Читать книгу The Production of Lateness - Rahel Rivera Godoy-Benesch - Страница 13

There is a strange paradox to the idea of late style, which has resulted in a persistent divide within the community of late-style scholars. It resides in the incompatibility of two of late style’s tenets: on the one hand, there is the belief that late style is a universal phenomenon. On the other, the late artist is considered a geniusgenius and therefore marked by singularity. However, one can hardly insist on an artist’s uniqueness, justifying his or her greatness with the presumed existence of his or her distinctive late period, and simultaneously affirm that late style just ‘happens’ in most artists’ work in much the same way. In the greater part of late-style criticism, this paradox causes no major inconvenience because most studies are concerned with one particular painter, composer, or writer rather than with the conceptual implications of late-style theory. However, the theoretically oriented scholar must sooner or later deal with this contradiction, and there seem to be two ways of reacting to it: the universalist and the individualist approach, both of which have certain limitations.

Universalist scholars assume that old age has an inevitable effect on an artist’s work and style; the artist’s physical declinedecline and closeness to deathdeath inscribe themselves in the work of art and thereby establish a close connection between the creative product and its producer’s biography. PainterPainter, Karen states:

Our fascination with lateness arises from the fact that the decline through aging or sickness to death is a universal phenomenon. The relationship between biography and artistic creation may be clearer in late works than in any other phase of life, and the self-exploration that is often prompted by the confrontation of genius with old age or fatal illness can be as deeply human as it is self-referential. We prize artistic production that seems to sum up the accumulated experiencehuman experience of life in a mature aesthetic vision: works of art that pose questions of mortalitymortality and existentialhuman existence meaning speak to each of us. (1)

According to the traditional understanding of late style that Painter describes here, the universality of lateness has at least four aspects: Firstly, physical decline is supposed to be a universal experience. Secondly, this decline must necessarily be in conflict with “genius”genius due to their opposed connotation (inferiority versus superiority), and said conflict will instigate biographical “self-exploration.” Furthermore, the late work that results from this process is said to provide a “mature aesthetic vision” and convey “existential meaning,” and, lastly, because of its universality, the late work will “speak to each of us.” However debatable these assumptions may be, they provide a convincing theory of our alleged preference for late works, and hence a justification of their supposed singular quality: since everybody will eventually undergo declinedecline, we all prioritize late works because they record, and make sense of, the experience of decline. In view of the closure the theory offers, the questionable choice of premises does not easily come under scrutiny.

Yet, universalist tendencies in late-style theories go beyond the simple affirmation that old age will influence an ageing artist’s work; scholars provide catalogues of specific characteristics that such late works arguably display. Joseph N. StrausStraus, Joseph N. assembled a three-page-long alphabetical list with attributes of late style in music as they appear in scholarly work: they go from “abstract”abstraction and “alienatedalienation” (8) to “severe” and “monumental” (10). Recognizing that such a list is “necessarily crude” and that “the categories tend to overlap to some extent” and even “occasionally seem to contradict each other,” Straus proposes that late works should “share at least some of these characteristics, but not necessarily all of them” (7). On the other hand, he also acknowledges that there are contemporary composers in their nineties who are still productive and whose “music continues to develop in interesting ways,” but none of their stylistic developments seem distinctively late (4). In view of this inconsistency, Straus suggests that late style is induced by physical frailtyfrailty and disabilitydisability rather than by biological old age:

Late-style music is understood as having certain distinctive attributes, often including bodily features (fractured, fissured, compact, or immobilized) and certain mental or emotional states (introverted, detached, serene, or irascible). It may be that in writing music describable in such terms, composers are inscribing their shared experiencehuman experience of disability, of bodies and minds that are not functioning in the normal way. (6)

However, even within his universalist approach, Straus allows for the possibility that “listeners and critics, knowing of the composer’s disabilities, [may] read nonnormative physical and mental states into the music” (6), shifting his focus from the composition to the receptionreception of the work.

