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Late style, as Theodor Adorno described it, is antagonistic. Its practitioner is unseduced by the standard judgments and values of his or her time and place. Unseduced too by any hope of transcendence. Such art, exemplified for Adorno by Beethoven, does not seek harmony, or elegance, or aesthetic resolution; it does not lead to a unified 'whole'; rather, it 'tear[s works] apart in time' - 'perhaps', he added (but sceptically), 'in order to preserve them for the eternal. In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes' (Adorno, 1964, 126).
Adorno's account of late style has been influential in literary and cultural criticism of the past ten years or so, largely thanks to the work of Edward Said, whose book on the subject was left unfinished at his death in 2004 (Said, 1988; 2003; 2004). In a series of essays on (among others) Benjamin Britten, Thomas Mann, Henrik Ibsen, and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Said extended Adorno's work on Beethoven into a wider consideration of literature as well as music. For Said Tate style' meant something subtly different from what it was for Adorno. 'Lateness', in Adorno's essays, designated an aesthetic style or manner more than a stage of life: it was the name he gave to the valid response of artistic form to capitalism, and though the proximity of the artist to the end of his or her life was seen as its prompt, it is not clear that for Adorno the connection to time of life had to be more than symbolic. Said, by contrast, insisted upon a literal connection to ageing, the decay of bodily powers, the onset of ill health, acknowledging his autobiographical reasons for doing so (his own proximity to death). To be consciously near the end of one's time induces 'tragic selfawareness', he wrote - and the pathos of that claim marks a subtle difference between his humanism and Adorno's stringently posthumanist thinking. In Said's account, late style is, for all its refusal of harmony and wholeness, integrated temperamentally and aesthetically by the force of its anger, its alienation, its anticipatory mourning.
Tennyson's writing in old age - specifically, the last four volumes of poetry: Tiresias and Other Poems (1885), Locksley Hall Sixty Years After (1886), Demeter and...