Читать книгу The Production of Lateness - Rahel Rivera Godoy-Benesch - Страница 14

Much has been written about Theodor W. Adorno’s extensive, yet fragmentary treatment of Beethoven’sBeethoven, Ludwig van late style. This comes as no surprise, given the lasting impact it has achieved.1 Adorno began his project in 1937 with the publication of the short, four-page essay “Late Style in Beethoven,” which is still the most often-quoted and most widely discussed text in connection with late style, and, “although an early text, it contains in nuce nearly all the motifs that will preoccupy Adorno for the rest of his life” (Spitzer 58). Not only were Adorno’s essays and fragments on Beethoven’s late style extensively reviewed in the fields of musicologymusic, art historyart history, and literary criticism, but they also became (and were, for Adorno himself), a way of describing modernitymodernity, and, more specifically, modernismmodernism, which he saw as “a sharpening and intensifying of modernity, or a response to it” (Hamilton 391).2 Adorno held the view that Beethoven’s late work, which is commonly believed to comprise the works composed in his last decade (1817–1827), was a precursor of modernism, and its fragmentedfragmentation, non-compliant character showed the “exhaustion of artistic forms,” that is, “the character of all artistic activity in modernity, which thus begins its trajectory towards volatilization, abstractionabstraction” (Bewes 83).

Some of Adorno’s thoughts may nowadays seem outdated or merely ‘historicalhistory,’ especially since he wrote in a time in which the Great War (and later also Nazi Germany) had taken a toll on philosophyphilosophy.3 “It is undeniable,” Timothy BewesBewes, Timothy states, “that Adorno’s lateness is in some sense a temporal hypothesis” (84). However, while one must historicize Adorno’s thought and consider it at a distance from the current situation, critics should also identify those parts of his philosophyphilosophy that are “open to future transformation,” that is, the parts that contain a more general, non-historical truthtruth claim (Klein, Einleitung 10–11).4 In view of the breadth of Adorno’s own approach to late style (he combined musicology with Marxist philosophy, aesthetic theory and art historyart history) and the variety of academic fields in which his late-style theories have been received, this short section cannot possibly do justice to Adorno’s work on Beethoven. Therefore, rather than attempting to provide an overview,5 I shall single out a particular aspect of Adorno’s view on late style and the way it has been taken up by Edward Said’sSaid, Edward recent contribution: the figure of the late artist, which has indeed proven to be ‘open to future transformation’ (to use Klein’s phrase), as it is reproduced again and again and each time given a slightly different shape.

McMullanMcMullan, Gordon rightly states that “[i]f there is one inevitable outcome of work on late style, it would seem, that outcome is complicity with authorial self-fashioning” (16). It may seem odd that Adorno’s writing has resulted in such a strong image of the artist, since his aesthetic theory is based on the principle of an art that is autonomousautonomous art and his “conception of lateness was developed in fierce opposition to biographical criticismbiographical approach” (Bewes 84). He believed in the principle of ‘art for art’s sake’ and the idea that “music lost its direct social function with the ascendancy of bourgeois culture from the late eighteenth century,” when “aristocratic and church patronage declined, and non-functional ‘art music’ developed” (Hamilton 394). However, with this development, artists also became more independent and they could produce “works that embod[ied] their own values rather than those of their patrons” (395). Hence, although creative works became more autonomous in a narrow sense in that they did not directly serve a political or social didactic (and possibly moralistic) purpose anymore, they could increasingly be designed to express their producer’s biographical reality – their subjectivitysubjectivity. Indeed, as Jürgen Stolzenberg affirms, the leading theme of Adorno’s writing on Beethoven is subjectivity (58). In this, Adorno fell in line with earlier, German romanticromanticism concepts that established “style as the organic product not of an epoch but of the life and will of a given artist” (McMullan 2). Thus, even if Adorno’s project was declaredly based on an allegorical understanding of Beethoven’s late compositions, the works themselves standing in for modernitymodernity rather than the old age of their composer, the image of the artist as the originator of the works was always at its core.6

