary criticism have arrived at a point of paralysis. The term ‘late art’ is often used as a label but critics carry out little further investigation into the connections between old age and creativity (McMullan and Smiles, Introduction 1–2). Much of the fascination with late works, especially in literary studies, is connected to the idea that these are believed to

constitute […] the artist’s final vision, a meditation on the creative act and on human achievementachievement that frequently offers a glimpse of future developments. In short, late style is presumed to demand our attention […] because a great artist’s final statements disclose profound truthstruth. (2)

Within this definition, the term ‘late style’ is freed from its old-age factor: indeed, an artist who dies at a relatively young age may create a masterpiece that is subsequently received as his/her final, weighty statement – provided that its creator is considered “a major creative voice” (3).2 The term ‘old-age styleold-age style,’ in turn, which takes the artist’s advanced age as a condition for the work’s production, applies to stylistic changes produced in an artist’s old age independently of the work’s (or the artist’s) canonical status. In other words, whereas ‘late style’ makes a quality judgment, ‘old-age style’ is a qualitatively neutral, analytical category that foregrounds the relationship between the artists’ age and style and presupposes a causal relationship between the two. In practice, however, the two terms often overlap and are used interchangeably (Amigoni and McMullan 378), with ‘late style’ dominating the critical discourse. This is frowned upon by McMullanMcMullan, Gordon and SmilesSmiles, Sam because it “arguably obscures the specific impact of old age on creativitycreativity” (Introduction 6).

Even though one should thus consider the connection between old age and creativity a priority in studying late art, the concept of old-age styleold-age style is more problematic than McMullanMcMullan, Gordon and SmilesSmiles, Sam allow for. If one is to assert that a certain style of a composer, painter, or writer is influenced by his or her old age, one needs to be able to define what old age means. When and why does a person qualify as old? What are the factors that determine old age? A certain number of years lived? Physical frailtyfrailty? Proximity to deathdeath? Numerous investigations suggest that old age is a fuzzy category, “a cultural constructcultural discourse” (Waxman 8), and ideas about what it means have shifted over the centuries. The leading German art historianart history Willibald SauerländerSauerländer, Willibald, for instance, has shown that with the increasing secularization of the Western world, ideas about old age have developed from the concept of a passive phase of waiting for death in expectation of the afterlife (i.e. God’s decision to take one’s life) to the current focus on consumption, entertainment, and active ageing.3 Moreover, as soon as we take the definition beyond chronological old age (i.e. the period of life after sixty, or seventy, depending on life expectancy), we will have to focus on subjective ageing, which is greatly influenced by a person’s individual situation and his/her cultural environment, for instance healthhealth, or, rather, illness and pain (cf. de Medeiros and Black), as well as social and economic circumstances (cf. Twigg and Martin, “Identities”). Regional distinctions, as, for example, rural versus urban life (cf. Edmondson and Scharf) and, more importantly, racerace, classclass and gendergender differences (cf. Calasanti and King) add to the complexity and make it almost impossible to safely determine to what extent and in which ways old age influences a particular artist’s creative production.

From this, it follows that there are only two valid methods to approach old-age style: either there is enough testimony by the artists themselves about what ageing meant or means for them and for their artistic activity,4 or critics will have to rely on general cultural concepts of ageing – with due consideration of time period, region, gendergender, and classclass. The latter method, however, lifts the work of art from the strictly biographical context of its producer, and the study of old-age style turns into a purely abstract, reception-basedreception investigation. Hutcheon and Hutcheon, in critically scrutinizing such approaches, emphasize their artificiality and ideological bias, stating that they are always “a retrospectiveretrospection, critical construct with its own aesthetic and ideological agenda and, most importantly, its own view of both aging and creativity” (“Late style(s)” 3, original italics). In other words, the latter approach diminishes insights into the “specific impact of old age on creativity” that McMullan and Smiles would wish to expand.

