Читать книгу The Production of Lateness - Rahel Rivera Godoy-Benesch - Страница 15

Among the authors who have fashioned themselves as late artists are, most prominently, ageing postmodernistpostmodernism writers: those who have always worked within the metafictionalmetafiction terrain, exploring and pushing the boundaries of literature. Mark CurrieCurrie, Mark describes metafiction as “a kind of writing which places itself on the border between fiction and criticism, and which takes that border as its subject” (Introduction 2). Hence, metafictional writers have evidently not remained oblivious to the scholarly discussion on late style. In Late Style and Its Discontents, McMullanMcMullan, Gordon and SmilesSmiles, Sam declare that their collection of essays is “designed as a provocation, as encouragement to art historiansart history, literary critics, and musicologists alike to reflect on received ideas about creativity at the end of life” (Introduction 2). Looking at the current literary landscape, one can confidently state that postmodernpostmodernism authors have been addressing precisely this challenge for some decades now. They have not only been enacting aspects of late style and thus provided critics with new material to analyze, but also reflected on the late-style debate, pushing it further. Patricia WaughWaugh, Patricia calls metafictional writers the “contemporary avant-gardeavant-garde” (10), and Sandro ZanettiZanetti, Sandro titles his extensive late-style study Avantgardismus der Greise (“avant-gardism of the aged”), hinting that late art displays just such an avant-garde spirit. In doing so, late works have created a site of discourse that runs parallel to the scholarly late-style debate. Considering such literary late-style treatments in conjunction with theoretical texts should therefore produce intriguing results. In the same way as Thomas Mann’sMann, Thomas passage from Doctor Faustus communicates with Theodor W. Adorno’sAdorno, Theodor W. essay “Late Style in Beethoven,” one could argue, fictional and theoretical contemporary treatments of late style interact in a mutually prolific manner.1 Although Mann’s text was, strictly speaking, fashioned after Adorno’s essay – in both its temporal and conceptual sense – its literary means act independently, producing meanings of their own. These meanings, when projected back onto the theoretical source text by Adorno, further illuminate the theoretical content of Adorno’s essay. In a similar manner, literary works that circle around late style may enlighten the scholarly late-style debate, from which they originally arose.

This is not the only manner, however, in which contemporary works that exhibit late style may be approached. McMullanMcMullan, Gordon and SmilesSmiles, Sam have raised the question as to how one can counteract the “discontents” of the late-style debate, assess late style in a more satisfactory manner and thus “find new, more reflexive, more critically and theoretically nuanced and rigorous ways to account for the creative possibilities associated with the end of the artistic life” (Introduction 12). This question will be addressed and three different ways will be proposed in which the reading of late-style narrativeslate-style narrative can be made productive for the late-style debate without the need to resort to simplifying binary oppositions or to lapse into otherwise problematic universalistuniversal late style and individualist approaches.

At this stage, it must be emphasized that contemporary authors use late style in a complex manner and employ different levels of literary communicationcommunication. Their texts do not exhibit Adorno’s late-style characteristics such as the fragmentariness of the artwork and the dissociation between subjectivitysubjectivity and conventionconvention. Rather, they are influenced by the image of the late artist and guided by the belief that lateness is an indicator of artistic accomplishment. However, even if we notice such similarities between the individual works, this cannot – and should not – result in a universalist approach, since the way in which authors implement late style is highly individualized. What McMullanMcMullan, Gordon and SmilesSmiles, Sam suggest is all too true: “Late style […] is a process still made more complex as creative artists become more and more versed in ideas of lateness” (Introduction 6). It would thus be disproportionate (and all too reductive) to simply read Adorno’sAdorno, Theodor W. characteristics into a contemporary late work.2 However, late style cannot be considered simply an invention of the critics either, since the late-style narrative explicitly refers to lateness and thus includes late-style concepts in the literary text. In view of these implications, late style will here be approached as a code of production, that is, a means of communication that is consciously and purposefully used by the authorial figure. Yet, late style is also a code of production with regard to the reading process; it is thus an essential meaning-making tool within the text. This presupposes a common ground of understanding between the authors and their audience, which may be one of the core reasons why authors resort to the late-style narrativelate-style narrative. With its semi-biographical artist-protagonists, its mise-en-abîmemise-en-abîme, and its metafictionalmetafiction mode, it is a particularly convenient medium: it can deliver its own theory alongside its narrative content, providing its readers with the necessary theoretical basis.

