There are no authors of brick walls or cabinet furniture: only bricklayers and cabinetmakers, tradesmen or artisans. So we can begin by saying that an author is not a tradesman or an artisan. Even if an author can occupy one or both of these subject positions, s/he is not confined by them. An author, that is to say, transcends the base subject categories of tradesman/craftsman/technician/artisan to occupy an exalted position in discourses on manufacturing. A tradesman 'makes' or 'assembles'; an author 'creates' or 'produces.' The one is condemned to repetition; the other aspires to originality.
But why this beginning? The issue of what constitutes an author, or of how 'the author' is constituted, has been a topic of considerable debate in recent decades. It is now virtually a matter of strict observance that the author is rethought of as an author-function, thereby displacing the humanist 'genius' - model which is immanent in the hierarchicization alluded to in my opening paragraph. Yet the question remains: why make any reference to this model at all? What does this have to do with my title? In practice, the debate on problems of authorship has so far largely been restricted to the domains of literature and cinema. It has not yet turned its attention to the domain of pop music and asked of the 'author' of the pop song the same questions it has put to the 'author' of the novel or film. This, at any rate, is part of the answer. The rest has to do with what 'Elvis Costello' signifies in discourses on pop music: obliquely, but at the same time first and foremost, its signified is the author.
Elvis Costello is frequently referred to as a 'genius' in his field, awarding him the kind of status in pop music which is bestowed on the likes of Patrick White and Jane Austen in humanist discourses on the novel. While it seems only commonsensical to refer to novelists as authors, however, the homonymy does not extend its self-evidence to pop stars. For these the most common appellation is 'artist.' Nevertheless, it is as the author that an artist' such as Elvis Costello is constituted. How and where is he
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so constituted? Doubtless, through and in the music press, since his access to video exposure on television and high-rotation airplay on radio is severely limited by the electronic media's reluctance to accept 'Elvis Costello' as a bankable name. (Of course, such reluctance - effecting as it does Costello's absence from television and radio - only reinforces his status as an author.)
Where is this taking us? It is clear from the foregoing that the subject category of the author in pop music is an institutional formation. In Costello's case, it is the institution of the music press through and in which his name is constituted as a sign of 'author.' But institutions do not exist in a discursive vacuum. Although it is true that the music press (especially in the form of such magazines as The Face, Rolling Stone, and New Musical Express) is the most important locus for the formation of the author in pop, it is also true that the press itself is a site upon which other discursive regularities are at work. In short, the pop music press has inherited and thereafter reproduced a pervasive social discourse on art which is imbued with humanist articulations of the individual as 'origin' and as the 'creator' of meaning. A discourse which denies its status as discourse. Its effects are most evident at the 'highest' level: commentaries on The Author. Implicated in these commentaries is the idea of authorship as central to the interpretation of texts, itself an idea which borrows from the notion that language is an expressive medium capable of communicating the experiences and intentions of an individual. But not only 'language' per se, of course, for paintings, films, and pop songs are all accorded an expressive function and capability by criticism and society in general. It follows from this that the purpose of reading (a novel, painting, film, or pop song) is to recover the intentions of an author.
Such is the logic which informs a reading by Danny Kelly of Elvis Costello's recent version of 'Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood,' a song which became a hit for The Animals in 1965:
... (anyone) with two ears knows that Costello's last LP, Goodbye Cruel World, was his worst ... Since that, rumours (too difficult to substantiate, too persistent to ignore) have pulsed endlessly along music's bush telegraph. They tell of a troubled love life, of a drink problem, and of an artistic stone wall ... So what does Elvis Costello choose to record and issue into the teeth of this gale but a version of an undisguised knees-bent plea for compassion, for a breathing space, for a ray of hope. And what a version! This is a funereal dirge, devoid of anything but the red raw edge of Costello's gravelly, wires-bared
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delivery. As a single, as a piece of pop, it's hopeless, hence the assertion that, consciously or otherwise, it's a harrowed howl for help (Kelly, 1986:19).
