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.