On the occasion of the third anniversary of the death of , Ferial J Ghazoul* reviews the posthumous publication of a collection of articles, lectures and class notes When passed away three years ago, on 25 September, 2003, one of his close friends and a Palestinian compatriot of his, Leila Mikadadi Qattan, remarked: "The world will not be the same without ." All of us, those who knew him closely or from far, who heard or read him, realise the loss that his departure signified, as if our frontline of defence had collapsed. A compelling speaker, not only on Palestine but on all issues related to the rights of the oppressed and the downtrodden, Said would shun simplistic idiom and demagogic rhetoric in favour of a humanistic discourse. His lectures in Cairo and elsewhere were cathartic events for all sorts of people, young and old, emerging and established scholars. Though his charismatic presence is no more Said continues to be with us through his works and the proliferation of his ideas. Columbia University, as well as the American University in Cairo, have an annual memorial lecture in his honour. There was an international Said conference in Amman in late August, 2006; an international Said congress is planned in Valencia, Spain, in early November, 2006 and an international Said workshop will take place in Cairo at the Centre d'études et de documentations juridiques et sociales (CEDEJ) in December 2006. A posthumous book by Said was published recently, collecting his articles and unpublished manuscripts on a subject, "late style", that was dear to him towards the end of his life. As Said was diagnosed with leukemia in his mid-fifties, from which he eventually died when he was 67 years old, ageing as well as dying was on his mind -- not that it curbed his extraordinary energies or diminished his will to work and produce. His awareness of the encroaching end made him more aware of the style of writers and artists in old age. We all know that style changes with age: childhood, adolescence, youth, maturity and old age exhibit different characteristics as clearly portrayed in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where each chapter varies in style as young Stephen Dedalus moves from being a toddler to becoming an assertive young man. Critics tend to examine the juvenilia of writers and artists, looking for traces of their genius in the early works but they have rarely considered the late works as a corpus. Said's interest, then, opens a new path by addressing the relationship between physical decline and artistic output. While the common consensus is that writers wane in their crepuscular years, gaining the serenity of surrendering old age, Said points to the intransigence of late years and late style. Whether this energetic outburst and fearless stance comes from the fact that ageing artists have nothing to lose anymore or because it is their "Indian summer" or "swan song" -- their last burst of artistic output before final departure -- is difficult to ascertain. Said, however, does more than relate the individual physical decline to the outburst of creativity in On Late Style. He is also addressing the issue of cultural decline and the occasional creative outburst that comes with it. Regretfully, he does not use figures like Ibn Khaldun (on whom he had written elsewhere though in this book there is only a passing reference to him) who represents the genius of a culture about to move from its golden age to a sombre age and who specifically referred to the rise and decline of civilisations, using the secular metaphor of the human life cycle. But then this book of Said is an unfinished project. It is thanks to the collaboration of his widow, Mariam Cortas Said, with his long- standing friend and colleague Michael Wood, that we have Said's final note in print. Said's interest in late style is a natural product of his interest in anomalies, in exceptions, in cases that do not fit in a system. For Said, creativity is necessarily an exilic state of mind. In his superb article on Said (in Alif 25 [2005], special issue on "Said and Critical Decolonization"), Hassan Nafaa sees a common thread in the entire corpus of Said's works and life, namely, his Palestinian-ness -- the anomaly it has come to mean in our world. Said himself defines "late style" towards the end of his book, after analysing Constantine Cavafy's rendering of lateness. Late style "has the power to render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradiction between them. What holds them in tension, as equal forces straining in opposite directions, is the artist's mature subjectivity, stripped of hubris and pomposity, unashamed either of its fallibility or of the modest assurance it has gained as a result of age and exile." For Said "lateness" or "belatedness" is almost a state of mind where one does not feel integrated, part of one's time. One becomes "untimely", as he says -- a state that is to time what exile is to place. But such an artist (or at least some artists he discusses) does not go gently in the night -- to paraphrase the famous poem by Dylan Thomas. There is an element of resistance, rejection of compromise and synthesis, refusal to belong and to adhere, in late works. At the same time such works exhibit a fascination with the aesthetic. To demonstrate his sophisticated argument, Said calls on literary works such as those of the