In the late-style narrative, late style firstly becomes a personal code of production in the way authors fashion their creative identity. HutcheonHutcheon, Linda and HutcheonHutcheon, Michael, even though they generally view late style as a concept imposed upon the text by the critic, acknowledge in a footnote that there may also be “the artist’s own view of his or her […] self-construction as a ‘late-artist’” (“Historicizing” 54, original italics). This self-fashioning may have a variety of biographical reasons, which obviously cannot be determined via deduction, using the creative product as a kind of symptom. A comparison with earlier, non-late texts of the same author, in turn, promises valuable insights. As ZanettiZanetti, Sandro argues, late works can only be considered late in reference to what has been there earlier (9). Moreover, the metatextual comments in the late work itself provide some additional clues. What stylistic adjustments were performed? How does the late work refer back to the author’s earlier style, and how are the stylistic changes justified? These are questions that can be pursued. Moreover, the historicalhistory development of the late-style debate provides its own clues. Not only has AdornoAdorno, Theodor W. supplied us with a model that praises lateness, but earlier approaches also view late style as the highest possible achievement, granted only to truly great artists. As a consequence, the opposite is also evoked and it becomes a daunting prospect: without a late style, an author’s previous work is threatened to be devalueddevaluation (cf. Urbanek 220), and the peak-and-decline modelpeak-and-decline model of creative production, which suggests that “artistic creation declines with advancing age” (Cohen-Shalev, “Old Age Style” 22), is confirmed.3 This was not always the case, as Painter states:

Before the romanticromanticism period, when the concept of late style gained a foothold in aesthetics, the greatest praise one could bestow on an older artist’s output was to report no change – which is to say, no declinedecline – in quality from earlier works. (2, original italics)

Already in the early 19^th century, however, the peak-and-decline model was firmly established. The fact that the ageing BeethovenBeethoven, Ludwig van was believed to be unable to compose a fugue (as taken up in Mann’sMann, Thomas Doctor Faustus) can be seen as an example. Two centuries later, contemporary ageing authors feel compelled to develop a late style of their own, and the fear of creative failure in old age is deeply ingrained in their works.

If a late style is established, then, the author affirms his or her agency, although the attempt itself may be even more valuable than its success. HutchinsonHutchinson, Ben notes a paradox in such a willful production of late style:

[T]he achievementachievement of late style implies a hermeneutic circle: the artist must know what he – it is an overwhelmingly male category – is setting out to achieve, but by definition he cannot know until he achieves it, else he is not yet ‘late.’ (Afterword 238)

This is an interesting proposition. Hutchinson’s view, however, depends on an understanding of late style as superiority in artistic quality, and, moreover, it is produced as a response to critics who believe late style to be a universaluniversal late style, natural phenomenon. Here, the distinction between latenesslateness and late stylelate style becomes important: whereas the former refers to the artist’s attitude, to his/her setting out to achieve a late style, the latter is its imprint upon the artistic product. When this distinction is made, the idea of late style is purged of the clinging notion of high quality and achievement. In an author-centered approach, lateness itself – the will and decision to attempt a stylistic change – is valued. The ageing American writer Nicholas DelbancoDelbanco, Nicholas, in his very own late-style intervention titled The Art of Old Age, confirms that “to the aging writer, painter, or musician the process can signify more than the result; it no longer seems as important that the work be sold” (16). Lateness as an authorial attitude, therefore, is an important and useful concept to explore the authorial self-fashioning that late style allows for. Hence, as a personal code of production, the concept of late style gains a plurality of meanings that can hardly be appreciated in a classical approach to art as autonomousautonomous art.

