Rahel Rivera Godoy-Benesch - The Production of Lateness

Such concerns about the response of the audience are, of course, nothing extraordinary in an artist’s world, were it not for the fact that they are here directly linked to the artists’ age. For each of these figures, old age contributes decisively to their wish to mark a stylistic change in their late creative works, and they state this wish explicitly. Unlike musicmusic and visual artpainting, literature has the advantage of explicit language and rhetoric. Hence, the protagonists can express what old age means for them, which makes subjective ageing subjectivity (rather than cultural stereotypesstereotype) more accessible to the critic. Interestingly enough, in each of the chosen works, the physical aspects are at the forefront. In Barth’sBarth, John The Development , long lists of age-related ailments and illnesses dictate how the various elderly characters are perceived by the reader (26–28). In Blixen’sBlixen, Karen “Echoes,” Pellegrina imagines herself attending the presentation of her last work – the singing peasant boy – as “an old unknown woman in a black shawl, the corpse in the grave witnessing its own resurrection” (170). Finally, Didion’sDidion, Joan Blue Nights abounds in descriptions of Didion’s frailtyfrailty and her fear of it. She is constantly afraid of, for instance, falling in the street, or of not being able to get up from a chair after a concert has ended (e.g. 105–111).

This strong emphasis on age-related vulnerabilityvulnerability and proximity to deathdeath raises some interesting questions while simultaneously complicating the positioning of late-style studies within the broader field of ageing studies. Should late stylelate style (or old-age style, for that matter) be defined as a stylistic phenomenon linked to physical declinedecline? Is it physical reality that intrudes upon the mental product, effecting changes in its form (rather than, for instance, wisdomwisdom and spiritual transcendencetranscendence)? Would one thus have to rename the phenomenon ‘style of frailty’?5 This would certainly not be doing any service to those branches of ageing studies dedicated to counter ageismageism, such as cultural gerontologycultural gerontology (cf. Twigg and Martin, “The Field”) and literary gerontologyliterary gerontology (cf. Falcus), since it would mean equating old age with decline and decay. Moreover, late works that foreground opposed values, such as the wealth of lived experiencehuman experience, would be excluded from this definition. Hence, how can we theorize late style usefully, without simply affirming the widespread peak-and-decline modelpeak-and-decline model (cf. Smiles 17) and fueling ageist discourse? Late-style theory is certainly not interested in suggesting that old age equals decay, but neither does it seem right to ignore the emphasis that many ageing authors place on physical decline.

One way of attempting a description of late style in connection with physical decline is to approach this decline neutrally, as a fact of human existence rather than a value judgment. The body must die, and it commonly approaches its death in stages rather than just collapsing all of a sudden. A neutral approach to physical decline allows us to avoid such commonplaces as “ despite his frailtyfrailty, author X still writes marvelously.”6 As Philip SohmSohm, Philip accurately remarks, “[e]xceptionalism is the masked twin of gerontophobia, the twin of denial and hope that tries to recue old artists from a conventionally predicated declinedecline” (26). In a similar manner, McMullanMcMullan, Gordon and SmilesSmiles, Sam acknowledge:

[P]erhaps, in fact, we should redefine old-age style as something which is directly or indirectly the product of the adjustments and collaborations necessary for creative artists in old age, not something that exists despite such contingencies. (Introduction 7, original italics)

However, late style criticism in literature must move even beyond defining late style as a product of physical decline. If the field of ageing studies is to profit from investigations into late style, rather than simply affirming a causality, critical investigations should define the precise nature of the connection between age-related decline 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 reception reception 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)