In “Late Style in Beethoven,” Adorno’s first, obvious purpose is to devalue traditional interpretations of the great composer’s late works, that is, those artist-centered approaches to his music that “make reference to biography and fate” (564). Beginning with a general characterization of late works as “not round, but furrowed, even ravaged,” and “[d]evoid of sweetness, bitter and spiny” (564), Adorno then goes on to state:

The usual view explains this with the argument that they are products of an uninhibited subjectivity, or, better yet, “personality,” which breaks through the envelope of form to better express itself, transforming harmony into the dissonance of its suffering, and disdaining sensual charms with the sovereign self-assurance of the spirit liberated. (564)

In such an approach, Adorno critically remarks, “late works are relegated to the outer reaches of art, in the vicinity of document,” which supposedly makes it impossible to “fix […] one’s attention […] on the work itself” in order to reveal its “formal law” (564). The need to discover the “formal law,” in turn, arises from the “disdain […] to cross the line that separates art from document” (564). Otherwise, Adorno declares somewhat haughtily, “every notebook of Beethoven’s would possess greater significance than the Quartet in C-sharp Minor” (564).

These introductory remarks contain the premises on which Adorno’s subsequent argument operates, and they simultaneously reveal why these premises are so crucial to his agenda in pursuing Beethoven’s late style. Adorno uses Beethoven to exemplify and justify his view of modernitymodernity and especially modernismmodernism as a state of disruption. Beethoven’s music must thus fit this purpose. It must (prematurely) express the modernist Zeitgeist, or rather, it must critique a Zeitgeist that is opposed to it,7 one that still prefers harmony to fragmentationfragmentation and decay.8 Hence, for Adorno, late art cannot possibly consist of an artistic product in the biographical sense, one characterized by a unity which the artist masterfully conveys. The late work must be cleared of artistic sense-making, of subjectivitysubjectivity, so it can be truly historicalhistory, that is, contain “more traces of history than of growth” (Adorno, “Late Style” 564). Thus, a biographical approachbiographical approach would be unsuitable to reach the interpretations Adorno pursues, and he therefore denounces its presumed “inadequacy,” its inability to recognize true art (hence the comparison with Beethoven’s notebooks [564]), and dismisses psychological criticism as clichéd, flat (565) and sentimental (art as “touching relics” [566]).

Interestingly enough, Adorno here seems to be unaware that, in his desire for the artist’s lack of subjective involvement, he simply covers it up with the critical inquiry itself. Adorno’s criticism is thus not simply non-biographical, but pointedly anti-biographical, aiming to erase the connection between artist and work. His strategy resembles that of textualist critics who, according to BurkeBurke, Seán, “proceed as though life somehow pollutes the work” and “as though the possibility of work and life interpenetrating simply disappears on that account” (187–188, original italics). Admittedly, Adorno does not do away with subjectivity altogether; rather, he re-defines the relationship between subjectivity and conventionconvention (“Late Style” 566): whereas convention is still found in the late work in the guise of “formulas and phrases” that are “scattered about” in a “bald, undisguised, untransformed” manner (565), subjectivity does not join them into an organic whole anymore. Instead, “[t]he power of subjectivity in the late works of art is the irascible gesture with which it takes leave of the works themselves,” Adorno states: “It breaks their bonds, not in order to express itself, but in order, expressionless, to cast off the appearance of art” (566). Hence, subjectivitysubjectivity releases its grip over the work of art – at least in the anti-biographical critic’s approach.

Adorno does not entirely succeed in disposing of the artist’s influence over the late work. One is tempted to quote Paul Watzlawick’sWatzlawick, Paul famous first axiom of communication: “behaviour has no opposite. In other words, there is no such thing as non-behaviour or, to put it even more simply: one cannot not behave” (48, original italics). In the same way, one could say, subjectivitysubjectivity cannot be expressionless, and the artist’s work cannot just not be biographical, since artistic creation is behavior. Although this claim admittedly disregards the complexity of Adorno’s points to some extent, it becomes persuasive once we consider Watzlawick’s immediate consequence of the first axiom: “one cannot not communicate” (49, original italics). For, in his attempt to negate the artist’s influence, that is, to not use a biographical approach in his essay, Adorno in fact evokes it. As he dismisses biographical readingsbiographical approach and provides several examples of biographical interpretation ex negativo, the approaches he aims to discredit are actually made present to the reader. This does not invalidate Adorno’s point on non-biographical readings. However, it does leave the reader with an image of the artist.

