On Late Style was published by Pantheon Books in 2006, three years after Said’s death from leukemia in 2003. The book was assembled from lectures, drafts, and fragments by his friend Michael Wood, and it bears the marks of its unfinished state — some chapters are fully developed, others are sketches, and the argument is suggestive rather than conclusive. But the book’s incompleteness is appropriate to its subject: lateness, in Said’s argument, is characterized by irresolution, and a book about late style that was itself unfinished has a kind of built-in authenticity.
Said’s starting point is Theodor Adorno’s essay on Beethoven’s late works — the last quartets, the last piano sonatas, the Missa Solemnis — which Adorno argued were not the serene summation of a lifetime’s achievement but works of radical difficulty and contradiction. Beethoven’s late style, for Adorno, was not a reconciliation with the world but a refusal to be reconciled: the music is fragmentary, abrupt, and resistant to the listener’s desire for resolution. Said extends this argument to other late artists: Mozart’s Così fan tutte (whose cynicism about love shocked contemporaries), Strauss’s late operas, Genet’s final writings, Lampedusa’s The Leopard, and Cavafy’s late poems.
The personal dimension is inescapable. Said, writing while dying of leukemia, was himself producing late work, and his meditation on lateness is inevitably a meditation on his own mortality and the question of how an artist faces death. He argues, following Adorno, that the most interesting response to approaching death is not acceptance or wisdom but resistance — a refusal to smooth over contradictions, to offer false comfort, to produce the kind of serene late masterpiece that the world expects from dying artists.
The book’s most brilliant passages deal with music — Said was a trained pianist and a close friend of Daniel Barenboim, and his musical knowledge was deep and technically informed. His readings of Beethoven’s Op. 111 sonata and Mozart’s Così are among the finest pieces of music criticism produced by a literary scholar.
Collecting On Late Style
First edition (Pantheon Books, New York, 2006): Cloth, dust jacket. Published posthumously.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $15–$35
- Later editions: $5–$10