Late works as a laboratory: Jean-Jacques Schuhl and Simon Liberati

Creativity and Pathology

Old age in literature has traditionally been framed as a phase of final reckoning, waning energy, or wise serenity. In the works published in 2022 by Jean-Jacques Schuhl (The appearances) and Simon Liberati (Performance However, we encounter a distinctly different paradigm: the “aging creator.” Here, advanced age—Schuhl wrote his work at 81, Liberati at 71—does not merely serve as a backdrop to decline, but as the driving force behind narrative and aesthetic reformulation. Physical infirmities, chronic illnesses, and the immediate confrontation with mortality become a “matter of thought” that compels new shifts in energy and formal reconfigurations. While Schuhl pursues a poetics of receptivity and withdrawal, in which the self recedes behind a dense network of quotations and appearances, Liberati relies on an actively transgressive aesthetic that derives its “diabolical power” from the conscious surrender to physical and moral decay. Both authors thus demonstrate how the “weapons and tricks of art” can be employed to transform biological finitude into aesthetic intensity.

Jean-Jacques Schuhl's narrator in The appearances Schuhl presents himself as a limping "ghost author" with a fading face, suspended between life and death. A severe internal hemorrhage leads to cerebral hypoxia, a lack of oxygen in the brain, which triggers five hypnotic "apparitions"—autonomous, menacing blocks of reality with an insistent presence. In a poetics of receptivity, Schuhl allows the self to disappear behind an incessant montage of fragments, newspaper clippings, and quotations, ultimately writing "with the ink of others." Old age appears here as a process of increasing transparency, in which the author becomes a mere relay for the world's images, while his own face dissolves beyond recognition in the mirrors of the clinic.

Simon Liberatis Performance In contrast, it unfolds an actively transgressive dynamic. The 71-year-old protagonist, trapped in the ruins of his body after a stroke, is jolted out of his lethargy by an unexpected commission—a screenplay about the Rolling Stones' wild years (1967–1969). The work connects his own decline with the tragedy surrounding Brian Jones and gains additional energy from his scandalous relationship with his 23-year-old stepdaughter, Esther. Her youthful "devilish beauty" serves as a projection screen for a desire that vampirically resists the approaching end. Liberati cultivates a "sinister pleasure" in decay and uses incontinence and physical pain as levers to reactivate a visceral, provocative art.

Both novels share the literary concept of "transfusion," whether as a medical necessity or a stylistic principle. Schuhl injects his text with "bursts of poetry" to electrify a dwindling prose, while Liberati uses the biographies of rock icons as an infusion for his own fragile identity. In this late style, the imagination operates beyond harmony or plausibility; it becomes a means of transformation, converting disintegration into aesthetic form. In a multi-layered mise en abyme, the characters reflect the suffering of their creators, making writing itself an "escape forward."

Ultimately, both works define aging as a space of paradoxical vitality. For Schuhl, this culminates in the vision of a "completely synthetic" novel without any original dialogue; for Liberati, in the aesthetic ennoblement of the ugliness of old age. In their respective radicalism, both demonstrate that the literary engagement with decay is not a dead end, but rather a laboratory in which new forms of aesthetic intensity emerge. Schuhl's fragmented silence and Liberati's aggressive splendor thus mark a turning point in the literature of aging, where the retreat or exaggeration of the self itself becomes an aesthetic gain.

Jean-Jacques Schuhl: The Poetics of Transfusion and the Vanishing Face

Jean-Jacques Schuhl's narrator in The appearances He presents himself as an almost ghostly figure, a "ghost author" physically marked by a limp ("boiter") and an "incomplete face, in the process of being erased." This experience of depersonalization is closely linked to his literary method, which Schuhl himself describes as "incessant montage" or "transfusion of style." He breaks with the concept of the genius creator, who ex nihilo creates, and instead relies on collecting and reassembling fragments:

For Schuhl, this writing with the "ink of others" becomes an existential survival strategy. He uses literary concepts such as the palimpsest or the cut-up to construct his text as a body on which he operates like a "microsurgeon," making incisions, performing transplants, and suturing. The paper becomes skin, the quotation a life-saving infusion. For him, art is not the expression of the self, but rather, to use T.S. Eliot's words, an "escape from oneself" ("l'échappée hors de soi-même").

The novel's central event, a severe internal hemorrhage leading to cerebral hypoxia (oxygen deprivation in the brain), acts as the physiological trigger for the titular "apparitions." These apparitions—autonomous blocks of reality with a powerful presence—are not perceived by the narrator as dreams or hallucinations, but rather as external "facts" imposed upon him in a state of extreme vulnerability. Schuhl develops a play of transparency here, which he calls "see-through": images overlap, like a photograph of Mao Zedong gradually transforming into a pin-up model. In this perspective, aging appears as a process of increasing porosity, in which the self becomes a relay station for the images of the world.

