Late Style, between Theodor Adorno and Mulk Raj Anand

Abstract

This essay positions the figure and thought of T.W. Adorno in relation to Mulk Raj Anand, and the latter’s foundational contributions to the modern Indian novel in English. In Adorno’s musical writings, “late style” features as a methodological premise, or an expository mode that removes the work from conventional norms of evaluation (including periodization, biography and context). Late style is directed especially toward canonized works that seem to lack current artistic or social relevance, despite their culturally privileged standing. The essay approaches Adorno and Anand, accordingly: Their affiliations with European modernism and postcolonial realism, respectively, are read in late style, or, as largely obsoleted formations of the previous century. Focussing on Anand’s historical fiction, Across the Black Waters (1936), my essay recuperates the novel’s vision of a single if internally differentiated twentieth-century: By imagining the Great War as world-historical crisis, Anand’s novel stages the spaces of continental Europe and an emergent postcolonial nation, together, as the map of an intertwined yet unequal modernity. Today, the obsolescence of Anand’s world-view features as an apposite image for global forces of commodification, rapid cultural aging, and loss of context. Anand’s style attests less to its origins in colonial realism than to the possibilities of a contemporary aesthetic of disintegration — or what Adorno hails as an enactment of the “loss of content” that now inheres in our very understanding of social reality.

Keywords:

• Late style
• Mulk Raj Anand
• the Great War
• parataxis
• epic syntax
• colonial realism
• mimicry
• Adorno and Balzac
• disintegrative realism

Notes

1. See Neil Lazarus, “Hating Tradition Properly,” New Formations 38 (summer 1999): 9–30; Deepika Bahri, Native Intelligence: Aesthetics, Politics and Postcolonial Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); and Amir Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 2007.

2. “Savages are not more Noble” is referenced at length by both Lazarus and Mufti; See Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia (London: Verso, 2002), 52.

3. N. Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 149.

4. Theodor W. Adorno, “Alienated Masterpiece: The Missa Solemnis,” in Essays on Music, trans. Susan H. Gillespie, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

5. M. R. Anand, Across the Black Waters (New Delhi: Orient Books, 2000).

6. Arif Dirlik, “Global Modernity? Modernity in an Age of Global Capitalism,” European Journal of Social Theory 6.3 (2003): 281–82.

7. Ibid., 282.

8. Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven,” in Essays on Music, 564, 567.

9. Adorno, “Alienated Masterpiece: The Missa Solemnis,” in Essays on Music, 574, 566.

10. Timothy Bewes, The Event of Postcolonial Shame (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 83.

11. Edward Said, “Adorno as Lateness Itself,” in Adorno: A Critical Reader, ed. Nigel Gibson and Andrew Rubin (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 193.

12. There were only two performances of the Missa Solemnis during the composer’s lifetime, and one of these was abbreviated.

13. Leila Rosenthal, “Between Humanism and Late Style,” in Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation, ed. Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 43.

14. Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 24.

15. Bewes, The Event of Postcolonial Shame, 82.

16. Theodor W. Adorno, “Alienated Masterpiece: The Missa Solemnis,” 569.

17. Despite being associated with the canonical authority of Anand, the work’s eclipse from national memory is striking, given that it is the only extended fiction of the Great War in twentieth-century Anglophonic Indian literature.

18. Theodor W. Adorno, “Extorted Reconciliation: On Gyorg Lukács’ Realism in Our Time,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 1, trans. Shierry Nicholsen, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).

19. Gyorg Lukacs, Realism in Our Time Literature and the Class Struggle (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 23. The work was translated into English as Realism in Our Time in 1964 in the United States, at the height of the Cold War.

20. Adorno, “Reading Balzac,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 1, 126, 125.

21. Ibid., 155.

22. For an extended account, see Michael J. Thompson, “Introduction: Recovering Lukács’ Relevance for the Present,” in Georg Lukács Reconsidered: Critical Essays in Politics Philosophy and Aesthetics, ed. Michael H. Thompson (New York: Continuum, 2011), 126, 155, 136, 126, 132, 126, 127.

23. Mulk Raj Anand, “On the Progressive Writers’ Movement,” in The Marxist Cultural Movement in India, ed. S. Pradhan, vol. 1 (Calcutta: National Book Agency, 1979), 20–21.

24. Ulka Anjaria, “Staging Realism and the Ambivalence of Nationalism in the Colonial Novel,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 44.2 (2011): 188. See Anjaria for a fuller account.

25. Anand, “On the Progressive Writers’ Movement,” 21.

26. See S. R. Bald, “Politics of a Revolutionary Elite: A Study of Mulk Raj Anand’s Novels,” Modern Asian Studies 8. 4 (October 1974): 473–89.

27. Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colonies, 184.

28. See J. Cleary, “Realism after Modernism and the Literary World-System,”Modern Language Quarterly 73.3 (2012): 255–68.

29. Anjaria, “Staging Realism,” 188.

30. Ibid.

31. Anand, Across the Black Waters, 7, 14.

32. The Indian Corps landed in Marseilles on 26 September 1914, less than six weeks after the declaration of war on Germany by the British, forming, at the time, the largest standing volunteer force in the world.

33. Anand, Across the Black Waters, 7.

34. Theodor W. Adorno, “Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry,” and “On Epic Naiveté,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 2, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

35. Adorno, “Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry,” 135, 136.

36. Adorno, “On Epic Naiveté,” 136.

37. Anand, Across the Black Waters, 113, 11, 167, 152.

38. Ibid., 178; Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004), 91.

39. Adorno, “Alienated Masterpiece: The Missa Solemnis,” 576, 575.

40. Bewes, “The Shame of Belatedness: Late Style in V.S. Naipaul,” in The Event of Postcolonial Shame, 94.

41. Adorno, “Alienated Masterpiece: The Missa Solemnis,” 576.

42. Adorno, “Reading Balzac,” 128.

43. Anand, Across the Black Waters, 123, 129, 130, 148, 133.

44. Ibid., 125, 264, 142.

45. Adorno, “Reading Balzac,” 127.

46. Anand, Across the Black Waters, 149.

47. Anand, Across the Black Waters, 125, 119, 264.

48. Adorno, “Reading Balzac,” 128.

49. Anjaria, “Staging Realism,” 188.

50. Adorno, “Reading Balzac,” 126.