Nov
16
Late Style
Filed Under Feuilletons, Classical Music, Nonfiction, Fiction |
It seems really cold this morning in NYC and my back is killing me because I slept on the couch for the week. Whenever I have a lot of work to do, I can’t put it upon myself to go into the bedroom and sleep like a decent human being. Anyways, my wife just brought me a cup of coffee and Glenn Gould is on the stereo, the French Suites. I think of how so many artists - from Mozart to Klimt and dozens in between - end up being skewered by Thomas Bernhard, but Glenn Gould is immortalized. “We exist,” Gould says in The Loser according to its narrator, “we don’t have any other choice.” Bernhard’s life and work in a nutshell, in other words.
Which makes me think of Edward Said on Glenn Gould. Although Edward Said’s interpretation of Glenn Gould’s pianism is too dependent on Adorno’s description of Bach’s polyphony (perhaps the weakest chapter in On Late Style), his ultimate assessment of Gould’s genius seems spot on to me -
The tension in Gould’s virtuosity remains unresolved: that is, by virtue of their eccentricity his performances make no attempt to ingratiate themselves with his listeners or reduce the distance between their lonely ecstatic brilliance and the confusions of the everyday world.
Gould’s disinterest in resolving the tension between aesthetic pleasure and worldly confusions finds its literary counterpoint in Cavafy. Said quotes from “The God Abandons Antony,” in which Cavafy orders Antony, before his attendant death, to hold still in absolute silence so that he can hear the exquisite music of Alexandria in its exact notes, for the final time -
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion,
but not with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen - your final pleasure - to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.
Said claims that this refusal to resolve the tension between disenchantment and pleasure is the prerogative of late style in art: “[Late style] has the power to render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradiction between them.” This seems entirely right to me, too. For example: Beethoven’s Opus 110 Sonata. Its Arioso dolente is perhaps the most despairing passage of music among his late sonatas (Beethoven’s accompanying injunction is Ermattet, klagend - Exhausted, lamenting). Yet it leads, eventually and inexplicably, by the way of fugue, into a finale which is transcendentally ecstatic, life-affirming. The twin flames of disenchantment and pleasure. I think one of Jean Genet’s metaphors in Prisoner of Love illustrates this concept of late style, albeit inadvertently, better than anything I can say about it -
If you put two matches together and light them, they twine so close you can’t separate their single ember. Two immortalities in one. And so with the bard and the power that he sings, as long as no one goes and touches what’s left of the confused but splendid conflagration.
One more application of late style: W. G. Sebald. It bothers me to the n-th degree when different scholars and critics peg his work as unremittingly pessimistic, without hope, even going so far as to proclaim that the trajectory of his work seemed to foretell his untimely death. Is it me or does their reading seem reductive and problematic to you, too They miss the tiny moments of gleam which Sebald pits against the portents of destruction - the rendering of the pleasure and the disenchantment. Without this notice, it seems to me, one is reading only 1/2 of Sebald. The narrator’s notice of a flitting butterfly and the myriad of quartz fragments glimmering in the Alps, before his dreaming of the Great Fire of London in Vertigo. The bodies of herrings which glow in phosphorence after their death (The Rings of Saturn). The impenetrable beauty of salt crystals that the narrator of The Emigrants notices in the salt-frames of Kissengen, after he comes out of the neglected Jewish cemetery that’s almost crumbling into the ground. What to make of these numerous, tiny moments of “beatific” pleasure and beauty, pitted against the scenes of destruction
The answer comes from Sebald himself, in an interview with Michael Silverblatt of KCRW’s Bookworm (you can listen to the podcast here, or read an excerpt from the interview in the forthcoming The Emergence of Memory). Silverblatt astutely notices that there is something in Sebald’s prose which brings “the sensibility of tininess, miniaturization, to the enormity of the post-concentration camp world.” Sebald agrees with Silverblatt’s assessment, and his reply in characterizing his project is not so distant from Said’s characterization of what late style is, how it renders both pleasure and disenchantment, without the artist’s attempt to resolve their contradiction -
I think Walter Benjamin at one point says that there is no point in exaggerating that which is already horrific. And from that, by extrapolation, one could conclude that perhaps in order to get the full measure of the horrific, one needs to remind the reader of beatific moments of life, because if you existed solely with your imagination in le monde concentrationnaire, then you would somehow not be able to sense it. And so it requires that contrast.
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