The artist’s figure appears even more strongly when Adorno, “struggling for the exact calibration of the relationship between artistic subject and aesthetic object” (Hutchinson, Lateness 259), resorts to figurative language to endow his view of late art with additional expressiveness. The tropes by which the philosopher conveys his idiosyncratic catalogue of late-style characteristics consist of half terminology, half metaphor (Hinrichsen 226), and, surprisingly, these tropes reveal a conventional biographical image of the creative artist. Just after establishing that subjectivity “takes leave of the works themselves” (“Late Style” 566), Adorno writes:

Touched by death, the hand of the master sets free the masses of material that he used to form; its tears and fissures, witnesses to the finite powerlessness of the I confronted with being, are its final work. […] No longer does he gather the landscape, deserted now, and alienatedalienation, into an image. He lights it with rays from the fire that is ignited by subjectivity […] Objective is the fractured landscape, subjective the light in which – alone – it glows into life. He does not bring about a harmonious synthesis. As the power of dissociation, he tears them apart in time, in order, perhaps, to preserve them for the eternal. (566–567)

Despite Adorno’s claim that he is merely interested in the formal analysis of music, the image of the artist in the above quote has a strong physical presence (“the hand of the master”) as well as creative strength (“he tears them apart”) and might (“power”). His biographical presence is further shown in the intentionauthorial intention with which he composes the works, namely in order “to preserve” both the “fractured landscape” and the “light” of subjectivitysubjectivity. The artist thus possesses agency.9 In addition, and as if this reference to intention were not enough of a heretic stance, Adorno also calls the characteristics of the late work “witnesses” to the subject (although the subject, the mentioned “I confronted with Being,” may be a reference to the human conditionhuman condition rather than to the individual artist). Finally, in the “hand of the master,” the artist’s agency is linked to geniusgenius, even more so in the German original, in which “die meisterliche Hand” (“Spätstil Beethovens” 17) encompasses the sense of ‘the skillful hand’ as well.

As Andrew Goldstone rightly states, some of these passages “cohabit awkwardly with Adorno’s formal rules in his norm of late style” (74). However, even though one can view these inconsistencies in Adorno’s theory as “the true content of Adorno’s ideal of impersonality,” which is the idea of a subjectivitysubjectivity “striving to erase itself” (74, italics added), the impressive visual tropes leave the reader with a distinct, formidable and lasting image of the late artist. Still, it is important to note that Adorno does not directly violate his concept of a non-biographical approach, nor does he betray his idea of autonomous artautonomous art and absolute music, since he argues that this image of the artist is provided in the form of the music itself. However, the essay’s “enigmatic tone” (Spitzer 58) and its “opaque, aphoristic and at times internally inconsistent brilliance” and fragmentarinessfragmentation (McMullan 14) may, at the very least, give rise to selective interpretations. As Susan SontagSontag, Susan argues in her essay “On Style,” when we speak about stylestyle, we refer to “the totality of a work of art,” and “[l]ike all discourse about totalities, talk of style must rely on metaphors. And metaphors mislead” (22). A little less pointedly, one could say that metaphors call for interpretation.

Most notable in interpreting Adorno’s work on Beethoven, especially in the field of Anglophone literary theory, are Edward Said’sSaid, Edward essays, which were posthumously published in the volume On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain. McMullan and Smiles call them “[t]he most prominent recent intervention in the field” (Introduction 5). 10 Indeed, Said perceives the artist figure in Adorno quite clearly, and he does not hesitate to refer back to Adorno himself in a biographical approach of his own, stating that “the figure of the aging, deaf, and isolated composer [i.e. Beethoven]” was fully “convincing as a cultural symbol to Adorno” (8). Here, Said readily jumps from Adorno’s formal analysis of the late music to the composer of flesh and blood. Since Said’s volume only came out in 2006, one can hardly claim that he influenced the artist image of the works discussed in this study, some of which were written earlier. Nonetheless, Said’s take may be seen as an example of how easily one can move from Adorno’s form-focused late-style theory to an artist-centered biographical readingbiographical approach of late works.

