The Production of Lateness. Rahel Rivera Godoy-Benesch
and artistic expression.
Thus, in this study, ‘late style’late style refers to characteristics in an author’s work that are recognizably caused by the author’s awareness of old age, particularly of its physical factors. The term ‘style’style is thus used in a broader sense and not restricted to stylisticsstylistics only.7 A ‘late work’ is an artistic product, the composition of which is driven by the author’s desire to leave an impression as an ageing artist, which is explicitly or implicitly revealed in the work itself, either through its content or its form.8 A third term, ‘lateness,’lateness will be employed to denote the authors’ concern for their late work’s receptionreception and their awareness of late-style theories, an authorial stance that must be inferred from the elements of the text itself and from its comparison with earlier works.9 These definitions restrict late style to something explicitly or implicitly referred to in the late work itself. Late style is thus revealed in a metafictionalmetafiction manner; it is not just a sign of old age, but it makes a statement on its own nature and its status as a sign.
Writers thus actively use critical ideas of late style for their self-fashioning but they go beyond a simple adoption of these ideas.10 Specifically in narratives that portray fictional or semi-autobiographicalautobiography ageing artists in a self-reflexive manner, late-style theory is not just enacted, but developed. It is for this reason that such works were chosen for this study of late style. Firstly, through the portrayal of their aged-artist figures, they offer a theory of late creativity that can be studied in its own right. In the (semi-)fictional microcosm of the stories, the artist-protagonists’ lives are the points of departure for their creative products. Hence, these texts suggest a causal relationship between old age and creativity and propose a late-style theory. However, almost inevitably, the proposed theory extends to the authors themselves because the artist-protagonists are fashioned in an autobiographical or near-autobiographical manner. This may produce friction because life facts and other details refuse to match. This friction between the creative theory internal to the text and the signs of lateness the work itself carries must be examined.
However, at least in current Anglophone literary criticism, drawing such parallels between the protagonists’ and their authors’ lateness creates a certain unease because it seems to fall back on outdated concepts of biographical interpretationbiographical approach, from which it is only a small step to intentional fallacyauthorial intention (cf. Wimsatt and Beardsley). Yet, the separation between author and work, which has dominated most branches of literary criticism since the mid-twentieth century, can be challenged. Seán BurkeBurke, Seán outlines the critical landscape as follows:
For the best part of the twentieth century, criticism has been separated into two domains. On the one side, intrinsic and textualist readings are pursued with indifference to the author, on the other, biographical and source studies are undertaken as peripheral (sometimes populist, sometimes narrowly academic) exercises for those who are interested in narrative reconstructions of an author’s life or the empirical genealogy of his work. Work and life are maintained in a strange and supposedly impermeable opposition, particularly by textualist critics who proceed as though life somehow pollutes the work, as though the bad biographicist practices of the past have somehow erased the connection between bios and graphē, as though the possibility of work and life interpenetrating simply disappears on that account. (187–188, original italics)
According to Burke, textualist critics, by deciding to ignore the various connections between authors and their creative products, simplify matters rather too much. As a result, issues of creativecreativity production have not been explored sufficiently. Yet, against the backdrop of the current ‘return to biographybiographical approach,’ a development that was already set in motion with Roland BarthesBarthes, Roland’ The Preparation of the Novel and within which “the question of the author poses itself ever more urgently” (Burke 191), literary criticism could face the challenge to include the author in textual analysistextual analysis. Frédéric RegardRegard, Frédéric makes a plea for this, arguing that it “raise[s] crucial issues in the theory of interpretation, if only because the notion of the author’s concrete life as person, a living individual, cannot be totally eradicated from the literary text” (396). The literary works’ own encouragement to draw parallels between the protagonists and their authors could be a starting point for critics to work their way from a text to its writer. And what better material is there than narratives with protagonists that are, like their authors, acutely aware of the tenets of creative production – here in the form of late-style theory? Literary criticism could certainly benefit from theorizing the boundary between author and work more thoroughly, and late-style theory may uncover some notions of creativecreativity production that have remained veiled so far.
This boundary is subject to the concept of the late-style narrativelate-style narrative, which develops a theory of late style through the portrayal of an aged artist-protagonist and motivates the comparison between the protagonist’s and the author’s creative processes. The works assessed in this study are all late-style narratives, and there are many more that one could include: Philip Roth’sRoth, Philip Exit Ghost, Joseph HellerHeller, Joseph’s Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man, Paul Auster’sAuster, Paul Winter Journal, Hanif Kureishi’s The Last Word, Samuel R. Delany’sDelany, Samuel R. Dark Reflections, and several of J.M. Coetzee’sCoetzee, John Maxwell novels (for instance Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello), to name but a few. Unsurprisingly, the most straight-forward examples, listed above, are all written by male authors, for, traditionally, late style has been “an overwhelmingly male category” (Hutchinson, Afterword 238). Addressing the gendergender bias in late-style studies, McMullanMcMullan, Gordon states that “women have no place in the ranks of late stylists, just as they have no place (or at best a highly circumscribed place) in the larger concept – geniusgenius – of which late style is a sub-category” (17). Indeed, not only is there a noticeable gap in criticism about female late style, but female authors also seem more reluctant to write about issues of late-life creativity than their male colleagues. The few works that come to mind when looking for Anglophone late-style narratives written by women include Sena Jeter Naslund’sJeter Naslund, Sena The Fountain of St. James Court, Penelope Lively’sLively, Penelope Ammonites and Leaping Fish, as well as the works by Karen BlixenBlixen, Karen and Joan DidionDidion, Joan discussed in this study. Furthermore, there are traces of a late-style narrative in Alice Munro’sMunro, Alice most recent collection of short stories Too Much Happiness, and there are certainly further works that contain implicit references to the search for new forms of expression in old age.
Still, in comparison with the male type, female late-style narratives are scarce. This is no surprise: if one takes into account the hypothesis that ageing artists fashion their late works against the backdrop of late-style theories, and that these theories are mostly concerned with male artists, women writers do not see themselves reflected in these theoretical frameworks – nor may they feel the urge to reflect on late-style theories to the same extent as male writers. However, as more scholarly work on female late stylegender is produced (see, for example, the collection of essays Literary Creativity and the Older Woman Writer), more female late-style narratives might emerge, too. The present study, with two thirds of its analyzed texts being written by women, shall thus also contribute to a growing corpus of late-style theory that – besides being wary of ageist methodology (cf. Introduction) – aims at a more balanced gendered discourse.
2.2 Universalistuniversal late style and Individualist Approaches
There is a strange paradox to the idea of late style, which has resulted in a persistent divide within the community of late-style scholars. It resides in the incompatibility of two of late style’s tenets: on the one hand, there is the belief that late style is a universal phenomenon. On the other, the late artist is considered a geniusgenius and therefore marked by singularity. However, one can hardly insist on an artist’s uniqueness, justifying his or her greatness with the presumed existence of his or her distinctive late period, and simultaneously affirm that late style just ‘happens’ in most artists’ work in much the same way. In the greater part of late-style criticism, this paradox causes no major inconvenience