Late style as exile: De/colonising the life course

In the collection of essays On Late Style, Edward Said reflects on the new idiom achieved by great artists in their work near the end of their lives as “late style.” Drawing on Adorno's essay on Beethoven's late style, Said also focuses on the aesthetic aspects of lateness. Defining the late works of artists as “a form of exile,” however, Said moves beyond Adorno's aesthetic conception of late style. Highlighting the artist's abandonment of communication with the established social order, who achieves a contradictory, alienated relationship with it instead, Said compares artistic lateness with the experience of the subject in exile. Drawing on the analogy provided by Said, this article argues that the relationship between “self” and “other” in the different theoretical contexts of Postcolonial Studies and Age Studies can be usefully combined in the composite concept of “late style as exile.” In order to explore how the concept of lateness correlates with that of exile, this contribution turns to theoretical and autobiographical texts by Edward Said.