“Beginnings are exciting; middles are gratifying;
but endings, boyoboy.”

John Barth, On with the Story

*

“La mort est en effet un sujet distrayant. On n’en parle pas
assez.” (“Death is indeed a distracting topic. We don’t talk
about it enough.”)

Dominique Noguez

1The last decade has been marked by the disappearance and mourning of numerous writers, more or less linked to postmodernism, first and foremost John Barth, whose essay “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967) is generally considered as the manifesto of postmodernist fiction. In addition to Barth, who died in April 2024, we have also lost Robert Coover (October 2024), Paul Auster (April 2024), and previously Cormac McCarthy (June 2023), as well as Philip Roth (May 2018) and William Gass (December 2017).

2From the outset postmodernism was driven by the notion of “exhaustion” (drawing from it a paradoxical creative energy aimed at renewing literary forms), and was also haunted by the mental, moral and perhaps even physical fatigue characteristic of the end of life, so much so that some critics had already sensed the movement’s redoubled extinction in the works of the second postmodernist generation (e.g. Stephen Burn and his revealing title Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism). After the end of postmodernism itself at the turn of the 20^th century (see McHale 171-175), and following the actual death of its “founders” in literature (who, for some, continued writing well beyond the “extinction” of postmodernism), it seemed relevant to question the existence of a “late style” that would be specific to these authors, to question their “personal end” as writers just as much as their “collective or institutional culmination, marking the end of an epoch” (Compagnon 19, our translation).

3Indeed, in his study La vie derrière soi. Fins de la littérature, Antoine Compagnon explains that the notion of “late style” was first a German theoretical concept (Georg Simmel, Theodor Adorno) applied to the fields of painting (Rembrandt, Michelangelo, El Greco, da Vinci) and music (Beethoven), before it was developed later in the United States by Edward Said, particularly in his posthumous work On Late Style (2006). Two late styles can be identified: one signals decrepitude, degradation, bitterness, spoiled invalidity and rehashing; the other, recognized by Adorno in Beethoven’s quartets, which constitutes a “catastrophe,” “transcends an artist’s career, gains prophetic significance and announces future art” (Compagnon 42), or manifests what art historian Walter Friedlander has called, in reference to Nicolas Poussin, the “senile sublime,” a form of superior, heroic apotheosis generally described as a “swan song” (83) in reference to Plato’s Phaedo. Salman Rushdie has recently taken up this contradiction, speaking of a “serene” relationship with the world which has finally been “accepted,” as opposed to an “enraged” and “disappointed” relationship with it—two contradictory dispositions that he suggested should be reconciled.

4By examining the final works of some of the above-mentioned major writers–—those who passed away, like the novelists Paul Auster, John Barth, Jonathan Baumbach, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and the poet A. R. Ammons, or the authors who are still alive but elderly like Don DeLillo or Thomas Pynchon—, can we outline the contours of a postmodern late style? As Stephen Burn points out in his essay, postmodernism might itself be viewed as “a theory of lateness,” whose style more or less corresponds to what Edward Said, following Adorno, writes about late Beethoven: full of “intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction,” involving “a nonharmonious, nonserene tension” (7). Aware, as John Barth argued in “The Literature of Exhaustion,” of “the used-upness of certain forms or the felt exhaustion of certain possibilities” (64), these writers emblematized the expiration of the novel, the obsolescence of formal notions such as “cause and effect, linear narrative, characterization, authorial selection, arrangement, and interpretation” (72). They duly recorded “the death of the author,” sometimes literally, as in the case of David Foster Wallace, the “already dead” or ghostly author of a posthumous work of fiction significantly titled The Pale King (2011) and published three years after his suicide. According to Barth, the postmodernists expressed “the feeling that Western civilization, or the world, [was] going to end rather soon” (72). Since the turn of the 20^th century, these authors have even further reinforced their literary obsolescence, as Stephen Burn asserts, due to their identity as “ageing, white, male novelists,” turning postmodernism into a late movement reduced to being nothing more than a “country for old men.”