Sicilian Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the German Thomas Mann, the classical Euripides, the French Jean Genet and the Alexandrian-Greek Cavafy. He also calls on the visual and cinematic in the works of Italian director Luchino Visconti, and on the auditory and the musical in the works of Richard Strauss and late Beethoven. Said's real inspiration in this book is, unmistakably, Theodor Adorno who coined the term "Spötstil Beethovens," in relation to Beethoven's late style. The New York Times cultural critic at large, Edward Rothstein, called Said's interpretation of Adorno's positions in this book "among the best available in English". In many ways the book exhibits the characteristics Said identifies with late style, from contradiction and lack of reconciliation to discontinuity and fragmentation. It is not an easy book to read, but Said's books, in contradistinction to his journalistic essays that appeared among other places in Al-Ahram Weekly, have never been easy reads. The fact that this book is a collage of articles, lectures, and class notes (Said taught a course on late style at Columbia University) contributes to the lack of organic development. Despite this lack the book offers wonderful insights and dazzling analysis that go beyond late style to cover artistic adaptations, the relation of the artist to history, music as a metaphor for the conflict of our times and the use of pastiche and irony. Said's book is a highly condensed work; at every corner we find a brilliant thought embedded in an abstruse construct. Said's critical language, like that of the Proustian literary text, forks out like a labyrinth: full of wonders, it is not easy to grasp its destination. Said refers not only to a given work but also to its performance, critiques of the performance and then his own views. Often it is not easy to disentangle all this on a quick reading. This is clear in the chapter entitled " Cosi fan tutte at the Limits" in which the Mozart opera is intertwined with Said's memories of attending a Metropolitan Opera production in the early 1950s when he first arrived in the US as a high school student. The most brilliant section in my view, and the one that has the most impact on our part of the world, is chapter V, entitled "A Lingering Old Order". By analysing the novel Il gattopardo ( The Leopard ) by the Sicilian aristocrat Lampedusa (1896-1957), in which he represents the decline of his class and sets the action in mid- nineteenth-century southern Italy, we are very much reminded of our region, with the decline of its feudal system and old ways. Though Lampedusa was no Marxist, Said sets the work in focus by highlighting the crucial work of the Italian Marxist who wrote convincingly about la questione meridionale (The Southern Question). Gramsci makes perfect sense as a link between the novel and the film based on it that was directed by the Marxist (specifically Gramscian) Italian aristocrat Visconti. For Gramsci, the Southern part of Italy was not only dominated by the North but also kept in a static and inferior state. "Social disintegration, the failure of the revolution, and a sterile and unchanging South are evident on every page of the novel," writes Said. Thus there is an intersection between Lampedusa and Gramsci, though by no means a correspondence, used by Visconti to make a film which embodies the control of the North. Supported by the modernised North, the film gains the extravagance and sumptuousness of the industrial section of Italy. Said's sensitivity to orientalism becomes apparent when he analyses Thomas Mann's novel Death in Venice, and its adaptation into an operatic work by Britten. He explains convincingly how Venice points to the exotic Orient in the context of the novel. The hero Aschenbach sets out on a journey, but "not all the way to the tigers" as the narrator tells us. In the opera the outer frame of narration is dropped and the hesitant tone is changed into a determination as Aschenbach sings of going to the sun and the south. Such differences are not simply stated but their significance is explained in terms of how they change the overall effect of the work: "Mann's work interiorizes the action, whereas... Britten's exteriorizes it: Aschenbach's thoughts are always audible in the opera, to be heard and seen, whereas in the novella Aschenbach is above all legible, scripted in that odd to-and-froing between his own thoughts and those of the narrator." This is a book that ultimately teaches us more than what "late style" is. It teaches us what style is all about, how a text or a film or a painting or a melody is not simply an item to be consummated aesthetically. It is a sign of our times and it says more than it is saying. Said might be difficult to grasp at times given his erudite references and mise-en-abyme style, but he also strikes us with his virtuosity and his tours de force. Said's final note teaches us the seduction of the difficult. The lesson we can extract from his finale is the beauty of steadfastness and standing against the grain. Youthful rebellion is common and superficial, the intransigence of age rare and profound. * The writer is a professor of English and comparative literature at the American University in Cairo. She is the editor of Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics and the author of Nocturnal Poetics: The Arabian Nights in Comparative Context ( 1996 ) and Saadi Youssef ( 1989 ) .
