Thoughts on Late Style 
Edward Said
Both in art and in our general ideas about the passage of human life there is assumed to be a general abiding timeliness. We assume that the essential health of a human life has a great deal to do with its correspondence to its time – the fitting together of the two – and is therefore defined by its appropriateness or timeliness. Comedy, for instance, seeks its material in untimely behaviour, an old man falling in love with a young woman (May in December), as in Moličre and Chaucer, a philosopher acting like a child, a well person feigning illness. But it is also comedy as a form that brings about the restoration of timeliness through the komos with which such a work usually concludes – the marriage of young lovers. Yet what of the last or late period of life, the decay of the body, the onset of ill health (which, in a younger person, brings on the possibility of an untimely end)? These issues, which interest me for obvious personal reasons, have led me to look at the way in which the work of some great artists and writers acquires a new idiom towards the end of their lives – what I’ve come to think of as a late style.
Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.
Edward Said, who died in September 2003, first contributed to the LRB in 1981.
Other articles by this contributor:
Is Israel more secure now? · Israel’s Dead End
Unoccupied Territory · Edward Said in Palestine
Between Worlds · a memoir
My Guru · Elegy for Ibrahim Abu-Lughod
Always on Top · From Birmingham to Jamaica
The Academy of Lagado · The US Administration’s misguided war
Palestinians under Siege · Edward Said puts Palestine on the map
My Encounter with Sartre · Edward Said describes an encounter with J-P Sartre
print layout
tell a friend