The Production of Lateness. Rahel Rivera Godoy-Benesch
between life and art. As a consequence, the late work itself, by way of referencing its author and its sibling texts, defies the idea of autonomousautonomous art art. It is no longer protected by a frameframe that traditionally “distinguishes art from non-art, provides it with the appearance of autonomy” and marks the boundary between art and life as intransitable (Cronk par. 1).1 The narrative itself thus motivates a reading that should include the author, a biographical readingbiographical approach. To read biographically, however, does not mean to naïvely project the artist’s life circumstances onto the work, nor does it suggest that one should embrace the idea of a naturally produced late style. Rather, it means taking into account the fact that “writing, art, and musical composition in later life” are determined by a system of “socialsocial discourse and cultural complexities” (Amigoni and McMullan 378). In other words, since elderly artists do not create artistic products in a social, cultural, and biographical vacuum, we can assume that their own old age, as well as the cultural stereotypesstereotype about old age, influence their work. Late-style narratives foreground the social and scholarly discourses about ageing and creativity within which the texts operate and within which their authors’ creative practice has taken place. Readers are therefore encouraged to include these discourses in their interpretation of the texts.
Going a step further in exploring the boundary between author and text, one may approach late-style narratives as social acts of communicationcommunication. As Umberto EcoEco, Umberto states in his very own late work, ironically titled Confessions of a Young Novelist, the idea of authors not writing for their audience is a myth:
I do not belong to that gang of bad writers who say that they write only for themselves. The only things that writers write for themselves are shopping lists, which help them to remember what to buy, and then can be thrown away. All the rest, including laundry lists, are messages addressed to somebody else. They are not monologues; they are dialogues. (29)
Yet, analyzing literary works as messages from their authors seems to violate the accepted methods of literary criticism. The formalistformalism and structuraliststructuralism movements around the middle of the twentieth century were largely successful in excluding the author from the study of literature, which has been decisive in counteracting intentionalismauthorial intention and in establishing literary criticism as an empirical endeavor, modeled after the ideal of the ‘objective’ natural sciences. WimsattWimsatt, William Kurtz and Beardsley’sBeardsley, Monroe 1946 essay “The Intentional Fallacy” is still one of the most important milestones of the Anglo-American formalist movement. The two critics’ argument that “the design and intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art” (468) was made in response to a then outdated idea of artistic quality in the sense of “classical ‘imitation’” (468), according to which a poem was successful if its author had achieved what he or she had intended (468–469). Hence, Wimsatt and Beardsley opposed a view that considered literature to be a craft dependent on the author’s skills, and the finalized work the product of an authorial plan. Clearly, literary criticism has moved beyond these ideas. With Roland BarthesBarthes, Roland’ 1967 essay “The Death of the Author,”death of the author at the very latest, it was made clear that the author had no say in the interpretation of his or her work: “writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing” (142). Denying the text’s possible social and communicative function, Barthes transfers the authority over the text’s meaning from the author to the reader (148). However, without the idea of an author as the originator of the work, it has also become almost impossible to explore questions of literary creativitycreativity.
The disregard of the authors and their intentions in the composition of the work can sometimes take almost absurd forms, as an example involving the elderly Philip RothRoth, Philip shows. The incident, which was later to be called the ‘Anatole Broyard controversy,’ began with several critics and reviewers suggesting that Roth had shaped Coleman Silk, the protagonist in his novel The Human Stain, after the literary editor Anatole Broyard, who, being of black origin, had passed as white early in his life, just as the fictional Silk had (cf. Kakutani; Moore). These claims made their way into the Wikipedia entry relating to The Human Stain (where they have since been partly adjusted). In the fall of 2012, Roth published “An Open Letter to Wikipedia” in The New Yorker, declaring that he did not know of Broyard’s racial background when writing the novel and that the character of Coleman Silk was actually inspired by a friend of his, Melvin Tumin. He further reported how he had “petitioned Wikipedia to delete the misstatement” but was reminded by the Wikipedia administrator that the author “was not a credible source” and that they “require[d] secondary sources” (Roth, “An Open Letter” par. 2). Roth’s open letter triggered further responses, among them a Facebook post by the late Anatole Broyard’s daughter, Bliss Broyard, who wrote: “I think it’s completely reasonable that Roth should be allowed to have the last word on who inspires his characters. But I don’t think it’s reasonable that Roth gets to dictate what conclusions other people draw about his characters” (Gupta). Her post was subsequently taken up in a web article by the Salon Media Group under the title: “Does Philip Roth Know What Inspired His Novel?” (Gupta). What these events show is that there are two different ways to ‘dictate conclusions.’ On the one hand, there is an author trying to assert his alleged right to the novel’s interpretation (Roth’s open letter is 10 pages long and delivers a number of interpretive imperatives), which is certainly problematic. On the other hand, however, there is Wikipedia, a powerful tool in building public knowledge, and other public media, which deem authors generally less credible than critics and do not even grant them an opinion with regard to their own creative processes.
Thus, we seem to have arrived at a point in literary criticism where authors have definitively lost jurisdiction over their works. However, in the discussion of late works, these rules, which go back to Wimsatt and Beardsley’s as well as Barthes’Barthes, Roland views, can be stretched somewhat. Barthes’ theory was developed for a very specific approach to literature. As he suggests, “a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself” (“The Death” 142). If we look at literature from this point of view – and Barthes certainly deems this the only valid point of view – “the voice loses its origin [and] the author enters into his own death” (142). Yet, when one considers an elderly author’s late work as making a statement of latenesslateness, it does “act […] directly on reality” (142), as it directs a message at the author’s audience. Such a work constitutes less “the very practice of the symbol itself” (142) than a gesture by its author to reveal him- or herself to the public. As SontagSontag, Susan asserts, “[a]rt is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world” (“On Style” 26, original italics).
For ageing studies, moreover, recognizing the communicative functioncommunication of late works is essential: if one wishes to counteract ageismageism and resist the stereotypestereotype of the peak-and-decline modelpeak-and-decline model in art criticism, one must acknowledge elderly authors’ artistic agencyagency. Thus, with this ‘resuscitation of the author,’ authorial intentionauthorial intention re-enters the debate – not to be used by critics in order to determine the literary work’s quality or success (Wimsatt and Beardsley have amply shown that this is vulnerable to fallacy), but as a genuine attempt on the part of the critic to understand the ageing author’s message. Frédéric RegardRegard, Frédéric, in “The Ethics of Biographical Readingbiographical approach,” argues that biographical texts in fact “engage […] the ethical stanceethics of the interpreter” (396, original italics). If one “shies away from the possibility that there might be something like a ‘truthtruth,’” this “bars the possibility of ethical interpretation” (396). The reader’s engagement with the work’s intended meaning, as it is inscribed in the text, is thus closely linked to ethical values, amongst them the respect and appreciation for the author’s personal agencyagency. In short, biographical reading means