oriented scholar must sooner or later deal with this contradiction, and there seem to be two ways of reacting to it: the universalist and the individualist approach, both of which have certain limitations.
Universalist scholars assume that old age has an inevitable effect on an artist’s work and style; the artist’s physical declinedecline and closeness to deathdeath inscribe themselves in the work of art and thereby establish a close connection between the creative product and its producer’s biography. PainterPainter, Karen states:
Our fascination with lateness arises from the fact that the decline through aging or sickness to death is a universal phenomenon. The relationship between biography and artistic creation may be clearer in late works than in any other phase of life, and the self-exploration that is often prompted by the confrontation of genius with old age or fatal illness can be as deeply human as it is self-referential. We prize artistic production that seems to sum up the accumulated experiencehuman experience of life in a mature aesthetic vision: works of art that pose questions of mortalitymortality and existentialhuman existence meaning speak to each of us. (1)
According to the traditional understanding of late style that Painter describes here, the universality of lateness has at least four aspects: Firstly, physical decline is supposed to be a universal experience. Secondly, this decline must necessarily be in conflict with “genius”genius due to their opposed connotation (inferiority versus superiority), and said conflict will instigate biographical “self-exploration.” Furthermore, the late work that results from this process is said to provide a “mature aesthetic vision” and convey “existential meaning,” and, lastly, because of its universality, the late work will “speak to each of us.” However debatable these assumptions may be, they provide a convincing theory of our alleged preference for late works, and hence a justification of their supposed singular quality: since everybody will eventually undergo declinedecline, we all prioritize late works because they record, and make sense of, the experience of decline. In view of the closure the theory offers, the questionable choice of premises does not easily come under scrutiny.
Yet, universalist tendencies in late-style theories go beyond the simple affirmation that old age will influence an ageing artist’s work; scholars provide catalogues of specific characteristics that such late works arguably display. Joseph N. StrausStraus, Joseph N. assembled a three-page-long alphabetical list with attributes of late style in music as they appear in scholarly work: they go from “abstract”abstraction and “alienatedalienation” (8) to “severe” and “monumental” (10). Recognizing that such a list is “necessarily crude” and that “the categories tend to overlap to some extent” and even “occasionally seem to contradict each other,” Straus proposes that late works should “share at least some of these characteristics, but not necessarily all of them” (7). On the other hand, he also acknowledges that there are contemporary composers in their nineties who are still productive and whose “music continues to develop in interesting ways,” but none of their stylistic developments seem distinctively late (4). In view of this inconsistency, Straus suggests that late style is induced by physical frailtyfrailty and disabilitydisability rather than by biological old age:
Late-style music is understood as having certain distinctive attributes, often including bodily features (fractured, fissured, compact, or immobilized) and certain mental or emotional states (introverted, detached, serene, or irascible). It may be that in writing music describable in such terms, composers are inscribing their shared experiencehuman experience of disability, of bodies and minds that are not functioning in the normal way. (6)
However, even within his universalist approach, Straus allows for the possibility that “listeners and critics, knowing of the composer’s disabilities, [may] read nonnormative physical and mental states into the music” (6), shifting his focus from the composition to the receptionreception of the work.
In view of the difficulty to justify a universalist approach to late style, other scholars argue that stylistic changes in old age may be a universal phenomenon but manifest itself in individual forms, for, as HutcheonHutcheon, Linda and HutcheonHutcheon, Michael affirm, “[t]here are as many late styles as there are late artists” (“Historicizing” 68).1 Imposing “a generalizing concept of late style (in the singular)” onto authors’ works must therefore inevitably result in an ageistageism activity, since it cannot do justice to the individual circumstances in which each author lives and writes (68). The individualist approach to late style, then, is less prone to grand generalizations. However, if the late style of an individual artist is not comparable to any other artist’s, this raises the question of how it can be recognized and assessed. Generally, scholars therefore resort to the comparative-sequential method: they evaluate an artist’s entire oeuvre, comparing earlier with later or last works, and establish meaningful differences in order to group the individual texts, paintings, or compositions into phases. In literary criticism, individualist approaches that set out to distinguish the style of an author’s last work(s) from his or her earlier output can be roughly divided into two groups. Firstly, there are those critics who identify three phases of production in an artist’s lifetime – early, middle, and late – and thus follow the system commonly used in musicology, which is consistent with cultural notionscultural discourse of a human being’s development: youthyouth, middle agemiddle age, and old age. The other group views the last works as an appendix to the main oeuvre whose beginning is marked by a turning point, which the critics duly identify. It may well be that this second method is influenced by one of Theodor W. Adorno’sAdorno, Theodor W. tenets, according to which the “dignity” of a composer depends on whether he will reach a late style in his artistic development (Urbanek 220).2 From this, it follows that, no matter how famous artists are and how well their work is receivedreception at an earlier stage, their oeuvre will require a kind of retrospectiveretrospection authorization by their late work if they wish to be appreciated beyond their middle age. The late work therefore acts as a kind of commentary on the previous creative output.
Whatever individualist approach critics choose, they frequently end up drawing a fairly conventional image of the late author as a creative genius. An example is Adam Zachary Newton’sNewton, Adam Zachary treatment of Philip Roth’sRoth, Philip last four short novels, which Roth himself grouped together under the title “Nemeses.” Newton selects two of these narratives, Indignation and Nemesis, and identifies them as a “prosthesis” in relation to Roth’s earlier works. Newton claims that Indignation and Nemesis are marked by artificiality and, like prostheses, do not pretend to supplant the earlier longer (and arguably more accomplished) novels, as they must naturally fall short of the various functions which the lost ‘body parts’ – Roth’s former novel writing skills – performed. By suggesting that Roth’s earlier works were more elaborate and complete, Newton thus seems to take up popular notions of artistic decline in old age. However, he states that the last works’ artificiality, reductiveness and flatness “possess […] an intrinsic power and ‘fascination’ in [their] own right” (131), affirming the almost magical attractiveness of enigmatic final words and staying in line with the traditional idea that closeness to deathdeath grants wisdomwisdom and transcendencetranscendence. A further individualist study which ultimately reveals traditional late-style concepts is Stephen J. Burn’sBurn, Stephen J. discussion of John Barth’sBarth, John late works. Burn initially contends that “the idea of imminent deathdeath does little to illuminate the signal qualities of Barth’s later fiction” (182). Later, however, he states that “what we find in the fourth-period Barth [i.e. the late Barth] is […] a writer’s meditation on what it means to be at the end” (187, italics added). Partly, this meaning of being “at the end” is expressed through a distinct, active way of avoiding closureclosure (184), “draw[ing] attention to the figure of the author” in order to create “chains of affect” between author and work (185). In other words – Burn does not put it quite so pointedly – Barth binds himself to his last works in order to affirm his existence and his controlcontrol over his creative products. His latenesslateness thus consists of a strengthening of his own position. Hence, he establishes an image of himself as an artist in his prime, a true late geniusgenius.
Individualist approaches may carry different argumentative thrusts and have different agendas: late-style studies in literature are not always written exclusively to explore