The confrontation with old age becomes particularly striking in the reflection on Albrecht Dürer. While the young narrator still identified himself arrogantly with Dürer's proud self-portrait, in old age he recognizes only the kinship with the "crumpled, formless face" of the master's late engravings. Here, the face becomes a "chaos in which the features no longer adhere to the skin," a "total disastrous" that expresses the melancholy of old age as "pride and punishment" (Orgueil et Châtiment) allegorized. Art is the desperate attempt to insert forms between oneself and death, to depict death in order to, in a sense, draw it to one's own side.

Simon Liberati: The Diabolical Performance of Decay

In contrast to Schuhl's melancholic receptiveness, Simon Liberati presents in Performance an active-voluntaristic imagination that derives its power precisely from the conscious transgression of boundaries. Its narrator, a 71-year-old writer who, after a stroke (CVA) struggling with the ruin of his body, finds a new creative intensity through a commission via the Rolling Stones. The pathology – incontinence, cancer, the “abominable substances” (immonde matièresThe aging process is not discreetly concealed here; it is used as leverage to regain a visceral grasp of the world. Liberati cultivates a "dark pleasure" in his own demise.

The central source of inspiration for Liberati's work is the protagonist's scandalous, almost incestuous relationship with his 23-year-old stepdaughter, Esther. This connection is described as the driving force behind his creation; his love for very young women reveals a beauty "of clearer water," which grants the aging man a new raison d'être. He describes his aging as a parasitic process in which he, as it were, "absorbs" his partner's youth to compensate for his own dwindling vitality. Here, the literary concept of decadence comes into play: beauty is elevated as an absolute value above goodness, life, and happiness. It is a Faustian pact in which the contemplation of beauty is bought at the "price of the soul."

Liberati's writing style is characterized by a masterful mise en abyme: While the narrator is writing a screenplay about the Rolling Stones from 1967 to 1969, he identifies so profoundly with Brian Jones's decline that the boundaries between author and character blur. The Stones' past—marked by drugs, sex, and betrayal—serves as a hall of mirrors for the narrator's own agony. His imagination is a "diabolical force" that uses opium to contact the spirit of the deceased Anita Pallenberg and to explore "spiritual amusement parks." For him, aging is not a time of gentleness; rather, it is a "flight forward."

Aesthetic strategies of the late style: commonalities and breaks

Despite their contrasting approaches—Schuhl's subversion through passivity versus Liberati's self-empowerment through transgression—both authors share essential characteristics of a literary-critically defined "late style." This style is characterized not by harmony or reconciliation, but by fragmentation, sharpness, and the relentless confrontation with mortality. Both works utilize autobiographical elements and overlay them with fictional narratives, making them outstanding examples of autofiction.

A crucial concept that explains both styles is intertextuality as a life-giving principle. Schuhl uses quotations from other authors to electrify his own "languishing prose," the quotation acting like a transplant that keeps the text alive. Liberati, in turn, uses the biographies of the Rolling Stones as an "infusion" for his own identity, meticulously reconstructing details from old accounts to fill his own emptiness. In both cases, the author's "I" is stabilized or even recreated through the incorporation of other people's existences. Old age thus becomes a phase of radical porosity, in which the boundaries between self and world, between medical reality and literary fiction, become permeable.

Imagination performs the crucial work of transformation: it transmutes the "impure substances" of decay into aesthetic signs. For Schuhl, imagination acts as an involuntary seismograph of the body, which, in the pathological experience of hypoxia, receives an "alternative reality." For Liberati, it is a transgressive tool that distills a "dark joy" and a higher aesthetic truth from personal suffering and moral failure. Here, aging provides the radical freedom to transcend conventional plausibilities and moral constraints.

Jean-Jacques Schuhls The appearances and Simon Liberatis Performance These novels can be read as exemplary, yet radically contrasting, late works of contemporary French literature. Both novels address the aging, ailing writer and take physical decline as the starting point for literary reflection. However, while they converge in their diagnosis of old age as an aesthetic crisis zone, they develop diametrically opposed stylistic, metaphorical, and autopoetological responses to this experience. It is precisely in comparison that it becomes clear that late-life literature should not be understood as a unified late style, but rather as an open field of diverging aesthetic strategies.

