On Thomas Pynchon’s “Shadow Ticket”

“Late style” is a woolly term, and one that, when you really think about it, doesn’t seem to mean much. What do we make of the artist who dies accidentally? Or who is suddenly precluded from producing more work, either by political or personal forces? This same structural ambiguity organizes Edward Said’s bent in On Late Style. Unfinished and written in his final months—the book thereby taking up its object of study as its formal subject—On Late Style oscillates between genres, forms, and media. In the book’s first chapter, Said considers Adorno’s essays on Beethoven’s late style as themselves embodying Adorno’s own lateness as such: “Adorno is very much a late figure because so much of what he does militated ferociously against his own time.” In this way, Adorno’s own “lateness” is configured in his pre-occupation with Beethoven’s disfigured and dissonant “late style”: that is, for Adorno and Said alike, “artistic lateness” is imagined “not as harmony and resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction.”