Malouf and Late Style

In last night's interview on Lateline, David Malouf provides insight into the phenomenon, described by Adorno amongst others, of Late Style:

You discover really that your brain does not really work in the same kind of way, and it’s partly to do I think with patience. You know, if you’re writing a novel, for example, you really do have to work at it every single day for as long as the novel takes: that could be six months; it could be two years. And you’ve also got to be endlessly interested in detail, and I think there’s a point you get to as a writer where you become impatient of that kind of finicky detail. And I think that’s the point where you need to think ‘Can I really go on writing novels which demand this?’ Because what I will write will be “thin” rather than dense.

David Malouf, 1 April 2015

Adorno rather than seeing late works, and he is focussing on Beethoven's late music, as "thin"; rather "The maturity of the late works of significant artists does not resemble the kind one finds in fruit. They are, for the most part, not round, but furrowed, even ravaged. Devoid of sweetness, bitter and spiny, they do not surrender themselves to mere delectation."

Edward Said, in a piece published in the London Review of Books, characterizes Adorno's thinking: "It is the episodic character of Beethoven’s late work, its apparent carelessness about its own continuity, that Adorno finds so gripping ... Adorno is describing the way that Beethoven seems to inhabit the late works as a lamenting personality, and then to leave the work or phrases in it incomplete, suddenly, abruptly jettisoned."

Malouf's simple explanation suggests that we do not necessarily need to follow Adorno into thinking that an ageing artist such as Beethoven is, by his abrupt jettisoning of detail and apparent disregard for continuity, in effect declaring that 'no synthesis is conceivable'.