5But did they end in the same manner? Echoing Linda and Michael Hutcheon’s critique of late style which connects “ageing and creativity” (4), Burn offers a distinction between style and form, between what he calls a “late style,” or “sentence-level style” that “records lateness,”—of which Don DeLillo would be a representative example—and “a form adequate to convey lateness,” which, he argues, better characterizes Robert Coover and William Gaddis, who “return to earlier texts to spiral forward into their late period.” Burn provides two examples: Robert Coover, who in The Brunist Day of Wrath (2014) returns to The Origin of the Brunists (1966) but to “extend and continue” that early work, and William Gaddis, who in Agapē Agape (2002) “expands on material that first appeared in The Recognitions (1955).” This “spiral” form is indeed the very aesthetic design of postmodernism which acknowledged its “advanced” or “late” position in history and proposed to revisit older forms to parody and update them for the present and the future. Upon reading the various essays in this dossier, another defining feature of postmodernism emerges with particular force: the metafictional dimension of late-period style. Although none of them bears the title The Last Novel (2007)—as David Markson named his final work shortly before his death—, each of the late works analyzed here comments on its own conclusion or employs metaphors to address it like Don DeLillo’s The Silence, Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger or Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket. In Dreams of Molly, Jonathan Baumbach’s last novel, the metafictional reflexivity first seems to bring to a close the writer’s oeuvre with a narrative returning to his 1974 fiction entitled Reruns. Toni Morrison’s God Save the Child or Cormac McCarthy’s Stella Maris choose to articulate a realm beyond this ending in the intuition of a transcendence. Conversely, A. R. Ammons’ flat writing in his late poems is deliberately aimed at running against the grain of a romantic view of “late style geared toward lyrical epiphany and metaphysical transcendence,” as Juliette Utard underlines in her essay.

6Finally, just as postmodernism drew upon all existing literary genres and styles to give them a contemporary feel and to creatively put them into critical perspective, one could say that this collection offers a striking synthesis of all late styles theorized in the past—a synthesis that Salman Rushdie had long hoped for. Toni Morrison’s late style may evoke the characteristics of late Beethoven’s “irresolution,” “unsynthesized fragmentariness” and “negativity” (Said 12). But it also brings to mind what Georg Simmel saw in “artists of the highest rank,” the production through the natural decline of old age of “their finest and purest work,” “the very greatest, deepest, and most authentic contours” of creativity when “capacities to create forms with sensuous appeal and steadfast dedication to the real begin to fade” (Simmel 236). Don DeLillo’s fictions which have grown thinner over the years might fit this definition, as well as the one offered by John Updike, three years before his own death, when he commented on Herman Melville’s late works: “a way back to an earnest simplicity […] shed of ‘obscuring puppy fat,’ [and] tending to have a translucent thinness” (61). They seem, in fact, to tend, if not toward The Silence, at least since Point Omega (2010), in the direction of the “marvelous” and “alive” dots or lines that painter Hokusai, quoted by Kenneth Mackenzie Clark in his essay “The Artist Grows Old,” related to very old age:

All I have produced before the age of seventy is not worth taking into account. At seventy-three I learned a little about the real structure of nature, of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes and insects. In consequence when I am eighty, I shall have made still more progress. At ninety I shall penetrate the mystery of things; at a hundred I shall certainly have reached a marvelous stage; and when I am a hundred and ten, everything I do, be it a dot or a line, will be alive. I beg those who live as long as I to see if I do not keep my word. Written at the age of seventy-five by me, once Hokusai, to-day Gwakio Rojin, the old man mad about drawing. (85-86)

7As for Burning Boy (2021), the biography of Stephen Crane that Paul Auster wrote three years before his death, it gives “a sense of exile and anachronism” (Said 17) compared to the author’s age and the rest of his works, refutes “the definitive cadences of death” which “appears in a refracted mode, as irony” (Said 24), but meanwhile expresses “an unprecedented freedom” and “an astonishing grace” (Thouard 43-44, our translation), much like Verdi’s late operas that “exude a renewed, almost youthful energy” (Said 6, 7). In his “last manner,” Auster seems not only to abolish the distinction introduced by David Galenson between “young geniuses” and “old masters” but to confirm Henry James’ assertion in his autobiography called The Middle Years that “We are never old, that is we never cease easily to be young” (4).

