Working into the night

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The influence of an intellectual is not necessarily proportional to his merit. The late Edward Said was a prime example of this dissociation between influence and merit. His most famous book, Orientalism, has had a profound and lasting effect on writing about the Middle East, yet it is badly written, worse argued and uses evidence so selectively that it is little short of mendacious.

Said, however, was a literary critic and accomplished amateur pianist as well as a political polemicist, and in this post- humous work he considers what he calls ‘Late Style’.

Unfortunately, it has long been fashionable in some intellectual circles to discuss concepts to which no very clear definition can be given, the better to discourse about them with an air of profundity, and I am afraid that late style is one such concept. Insofar as I was able to extract any meaning from this term, as used by Professor Said, it is this: that certain artists with an awareness of impending death create works that, far from expressing reconciliation or resignation, are technically challenging, emotionally jarring and frequently anticipatory of developments in the art form of which they are an example. The artist who creates them is indifferent to the reception of his work by the society around him. Beethoven’s last quartets, for example, exhibit late style.

Since Professor Said did not have an opportunity to revise his book, perhaps it would be unfair to criticise his manner and style too harshly. Perhaps also he would have clarified what is at present opaque or at best faintly translucent, though personally I rather doubt it. Clarity, after all, clarifies banality as well as depth. Here, early on, is a typical passage:

To locate a beginning in retrospective time is to ground a project (such as an experiment, or a governmental commission, or Dickens’s beginning to write Bleak House) in that moment, which is always subject to revision.

It always astonishes me that someone who has spent a lifetime studying great literature can write, or even think, such a sentence. Professor Said continues:

Beginnings of this sort necessarily involve an intention that is either fulfilled, totally or in part, or is viewed as totally failed, in successive time.

Do we really need professors of English and Comparative Literature to tell us, in barbarous locutions, that either we do or we don’t succeed in carrying out our intentions? Is there anyone who doubts it? Against whom are such professors arguing? Their verbiage seems to me symptomatic of a desire to write that is vastly in excess of the importance of anything they have to say.

The choice of illustrations of late style in the book, insofar as any meaning can be given to the term, is eccentric. The discussion of Così fan tutte, a highly accessible work, is convoluted without being subtle, and while it raises an interesting, though hardly original, question about this sublime masterpiece, namely the expenditure of so much transcendent music on so untranscendent a plot, it does not provide a plausible answer  to it. I think I could do better.

I am glad that Professor Said thought that Cavafy was a great poet — his judgment in this at least is sound — but it is not true that Cavafy published nothing in his lifetime, and therefore his supposed non-publication cannot be taken as evidence of anything. Moreover, Said was particularly prone to use the word ‘therefore’ when two of his thoughts had no logical connection, as a means I suspect of rhetorical bullying.

The one essay that I would exclude from my strictures is that on Glenn Gould, the Canadian pianist, which is clearly written and, not coincidentally, patently sincere in its admiration of the man. But it is not sufficient in itself to redeem the book.

Edward Said was both a product and a moulder of the Zeitgeist, at least in the humanities departments of Western universities. On Late Style has an introduction by Michael Wood of Princeton University. He writes:

It is part of the generosity of Said’s critical imagination that he sees ‘amusement’ as a form of resistance.

Why the inverted commas? Amusement by what? Resistance to what? It’s almost as bad as a speech by Mr Blair.