The subjacent assumptions here are too numerous to deal with all at once. Let it suffice for the moment to note that Elvis Costello - and not the song - is under review. It is because of rumoured troubles in Costello's career and personal life that a reading of the song as 'a harrowed howl for help' is rendered permissible, that indeed it is legitimated as self-evident. Thus the performer has been made homonymous with the T of the song: 'I'm just a soul whose intentions are good / Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood.' The pronoun is the singer, in a way that would not be necessarily so if the singer were Elton John, perhaps, or George Michael. What makes Elvis Costello different? In a word, it is the capacity of his name to function in discourses on pop music as an index of author. At which point it's high time we addressed a couple of burning questions.
1. What is an Author?
From where does a theorem come? Whence a novel? These questions are only of concern to us insofar as they can be answered thus: a theorem comes from other theorems but a novel from the heart and mind and soul, the life experience, the hopes, the dreams, the fears of a unique individual. Newton could have been anybody. What does it take but a high IQ to think up the law of gravity? But Jane Austen: only she could have written Pride and Prejudice because it comes from her soul and no
other's.
So let us propose as a working definition that an author is someone who lays bare a self - an irreplaceable self - regardless of whatever objections we might want to raise against the discourse which renders this definition 'obvious.' Accordingly, then, Pride and Prejudice has an author but the law of gravity does not. We could even take this further to maintain that the more 'formulaic' the novel, the less likely it is to be authored in the strictest sense of 'laying bare a self.' Thus Dr. No carries the name of Ian Hemming on the title-page who is responsible for the text in the way that a bricklayer is responsible for a brick wall, but he is not an author. The same would apply to writers of detective novels, science fiction, and historical romance: they are not authors because they do not lay bare a self. But a painter or a filmmaker could be an author according to this definition - and so could a pop star. It is in this sense of someone who lays bare a self that
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the name of Elvis Costello functions as an index of author. Which brings us to the second burning question.
2. What's in a Name?
Let us say that Plaza Cameron is the name of a bricklayer who has a wife, two children, and a drinking problem. As long as he never publishes a novel, records a song, directs a film, exhibits a painting or a photograph - is never responsible for any artefact other than a brick wall - his name will continue to function as a symbol of the person it designates: a hard-drinking bricklayer who is married with two children. But let us say that Plaza Cameron writes and publishes a novel about a hard-drinking bricklayer who is married with four children of whom one is illegitimate. Let's call it The Boozy Brickie and say that it takes out the Miles Franklin Award for Australian Novel of the Year. It's a big hit with the critics, most of whom are predicting a bright future for the 28-year-old Mr. Cameron. When the announcement is made in the newspapers the next day it is also revealed that Plaza Cameron used to be a bricklayer, like the hero of his award-winning first novel. All the papers play up this biographical angle. Some of them run a photograph of Plaza looking like Paul Hogan in a pair of footy shorts but with a copy of Meanjin tucked into his waistband. The captions all say something like: 'His workmates never knew.' Assuming you've already read The Boozy Brickie, then how long after reading the newspapers before you start to wonder which one of Plaza Cameron's kids is a bastard?
Biographical hearstory is only held to be inseparable from an appreciation and understanding of authored work. What Pythagoras did in bed is of no consequence to our estimation of his theorems. Why, then, should it be of any concern to us that Elvis Costello is rumoured to be in throes of 'a troubled love life?' Which is merely to rephrase as a rhetorical question what Michel Foucault has otherwise stated more assertively: 'the name of an author is not precisely a proper name among others' (Foucault, 1977:122).
We have already suggested one way in which the name of an author differs from proper names in general. Plaza Cameron the husband-father, the bricklayer, the novelist: a single name for a plurality of subjects. But only in the last of these categories does 'Plaza Cameron' serve as the index of an irreplaceable self who exists only as an effect of ideation. Were Plaza Cameron to continue writing novels, moreover, his name would then enable
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'relationships of homogeneity' (Foucault: 123) to be established among works that might otherwise be read in different ways. Thus are oeuvres formed, based on the assumption that works by the same author must share stylistic and probably also thematic features and that they must interrelate in the service of authorial expression. The author, in short, is a function of discourse on works. It just so happens that in our culture, over the last few hundred years, such a discourse has produced the individualiza-tion of authors in the form of sensibilities, textual mechanisms, and intentions which are attributed to and invoked in their proper names.
