The rage of the old
Great artists are said to mellow as they face the prospect of death. Not so, argued Edward Said, who died last year, in this the final article of a luminous career
Sunday August 1, 2004
The Observer
Both in art and in our general ideas about the passage of human life there is assumed to be a general abiding timeliness by which I mean that what is appropriate to early life is not appropriate for later stages, and vice versa. We assume that the essential health of a human life has a great deal to do with its correspondence to its time and is therefore defined by its appropriateness or timeliness. Comedy, for instance, seeks its material in untimely behaviour, an old man falling in love with a young woman as in Molière and Chaucer, a philosopher acting like a child, a well person feigning illness. But it is also comedy as a form that brings about the restoration of timeliness - the marriage of young lovers, for instance.
Yet what of the last or late period of life, the decay of the body, the onset of ill health (which, in a younger person, brings on the possibility of an untimely end)? These issues, which interest me for obvious personal reasons, have led me to look at the way in which the work of some artists acquires a new idiom towards the end of their lives - what I've come to think of as a late style. The accepted notion is that age confers a spirit of reconciliation and serenity on late works, often expressed in terms of a miraculous transfiguration of reality. In late plays, such as The Tempest or The Winter's Tale , Shakespeare returns to the forms of romance and parable; similarly, in Sophocles's Oedipus at Colonus the aged hero is portrayed as having finally attained a remarkable holiness and sense of resolution. Or there is the well-known case of Verdi, who in his final years produced Othello and Falstaff, works that exude a renewed, almost youthful creativity and power.
Each of us can supply evidence of how it is that late works crown a lifetime of aesthetic endeavour. Rembrandt and Matisse, Bach and Wagner. But what of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty and contradiction? What if age and ill health don't produce serenity at all? This is the case with Ibsen, whose final works, especially When We Dead Awaken, tear apart the artist's career and re-open questions that a late period is supposed to have resolved. Far from resolution, however, Ibsen's last plays suggest an angry and disturbed artist for whom the medium of drama is an occasion to stir up more anxiety, tamper irrevocably with the possibility of closure, leave the audience more perplexed and unsettled than before. It is this second type of lateness as a factor of style that I find deeply interesting: a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness, a going against.
Philosopher and social critic Theodor Adorno uses the phrase 'late style' in his posthumously published book on Beethoven (1993). For Adorno, Beethoven's last works - which include the last five piano sonatas, the Ninth Symphony and the Missa Solemnis - constitute an event in the history of modern culture: a moment when an artist who is fully in command of his medium nevertheless abandons communication with the social order of which he is a part and achieves a contradictory, alienated relationship with it. His late works are a form of exile from his milieu.
It is the episodic character of Beethoven's late work, its apparent carelessness about its own continuity, that Adorno finds so gripping. He speaks of the late work as 'process, but not as development', as a 'catching fire between extremes which no longer allow for any secure middle ground or harmony of spontaneity'. When he was a young composer, Beethoven's work had been vigorous and organically whole, whereas it has now become more wayward and eccentric; as an older man facing death, Beethoven realises that his work proclaims that 'no synthesis is conceivable'. Beethoven's late works, therefore, communicate a tragic sense in spite of their irascibility.
There is an insistence in late style not on mere ageing, but on an increasing sense of apartness and exile and anachronism. It is anachronism that characterises the work of Adorno's Italian contemporary, Lampedusa, although Lampedusa's single great work, The Leopard, is accessible to audiences who stay away from Adorno. Lampedusa is nonetheless a late-style practitioner whose interest for the modern reader is, I think, quite special.
The Sicilian aristocrat Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896-1957) did not begin work on The Leopard until late in his life. He was fearful perhaps of a bad reception on the mainland, and also unwilling to compete with other writers. His English biographer, David Gilmour, suspects that he was moved to write by his sense that as an 'ultimate descendant of an ancient noble line, whose economic and physical extinction culminated in himself', he would also be the last member of his family to have 'vital memories', or be capable of evoking a 'unique Sicilian world' before it disappeared. He was interested in (and depressed by) the process of decadence, one sign of which was the loss of a house in Santa Margherita (Donnafugata in the novel) and of his family's palace in Palermo. The Leopard was turned down by many publishers before becoming an almost instant bestseller in November 1958, a year after its author's death. (Visconti's film adaptation was made in 1963.)
The novel is the story of the Sicilian Prince of Salina, Don Fabrizio, the author's great-uncle, a giant of a man whose estates are crumbling and who feels the approach of death. The story unfolds during Garibaldi's campaign to unify Italy, a period that marks the final decline of the monarchical aristocratic order, of which the prince is the last and noblest representative. The sense of all-pervading mortality suggests the very late passages of Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, in particular Marcel's return to a now decayed Paris after the First World War, although unlike Proust, Lampedusa provides no theory of redemptive art at the end. In his final illness and death, the prince lies in a shabby Palermo hotel.
The prince stands for a pessimism of the intelligence and the will. The paradox is that these late-style negations are conveyed in a thoroughly readable form: Lampedusa is no Adorno or Beethoven whose late styles actually undermine the reader's pleasure, actively eluding any attempt at easy understanding.
Lampedusa's poetic counterpart is the Greek Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy, none of whose poetry was published until after his death in 1933. His poems are an attempt to clarify and dramatise a moment or incident from the past, either a personal past or that of the wider Hellenic world.
One of Cavafy's greatest achievements is to render the extremes of lateness, physical crisis and exile in forms and situations and above all in a style of remarkable inventiveness and lapidary calm. In one of his finest late poems, 'Myris: Alexandria, AD 340', the speaker comes to the funeral of his friend Myris only to discover that his charming former drinking companion was Christian, and in death is being recreated as an object of elaborate church ceremony. He suddenly fears that he had been deceived by his passion for Myris.
I rushed out of their horrible house
rushed away before my memory of Myris
could be captured, could be perverted by
their Christianity
This is the prerogative of late style: it has the power exactly to render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradiction between them. What holds them in tension, as equal forces straining in opposite directions, is the artist's mature subjectivity, stripped of hubris and pomposity, unashamed either of its fallibility or of the modest assurance it has gained as a result of age and exile.
· This is an edited version of an article that will appear in the next issue of London Review of Books (www.lrb.co.uk)
The London Review of Books Edward Said Memorial Concert, with Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, takes place at the Barbican Centre on Wednesday, 4 August, at 7.30pm. The orchestra was formed by Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said in Weimar in 1999, and brings together young musicians from Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon to perform with some of the world's finest orchestral musicians. Tickets are available from the Barbican box office on 020 7638 8891. ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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