The Production of Lateness. Rahel Rivera Godoy-Benesch

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СКАЧАТЬ author’s self-fashioning as a late artist, one must ask what such a clutching at interpretive authority entails. Is it a confirmation of the author’s late style’s individuality, suggesting that no previous theory would be able to do it justice? Or, rather, is it motivated again by the concern that the work could be received unfavorably, that is, the fear of artistic failure? According to HutcheonHutcheon, Linda and HutcheonHutcheon, Michael, such apprehension would be justified: “Throughout historyhistory […] there is a negative as well as positive discourse of lateness. Often, when a late work appears, responsesreception are genuinely divided between approval and dismissal” (“Historicizing” 52). Hence, self-reflexivity and self-sufficiency in late-style narratives arguably are an attempt to make sure that the work will not be dismissed. Most importantly, however, if we consider late-style narratives as self-referential works rather than filtering them through existing late-style theories, we are encouraged to appreciate their spirit of novelty and to read them with fresh eyes.

      Whenever late-style narratives refuse to be brought into contact with theory, they open themselves up to a different system of intertextual assessment, which is, thirdly, the genericgenre code of production. Narrative portrayals of ageing artists display remarkable similarities. In the course of doing research for my study Kompass zur Altersbelletristik der Gegenwart, I assessed a corpus of approximately one thousand German, English, French and Italian novels and short stories that deal with old age from a variety of perspectives.5 I found that in roughly one tenth of them, the authors assign a prominent role to old-age art and creativitycreativity (Pro Senectute Schweiz). In many cases, a late-style narrative with an artist-protagonist is used to explore these issues, and, after a while, I could predict such stories’ structures and outcomes with considerable accuracy. I had begun to approach them comparatively and recognized their shared generic code of production. According to Franco MorettiMoretti, Franco, literature works with “formal patterns […] in order to master historicalhistory reality, and to reshape its materials in the chosen ideological key” (xiii). If one disregards generic form, Moretti claims, the complexity of this process is lost (xiii). Hence, a generic reading of late-style narratives can reveal the processes through which ageing authors come to terms with two kinds of historical reality: their own ageing and the existing late-style debate. Moreover, Jonathan CullerCuller, Jonathan states:

      The function of genre conventions is essentially to establish a contract between writer and reader, so as to make certain relevant expectations operative, and thus to permit both compliance with and deviation from accepted modes of intelligibility. (147)

      It is thus by comparison with a projected ideal genre (which may not be represented in its entirety in any individual work) as well as in distinction to other, related genres that late-style narratives are endowed with meaning.

      In order to outline the principles that underlie late-style narratives, a related aspect – gendergender – 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 СКАЧАТЬ