It is well to point out, then, that the author-function is neither universal nor transhistorical (cf. Foucault: 125-26). In western pop music, it only begins to emerge around the late 1950s to become a dominant and largely unconscious tenet of discourses on pop a decade or so later. By the end of the 1960s, in other words, the category of the author is made available to pop stars. But it is only applied under certain conditions and only to the names of certain artists in the pop domain. Our immediate concern is briefly to address the questions of how and why this is so. Thereafter, we will come to a specific consideration of how and why the name Elvis Costello is enabled to circulate as an author-function in discourses on pop music.
Pop Music Isn't Switzerland
One of the earliest academic studies of pop music is entitled The Story of Rock by Carl Belz, published in 1968. In the second edition of this book (1973), Belz includes a 'Selected Discography' of significant pop records from 1953 to 1971 which he divides into two sections: the first (1953-63) is a discography of pop singles; the latter a discography of albums. Belz explains his methodology thus: 'Since 1963, rock has become increasingly dominated by albums, so a select list of LPs only is included for the 1964 to 1968 period' (Belz, 1973:244).1 We could speculate on the economic advantages to record companies of this material change to the pop product after 1963, but our main interest lies in how this changed materiality of the pop artefact produced a discursive effect on writings about pop music.
Foucault argues that 'the author's name characterizes a particular manner of existence of discourse. Discourse that possesses an
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author's name is not to be immediately consumed and forgotten ...' (Foucault:123). But if that discourse is presented as a three-minute pop song in the form of a seven-inch vinyl record, is it not destined 'to be immediately consumed and forgotten'? The pop single, in short, is disposable and marketed as such. Consequently, the proper names associated with pop singles are not accorded the status of an author-function. It is only with the material change to the pop artefact after the mid-1960s that the pop artist is able to be constituted as a pop author. To begin with, an album is more expensive to buy than a single and this value as a consumer-purchase is susceptible of translation into aesthetic value. It also seems only natural that if albums can be made into 'libraries,' then they must share something of the aesthetic worth of books. (It is true that singles, too, can in theory form 'libraries.' But this specific formation is only made possible after the value accorded the pop album in the late-196os. Indeed, it is not really until punk a decade later that the pop single is retrospectively appropriated into pop discourses on authored work.) Secondly, the pop LP is a collectable possession in its own right. Unlike the majority of singles which are marketed in paper bags, pop album-covers are often elaborate works of graphic and/ or photographic art. Hence they can be appreciated for their own sake, almost regardless of the music on the disc therein. Moreover, throughout much of the 1970s the mandatory form of an album-cover was the gate-fold sleeve, lending an album the appearance and material feel of a book and reinforcing the value of its book-like collectability. But the most significant change resulting from the dominance of the LP record since 1963 is that it has enabled the transformation of pop artist into pop author. This because an LP is made up of eight to twelve songs over a playing time of around forty minutes.
The increased playing time of the pop LP and its greater number of songs creates a site for critical operations to be performed on 'the author.' Even though pop records are the result of collective effort (usually involving at the recording stage, at least, a vocalist, musicians, songwriters, a producer, and engineers), their meanings are nevertheless attributed to the intentions and sensibility of an individual. In pop discourse, sensibility translates as 'soul' or sometimes 'feel.' Thus a pop artist may be said to have a feel for the blues and real soul when s/he sings. But what is soul? Writing in Esquire in 1968, Al Calloway defines soul as a black form of self-expression. He cites its major exponents as being Mahalia Jackson, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and James Brown: all of them black and two of them women (Calloway, 1969:709). But he also defines soul as the means by which the self
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is submerged in and discovered through racial identity: 'Among black people, soul is a congenital understanding and respect for each other. It is the knowledge that one is but a segment of all that is ...' (Calloway:712). Clearly, soul is hard to pin down. It is caught up in discourses on politics, art, and race, and it has something to do with the emergence of the self through its submergence in a greater community. In white discourses on pop music, however, 'soul' simply functions as an index of the self. It is not confined to black artists, nor to the musical style which bears its name. It is, though, a crucial test of authorship.
