1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Penetrating Meditations on Lateness, August 24, 2011
Edward Said, perhaps best known for "Orientalism," one of the most-recognized and important contributions to post-colonial studies, wrote the essays in "On Late Style" shortly before his death. The sense of "lateness" - of mortality, of obsolescence - permeates them, and they cover everything from the music of Strauss, Mozart, and Beethoven, to the political activism of Jean Genet, to "Il Gattopardo" (as envisioned by both Lampedusa and Visconti). In many ways, this is Said's last conversation with Theodor Adorno, whose presence deeply informs his criticism in many of these essays.
The book begins by reading around lateness as an aspect of chronological development - as synonymous with maturity - and opens the concept up as something that can realize "intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction," instead of the facile harmony and resolution that seeks the end of all tension. Said claims that late style refuses to reconcile what is impossible to reconcile, and that this reconciliation is oftentimes just a refusal to accept difference. It "grasps the difficulty of what cannot be grasped and then goes forth to try anyway." Musicologist Rose Subotnik says of the late work of Beethoven, no doubt with his Missa Solemnis or the Ninth Symphony in mind, "no synthesis is conceivable [but is in effect] the remains of a synthesis, the vestige of an individual human subject sorely aware of its wholeness, and consequently the survival, that has eluded it forever." It is this idea of lateness - which is quite distinct from, but not completely unrelated to, mortality and death - which Said puts to critical use in these wonderful essays.
While I think that everything in the book is worth reading, a few essays especially jumped out as being worthy of attention. In "Return to the Eighteenth Century," Said sets out to carve a middle path between two radically different opinions on the late operas of Richard Strauss. Adorno's rejection and derision of them is total, saying that he "intended to master music without submitting to its discipline" and that "his ego ideal is now fully identified with the Freudian genital-character who is uninhibitedly out for his own pleasure." Compare this with Glenn Gould's hagiographic characterization of Strauss as "more than the greatest man of music of our times." In one of the most convincing arguments made in the book, Said argues against Adorno's accusation of Strauss being a Beidermeier relic, and that he went a long way in countering Wagner's theatrical idiom of "history as a grand system to which everyone and every small narrative is subject," becoming the "keeper of the art of our fathers."
The most compelling and readable essay in the collection is "On Jean Genet," an autobiographical account of Said's two encounters with Genet during the early 1970s. The second of these, which took place in Beirut, allowed Said to learn about Genet's role in Palestinian activism, which was passionate and total. Through a reading of "Les Paravents," Said argues that because of Genet's lifelong marginality as a thief, prisoner, and homosexual, that he was able to sympathize with Palestinians without the Western rose-colored glasses of Orientalism.
I recommend this for anyone, especially those seriously interested in classical music. For Said admirers who have only known him as a literary critic, these essays open up whole new vistas by displaying the full panoply of his concerns and academic interests. While I have the suspicion that many musicologists would disagree with his characterizations of, for example, Mozart and late Beethoven and perhaps Strauss, these are nevertheless well-wrought essays constructed with lapidary reasoning. These essays are all the more poignant because Said knew that he was in the last stages of his fight with leukemia as they were being written. Readers who admire Said for his clear presentation of sometimes very opaque ideas will not be disappointed with this collection.
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25 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Late Style Said, June 18, 2007
Edward Said's writings never aim to make the obvious observation but instead seek to discover underlying strands of ideas that buoy up the work at hand and reveal subterranean layers of meaning. When he accomplishes this, his writings brim with the enthusiasm of a new discovery or the pleasure of understanding a familiar work in an unfamiliar way.
The cost to the reader not infrequently consists of wading through thickets of inpenetrable prose, prose that needs be hacked at to decipher the meaning intended. This necessity may be exacerbated in this collection by the fact that it was left unfinished and unpolished at his death. Nonetheless, skill in reading Theory and the jargon that attends it is required to comprehend, not to say appreciate, much of the early chapters. Happily much of this falls away as the book proceeds and many pearls are revealed undisguised and in fascinating verbal settings.
I continued to have difficulties with much of the entire enterprise: to wit, are Mozart's late operas really "late style" considering the man died so young? Surely they became "late style" by way of premature mortality alone. Extrapolating late style from one book wonders such as Di Lampedusa also stretches the point.
And yet incomplete, impenetrable and, as always, arguable Said, paradoxical as it sounds, remains more intellectually stimulating than most comparable critics, and still repays the effort it takes to read him.
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