Late Style
Late style is death. Adorno isn’t as bald as that (though, obviously, he was indeed notably bald in a purely physiological sense) in his ‘Late Style’ essay, but that’s what he means. Which is to say, not the brute fact of death so much as, as Said puts it,
Adorno’s thesis is that all this is predicated on two considerations: first, that when he was young Beethoven’s work had been vigorous and organically whole, but became more wayward and eccentric; and second, that as an older man facing death, Beethoven realised that his work proclaims that ‘no synthesis is conceivable’: it is in effect ‘the remains of a synthesis, the vestige of an individual human subject sorely aware of the wholeness, and consequently the survival, that has eluded it for ever’. Beethoven’s late works, therefore, communicate a tragic sense in spite of their irascibility.
I don’t see ‘tragic’, here, to be honest: at least, not in an Aristotelian-cathartic or Hegelian-dialectic sense (maybe Said has something else in mind). But I do dig the ‘no synthesis is conceivable’ insight. True, that. Or … wait: does that make me late, now? I’m only 55!
A lot has been written about Adorno, Said and ‘late style’, usually from literary or musicological angles. Me, I wonder how far we could extend the idea. ‘Style’ is more than just a particular way of arranging words, or musical harmonies, after all. What is the difference between Catholicism and Protestantism, for example, if not a difference of style? Both faiths worship the same God, believe in the same divinely incarnated Christ and so on. There’s the caricature stuff: incense, Latin, stained-glass and ritual versus plain white plaster and austere vernaculars. But I wonder if it goes deeper. What might it look like to call Protestantism the late style of Catholicism? A faith predicated (as evident in its extraordinary fecundity of creation: all the heirarchies and angelology, all the elaborations and ornamentation of its core gospel) on a vigorously and organically-conceived life phases into a faith in which the impossibility of synthesis, the structure of death articulating a message of the overcoming of death, dominates?