In view of the difficulty to justify a universalist approach to late style, other scholars argue that stylistic changes in old age may be a universal phenomenon but manifest itself in individual forms, for, as HutcheonHutcheon, Linda and HutcheonHutcheon, Michael affirm, “[t]here are as many late styles as there are late artists” (“Historicizing” 68).1 Imposing “a generalizing concept of late style (in the singular)” onto authors’ works must therefore inevitably result in an ageistageism activity, since it cannot do justice to the individual circumstances in which each author lives and writes (68). The individualist approach to late style, then, is less prone to grand generalizations. However, if the late style of an individual artist is not comparable to any other artist’s, this raises the question of how it can be recognized and assessed. Generally, scholars therefore resort to the comparative-sequential method: they evaluate an artist’s entire oeuvre, comparing earlier with later or last works, and establish meaningful differences in order to group the individual texts, paintings, or compositions into phases. In literary criticism, individualist approaches that set out to distinguish the style of an author’s last work(s) from his or her earlier output can be roughly divided into two groups. Firstly, there are those critics who identify three phases of production in an artist’s lifetime – early, middle, and late – and thus follow the system commonly used in musicology, which is consistent with cultural notionscultural discourse of a human being’s development: youthyouth, middle agemiddle age, and old age. The other group views the last works as an appendix to the main oeuvre whose beginning is marked by a turning point, which the critics duly identify. It may well be that this second method is influenced by one of Theodor W. Adorno’sAdorno, Theodor W. tenets, according to which the “dignity” of a composer depends on whether he will reach a late style in his artistic development (Urbanek 220).2 From this, it follows that, no matter how famous artists are and how well their work is receivedreception at an earlier stage, their oeuvre will require a kind of retrospectiveretrospection authorization by their late work if they wish to be appreciated beyond their middle age. The late work therefore acts as a kind of commentary on the previous creative output.

Whatever individualist approach critics choose, they frequently end up drawing a fairly conventional image of the late author as a creative genius. An example is Adam Zachary Newton’sNewton, Adam Zachary treatment of Philip Roth’sRoth, Philip last four short novels, which Roth himself grouped together under the title “Nemeses.” Newton selects two of these narratives, Indignation and Nemesis, and identifies them as a “prosthesis” in relation to Roth’s earlier works. Newton claims that Indignation and Nemesis are marked by artificiality and, like prostheses, do not pretend to supplant the earlier longer (and arguably more accomplished) novels, as they must naturally fall short of the various functions which the lost ‘body parts’ – Roth’s former novel writing skills – performed. By suggesting that Roth’s earlier works were more elaborate and complete, Newton thus seems to take up popular notions of artistic decline in old age. However, he states that the last works’ artificiality, reductiveness and flatness “possess […] an intrinsic power and ‘fascination’ in [their] own right” (131), affirming the almost magical attractiveness of enigmatic final words and staying in line with the traditional idea that closeness to deathdeath grants wisdomwisdom and transcendencetranscendence. A further individualist study which ultimately reveals traditional late-style concepts is Stephen J. Burn’sBurn, Stephen J. discussion of John Barth’sBarth, John late works. Burn initially contends that “the idea of imminent deathdeath does little to illuminate the signal qualities of Barth’s later fiction” (182). Later, however, he states that “what we find in the fourth-period Barth [i.e. the late Barth] is […] a writer’s meditation on what it means to be at the end” (187, italics added). Partly, this meaning of being “at the end” is expressed through a distinct, active way of avoiding closureclosure (184), “draw[ing] attention to the figure of the author” in order to create “chains of affect” between author and work (185). In other words – Burn does not put it quite so pointedly – Barth binds himself to his last works in order to affirm his existence and his controlcontrol over his creative products. His latenesslateness thus consists of a strengthening of his own position. Hence, he establishes an image of himself as an artist in his prime, a true late geniusgenius.