8Ultimately Cormac McCarthy (because he was the one that first inspired the idea for this dossier and embodies all these qualities) most “attests to an apotheosis of artistic creativity and power” (Said 7), and literally delivers what is commonly called a “swan song.” In Phaedo, Socrates explains that swans, when they are about to die, sing their most resounding and beautiful song because they possess a prophetic gift and foresee the Invisible. The Passenger, in a farewell letter to the world included within its pages, offers an ironic take on this: “I have never thought this life particularly salubrious or benign and I have never understood in the slightest why I was here. If there is an afterlife—and I pray most fervently that there is not—I can only hope that they won't sing” (348). Yet the last two paired works, The Passenger and Stella Maris (2022), appear to come closest to what Antoine Compagnon calls the “plu-perfect” of the works or their “senile sublime,” in reference to what François-René de Chateaubriand wrote in Vie de Rancé regarding Nicolas Poussin’s last painting. They illustrate this phrase: “Often men of genius have heralded their end with masterpieces: it is their soul that flies away” (Chateaubriand 244, our translation). All the essays included in the dossier testify to the final reconciliation, resolution or synthesis of many late style theories and exemplify not so much a single postmodern late style as postmodern late styles, like Adorno’s metaphoric fruit, at times “round and sweet” and otherwise “furrowed, ravaged, bitter and spiny” (564).

9Offering an appropriate starting point into the dossier’s theme, Stephen Burn’s essay begins by highlighting the inherent paradox of this collection—namely, the apparent contradiction that might exist between American literature and “late style,” as works from the New World are generally associated with youth and “meteoric talents” such as Sylvia Plath or David Foster Wallace rather than with authors of “remarkable longevity and productivity” like Robert Coover, Toni Morrison, or Philip Roth. Defining the late phase of postmodernism as the years 1989-2009, he reads John Barth’s Once Upon a Time (1994) as “the earliest late postmodern text” and sees it as “an exemplary case of how a postmodern writer wrestled with form rather than style to explore and at times resist lateness.” Displaying a late form which “invokes polarities to absorb and contain them” with “a forward and backward motion,” “Chaos-informed” or “Koch snowflake” structure, Once Upon a Time, abbreviated to “OUT,” embodies ambivalence by pointing both to the origin of all narrative, fairy tales in particular, and to the exit of its ageing author.

10In the next essay, Sophie Vallas identifies Paul Auster’s (1947–2024) late style not in his last novel, Baumgartner (2023)—in which the eponymous 70-year-old protagonist grapples with old age, physical decline, and the loss of his wife ten years prior—but in the biography he wrote about Stephen Crane which is entitled Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane (2021). Written in a classic, chronological manner, it seems far removed from the postmodern aesthetic that Auster displayed in his work, while relentlessly tapping into the autobiographical vein. It is the fruit of an “old writer in awe of a young writer’s genius,” of one master paying homage to another. Yet, as Sophie Vallas demonstrates, the hand at work is not that of an old man, as Chateaubriand observed regarding the trembling hand of Nicolas Poussin when he painted “The Deluge,” but the vibrant, energetic, and electric hand of a young author “inexperienced yet daring, fearless and willing to try anything”—what Auster calls Crane’s “manyness.” Auster’s late style thus seems to reveal a contradiction: far from being a farewell to life, it expresses a contrary fascination and even a “hunger” for a “burning” and eternal youth that never reaches maturity or old age. “Early style is the new late style,” Sophie Vallas concludes.