With these reservations in mind, and based on further reasons to be outlined below, the term ‘late stylelate style’ rather than ‘old-age styleold-age style’ will here be proposed for investigations into the connection between artists’ old age and their creative production, especially in the study of contemporary literature. The works selected for the discussion of stylistic changes in old age – John Barth’s The Development, Karen Blixen’s “Echoes,” and Joan Didion’s Blue Nights – were all written by ageing authors, and they could thus well carry the label ‘old-age style.’ However, although the texts abound with comments about old age, much of their impact lies in their urgency to make a last and lasting statement on creativity. The writers’ old age is thus relevant not merely as another phase of life, after childhoodchildhood, adolescenceadolescence, and middle agemiddle age have passed, but as the last stage, and therefore the last opportunity to be artistically productive. Within this line of argument, old age – with whatever markers it is culturally and personally endowed, the physical declinedecline and lossloss of social status, or rather, the wealth of a long life and gained wisdomwisdom – remains an important factor, but it cannot fully account for the works’ peculiar latenesslateness. In Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing, McMullanMcMullan, Gordon insists on the separation between old-age style and late style because late style, rather than being linked to old age, is “a celebration of a particular liminality – of, that is, the proximity of deathdeath. Late work is, in other words, borderline activity, a creative response to death, a kind of eschatology” that is not exclusive to old age (10). Yet, since old age is by definition always the last phase of life and therefore marked by the proximity to death, one could also argue that old age induces lateness, in the sense that the awareness of their advancing age may cause elderly authors to think about the liminal status of their life and their work. Karen PainterPainter, Karen suggests:

The artist who does not die suddenly has the opportunity, and often feels the compulsion, to concentrate on the implications – the meanings – of lateness. He or she can come to terms with the limits of life and achievementachievement and focus on what still seems most important. (6, original italics)

For many artists, such a stock-taking is marked by a concern about the last impression that their work(s) will leave.

In the texts selected for this study, the feeling of urgency and the desire to make a last and lasting impression as an artist is observable on several levels. Most notably, this desire is expressed explicitly by the artist-protagonists portrayed in each story. In John Barth’sBarth, John The Development, the protagonist George Newett muses that he “would be remembered as a once-conventional and scarcely noticed writer who, in his Late Period, produced the refreshingly original works that belatedly made his name” (89). In Karen Blixen’sBlixen, Karen short story “Echoes,” Pellegrina Leoni, the ageing wanderer and former opera singer, decides to engage in one last act of creativity by turning a talented peasant boy into a professional singer, reflecting that “this last part bestowed upon her [by God] was the greatest of her repertoire and in itself divine. In it she must allow herself no neglectfulness and no rest. Were she to die at the end of the respite granted her it would be but a small matter” (171). She further compares her swan song’s effect to Christ’sChrist resurrection, upon which “the whole world had built up its creed” (170). In Joan Didion’sDidion, Joan autobiographical novel Blue Nights, the author’s desire to make a last statement can be best discerned in her wish to show herself in a direct, immediate way, rejecting her former authorial masksmask. “Let me try again to talk to you directly,” she states (134). And: “The tonetone needs to be direct. I need to talk to you directly, I need to address the subject as it were” (116, original italics). What the statements from these three texts have in common is their strong concern for the audience. How will the late or last work be receivedreception? What kind of shadow will the creative work cast on its creator? What image of the artist will the general public and the critical community infer from it?

Such concerns about the response of the audience are, of course, nothing extraordinary in an artist’s world, were it not for the fact that they are here directly linked to the artists’ age. For each of these figures, old age contributes decisively to their wish to mark a stylistic change in their late creative works, and they state this wish explicitly. Unlike musicmusic and visual artpainting, literature has the advantage of explicit language and rhetoric. Hence, the protagonists can express what old age means for them, which makes subjective ageingsubjectivity (rather than cultural stereotypesstereotype) more accessible to the critic. Interestingly enough, in each of the chosen works, the physical aspects are at the forefront. In Barth’sBarth, John The Development, long lists of age-related ailments and illnesses dictate how the various elderly characters are perceived by the reader (26–28). In Blixen’sBlixen, Karen “Echoes,” Pellegrina imagines herself attending the presentation of her last work – the singing peasant boy – as “an old unknown woman in a black shawl, the corpse in the grave witnessing its own resurrection” (170). Finally, Didion’sDidion, Joan Blue Nights abounds in descriptions of Didion’s frailtyfrailty and her fear of it. She is constantly afraid of, for instance, falling in the street, or of not being able to get up from a chair after a concert has ended (e.g. 105–111).