The most obvious site on which to apply this test is the LP record. Across the eight to twelve songs of a pop album, an artist can lay bare a self through the conventions of a soulful vocal delivery, meaningful lyrics, and a feel for the music. Thus the critical conception of the pop album takes on the status of an artwork in which, as Dugald Williamson says in respect of literary works, 'the play of textual elements ... is thought to manifest a vision which takes shape through an authorial drama of consciousness' (Williamson, 1986:3). For 'vision,' though, read 'soul' or 'self: the point being that under certain conditions the pop artist can perform the role of author-function.
What are these conditions under which a pop star can be an author? Firstly, it needs to be established that the star in question is the origin of textual meaning, regardless of whatever contributions are made to the text by a producer, engineers, musicians, or sometimes even a songwriter. This involves individualizing procedures carried out in and by the press and the electronic media, and also by the music industry. One such procedure is the industrial practice of crediting records to a single individual or group of individuals. Hence, Like a Virgin is by Madonna and 'Suspicious Minds' is by Fine Young Cannibals. This practice is institutionally endorsed in the press ('Madonna's new record is good/bad/indifferent'), on the radio ('Here's the new one from Madonna'), and on TV shows like Countdown ('Still to come: Madonna's latest video'). But if this were the only individualizing procedure in the pop domain then all pop artists would be authors.
A more discriminatory technique is that of the interview. Again, however, since any pop artist can be the subject of an interview, it would seem that all pop artists must be authors. But we have used 'author' in the specific sense of someone who lays bare a self, as opposed to someone who is simply responsible for
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a text's production. It is possible to discern differences in the questions put to interviewees on the basis of this distinction. How did you get that drum sound on your last record? Were you depressed, at all, when you wrote that song? These are quite different questions addressed to different subjects even though they could be asked of the same person. It it only the second question which addresses and thereby constitutes the subject as an author. In order for this question to be asked at all, however, it is necessary that the subject be always already constituted as an author. The interview, in other words, is not the source but only one of the procedures of authorial constitution. It is simply taken as a given of pop discourse that some artists are more authorial than others.
Nevertheless, 'the form of the interview has the effect of individualizing the speaking subject' (Williamson:42) regardless of how the subject is constituted by the interviewer prior to the interview. Consequently, even the most banal and otherwise insignificant of interviewees (someone, say, from A-Ha) is personalized and credited with intentionality, creativity, and author-ity by the mere fact of being interviewed. So it is not only the individualizing procedure of the interview per se which must be taken into account when considering under what conditions the pop artist can perform the role of author-function. We must also take account of where each particular interview is situated in what might be called the debate on 'banality' versus 'profundity.' It is not the same, in other words, to be interviewed by Molly Meldrum on Countdown as it is to be interviewed by Nick Kent in The Face. Which isn't simply to assert that TV is different from print journalism. Rather, it is to say that Countdown is perceived as uncritical in contrast to a perception of The Face as analytic. To use the appropriate discourse: it is to say that the one is perceived as 'mainstream' and the other as 'alternative.'
This opposition is premised on a set of assumptions about what it means to be an artist. Its most recent historical locus was the London punk era of the late-1970s during which time the notion of do-it-yourself alternatives to the mainstream forms of production, promotion, and distribution of pop music was often articulated in the marginal musical press as a working class struggle for control of the self. Class politics aside, however, it is a constant of theories of pop that the true artist redefines selfhood as the triumph of 'personal' meaning over the received ideology and myths of his or her culture. The following passage from Greil Marcus' celebrated Mystery Train: Images of America i Rock V Music is therefore typical in this regard:
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It's easy to forget how young this country is; how little distance really separates us from the beginnings of the myths, like that of Lincoln, that still haunt the national imagination. It's easy to forget how much remains to be settled. Since roots are sought out and seized as well as simply accepted, cultural history is never a straight line; along with the artists we care about we fill in the gaps ourselves. When we do, we reclaim, rework, or invent America, or a piece of it, all over again ... dispensing with the rest of the American reality if we can. We make the oldest stories new when we succeed, and we are trapped by the old stories when we fail (Marcus, 1976:6).
