ON LATE STYLE Edward W. Said Edward W. Said was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He was the author of more than twenty books, including Orientalism, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Culture and Imperialism; Representations of the Intellectual; The End of the Peace Process; Power, Politics, and Culture; and Out of Place: A Memoir. His books have been published in thirty- six languages. He died in 2003. ALSO BY EDWARD W. SAID Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography Beginnings: Intention and Method Orientalism The Question of Palestine Covering Islam Literature and Society (editor) The World, the Text, and the Critic After the Last Sky (with Jean Mohr) Blaming the Victims (editor) Musical Elaborations Culture and Imperialism The Politics of Dispossession Representations of the Intellectual Peace and Its Discontents The Pen and the Sword Entre guerre et paix Henry James: Complete Stories, 1884-1891 (editor) Out of Place: A Memoir The End of the Peace Process The Edward Said Reader Reflections on Exile and Other Essays Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (with Daniel Barenboim) Humanism and Democratic Criticism From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map CONTENTS Foreword by Mariam C. Said Introduction by Michael Wood ONE Timeliness and Lateness TWO Return to the Eighteenth Century THREE Così fan tutte at the Limits FOUR On Jean Genet FIVE A Lingering Old Order SIX The Virtuoso as Intellectual SEVEN Glimpses of Late Style Notes FOREWORD Edward was in the process of writing this book when he passed away on Thursday morning, September 25, 2003. In late August we were in Europe: first in Seville, where Edward participated in the West Eastern Divan workshop, and then in Portugal visiting friends, when he fell ill. We returned to New York a few days later, and after three weeks of high fever he began to pull through. He felt well enough to resume work Friday morning, three days before his illness took over for the last time. He said to me as we were having breakfast that morning, “Today I will write the acknowledgments and preface to Humanism and Democratic Criticism (the last book he finished, which was about to come out). The introduction to From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map I’ll finish by Sunday. And next week I’ll concentrate on completing Late Style, which will be finished in December.” All this was not meant to be. However, Edward left us a tremendous amount of material on this book to allow us to finish it and produce posthumously a version of what he had in mind. My recollection is that this idea—writers’, musicians’, and other artists’ “late works,” “late style,” “Adorno and lateness,” etc.—became part of Edward’s conversation sometime at the end of the 1980s. He had begun to be interested in this phe- nomenon and was engrossed in reading about it. He discussed it with many friends and colleagues and began to include examples of late works in many of his articles on music and literature. He even wrote specific essays on the late works of some writers and composers. He also gave a series of lectures on “late style,” first at Columbia and then elsewhere, and in the early 1990s he taught a class on the topic. Finally he decided to write a book and had a contract in hand. This book would not have been possible without the help of several devoted people and friends. My family and I are more than indebted to them for their contribution toward this endeavor. Our thanks first and foremost go to Sandra Fahy, Edward’s assistant, whose help and dedication were crucial in assembling the material that went into this book. We are also grateful to Andrew Rubin, Edward’s student and former assistant, who kept detailed notes, was very resourceful, and directed us to various valuable sources of information. And to Stathis Gourgouris—who had long discussions on late style with Edward—for his valuable time and willingness to share his ideas. To Shelley Wanger, Edward’s editor, whose patience and perseverance we will always cherish, to Sarah Chalfant and Jin Auh at the Wylie Agency, and to Akeel Bilgrami, Edward’s friend and colleague, who taught several seminars with him and who read the manuscript—to all of them go our heartfelt thanks. I also would like to thank the many friends and former students contacted who were very helpful with their time and information. Last but not least, this book would not have seen the light of day without two dear friends to whom my family and I are most grateful and will always be indebted for their love, generosity, and expertise. The person whose wisdom, advice, and meticulous reading of the material gave us the green light to proceed with this publication was “America’s finest literary critic,” as Edward always described his friend Richard Poirier. Richard oversaw this manuscript from beginning to end. The other person who labored on and edited this manuscript with a fine-tooth comb and devotion is our close friend Michael Wood. He has done a superb job of not only editing the essays and arranging the material, but also putting it all together without losing Edward’s