Individualist approaches may carry different argumentative thrusts and have different agendas: late-style studies in literature are not always written exclusively to explore texts but also to make a point about old age. Literary gerontologyliterary gerontology is the term for this field (cf. Falcus 54–56). Using literature to explore old age presupposes, however, a close connection between the late stylelate style detected in the works themselves and the physical or mental ageing process of their author. The division of an author’s oeuvre into an early, middle, and late phaselate phase is based on such a connection, and even though a critical study may focus on an individual author, composer, or painter, if it makes use of this universalist division, the results are predetermined. According to Amir Cohen-ShalevCohen-Shalev, Amir, psychological life-spanlife span creativity research has shown that creative expression develops over the life course due to “psychological maturation” (“Self and Style” 298), and the differences between earlier and later phases are marked by the way in which the self positions itself in reference to its outer reality. Works by young artists typically show a “correspondence of self and style,” an “emotional lyricism” and “extreme subjectivitysubjectivity” in which “‘objective’ reality does not have an independent existence; it can be rejected, transformed by the author’s imagination, ignored or magnified, but it is always perceived and responded to from within” (295–296). In middle agemiddle age, in turn, “the need of individuals […] to carve a niche in their community” shows in a concern “with effectiveness in the broader social world [that] often leads to a search for objective information on the external environment” (296). In old age, finally, self and reality “come to maintain an uneasy coexistence” in which “[f]ragmentation by design, incompleteness, internal contradictioncontradiction and emotional ambivalenceambivalence loosen the boundaries between inner and outer realities and enable a two-way flow,” resulting in a “lack of distinction between fact and fantasy, autobiographyautobiography and invention, [and] prose and poetry” (297).

Cohen-ShalevCohen-Shalev, Amir uses these findings in his study on IbsenIbsen, Henrik rather convincingly (cf. “Self and Style”), providing in-depth insight into Ibsen’s works. Whether these three stylistic phases materialize in all artists’ oeuvres is questionable, however, and even if they do, determining their precise form will still pose problems to the critic. Mark TwainTwain, Mark, in his autobiographyautobiography, writes that when he “was younger [he] could remember anything, whether it had happened or not,” but as his “faculties are decaying” in his old age, he shall soon not “remember any but the things that never happened” (113). One could now easily match his statement with the “lack of distinction between fact and fantasy, autobiography, and invention” that Cohen-ShalevCohen-Shalev, Amir assigns to old age (“Self and Style” 297). Yet, the fact that Twain is able to comment on his alleged inability explicitly – and probably somewhat tongue-in-cheek – makes such a direct correlation problematic. Actually, Twain does distinguish between fact and fantasy here, even though he claims that he does not. Indeed, he seems to take up prevailing ideas of latenesslateness in literature or cultural notions of life-spanlife span development and twist them in his idiosyncratic manner, purposefully drawing attention to them rather than enacting them in a ‘natural’ way. Whether his statement can be considered an instance of late style is therefore questionable, unless late style is declared as consisting of a metaliterary reflection on existing concepts of lateness, as I have suggested above. Late style thus becomes a “‘see-through’ art where the tricks of the trade – the techniques of ‘make believe’ – are dropped and make way for an art of dis-illusion and de-sublimation,” as Cohen-Shalev suggests in the slightly different context of old-age styleold-age style in cinemacinema (Visions of Aging 15). It follows that one can indeed use insights from psychological life-span research to support the analysis of late style in literature but such inquiries must go beyond a simple matching of the theories with certain aspects of the literary texts under scrutiny.

As the above discussion shows, no matter whether one approaches late style from a universalist or an individualist point of view, the enterprise is fraught with difficulties. Hence, at this stage, one must ask why the concept of late style continues to flourish in literature. A possible answer is that the idea of late style caters to our need for an artist figure, and it does so for both parties: the authors who produce writing in late style and their public who reads late style into the texts. The authors, on their part, define themselves as worthy of esteem when producing a late work marked by stylistic extravagance. Their audience, in turn, can affirm their belief in personal agencyagency, as the works they read are testimony to a strong authorial figure who takes the liberty to pursue an individual stylistic approach in old age and thus proves to be in controlcontrol of his/her actions. The universality of late style, believed to be detected in many artists’ freedom to disregard conventionsconvention, is thus inextricably linked to individuality, as these artists decide to ‘have it their way.’ As will be outlined below, this artist figure is not connected to old age or late style in a natural way; rather, it is the result of the establishment of late-style theories. This movement began in the 19^th century, but it experienced its most important development with Theodor W. Adorno’s lifelong project of describing Beethoven’s late work.