The punk version of this discourse substituted 'mainstream' for passive acceptance and 'alternative' for active in(ter)vention. It borrowed from other discursive oppositions (between rich and poor, commerce and art, corporate and individual, sophisticated and simple, out of touch and in touch, false and real) to deny the possibility of self-expression to canonic pop stars signed to multinational record companies which had control of the marketplace in the form of access to the media. The less an artist was promoted by and through the mainstream media, in other words, the more likely s/he was to be an 'author' in the sense of someone who lays bare a self because it was the more likely s/he would be perceived as the origin of textual meaning. Thus the oppositional perception of Countdown as too implicated in the success of the industry it promotes to be other than its instrument - and of the artists who appear on Countdown as too mainstream to be authorial - is an effect of the discursive binaries articulated above. Certainly, it is a given of pop discourse that all artists are individuals. It is just that some are more individual than others.
The author-function 'is not defined by the spontaneous attribution of a text to its creator, but through a series of precise and complex procedures' (Foucault:130). We have argued, however, that the author-function is not simply an effect of these individualizing procedures as they pertain to the creators of any text, otherwise the members of A-Ha would share the mantle of 'author' with Elvis Costello. It is true, in other words, that the ensemble of individualizing techniques is the same in mainstream as in alternative promotion through noncommercial radio and magazines like The Face. But their effects are different. Perhaps this is due to differences of consumption. As Clive James says in respect of art in general: 'The world justifies itself and would still be worth living in if there were no art ... Art can't be escaped to. It isn't Switzerland' (James, 1983:10). Which is to imply that people think it is.
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II
The De-naming of Elvis Costello
'Elvis Costello' is one name which performs a 'Switzerland-function' in discourses on pop, relocating the pop domain in an elsewhere both as real and mythic as the Swiss Alps. (This twilight zone of otherness is called 'art.') So what happens how that Elvis Costello wants to change his name? Since the release of his latest album, King of America (1986), Elvis Costello has made public his intention to revert to the name with which he was christened - Declan MacManus. In one sense, indeed, the intention has already been realized: he who was formerly known as Elvis Costello became legally known again as Declan MacManus in late-1985.
If a bricklayer changed his or her name, the only consequence would be financial: the bricklayer would suffer a temporary loss of trade until the marketplace became familiar with his or her new name. So it would be if s/he changed their business address (or if a business changed its company name). In this respect, a proper name is but a trade name and bears no relation to the designation of a self. 'Elvis Costello,' in other words, is now simply trading under the name of Declan MacManus - and it is up to his record company to make known that the 'debut' album by Declan MacManus is really the latest album by 'Elvis Costello.' But if pop music (at least for some) is not just a business then 'Elvis Costello' is not just a brand name, although Declan MacManus has argued otherwise:
... Elvis Costello was always partly an 'invention' ... I needed this persona and I clung to it because if I gave the game away, I felt I would never be quite assured enough of myself. So I rationalized it - and still do to a slight extent. Elvis Costello is a good brand name, you know, like 'Durex'! (from an interview by Nick Kent, 1986:12).
There are people out there who seem to think I know the answers to some great unfathomable question. Like there's one guy who helps run this magazine - The Elvis Costello Information Service - which I quickly should add I'm very flattered by overall, but this one guy, finally I felt I should meet him. I went along with T-Bone Burnette ... [and] ... he realized even quicker than I did that this person just couldn't be communicated with rationally. I just wanted to show this guy that Elvis Costello is just as human and fallible as him and that, no, I
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don't hold the magic key to the unravelling of life's great mysteries. But five minutes into talking, I realized this person wasn't interested in having it proven to him that Elvis Costello is just a human being.
So I felt maybe it was time to put Elvis Costello, the brand name, to rest as the only other solution' (Kent: 13).
On the face of it, these claims are seemingly incontrovertible and unproblematic. To argue their contradiction would be to challenge the subject's state of mind or to at least debate the possibility of the subject's ever knowing his or her intentions. But we do not have to be sceptics to argue that these claims have been put to a certain use, so that their effects can be seen as the by-products of a specific discourse.