There is a further, almost curious way in which Adorno’s late artist type was cemented: through the collaboration with his friend, the author Thomas MannMann, Thomas. Their combined philosophicalphilosophy and literary efforts resulted in a dramatic novelistic portrait of Beethoven in Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus. The “frightful story […] of the sacred trials of […] the person of the afflicted artist” (Mann, Doctor Faustus 57) fictionalizes Beethoven’s composition of the Missa Solemnis: struggling with the fugue in the “Credo” (Beethoven was believed to be unable to write a fugue), old Beethoven forgets to have dinner until after midnight and then furiously drives his maidservants out of the house because they have meanwhile fallen asleep, and the food has dried up on the stove.11 The story continues in a manner that is both hilariously funny and deeply moving:

[Beethoven] worked in his room on the Credo, the Credo with the fugue – the young ones [i.e. two visitors] heard him through the closed door. The deaf man sang, he yelled and stamped above the Credo – it was so moving and terrifying that the blood froze in their veins as they listened. But as in their great concern they were about to retreat, the door was jerked open and Beethoven stood there – in what guise? The very most frightful! With clothing disheveled, his features so distorted as to strike terror to the beholders; the eyes dazed, absent, listening, all at once; he had stared at them, they got the impression that he had come out of a life-and-death struggle with all the opposing hosts of counterpoint. He had stammered something unintelligible and then burst out complaining at the fine kind of housekeeping he had, and how everybody had run away and left him to starve. […] Only three years later was the Mass finished. (58)

This fictional depiction of the late composer echoes several aspects of Adorno’s “Late Style in Beethoven,” especially when considering Adorno’s idea of non-late art as formal conventionconvention. Beethoven’s wild fury, his withdrawal to his room, and his disregard for social hours in Mann’s novel resemble the “irascible gesture with which [subjectivity] takes leave” of the work of art, as a result of which the conventions are “left to stand” (Adorno, “Late Style” 566) – the maidservants and visitors of the Beethoven household quite literally being ‘left to stand’ waiting, perplexed at the master’s behavior. Further, Adorno’s idea of late style “cast[ing] off the appearance of art” (566) is embodied in Beethoven’s disheveled clothing and his socially unacceptable appearance. In this way, the composer himself comes to stand for the late work, whereas his surroundings represent the conventions of non-late art. The passage thus conflates the ageing artist and his late work.

This preliminary conclusion, however, is complicated once we take a closer look at Mann’s language. Probably the most fascinating fact about this passage from Doctor Faustus is that it contains a compressed version of Adorno’s essay in one single phrase: that Beethoven seems to have “come out of a life-and-death struggle with all the opposing hosts of counterpoint” (Mann, Doctor Faustus 58). In this statement, the order of the noun phrases, “life-and-death struggle” / “opposing hosts” / “counterpoint,” substantially influences the reader’s perception. In a strictly sequential reading and understanding, the “life-and-death struggle” is first perceived literally as pointing to Beethoven’s approaching death, evoking an ageing or ill man who is trying to resist his demise. As the “opposing hosts” are added, the old man’s struggle is flavored with religious meaning, especially when considering the intertextualityintertextuality signaled by the novel’s title: in the Dr. Faustus legend, the dying genius has to confront the devilish force that contributed to his success in return for his soul. This chain of meaning suddenly collapses – not without comic relief, after such grave considerations – when the word “counterpoint” completes the picture: the struggle now turns into an artistic rather than a physical or spiritual one, in which the ageing composer attempts to master the musical conventions and rules. A historicalhistory component is added by the fact that counterpoint represents the classical tradition par excellence, which Beethoven is here struggling with. Hence, he becomes the epitome of a new artistic movement.

