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Journalism of Courage
SOMETIME AT THE END of the 1980s, writer, critic and intellectual Edward Said began to be interested in the idea of writers’, musicians’ and other artists’ “late works”, or “late style” (Adorno’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, “Edward left us a tremen-dous amount of material… to allowus to fin-ish it and produce posthumously a version of what he had in mind.”
So, here it is, a gem of a book on literary (and music) criticism (Said’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 “wanted to finish this book… 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 Said’s book Beginnings, or even earlier, with his book on Conrad.”
Said’s interest in “late style” 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: “I don’t think I was ever consciously afraid of dying… though I soon grew aware of the shortage of time.”
Said of course is not interested in artistic lateness as harmony: “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 don’t produce the serenity of ‘ripeness is all’?” He loves to explore the ex-perience of late style that involves a non-har-monious, non-serene tension…. Close to Said’s heart for he definitely had—as Wood reminds us —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-hoven’s last works constituting a form of ex-ile. Of Frenchman Jean Genet’s involvement with the Palestinian resistance movement, which Said describes thus: “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.” The most poignant is Said’s critique of Lampedusa’s posthumously pub-lished novel The Leopard.
So, should we be upset that Said wasn’t around to see the final version? Well, as Wood tells us: “We can regret what might have been… but we have no reason to be ungrate-ful for what there is.”