A second and distinct way of assessing late-style narratives is by considering them as self-referential systems and by aiming to detect their work-internal logic. In such an approach, the code of production is considered self-referential in that the work provides its own theory in whose light late style should be viewed. Narratives that encourage such an approach are usually overtly and explicitly metafictionalmetafiction. They are characterized by a propagated self-sufficiency, and their most important feature is mise-en-abîmemise-en-abîme: the artist-protagonist is portrayed as setting out to fashion his/her identityidentity as a late artist much in the same way as the real author does by writing the fictional or semi-biographical late-style narrative. Rather than just duplicating the protagonist’s struggle with late style and projecting it onto the real author,4 however, one should consider this mise-en-abîme a more complex site of meaning-making. Protagonists may be ironic figures, as happens in John Barth’sBarth, John Development and, to a certain extent, also in Karen Blixen’sBlixen, Karen “Echoes,” which creates distance between author and character. Furthermore, if the characters are not fully autobiographicalautobiography, every little difference to their authors carries meaning. A further complication arises with these narratives’ combined diegetic-mimeticmimesis method, that is, the way in which they simultaneously tell and enact the principles of late style. This entails a systemic curiosity: in a first, straightforward approach, we may consider the protagonist to be enacting lateness and late style, whereas the author tells about it. However, once we take the real author’s lateness into account, we turn the tables. Now, the protagonist’s story tells us about late style, and the narrative as a whole enacts the late style of its author. Hence, the self-referentiality works both ways, which provides this approach with considerable complexity and productivity.

By pretending to be self-sufficient, the late-style narrative also attempts to resist a traditional assessment via mainstream late-style discourse. Since the narrative provides its own theory, it suggests that no other theoretical input is required (or appropriate, for that matter). This is a mere demonstration of power. The author assumes a very convenient position from where he/she can controlcontrol the meaning and thus also the reception of his/her work (although the text may lend itself to deconstructiondeconstruction). In interplay with the first approach, i.e. the author’s self-fashioning as a late artist, one must ask what such a clutching at interpretive authority entails. Is it a confirmation of the author’s late style’s individuality, suggesting that no previous theory would be able to do it justice? Or, rather, is it motivated again by the concern that the work could be received unfavorably, that is, the fear of artistic failure? According to HutcheonHutcheon, Linda and HutcheonHutcheon, Michael, such apprehension would be justified: “Throughout historyhistory […] there is a negative as well as positive discourse of lateness. Often, when a late work appears, responsesreception are genuinely divided between approval and dismissal” (“Historicizing” 52). Hence, self-reflexivity and self-sufficiency in late-style narratives arguably are an attempt to make sure that the work will not be dismissed. Most importantly, however, if we consider late-style narratives as self-referential works rather than filtering them through existing late-style theories, we are encouraged to appreciate their spirit of novelty and to read them with fresh eyes.

Whenever late-style narratives refuse to be brought into contact with theory, they open themselves up to a different system of intertextual assessment, which is, thirdly, the genericgenre code of production. Narrative portrayals of ageing artists display remarkable similarities. In the course of doing research for my study Kompass zur Altersbelletristik der Gegenwart, I assessed a corpus of approximately one thousand German, English, French and Italian novels and short stories that deal with old age from a variety of perspectives.5 I found that in roughly one tenth of them, the authors assign a prominent role to old-age art and creativitycreativity (Pro Senectute Schweiz). In many cases, a late-style narrative with an artist-protagonist is used to explore these issues, and, after a while, I could predict such stories’ structures and outcomes with considerable accuracy. I had begun to approach them comparatively and recognized their shared generic code of production. According to Franco MorettiMoretti, Franco, literature works with “formal patterns […] in order to master historicalhistory reality, and to reshape its materials in the chosen ideological key” (xiii). If one disregards generic form, Moretti claims, the complexity of this process is lost (xiii). Hence, a generic reading of late-style narratives can reveal the processes through which ageing authors come to terms with two kinds of historical reality: their own ageing and the existing late-style debate. Moreover, Jonathan CullerCuller, Jonathan states:

The function of genre conventions is essentially to establish a contract between writer and reader, so as to make certain relevant expectations operative, and thus to permit both compliance with and deviation from accepted modes of intelligibility. (147)

It is thus by comparison with a projected ideal genre (which may not be represented in its entirety in any individual work) as well as in distinction to other, related genres that late-style narratives are endowed with meaning.

