LATE WORKS.(William Shakespeare)

Last words, recorded and treasured in the days when the deathbed was in the home, have fallen from fashion, perhaps because most people spend their final hours in the hospital, too drugged to make any sense. And only the night nurse hears them talk. Yet, at least for this aging reader, works written late in a writer's life retain a fascination. They exist, as do last words, where life edges into death, and perhaps have something uncanny to tell us. In 1995, the critic, teacher, and journalist Edward W. Said, best known for his pro-Palestinian advocacy, taught at Columbia a popular course called "Last Works/Late Style." Until his untimely death, of leukemia, in 2003, he was working on a collection of essays and lectures relevant to the topic; this assemblage, edited and introduced by Michael Wood with the cooperation of Said's widow, has now been published by Pantheon under the title "On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain" ($25). Said's central idea, set forth in the first chapter, comes from the German philosopher Theodor Adorno (1903-69), who wrote extensively, with an agitated profundity, on Beethoven's late works. Adorno found in the disharmonies and disjunctions of these works a refusal of bourgeois order, an "idea of surviving beyond what is acceptable and normal." In his own not easily understandable words, possibly clearer in the original German:

Objective is the fractured landscape, subjective the light in which--alone--it glows into life. He [Beethoven] does not bring about their harmonious synthesis. As the power of dissociation, he tears them apart in time, in order perhaps, to preserve them for the eternal. In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes.

In Beethoven's case, the catastrophe was fruitful; Adorno credited his late style with presaging the innovations of Schoenberg, whose "advanced music has no recourse but to insist on its own ossification without concession to that would-be humanitarianism which it sees through." Adorno writes from within a sardonically modern, anti-bourgeois mind-set that welcomes dissociation, catastrophe, and affronts to harmony and humanitarianism. Thus art, at least modern art, makes itself new. Adorno decreed, "The power of subjectivity in the late works of art is the irascible gesture with which it takes leave of the works themselves."

The artists Said cites in "On Late Style" are predominantly composers and, in a chapter centered on Glenn Gould, performers. Said, an accomplished pianist and, among his other activities, music critic for The Nation, had an insatiable appetite for musical performances and, though he disclaims a musicologist's competence, an extensive and technical grasp of music. Beethoven, Mozart, Richard Strauss, Bach: among learned discussions of all these only a few writers are considered at any length, and they--the Sicilian aristocrat Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the French criminal Jean Genet, the Greek Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy--are valued for their "against the grain" qualities of eccentricity and intransigence. A different list of literary performers would be needed for an inventory of late works that answer, perhaps, to what another literature professor, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, has termed the "senile sublime." Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in her book "Touching Feeling" (2003), uses the phrase to describe

various more or less intelligible performances by old brilliant people, whether artists, scientists, or intellectuals, where the bare outlines of a creative idiom seem finally to emerge from what had been the obscuring puppy fat of personableness, timeliness, or sometimes even of coherent sense.

A sacrifice of, or impatience with, "coherent sense," as well as the requisite irascibility and what Said calls "highlighting and dramatizing . . . irreconcilabilities," can certainly be ascribed to the shimmering late works of Shakespeare, an artistic titan on Beethoven's scale. Lateness came early to both, both dead in their fifties.

After the composition of Shakespeare's last tragedies--the opulent, spacious "Antony and Cleopatra" (1606-1607), the cold, rhetorically contorted "Coriolanus" (1607-08), and the rough-hewn, one-note "Timon of Athens" (1607-08)--there is a slackening, as if something had snapped. "Timon of Athens," apparently unfinished and unproduced, has been thought by some speculative scholars to mark a personal crisis for the writer; no less measured a source than the Encyclopaedia Britannica perceived "a clear gulf" between it and the four plays that follow. These plays--"Pericles" (1607-08), "Cymbeline" (1609-1610), "The Winter's Tale" (1610-11), and "The Tempest" (1611)--are commonly grouped together and called romances. Their form is a crowd-pleasing one, still in wide use: the audience, after witnessing many travails and perils, arrives at a happy, if implausible, ending--storms, terrors, and confusions give way to recognitions, reunions, forgiveness, and reconciliation. But a silvery chill blows through these romances, a deliberate and, at times, brazen use of stage artifice.