11Cormac McCarthy’s last two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, haunted by loss and mourning, contrast with the ebullient spirit of Auster’s Burning Boy. Frédérique Spill analyzes their late style by drawing attention to the two meanings of “late” in English (“final” and “dead”), which, in this author’s work, become indistinguishable. Resonating like an echo chamber with earlier novels—marked by a return to styles and themes already explored in the other fictions—they also present new ideas about the world as well as unprecedented formal experiments and constitute “an ending as well as an opening.” Far from what Kenneth Clark considered late style “isolation,” “holy rage” and “pessimism,” (87) the texts, on the contrary, display an impetuous creativity, “a new restlessness and urgency” (Linda and Michael Hutcheon 60), primarily in the simultaneous publication of two volumes—or “double finale”—that are as “welded” together. Displaying a “gravity and silencing beauty,” they are like “a farewell letter” to the world and offer to the reader what Saul Bellow identified in McCarthy as “his life-giving and death-dealing sentences.”

12To discuss the “late” trilogy of novels published by Thomas Pynchon—Inherent Vice (2009), Bleeding Edge (2013) and Shadow Ticket (2025)—, Sacha Pöhlmann starts with a strong contention against the very notion of late style as articulated by Edward Said, especially when it serves to depreciate the later, supposedly “lighter” work of Pynchon (sometimes labeled “Pynchon Lite”), whose earlier novels, most prominently Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), contributed to defining postmodernism. Pöhlmann argues that “Pynchon’s postmodernism is not the decisive factor in setting apart his late style from whatever preceded it,” although the later works do evince an undeniable stylistic change “marked by a consistent shift into the genre of detective fiction.” Against the idea of a radical rupture after Against the Day (2006) that led some critics to use the label “Pynchon Lite” about the novelist’s subsequent production, Sascha Pöhlmann defines Pynchon’s writing in the crime fiction trilogy as rather characterized by a change in focus “to a different kind of readerly engagement” based on genre expectations and a reduced degree of the “overwhelming multiplicity” of the previous novels. However, by pushing generic conventions into “overdrive,” through aesthetic means that draw on earlier Pynchonian techniques, the crime novels are not Pynchon’s “late style but still very much Pynchon’s style,” inviting us to a readerly experience unhampered by a priori categorizations.

13As opposed to Pöhlmann’s playful skepticism about the critical effectiveness of the notion of “late style,” Étienne Roy’s analysis of Don DeLillo’s The Silence (2020) relies on Edward Said’s criteria to determine the sure signs of lateness in the novel’s stylistic minimalism and thematic reflection on endings. Since The Body Artist (2001), DeLillo has consistently published shorter works characterized by their combined terseness and obliqueness, giving up on the narrative excess of his previous historical fictions such as Libra (1988) or Underworld (1997). In The Silence, the general technological blackout that “silences” all electronic media and tools is a source of fruitless speculation for the five characters gathered in a huis clos situation in a New York apartment. There is no apocalyptic revelation, but only a series of fragmentated, limited dialogues suggesting a collapse of language and communication. DeLillo’s stripped-down nominal sentences and paratactic writing reinforce the haunting sense of an undescribed catastrophe whose reality is not even certain. “Late style” in The Silence is embodied in this double narrative and stylistic exhaustion, as well as in a form of metafictional self-reflexivity verging on a parody of the main features of postmodernist fiction. Through its own end, Roy argues, The Silence might very well postulate the end of all writing.

14As Maud Bougerol shows, metatextual self-consciousness is also a marker of late style in Jonathan Baumbach’s last novel, Dreams of Molly (2011), which is a loose sequel to his highly metafictional Reruns (1974). However, by returning to an earlier work, Baumbach is not just “simultaneously looking backward at his past and at postmodernism.” In Dreams of Molly, the novelist “reshape[s] his literary practice” by redirecting its focus from experimental language play to “affect and the human experience”—a characteristic move, as suggested by Mary K. Holland in Succeeding Postmodernism—which allows him to be “looking toward what comes after postmodernism” and to face “the possibility of death and oblivion in a creative gesture that opens his prose up to new experiments.” Reviewing the postmodern techniques Baumbach uses in Reruns, among which the use of the cinematic trope to problematize the representation of reality, Bougerol argues that “the author’s late style […] merges a posterior reflection on postmodern aesthetics with a radicalization of some of its experiments that, somewhat paradoxically, allow him to distance himself from them.” Close readings of passages from Reruns and Dreams of Molly highlight the nature of the changes in Baumbach’s late writing, which “straddles postmodern and post-postmodern aesthetics” and which exemplifies the writer’s impertinent intimations of immortality beyond his direct confrontation with death—his own and that of postmodernism.

