Our examination of the ends of literature led us first to reflect on the cessation of activity : when and how does one stop ? The swan song is a metaphor for the end of an individual's career, but also for the end of an entire art form, the end of art : for Broch, modern literature is a " swan song out of all proportion ". Simmel and Adorno have valorized the notion of late style, establishing a canon of the senile sublime with the last works of Rembrandt, Beethoven and Goethe. A style is late if it breaks with the epoch: these elderly artists foreshadow their successors. Finally, Galenson highlights a distinction between conceptualist artists and experimentalists : it's easier to grow old for experimentalists, who advance little by little. Some of them wait until the last moment to rebel against their work, even : this is late style or senile sublime.
Broch invited himself into this search with La Mort de Virgile. The work's thematic content denounces language and literature : the masterpiece leads to silence. But bankruptcy also suggests rebirth. The sublime ending becomes a prophecy of a new cycle. Joyce and Kafka are bearers of an uncertainty between final end and new beginning. Their works fuel a new myth of literature, without which it would no longer exist. Kafka, above all, has a presentiment of a new cosmogony. For Sartre, the end consists in deciding to stop, or more precisely, in agreeing to stop, and in breaking with his past work. For Malraux, the great collective styles follow the cycle of life : they are born, reproduce and then die. The talent of painters knows no death. The late style is the supreme embodiment in the fading of what one was in maturity. In the bouquet of flowers in Velasquez's painting L'infante Marguerite en robe rose , Malraux guesses the last Manet.