This strong emphasis on age-related vulnerabilityvulnerability and proximity to deathdeath raises some interesting questions while simultaneously complicating the positioning of late-style studies within the broader field of ageing studies. Should late stylelate style (or old-age style, for that matter) be defined as a stylistic phenomenon linked to physical declinedecline? Is it physical reality that intrudes upon the mental product, effecting changes in its form (rather than, for instance, wisdomwisdom and spiritual transcendencetranscendence)? Would one thus have to rename the phenomenon ‘style of frailty’?5 This would certainly not be doing any service to those branches of ageing studies dedicated to counter ageismageism, such as cultural gerontologycultural gerontology (cf. Twigg and Martin, “The Field”) and literary gerontologyliterary gerontology (cf. Falcus), since it would mean equating old age with decline and decay. Moreover, late works that foreground opposed values, such as the wealth of lived experiencehuman experience, would be excluded from this definition. Hence, how can we theorize late style usefully, without simply affirming the widespread peak-and-decline modelpeak-and-decline model (cf. Smiles 17) and fueling ageist discourse? Late-style theory is certainly not interested in suggesting that old age equals decay, but neither does it seem right to ignore the emphasis that many ageing authors place on physical decline.

One way of attempting a description of late style in connection with physical decline is to approach this decline neutrally, as a fact of human existence rather than a value judgment. The body must die, and it commonly approaches its death in stages rather than just collapsing all of a sudden. A neutral approach to physical decline allows us to avoid such commonplaces as “despite his frailtyfrailty, author X still writes marvelously.”6 As Philip SohmSohm, Philip accurately remarks, “[e]xceptionalism is the masked twin of gerontophobia, the twin of denial and hope that tries to recue old artists from a conventionally predicated declinedecline” (26). In a similar manner, McMullanMcMullan, Gordon and SmilesSmiles, Sam acknowledge:

[P]erhaps, in fact, we should redefine old-age style as something which is directly or indirectly the product of the adjustments and collaborations necessary for creative artists in old age, not something that exists despite such contingencies. (Introduction 7, original italics)

However, late style criticism in literature must move even beyond defining late style as a product of physical decline. If the field of ageing studies is to profit from investigations into late style, rather than simply affirming a causality, critical investigations should define the precise nature of the connection between age-related decline and artistic expression.

Thus, in this study, ‘late style’late style refers to characteristics in an author’s work that are recognizably caused by the author’s awareness of old age, particularly of its physical factors. The term ‘style’style is thus used in a broader sense and not restricted to stylisticsstylistics only.7 A ‘late work’ is an artistic product, the composition of which is driven by the author’s desire to leave an impression as an ageing artist, which is explicitly or implicitly revealed in the work itself, either through its content or its form.8 A third term, ‘lateness,’lateness will be employed to denote the authors’ concern for their late work’s receptionreception and their awareness of late-style theories, an authorial stance that must be inferred from the elements of the text itself and from its comparison with earlier works.9 These definitions restrict late style to something explicitly or implicitly referred to in the late work itself. Late style is thus revealed in a metafictionalmetafiction manner; it is not just a sign of old age, but it makes a statement on its own nature and its status as a sign.

Writers thus actively use critical ideas of late style for their self-fashioning but they go beyond a simple adoption of these ideas.10 Specifically in narratives that portray fictional or semi-autobiographicalautobiography ageing artists in a self-reflexive manner, late-style theory is not just enacted, but developed. It is for this reason that such works were chosen for this study of late style. Firstly, through the portrayal of their aged-artist figures, they offer a theory of late creativity that can be studied in its own right. In the (semi-)fictional microcosm of the stories, the artist-protagonists’ lives are the points of departure for their creative products. Hence, these texts suggest a causal relationship between old age and creativity and propose a late-style theory. However, almost inevitably, the proposed theory extends to the authors themselves because the artist-protagonists are fashioned in an autobiographical or near-autobiographical manner. This may produce friction because life facts and other details refuse to match. This friction between the creative theory internal to the text and the signs of lateness the work itself carries must be examined.

