Summary
The phenomenon, named in the forty-fourth essay of Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, of how writers confront mortality in their last works and how a separate, individualistically inflected late style (Spätstil or style tardif) emerges accordingly — a phenomenon Said says he has been studying for some years (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.498).
Details
- Two types of late work are distinguished: those like The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale, or Oedipus at Colonus, in which resolution and reconciliation occur, and those like Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken and Euripides’ The Bacchae, in which all the contradictions and unresolved antinomies of life are left standing, untouched by any sort of autumnal mellowness (PDF p.498).
- According to Adorno, speaking of Beethoven’s third-period masterpieces, late works are the catastrophes (PDF p.498).
- The essay’s landscape of lost causes is charted by late works of the second, decidedly problematic and unreconciled type: the summing-up novels of Cervantes, Flaubert and Hardy, written near the end of their careers at the moment when the individual feels the need for tallying up the evidence for and against the success of youthful ambitions (PDF p.495, 498).
- Adorno also attaches importance to Beethoven’s late phase and what he calls his “spätstil” (as printed, lowercase) in the forty-third essay (PDF p.478).
Related pages
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Ludwig van Beethoven, Theodor Adorno, Thomas Hardy