On J.M. Coetzee’s Late Style

There are a few obvious reasons we tend to be interested in a writer’s late works. For one, they allow us to indulge the superstition that the author is somehow more present, that the labor of their human hand is more clearly visible, whether through a generalized mental debility—the absence of youthful pyrotechnics or gracile phrasings—or by dint of their own encroaching death. In this respect, we’re buying into the conception of late works as “products of an uninhibited subjectivity” described by Theodor Adorno in his well-known essay on Beethoven’s late style. This harsh subjectivity, Adorno writes, “breaks through the envelope of form to better express itself, transforming harmony into the dissonance of its suffering.”