However, at least in current Anglophone literary criticism, drawing such parallels between the protagonists’ and their authors’ lateness creates a certain unease because it seems to fall back on outdated concepts of biographical interpretationbiographical approach, from which it is only a small step to intentional fallacyauthorial intention (cf. Wimsatt and Beardsley). Yet, the separation between author and work, which has dominated most branches of literary criticism since the mid-twentieth century, can be challenged. Seán BurkeBurke, Seán outlines the critical landscape as follows:

For the best part of the twentieth century, criticism has been separated into two domains. On the one side, intrinsic and textualist readings are pursued with indifference to the author, on the other, biographical and source studies are undertaken as peripheral (sometimes populist, sometimes narrowly academic) exercises for those who are interested in narrative reconstructions of an author’s life or the empirical genealogy of his work. Work and life are maintained in a strange and supposedly impermeable opposition, particularly by textualist critics who proceed as though life somehow pollutes the work, as though the bad biographicist practices of the past have somehow erased the connection between bios and graphē, as though the possibility of work and life interpenetrating simply disappears on that account. (187–188, original italics)

According to Burke, textualist critics, by deciding to ignore the various connections between authors and their creative products, simplify matters rather too much. As a result, issues of creativecreativity production have not been explored sufficiently. Yet, against the backdrop of the current ‘return to biographybiographical approach,’ a development that was already set in motion with Roland BarthesBarthes, Roland’ The Preparation of the Novel and within which “the question of the author poses itself ever more urgently” (Burke 191), literary criticism could face the challenge to include the author in textual analysistextual analysis. Frédéric RegardRegard, Frédéric makes a plea for this, arguing that it “raise[s] crucial issues in the theory of interpretation, if only because the notion of the author’s concrete life as person, a living individual, cannot be totally eradicated from the literary text” (396). The literary works’ own encouragement to draw parallels between the protagonists and their authors could be a starting point for critics to work their way from a text to its writer. And what better material is there than narratives with protagonists that are, like their authors, acutely aware of the tenets of creative production – here in the form of late-style theory? Literary criticism could certainly benefit from theorizing the boundary between author and work more thoroughly, and late-style theory may uncover some notions of creativecreativity production that have remained veiled so far.

This boundary is subject to the concept of the late-style narrativelate-style narrative, which develops a theory of late style through the portrayal of an aged artist-protagonist and motivates the comparison between the protagonist’s and the author’s creative processes. The works assessed in this study are all late-style narratives, and there are many more that one could include: Philip Roth’sRoth, Philip Exit Ghost, Joseph HellerHeller, Joseph’s Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man, Paul Auster’sAuster, Paul Winter Journal, Hanif Kureishi’s The Last Word, Samuel R. Delany’sDelany, Samuel R. Dark Reflections, and several of J.M. Coetzee’sCoetzee, John Maxwell novels (for instance Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello), to name but a few. Unsurprisingly, the most straight-forward examples, listed above, are all written by male authors, for, traditionally, late style has been “an overwhelmingly male category” (Hutchinson, Afterword 238). Addressing the gendergender bias in late-style studies, McMullanMcMullan, Gordon states that “women have no place in the ranks of late stylists, just as they have no place (or at best a highly circumscribed place) in the larger concept – geniusgenius – of which late style is a sub-category” (17). Indeed, not only is there a noticeable gap in criticism about female late style, but female authors also seem more reluctant to write about issues of late-life creativity than their male colleagues. The few works that come to mind when looking for Anglophone late-style narratives written by women include Sena Jeter Naslund’sJeter Naslund, Sena The Fountain of St. James Court, Penelope Lively’sLively, Penelope Ammonites and Leaping Fish, as well as the works by Karen BlixenBlixen, Karen and Joan DidionDidion, Joan discussed in this study. Furthermore, there are traces of a late-style narrative in Alice Munro’sMunro, Alice most recent collection of short stories Too Much Happiness, and there are certainly further works that contain implicit references to the search for new forms of expression in old age.

Still, in comparison with the male type, female late-style narratives are scarce. This is no surprise: if one takes into account the hypothesis that ageing artists fashion their late works against the backdrop of late-style theories, and that these theories are mostly concerned with male artists, women writers do not see themselves reflected in these theoretical frameworks – nor may they feel the urge to reflect on late-style theories to the same extent as male writers. However, as more scholarly work on female late stylegender is produced (see, for example, the collection of essays Literary Creativity and the Older Woman Writer), more female late-style narratives might emerge, too. The present study, with two thirds of its analyzed texts being written by women, shall thus also contribute to a growing corpus of late-style theory that – besides being wary of ageist methodology (cf. Introduction) – aims at a more balanced gendered discourse.