Last Notes

Edward Said8217;s thoughts on late style puts his life8217;s work in perspective

SOMETIME AT THE END of the 1980s, writer, critic and intellectual Edward Said began to be interested in the idea of writers8217;, musicians8217; and other artists8217; 8220;late works8221;, or 8220;late style8221; Adorno8217;s term, fa-mously going on to teach a course in Colum-bia on the subject a decade later. Finally, he decided to write a book, announcing to his wife a week before he died on September 25, 2003, that he wanted to finish Late Style by December that year. As his wife Mariam tells us in the foreword, 8220;Edward left us a tremen-dous amount of material8230; to allowus to fin-ish it and produce posthumously a version of what he had in mind.8221;

So, here it is, a gem of a book on literary and music criticism Said8217;s thoughts on a canon of artists like Adorno, Thomas Mann, Richard Strauss, Jean Genet, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, C.P. Cavafy put to-gether by long-time friend Michael Wood who believes Said never 8220;wanted to finish this book8230; There would have been a time for this book about untimeliness, but this time was always: Not quite yet. Completing the work would have been too much like writing the end of a life, closing the long chapter about the making of the self that opened with Said8217;s book Beginnings, or even earlier, with his book on Conrad.8221;

Said8217;s interest in 8220;late style8221; grew long be-fore he was diagnosed with leukaemia in 1991, which led him to writing, besides a se-ries of books, his memoir Out of Place 1999. But as Wood quotes Said: 8220;I don8217;t think I was ever consciously afraid of dying8230; though I soon grew aware of the shortage of time.8221;

Said of course is not interested in artistic lateness as harmony: 8220;Each of us can readily 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, diffi-culty, and unresolved contradiction? What if age and ill health don8217;t produce the serenity of 8216;ripeness is all8217;?8221; He loves to explore the ex-perience of late style that involves a non-har-monious, non-serene tension8230;. Close to Said8217;s heart for he definitely had8212;as Wood reminds us 8212;the politics and the morality he associated with late style, a devotion to the truth of unreconciled relations, and his oeu-vre can join the company of poems, novels, films and operas he writes about.

He writes about Adorno who found Beet-hoven8217;s last works constituting a form of ex-ile. Of Frenchman Jean Genet8217;s involvement with the Palestinian resistance movement, which Said describes thus: 8220;Genet is the trav-eller across identities, the tourist whose pur-pose is marriage with a foreign cause, so long as that cause is both revolutionary and in con-stant agitation.8221; The most poignant is Said8217;s critique of Lampedusa8217;s posthumously pub-lished novel The Leopard.

So, should we be upset that Said wasn8217;t around to see the final version? Well, as Wood tells us: 8220;We can regret what might have been8230; but we have no reason to be ungrate-ful for what there is.8221;