One effect of the claim by Declan MacManus that 'Elvis Costello' is simply a 'brand name' is that we take this statement to be true. We do so because we always already regard the addressee of an interview as the foremost author-ity on his or her consciousness. Certainly, the statement 'Elvis Costello is a brand name' is perhaps less incontestable than if MacManus had expressed a preference for burgundy over chardonnay, but equally the former claim is more authoritative than if it had been made by the interviewer Nick Kent. Which is to say that the statement derives its authority from the speaker: it is not an autonomous truth. Indeed, it is not even true because it has been stated by Declan MacManus but only 'true' in the sense that we believe that Declan MacManus believes it to be true. (And this, of course, is to discount the possibility of the speaker telling lies.) The important point is that the effect of MacManus' claim is produced out of the reader's familiarity with other interviews. Specifically, its effect is a product of anecdote.
As model illustrations - historical or (auto)biographical exemplars - anecdotes are a form of narrative: 'mini-narratives,' as Dugald Williamson would have it, 'organised around some small, even accidental detail which, in its very slightness, takes on exemplary significance' (Williamson:39). In the anecdote recounted by Declan Mac Manus above, the 'small detail' of his meeting with the anonymous helpmate on the Elvis Costello fanzine is of 'exemplary significance' for its revelation that 'Elvis Costello' is but a brand name - of which the implied meaning is that it nominates a persona but not a self. Why can't we let this be as it may? Because 'one of the effects of such anecdotes is, of course, to support the idea of a circularity between the experience depicted
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in the text and the experience of making the text' (William -son:41). In other words, such anecdotes have a closural effect on readings of authored work. It thus becomes 'obvious' that King of America is the textual re-presentation of the meeting between Declan MacManus and the unnamed fan(atic).
The weight of evidence in support of a reading of King of America as the de-naming of Elvis Costello - the moral of the anecdote - is seemingly impressive. Firstly, the name 'Elvis Costello' is all but absent from the text, appearing only as a kind of trace in the crediting of musicianship to 'The Costello Show: Featuring The Attractions and The Confederates.' (Were it not for his record company's denial, MacManus' wish to credit the album to 'The MacManus Gang' would have erased even this trace of his persona.) Secondly, Declan MacManus - not Elvis Costello -is credited as the album's songwriter. Thirdly, the album-cover features a sepia photograph of Elvis Costello - not Declan MacManus - wearing a crown. (It is Elvis [Presley] who is 'king' and therefore Elvis [Costello] who is the referent of the photograph.) The significance of this is that sepia images connote time past, suggesting here that the Elvis Costello persona has become a kind of impending absence or a fading memory. Finally, there is the evidence of at least two of the songs themselves: 'Suit of Lights' for its description of a burial, and 'Brilliant Mistake' for its closing refrain - 'I was a fine idea at the time / Now I'm a brilliant mistake.'
In light of such evidence, it is difficult not to acknowledge the legitimacy of a reading of King of America as the de-naming of Elvis Costello. But although it could be argued that the de-naming is textually encoded (cf. the four points above), it is only through extra-textual publicity that this reading becomes 'obvious.' That is to say, it is only after the author has narrated an anecdotal life-experience that we are permitted access to the text's 'intended' meaning based on the critical orthodoxy of a relation between 'the experience depicted in the text and the experience of making the text.' To accept this relation between authorial experience and textual representation, however, is to suppose that our pleasure of the latter is dependent on our knowledge of the former. It is to suppose that a pleasure of the text adheres in statements which surround it, especially when these statements are attributed to an individual in the role of author-function. But what can we expect to happen if we listen to King of America without first having read The Face} Are we to suppose that the pleasure of such a listening is only partial - unpleasurably incomplete - because it lacks the totalizing knowledge of an authoritative 'explanation' of the text?
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We cannot deny that closure is an advent of pleasure. It would be as frustrating not to know the signified of x in the equation '2 +x = 4' as it would be pleasurable to solve the problem. Similarly, the anecdote narrated by Declan MacManus above functions as the signified of a kind of x- factor in the equation "the conventions of pop music + x = the meaning of King of America.' But knowing the anecdote not only gives us the pleasure of solving the equation (which, by the by, is always already closural insofar as x is presumed to be knowable). It also gives us the pleasure of having something to say about the text, of which the converse is that the fear of silence is a pain. It is, in other words, an unpleasurable experience to be asked for an opinion and not to have one.