In order to outline the principles that underlie late-style narratives, a related aspect – gendergender – must be addressed. As noted by various scholars, female artists have largely been excluded from concepts of late style (e.g. Hutchinson, Afterword 238; McMullan and Smiles, Introduction 4). “This is not to say,” McMullanMcMullan, Gordon writes, that “women artists, writers and composers have not produced remarkable work late in life, but rather that critics have effectively never attributed the cachet of late style to that work” (18).6 For this reason, late-style theories probably have a different effect on women’s literary production, the exact nature of which is still to be explored. In terms of genregenre markers, one can observe that men’s late-style narratives fall heavily back on the artist novel par excellence, the KünstlerromanKünstlerroman, to which James JoyceJoyce, James had given “definitive treatment” (Beebe 260) with his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This archetype of the male young artist is so present, in writers’ and readers’ minds alike, that it exerts a considerable effect on the late-style narrative, even though its subject is youthyouth rather than old age. As Kathleen WoodwardWoodward, Kathleen states in Aging and Its Discontents, Western distinctions of age “ultimately and precipitously devolve into a single binary – into youth and old age. […]. Youth, represented by the youthful body, is good; old age, represented by the aging body, is bad” (6–7). The analysis of The Development by John BarthBarth, John (Chapter 3) will examine this binary as well as the ageing artists’ attempt to break free from an artistic creativity that depends on youth. The Künstlerroman also has an effect on women’s late writing, but in a different way. What Abel, Hirsch and Langland state about the BildungsromanBildungsroman genre is certainly also true here: “The sex of the protagonist modifies every aspect” (Introduction 5). In Chapter 4 on Karen Blixen’sBlixen, Karen narratives “The Dreamers” and “Echoes,” it will be explored how male and female Künstlerroman traditions – as well as the gendered late-style debate – are taken up by the female ageing author.

The genericgenre approach to late-style narratives raises a number of interesting questions, some of which are related to gendergender. Considering the different patterns in male and female late-style narratives, one must ask: Is art gendered? Is ageing gendered? Is stylestyle – and specifically late style – gendered? And what about latenesslateness as an attitude or an authorial stance behind the work? Yet, within the generic code of production, one must keep in mind what is also valid for the second, self-reflexive code of production: late-style theories have no direct bearing on the assessment of the text. Rather, meaning is produced by comparison with similar literary works. This is owed to the fact that these works, rather than being written in direct response to the scholarly late-style discourse, have begun to imitate each other. They thus become self-referential in the sense of referring to a literary late-style tradition, shaking off the seemingly outdated, traditional ideas of late-style philosophy.

Thus, in the contemporary literary world, an emancipation from late-art criticism and theory is taking place. Ageing authors express that they are the experts of late art – not the critics and the philosophersphilosophy. In the following three chapters, it is therefore the individual authors’ own view of late style that shall be of concern. Returning to the questions which introduce this chapter – the Hutcheons’ provocative question as to why we should “bother” to theorize late style and elderly artists (“Historicizing” 58) – one can say that late style becomes a concern again once the written work is approached as the expression and communicationcommunication of an authorial figure. This concern should be addressed in literary criticism as well as in ageing studies in general. For the former, disregarding late style would be as short-sighted as disregarding the peculiarities of youthyouth in the KünstlerromanKünstlerroman. Within the field of ageing studies, its pertinence is even higher, and the Hutcheons’ claim that late-style theory is ageistageism (cf. “Late Style(s)”) will be challenged. If critics wish to affirm the importance of creativitycreativity in a human life and determine its role for those who are near the end of it, late-style studies are the opposite of ageist. They emphasize the relevance of old-age art and support its endeavor to claim a space of its own.