Working into the night

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The influence of an intellectual is not necessarily proportional to his merit. The late Edward Said was a prime example of this dissociation between influence and merit. His most famous book, Orientalism, has had a profound and lasting effect on writing about the Middle East, yet it is badly written, worse argued and uses evidence so selectively that it is little short of mendacious.

Said, however, was a literary critic and accomplished amateur pianist as well as a political polemicist, and in this post- humous work he considers what he calls ‘Late Style’.

Unfortunately, it has long been fashionable in some intellectual circles to discuss concepts to which no very clear definition can be given, the better to discourse about them with an air of profundity, and I am afraid that late style is one such concept. Insofar as I was able to extract any meaning from this term, as used by Professor Said, it is this: that certain artists with an awareness of impending death create works that, far from expressing reconciliation or resignation, are technically challenging, emotionally jarring and frequently anticipatory of developments in the art form of which they are an example.