Whether the request for commentary is made informally (in the course of, say, a conversation around the dinner table) or whether it is conditioned by the pedagogical-and-other regulations of the examination hall or the seminar room: we live in fear of not being able to satisfy it. To be able to say that King of America is 'about' the de-naming of Elvis Costello, then, is to avert the pain of dumbness. Like all similar pleasures, perhaps, it is as much a product of this aversion as of a belief in having found the true meaning of the text. But to challenge the grounds for such a belief is not to condemn us to silence. We need not be struck dumb by the text - fated to be mute and ignorant in the presence of its 'mysterious' articulations - if we are deprived of the sense-making protocol of authorial discourse. Nor is this to give licence to free-association, to the kind of sentimental argument which turns on how the user 'relates' to the text. It is to propose, rather, that in place of author-centred criticism we consider what Dugald Williamson calls 'textual analysis' (Williamson:44ff). By this term are two arguments indicated:
First, in contrast to the claim that the authored text is different from others because of its essential, expressive function, the [texts] grouped by the name [of an author] can be analysed ... into a range of techniques, conventions and popular knowledges whose articulation produces particular forms of meaning. Second, the so-called expressions of a central authorial meaning are not the same thing across the different texts, and they break up into a number of techniques which, contrary to the assumption of an underlying principle of unification, display no necessary unity at all (Williamson:46).
Before deferring to these arguments, however, I want briefly to recapitulate some of the claims which were made in earlier parts
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of this paper on behalf of authored work. Firstly, it was held that authored work lays bare a self such that the revelation of selfhood is the dominant sign of authorship. ('Accordingly, then, Pride and Prejudice has an author but the law of gravity does not.') Secondly, even within what might be termed authored discourses -such as literature - there are 'degrees' of authorship ('... the more 'formulaic' the novel, the less likely it is to be authored in the strictest sense of "laying bare a self"). Thirdly, the author is the principle by which texts are grouped into oeuvres, 'based on the assumption that works by the same author must share stylistic and probably also thematic features and that they must interrelate in the service of authorial expression.'
These claims are reproduced in pop criticism. In the previously cited review by Danny Kelly, for instance, the meaning of 'Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood' is presumed to be autobiographical -the expression of a self under attack from the critics ('Costello's last LP ... was his worst') and suffering from writer's block, dipsomania, and the effects of a marriage breakdown. But that these charges are denied by Declan MacManus in The Face ('Actually, I've never been as happy as I am right now,' (Kelly, p. 12)) does not alter the assumption that his work reveals a self: it is merely that the tortured self of Elvis Costello according to Danny Kelly is replaced by the self-assured Declan MacManus according to Nick Kent. In whatever manifestation, though, the authoring self is presumed to be responsible for work which is distinguishable by its 'inventiveness' (either by its avoidance or 'creative use' of formulaic mechanisms), so it is no accident that David Fricke in Rolling Stone should praise King of America for 'its acutely personal singing and heroically unfashionable acoustic sound' (Fricke, 1986:24). Finally, we should note in respect of the metonymic function of-the author's name that the oeuvre inherited by 'Declan MacManus' is not the object of unconditional acclaim. It is instead, like literary oeuvres, judged to be the sum of 'uneven' parts which are axiomatically signposted as follows: 'an auspicious debut' (1977: My Aim is True), 'a flawed masterpiece' (\919:Armed Forces), 'a controversial work' (1981:Almost Blue), 'a true masterpiece' (1982:Imperial Bedroom), and 'unworthy failures' (1983/84:Punch the Clock, Goodbye Cruel World). The preliminary verdict on King of America, by the by, is that it represents for Costello/MacManus 'easily his most focussed and eloquent work since Imperial Bedroom' (Kent, p. 17).