Stylistic economy and linguistic excess

Stylistically embodied The appearances A poetics of reduction and permeability. Schuhl's prose is fragmentary, elliptical, montage-like. It largely dispenses with narrative coherence, psychological depth, or expressive embellishment. The text seems thinned out, as if the act of writing itself has adapted to physical and cognitive decline. This formal withdrawal, however, is part of a consistent aesthetic program. The narrator describes himself as a "phantom writer" and expresses the wish that things might happen to him "without me." Writing here no longer means shaping the world; it means registering perception. Style acts as a membrane through which images, quotations, and impressions pass without being controlled by the subject.

Liberatis Performance It follows the opposite impulse. The style is expansive, insistent, and emotionally charged. Repetitions, provocative statements, and emphatic confessions create a tone of exaggeration. Illness and age do not lead to linguistic retraction, but rather to an escalation of expression. The text aims to overwhelm, irritate, and attack. Writing appears as a counter-offensive against biological decay, as a last resort to generate intensity. While Schuhl stylistically dissolves the self, Liberati asserts it all the more vehemently. Here, the late work becomes the stage for a linguistic self-surpassing.

Metaphorical self-conceptions of the aging body

These stylistic differences correspond to fundamentally different metaphorical conceptions of the body. The appearances The aging body functions as a defective medium. Hypoxia, bleeding, and physical weakness are not primarily experiences of suffering; they are conditions of altered perception. The central metaphors are drawn from the visual realm: film, documentary, reportage, transparency. The so-called "apparitions" appear as autonomous visual events that befall the narrator without their creation. The body thus becomes a projection apparatus that filters reality differently. It is neither a site of desire nor of self-representation, but a technical device that enables and simultaneously distorts perception.

In Performance In contrast, the body becomes a stage for aesthetic truth. Liberati ostentati displays illness, decay, and physical shame. Enuresis, cancer, and exhaustion are not neutralized; they are staged as signs of radical authenticity. The ruined body acts as an argument: those who have gone this far believe themselves to be closer to the truth. Metaphorically, the struggle, the duel with death, the performance as the ultimate staging of the self, dominates. The body is not a medium, it is a stage; not a filter, but rather proof. Age is not interpreted as a loss, but displayed as an intensification of aesthetic impact.

Autopoetics of late writing

These different body metaphors result in contrasting autopoetics. The appearances He formulates a poetics of self-disempowerment. The narrator emphasizes that he possesses no imagination in the classical sense and rejects the notion of creative sovereignty. Writing here is montage, quotation, observation. Originality arises not from invention, but rather from the specific arrangement of borrowed materials. Authorship dissolves into process. The late work appears as writing after the self, not from within it. Paradoxically, creativity arises from the loss of control and intentionality.

Performance In contrast, it develops an autopoetics of ultimate sovereignty. Precisely because the body fails, writing claims absolute freedom. The narrator elevates beauty to the highest category, placing it above morality, life, and happiness. Literature here claims a zone of exception where everything is permitted. Writing becomes self-rescue, the aesthetic legitimization of scandal, the last resort for exercising power over one's own existence. Autopoetologically, it is Performance A late work of presumption: The subject refuses to disappear and instead escalates into a radical self-assertion.

In comparison, show The appearances and Performance That literary works of old age do not adhere to a homogeneous paradigm. In writing, old age can become a zone of maximum reduction or maximum aggression. Schuhl and Liberati mark the two poles of this spectrum: here, the disappearance of the self in perception and montage; there, its hypertrophic self-staging under the sign of desire and transgression. Both texts share a rejection of mellowing with age, reconciliation, or taking stock. Old age does not appear as an end; it appears as an extreme aesthetic zone in which literature radicalizes its forms. In this sense, both novels are works of the highest formal and poetological consistency not despite, but precisely because of, their late date of composition.

Creative aging as a radical act

It can thus be determined that both The appearances as well as most Performance Understanding aging as a phase of heightened creative intensity, deriving its urgency precisely from the proximity to death, replaces the "demonization" of old age as a mere burden with a redefinition of the self's relationship to the world. Schuhl and Liberati demonstrate that the experience of illness and decay gives rise to new narrative forms that fundamentally transform literary creation. In Schuhl's fragmented collage and Liberati's aggressive transgression, "aging creatively" manifests itself as a radical form of artistic truth that definitively dissolves the boundary between the biographical and the aesthetic.

Old age thus becomes the site of a radical experiment with reality, in which the self is allowed to disappear (Schuhl) only to be resurrected as an "old magician" with "fragments of old power" in another dimension (Liberati). The novels illustrate that the "weapons and tricks of art" are capable of transforming biological decline into a powerful "matter of thought." Ultimately, it is the imagination that, in the face of mortality, opens up the possibility of staging one's own disappearance as an aesthetic gain and discovering new, enigmatic forms of vitality in the process of decay. From this perspective, aging itself becomes a creative act that does not deny mortality but rather uses it as the most precious material for creating lasting beauty.