This process of reading and understanding Mann’s phrase reflects Adorno’s didactic aim towards his own readers, and the analyzed phrase thus reveals an entire philosophyphilosophy of musicmusic. Just like in Mann’s passage, Adorno’s readers in “Late Style in Beethoven” are guided from a (supposedly wrong) biographical understandingbiographical approach of late style towards the (supposedly correct) formal, abstract notion of lateness. In the former, the artist’s struggle with death is real, whereas, in the latter, the deathly struggle is an allegory for a historical development. In this sense, the reference to “counterpoint” represents quite literally a counter-point: it contains the structured sense of harmony of the classical period, which the late Beethoven supposedly strives against. Just as Mann connects the musical figure of counterpoint with the devilish “opposing hosts,” moreover, late style’s struggle against these forces is also assigned a notion of heavenly truthtruth. This recalls the passage where Adorno states that the subjectivitysubjectivity of the late artist “in the name of death, disappears from the work of art into truth” (“Late Style” 566). The English translation takes some interpretive license here. The original German version reads: “[Die Subjektivität], sterblich und im Namen des Todes, verschwindet in Wahrheit aus dem Kunstwerk” (Adorno, “Beethovens Spätstil” 17). Its last part could thus also be translated as subjectivity “truly” disappearing from the work of art (rather than disappearing “into truth”).12 The difference in meaning becomes apparent when Beethoven’s struggle with the “opposing hosts of counterpoint” is considered (Mann, Doctor Faustus 58): in line with Adorno’s original German essay, the “life-and-death struggle” (Mann, Doctor Faustus 58) of the late artist should not be aimed, as one could wrongly gather from Doctor Faustus, at mastering counterpoint, which would result in the inscription of the composer’s subjectivity into the conventional classical tradition. Rather, it is a struggle against being mastered by the tradition of counterpoint; that is, the struggle is aimed at making the sense-gathering subjectivity truly disappear from such art, thus leaving it fractured and broken. In this sense, the “landscape” of the classical tradition in music, represented by counterpoint, is left “deserted now, and alienated” (Adorno, “Late Style” 567), an image that extends to modernitymodernity in general.

When reading Mann’s passage alongside Adorno’s “Late Style” essay, what stands out clearly is that Adorno’s late-style project was in fact a way to legitimize his prioritization of a type of art that is enigmatic, fractured, and contradictory,13 and Adorno extended his focus to the artistic attitude attached to it. Obviously, the musical avant-gardeavant-garde of modernism with Alban BergBerg, Alban and Arnold SchoenbergSchoenberg, Arnold would provide such art, and it is equally obvious that Adorno was elitist in his assumption that no easily understood musical piece was truly artistic.14 Keeping this in mind, and trying to understand the intrusive appearance of the late artist in Adorno’s professedly non-biographic approach, one will find an explanation in Said’sSaid, Edward comments:

I think it is right […] 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. To be late meant therefore to be late for (and refuse) many of the rewards offered up by being comfortable inside society, not the least of which was to be read and understood easily by a large group of people. (21–22)

According to Said, Adorno thus used the late Beethoven to justify his own difficult, non-compliant philosophicalphilosophy attitude: by way of his admiration of the ageing composer, he himself turned into a ‘late artist’ though he was still young.15 In this context, one of Ben Hutchinson’sHutchinson, Ben comments is illuminating, although it is made in a slightly different context: he writes that Adorno “wants to preserve the particularity of Spätstil [i.e. late stylelate style] […] from its creeping association with Altersstil [i.e. old-age styleold-age style]” (Lateness 258). In order to make his late-style theory compatible with his own, ‘young’ lateness, he must rid late works of “the proximity of deathdeath that is traditionally ascribed to [them] – and that is generally held to lend them their pathos” (Lateness 258–259).

The way in which Adorno fashioned his writerly stance after what he believed to be Beethoven’s own attitude has remained a model for subsequent authors and artists who strive for the enticing characteristics that the late artist figure encompasses: eccentricity, agency, liberty and fame. More than the theoretical essence of Adorno’s famous 1937 essay, it was the vivid imagery of its language that encouraged this trend. Moreover, Thomas Mann’sMann, Thomas novel played an important role. As Hinrichsen explains, it was the publication of Doctor Faustus in 1947 that caused the reprinting of “Late Style in Beethoven” and made Adorno’s essay popular again (226). It thus seems plausible that readers who were familiar with Doctor Faustus would perceive Adorno’s references to the late artist in “Late Style” with even more clarity and thus favor an artist-centered reading over one that considered merely the formal aspects of Beethoven’s late work. The contemporary late artist had been born.