Late Style and its Discontents: Essays in Art, Literature, and Music ed. by Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles (review)

This earnest volume is the belated issue of two conferences held almost a decade ago. Many of the contributors digest or supplement books they have written on their topics, sometimes recycling previously published material. (I found earlier publications of one essay, slightly revised, and sentences from another, and there may be others; this is not unusual but should have been acknowledged.) And all the essays sing the same tune about the diversity of late styles. In addition to citing themselves and one another, the other two walls off which the echoes bounce are named Theodor Adorno and Edward Said. All but one of the authors cite one or both, always stressing their limitations, with the final essay devoted to a careful study of Adorno. The redundancies make the collection less than the sum of its parts.

Taking Beethoven as his model, Adorno wrote a well-known essay about daring experimentation and convention-breaking in geniuses after they have reached the summit of mastery. The essay devoted to Adorno quotes a characteristic aphorism from his posthumous Aesthetic Theory expressing the negative dialectic that he pursued throughout his career: "Dissonance is the truth about harmony" (225). Said's modest posthumous collection, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain,¹ acknowledges varieties of lateness before opting to follow Adorno's lead.

The present collection demurs. "'Late style' is … a trope, a critical construct …, a genre" (36), according to an essay intriguingly reevaluating the American poet George Oppens's dementia. "Late style is, as many of these chapters argue, in part at least a cultural fiction" (71), says an essay on Darwin's affective relation to earthworms, the subject of his final book. An essay that contrasts D. H. Lawrence to Goethe and Thomas Mann almost persuasively demonstrates "the instability of lateness as a category" (132). I say almost because it presumes Olympian notions of these reference authors—calling Goethe "an opposite model to the eruptive genius of the late Beethoven as defined by Theodor Adorno" (133)—whereas in fact Adorno's Notes to Literature contains a great essay on the last scene of Faust and a surprisingly affectionate portrait of Mann, both of them affiliating their work with his accounts of late style. Rather confusingly, the essay on Picasso's problematic last works, which were initially dismissed as senile scrawls before being celebrated as bold experiments, says that they show how "it is well nigh impossible to define a 'late style,'" but also that they display "preoccupations typical of the elderly" (101), which sounds to me like a perfectly possible definition of late style. The essay on Monet's last work dismisses Adorno and Said as "reductive," indeed "obsolete and unproductive" in "generaliz[ing]" late style "into a symptom of old age" (218). This, of course, is not what Adorno did, notably in the longest essay in Notes to Literature, "Parataxis," on the "late-style" poetry that Hölderlin wrote in his early thirties. In fact, this essay's descriptions of Monet's "gloomy, almost aggressive, dissonant colours and shapes" (217), while overly impressionistic, constitute the volume's closest approximation to Adorno's stance. The book's "Afterword" appropriately concludes by acknowledging "all of the contributors' patient endeavours to debunk the universalizing myth of late style" (235).

Some of these endeavors are better than just "patient," others perhaps not. The least patient, on Jane Austen, reproaches preceding editors and commentators while aiming to demonstrate that some high-spirited verses she wrote on her deathbed and the incipient novel known as Sanditon "retained all the vigour and tough-mindedness of her earlier work" (157). The debunking is more respectful elsewhere, and always knowledgeable, apart from only spottily incorporating scholarship since the original conference dates. Essays on Ravel and on the German–British poet and translator Michael Hamburger are informative work surveys, the former (to my mind) more...