voice. Mariam C. Said New York, April 2005 INTRODUCTION 1 “Death has not required us to keep a day free,” Samuel Beckett writes with grim and intricate irony, suggesting both that death doesn’t make appointments and that we can die just as well when we’re busy. But death does sometimes wait for us, and it is possible to become deeply aware of its waiting. The quality of time alters then, like a change in the light, because the present is so thoroughly shadowed by other seasons: the revived or receding past, the newly unmeasurable future, the unimaginable time beyond time. With such moments we arrive at the conditions for the special sense of lateness that is the subject of this book. It’s worth pausing over the delicately shifting meanings of the word late, ranging from missed appointments through the cycles of nature to vanished life. Most frequently perhaps late just means “too late,” later than we should be, not on time. But late evenings, late blossoms, and late autumns are perfectly punctual—there isn’t another clock or calendar they are supposed to match. Dead persons have certainly got themselves beyond time, but then what difficult temporal longing lurks in our calling them “late”? Lateness doesn’t name a single relation to time, but it always brings time in its wake. It is a way of remembering time, whether it is missed or met or gone. “Conversion of time into space,” Edward Said wrote in one of his notes for a famous course he taught at Columbia, “Last Works/Late Style.” “Opening up of chronological sequence into landscape the better to be able to see, experience, grasp and work with time…. Adorno: fractured landscape as objective” (Said’s italics). The note goes on to mention several passages in Proust and three poems by Hopkins. All of the Proust passages come from the end of In Search of Lost Time, where the narrator is simultaneously enchanted by his new insights into the recoverability of the past and anguished at the shortness of the years or months that are probably left to him. He sees a person as a crossroads, time as a body, “characters as duration,” as Said’s note says. With Hopkins, Said is thinking of the darkening landscapes the poet so loves, of the 2 “winter world” that “yields … with some sighs, our explanation,” and above all, perhaps, of a terrifying picture of sleep and death as our only escape from the steep drops and fierce weather of the mind: O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man- fathomed. Hold them cheap May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep, Wretch, under a comfort 3 serves in a whirlwind: all Life death does end and each day dies with sleep. These are examples of (I quote from the course description for “Last Works/Late Style”) “artists … whose work expresses lateness through the peculiarities of its style,” and clearly those “peculiarities” go beyond converting time into space. Adorno’s “fractured landscape” is only one of the ways in which late works quarrel with time and manage to represent death, as he puts it, “in a refracted mode, as allegory.” This angle of refraction is important for Said, too. “Late style”—the term is Adorno’s—can’t be a direct result of aging or death, because style is not a mortal creature, and works of art have no organic life to lose. But the approaching death of the artist gets into the works all the same, and in many different ways; the privileged forms, as Said wrote, are “anachronism and anomaly.” He had a canon of such artists, including those already quoted, and almost all of them appear in some form in this book: Adorno himself, Thomas Mann, Richard Strauss, Jean Genet, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, C. P. Cavafy. There are others, too, who appear in separate articles Said published toward the end of his life: Euripides, Britten, even—in one opera at least—Mozart, where a sudden lateness, as distinct from maturity, produces, as we read in this book, “a special ironic expressiveness well beyond the words and the situation.” This type of lateness is quite different, Said argued, from the unearthly serenity we find in the last works of Sophocles and Shakespeare. Oedipus at Colonus, The Tempest, and The Winter’s Tale are late enough in their way, but they have settled their quarrel with time. “Each of us,” Said writes in the first chapter of this book, “can readily supply evidence of how it is that late works crown a lifetime of aesthetic endeavor. Rembrandt and Matisse, Bach and Wagner. But what of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction?” And what of an artist like Glenn Gould, who created his own form of lateness by removing himself from the world of live performance, intransi-gently becoming posthumous, so to speak, while still intensely active? Said owes a great debt to Adorno, which he repeatedly acknowledges. He was “the only true follower of Adorno,” he said in a late interview. (This was the same interview, with Ha’aretz Magazine, Tel Aviv, in which he said he was “the last 4 Jewish intellectual.”) He was joking, but the joke was about the idea of Adorno having followers (or Said’s following him all that closely) and not about the importance of the