The Production of Lateness. Rahel Rivera Godoy-Benesch
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 19th 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