“Does one grow wiser with age,” Edward Said ponders in the book “On Late Style” (2006); “and are there unique qualities of perception and form,” he continues, “that artists acquire as a result of age in the late phase of their career?” Usually, Said argues, we think of late artistic works as the crowning achievements of a career; works that exude resolution, serenity, harmony. Old age is accompanied by an acute awareness that the late artistic work is at the same time the artist’s final word; a finality that requires old scores to be settled, debts repaid or reclaimed. Beyond the late artistic work, there is nothing but silence. 

In Sophocles’ late play “Oedipus at Colonus” (ca. 406 B.C.), we find the character Oedipus finally at peace with himself and his surroundings in his old age. Oedipus discovers the blessings of peace and forgiveness near the end of a life so harrowing and terrifying that we still consider it as the template of tragedy today. The image of an aged character attaining wisdom and maturity at the end of a tragic life is a perennial artistic theme ― in novels, paintings, operas, and plays ― from Sophocles to our times. Edward Said, however, is interested in an alternative artistic vision of old age ― old age “not as harmony and resolution but as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction.” This is a vision of lateness ― a late style, as Said calls it ― that is unconcerned about creating, forming, shaping; a vision obsessed with the destructive gestures of breaking down, tearing apart, erasing. Imbued with such a vision, the artist destroys the organic totality of his or her art work in an attempt to release an anarchic, disharmonic, and negative energy that refuses to be reconciled with the continuity of reality ― its lateness. The awareness of the approaching ― and very real ― end prompts an intensified process of artistic self-reflection, but one that does not lead to aesthetic synthesis or transcendence. On the contrary, Said argues, it is a process that reveals the “too late”: too late to re-establish and tie up the overall meaning, perhaps too late even to care. Late style, Said observes, articulates the artist’s “mature subjectivity, stripped of hubris and pomposity, unashamed either of its fallibility or of the modest assurance it has gained as a result of age and exile.”

Aging and exile are central themes in the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s penultimate work “John Gabriel Borkman” (1896). The play stages the life of a former bank manager, John Gabriel Borkman, who spent eight years in prison for illegally investing the bank’s money in property development. The play begins eight years after Borkman has been released from prison. Sixteen years have thus passed since his disgraceful downfall, yet Borkman still waits, illusorily, for people to realize that they need him to lead the bank again ― an expectation that attests to his deluded sense of reality.

Largely forgotten by everyone, Borkman has not been forgotten by time; nor has he forgotten time. Among the play’s characters, it is he who most explicitly expresses an uneasy awareness of time’s passing: “time passes; the years pass; life ― ah no ― I daren’t think of that!” Yearning for his old position as bank manager ― as a visionary entrepreneur in the real world ― Borkman has isolated himself in his room, an enclosed space in which he pathologically re-enacts the great moments of his past; the time when he was still “John Gabriel Borkman ― and no one else.” While everything around him has changed mercilessly, Borkman desperately attempts to freeze time. It is a futile endeavor: the signs of time infallibly mark his ageing body, increasingly exposing the shape of a confused old man. When people knock on his door, it is no longer the hero of the drama “John Gabriel Borkman” who receives them, but merely an aged man playing this role. Time condemns Borkman to play-acting, to impersonate himself, his own character; however, a “whole life-time lies between” the youthful “John Gabriel Borkman” of the past and the aging character we encounter in the play.

Edward Said argues that late style “is what happens if art does not abdicate its rights in favor of reality.” It is a form of excess, a transgression of what is normal ― normal progression ― a sense of “being at the end, fully conscious, full of memory, and also very … aware of the present.” Late style articulates the artist’s rebellion against time running out. To Said, Ibsen’s late works “suggest an angry and disturbed artist for whom the medium provides an occasion to stir up more anxiety, tamper irrevocably with the possibilities of closure, and leave the audience more perplexed and unsettled than before.” “John Gabriel Borkman” is a play that rules out any possibility of harmonic closure; it is a play in which traditional artistic endings have become illusory ― just as illusory as Borkman’s last, desperate, and unreconciled howl of a vision somewhere on a desolate mountain hill where he finally dies after having ventured out into reality one last time.

In an essay entitled “The Art of Growing Old,” an anonymous author reflects that old age, “in theory, demands respect, veneration, and even admiration.” In reality however, the author adds, old age “suffers contempt, ridicule, and neglect.” Borkman’s last vision on the mountain hill is a fiery rejection of the untimeliness of old age, the natural passing of time that transforms the great hero into an impersonator. The play’s ending leaves everything unfinished, for the characters as well as for John Gabriel Borkman the drama. Above all, it leaves everything awkwardly insignificant: there is no dramatic after-life, no questions to be answered, no sequels, let alone new beginnings. When we reach the ending of the play, issues of anagnorisis, remorse, motives, guilt, and morals have lost their meaning in the cold winter night that surrounds Borkman’s death ― not because all has been resolved, but because it is too late to pursue anything further. It is as if nothing really matters once the play’s late style has exhausted itself. “John Gabriel Borkman” is a defiant revolt against this experience of lateness, and ultimately against death itself; a refusal ― in Dylan Thomas’ words ― to “go gentle into that good night.”

By Eli Park Sorensen

Eli Park Sorensen is an assistant professor in the College of Liberal Studies at Seoul National University. He specializes in comparative literature, postcolonial thought and cultural studies. ― Ed.