– must be addressed. As noted by various scholars, female artists have largely been excluded from concepts of late style (e.g. Hutchinson, Afterword 238; McMullan and Smiles, Introduction 4). “This is not to say,” McMullanMcMullan, Gordon writes, that “women artists, writers and composers have not produced remarkable work late in life, but rather that critics have effectively never attributed the cachet of late style to that work” (18).6 For this reason, late-style theories probably have a different effect on women’s literary production, the exact nature of which is still to be explored. In terms of genregenre markers, one can observe that men’s late-style narratives fall heavily back on the artist novel par excellence, the KünstlerromanKünstlerroman, to which James JoyceJoyce, James had given “definitive treatment” (Beebe 260) with his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This archetype of the male young artist is so present, in writers’ and readers’ minds alike, that it exerts a considerable effect on the late-style narrative, even though its subject is youthyouth rather than old age. As Kathleen WoodwardWoodward, Kathleen states in Aging and Its Discontents, Western distinctions of age “ultimately and precipitously devolve into a single binary – into youth and old age. […]. Youth, represented by the youthful body, is good; old age, represented by the aging body, is bad” (6–7). The analysis of The Development by John BarthBarth, John (Chapter 3) will examine this binary as well as the ageing artists’ attempt to break free from an artistic creativity that depends on youth. The Künstlerroman also has an effect on women’s late writing, but in a different way. What Abel, Hirsch and Langland state about the BildungsromanBildungsroman genre is certainly also true here: “The sex of the protagonist modifies every aspect” (Introduction 5). In Chapter 4 on Karen Blixen’sBlixen, Karen narratives “The Dreamers” and “Echoes,” it will be explored how male and female Künstlerroman traditions – as well as the gendered late-style debate – are taken up by the female ageing author.
The genericgenre approach to late-style narratives raises a number of interesting questions, some of which are related to gendergender. Considering the different patterns in male and female late-style narratives, one must ask: Is art gendered? Is ageing gendered? Is stylestyle – and specifically late style – gendered? And what about latenesslateness as an attitude or an authorial stance behind the work? Yet, within the generic code of production, one must keep in mind what is also valid for the second, self-reflexive code of production: late-style theories have no direct bearing on the assessment of the text. Rather, meaning is produced by comparison with similar literary works. This is owed to the fact that these works, rather than being written in direct response to the scholarly late-style discourse, have begun to imitate each other. They thus become self-referential in the sense of referring to a literary late-style tradition, shaking off the seemingly outdated, traditional ideas of late-style philosophy.
Thus, in the contemporary literary world, an emancipation from late-art criticism and theory is taking place. Ageing authors express that they are the experts of late art – not the critics and the philosophersphilosophy. In the following three chapters, it is therefore the individual authors’ own view of late style that shall be of concern. Returning to the questions which introduce this chapter – the Hutcheons’ provocative question as to why we should “bother” to theorize late style and elderly artists (“Historicizing” 58) – one can say that late style becomes a concern again once the written work is approached as the expression and communicationcommunication of an authorial figure. This concern should be addressed in literary criticism as well as in ageing studies in general. For the former, disregarding late style would be as short-sighted as disregarding the peculiarities of youthyouth in the KünstlerromanKünstlerroman. Within the field of ageing studies, its pertinence is even higher, and the Hutcheons’ claim that late-style theory is ageistageism (cf. “Late Style(s)”) will be challenged. If critics wish to affirm the importance of creativitycreativity in a human life and determine its role for those who are near the end of it, late-style studies are the opposite of ageist. They emphasize the relevance of old-age art and support its endeavor to claim a space of its own.
3 Old Age, the Intruder: John Barth’sBarth, John Young and Old Artists
[A] fictional character both exists and does not exist; he or she is a non-entity who is a somebody. […]. The embodiment longed for is of something outside language, beyond an author, but it is of course the author’s ‘voice’ which is the utterance; language which is the totality of existence; text which is reality.
(WaughWaugh, Patricia, Metafiction 90–91)
3.1 From the KünstlerromanKünstlerroman to the Late-Style Narrativelate-style narrative
John Barth’s collection of short stories The Development (2008) usefully exemplifies what is at stake in late-style narratives written in response to the late-style debate. Firstly, Barth stands out for his ability to catch the Zeitgeist, and he is therefore a true representative of this group of twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers whose critical awareness urges them to reassess their stylestyle as they grow old, which results in a re-fashioning of their artistic persona. This is the personal code of the three codes of production proposed for a reading of late-style narratives in Chapter 2. The second reason is Barth’s metafictionalmetafiction mode, which merges fiction and theory in one single text and not only shows the creative result of the author’s awareness of age-related style issues, (i.e. the fictional narrative), but also provides some clues as to why and how these stories were conceived. As Stephen J. BurnBurn, Stephen J. suggests in his article on Barth’s late phaselate phase, “the fourth-period Barth [i.e. the late Barth] is less an example of late style than it is itself a multi-volume theory of late style” (187, original italics). Hence, the work’s self-referentiality is also one of the codes of production that late style allows for. Finally, by contrasting Barth’s ageing-artist-types with the young artist-to-be Ambrose in Barth’s much earlier Künstlerroman, the short story cycle Lost in the Funhouse (1968), one can also gain insight into the way in which the creative processescreativity in old age draw on earlier, ‘youthful’ definitions of artistic creativity that were established in a Künstlerroman. Hence, The Development also makes use of the genericgenre code of production.
BurnBurn, Stephen J., who has to my knowledge published the only extensive article on John Barth’s late style so far, identifies a strange dearth in later-Barth criticism. Scholars generally “prefer […] to re-read the earlier (and already intensively studied) books to locate new weights of emphasis in the already known” (180), he observes, and whereas for studies of the later Barth it seems necessary to consider his earlier works, “there is no corresponding responsibility for the critic of the early works to consider the late books” (181). Burn therefore proposes reading Barth’s later works not as “a late return to an already complete fictional project, but rather as […] a new phase in Barth’s career” (181). This new phase begins with On with the Story (1996) and carries on to his latest published work, Every Third Thought: A Novel in Five Seasons (2011). This chapter is less concerned with establishing a comprehensive account of Barth’s late style and my choice of texts is therefore more selective. However, in order to explore the late-style narrative – here The Development – and its central figure, the ageing artist, it is necessary to have some kind of ‘counternarrative’ with a ‘counterfigure,’ with which the late-style narrative can be contrasted. Barth’s early collection Lost in the Funhouse, a postmodern Künstlerroman with highly metafictional, theoretical messages, provides ideal conditions for such a comparison: it contains the same strong focus on creativitycreativity as The Development and therefore offers itself for comparison. Yet, with its youthful artist-protagonist, Ambrose, Lost in the Funhouse dwells at the opposite pole of the age spectrum.
The artist-protagonist’s bodybody is the point where young and old artists meet – and separate. For both, the young and the old artist, their body is a source of instability and unease, but the nature of the physical change that is taking place is quite different: the adolescentadolescence boy’s body undergoes a process of growth and maturing whereas the ageing man is confronted with physical declinedecline, illness