15Concentrating on the poet A. R. Ammons’s final collections, Garbage (1993) and Bosh and Flapdoodle (published posthumously in 2005), Juliette Utard argues that Ammons’s “performance of late style” is anything but “neo-Romantic.” The recent critical reevaluation of late Ammons’ experimental poetics of the everyday as postmodernist calls for “an exploration of his old-age style as a postmodern take on ‘late style’.” Exhaustion is a key notion here, which, related to John Barth’s own description of the exhausted, used-up forms of literature, helps define Ammons’s later works, as Juliette Utard indicates: “[Ammons’s] (mostly comic) exploration of exhausted forms of lyricism […] demonstrates his continued interest in exhaustion as a source of—and paradoxical reactivation of—lyricism in poetry.” Through close textual analyses of several of the texts’ zany poetics, Utard highlights the way Ammons creates a “postmodern comedy of old-age” which “redefines the poem as a low-intensity energy field.” Far from being limited to any lamenting, if often comic, self-contemplation of personal decrepitude, Ammons’s ultimate collection “explores lyrical exhaustion as the barometer not just of a postmodern old age but also of larger concerns about planetary depletion in the age of late capitalism.” Thus, the poet’s postmodern late style is inscribed within a larger than human scale, which paradoxically enhances the acuteness of its lyrical flatness while revealing Ammons’s crucial and deliberate choice to “exit without style.”

16Finally, to define the late style that Toni Morrison employs in her last novel, God Help the Child (2015), Claudine Raynaud chooses the term “allegory.” She attempts to understand the various critical reactions to this text—its didacticism, its lack of character development, and its supposed superficiality—and draws upon the meaning that Fredric Jameson ascribes to allegory in Allegory and Ideology (2019) to elucidate them. Allegory is understood as a crisis in representation that contradicts ideology, itself conceptualized as a fiction of harmony or an imaginary resolution of contradictions. By conversely depicting “a fractured social world while holding its fragments together,” allegory stands as an alternative to ideology and a “coping strategy.” Claudine Raynaud then demonstrates how the allegorical style of God Help the Child, while acknowledging the irrepresentability of evil in the world and its futility, draws on intratextuality by revisiting all the themes previously addressed in the work—such as child abuse, beauty, colorism, mother-daughter relationships, and racial trauma—but in a condensed and stripped-down manner.

17The eight essays gathered here present contrasted, sometimes diametrically opposed views of late style the relevance of which is debated and, for some, debatable. To what extent can it be a useful critical category for approaching the specificities of the later works written by those authors who were in the spotlight of the postmodernist literary scene in the second half of the 20^th century? The diverse novels and poems analyzed in the dossier cover a whole spectrum of variations in “late styles”—illustrating the pliability and the hermeneutic—if not heuristic— value of the notion. Or could “late style” be only a “fable for critics” (to borrow the title of James Russell Lowell’s 1848 satirical poem, which the reluctantly postmodernist novelist William Gaddis liked to quote)—another critical fiction trying to come to terms with the question of why writers write and keep on writing sometimes to the very end— a question to which, in a short text published in 1989, Robert Coover listed twenty-three alphabetically arranged possible answers, including the four below:

Because art blows life into the lifeless, death into the deathless.
[…]
Because death, our mirthless master, is somehow amused by epitaphs.
Because epitaphs, well-struck, give death, our voracious master, heartburn.
[…]
And because, alas, what else? (17)