Through the procedures of a textual analysis, however, we can hope to show that King of America is not the expression of an
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authoring self. Rather, it is the sense-made sum of 'a range of techniques, conventions, and popular knowledges whose articulation produces particular forms of meaning.' Once such popular knowledge, for example, is the cautionary axiom 'Know Thyself/ This is linked to other proverbial wisdoms (e.g., 'the self has many guises') and to what might be called the pop-psychological commonplace that we are all, to some extent, the victims of a 'split-personality.' Literary manifestations of this episteme include the genres of tragedy and the gothic romance, while its antithesis (i.e., the impossibility of knowing the self) might be said to inform all works of an absurdist bent in our own century. Elsewhere, this popular knowledge of the dual- or multiple-self is reproduced in the media (where celebrities and politicians, for example, are often supposed to have 'private' and 'public' selves) and is not even unknown to mass-entertainment forms - such as soap opera - in which the self is otherwise presented as stable and stereotypical (an example is the recent transformation of Sammy Jo in Dynasty from a 'bad' self to a 'good' self, or from an agent of deception to an agent of revelation).
Due to the pre-textuality of this episteme, then, we are enabled to read King of America as the de-naming of Elvis Costello. But it hardly needs to be said that 'Declan MacManus' is not the author but the produce of this popular knowledge. Like the transformation of Sammy Jo in Dynasty, in other words, the de-naming of Elvis Costello does not have to be explained in thaumatological terms as the effect of a wondrous personality change. Instead, it can be structurally accounted for (after Northrop Frye) as the displacement of the alazon by the eiron.2 That is to say, in dis-claiming the selfhood of Elvis Costello by re-claiming that of Declan MacManus, the subject undergoes a shift in agency from deceiver to revealer. Textually, this shift is available as a metaphor in 'Suit of Lights' in which the eiron- T narrates the burial of the alazon-'he.' Hence the meaning of the song is produced out of this conventional, non-authorial rendering of an epistemological commonplace and is not the product of profound 'self-expression. It is not a heart-felt 'coming out' but a formulaic 'killing off.'
Similarly, the claim by David Fricke that King of America is remarkable for 'its acutely personal singing and heroically unfashionable acoustic sound' can be textually analyzed into a set of conventions and relational differences which produce this reading. What Fricke calls the 'personal,' in other words, is really an effect of signification rather than of individuality or authorship. Consider, for example, several of the music forms represented on King
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of America - rockabilly ('Lovable'), country and western ('Our Little Angel'), rhythm and blues ('Eisenhower Blues'), Celtic folk ('Little Palaces'), the popular ballad ('Poisoned Rose,' 'Sleep of the Just'). Each of these is connotatively 'authentic' because historically anterior to the commodification of rock and roll. In contrast to mainstream pop music of the mid-1980s, moreover, these forms are 'alternative' because of their independence from studio technology and computerized instrumentation and due to their foregrounding of the human voice as the central signifying element in the text. As a result of these conventions (the vocal and acoustic biases) and of the relational differences of these forms (their 'authenticity' and 'alternativeness') from mainstream pop music, they produce of themselves what David Fricke attributes to 'acutely personal' authorship.
The 'unfashionable acoustic sound' of King of America, then, is not an effect of authorial 'heroism' but rather of a system of relations pre-existent to the text which always already connote the 'acutely personal.' Following Roman Jakobson, we might identify as emotive the enabling functions which produce this reading of a 'personal' text.3 Hence the felt 'presence' of an individualized 'self is an index of the vocalist-author's perceived function as the expressive source and sentient bearer of each song's meaning. But this is an effect of the code. In the ballad code, say, it is conditional that the human voice be foregrounded at the expense of instrumental accompaniment and that it convey paralinguistic intonations of 'warmth,' 'sincerity,' and intimacy.' That such intonations are also syntagms of the 'acutely personal,' however, is merely a convention. Consequently, that a ballad such as 'poisoned Rose' is an example of a text which faithfully reproduces the conventions of its code (assisted, we should add, by the technologized foregrounding of the singer's voice in the production mix) contradicts the inference that the song is 'authored' because of 'its acutely personal singing.' We might simply ask: how could it be otherwise and still be a ballad?
From this partial analysis we can see that 'the author' is necessary to value-judgements of the text (how else, unless its author were a hero, could a text be 'heroically unfashionable?') but not to criticism. Instead, the category of the author is a critical convenience. It facilitates a distinction between 'work' and 'nonwork' and enables textual groupings to be carried out on the basis of assumptions invested in the author's proper name. But as we have seen in respect of the de-naming of 'Elvis Costello,' the proper name of an author is merely an index of critical procedures. By
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whatever name the authoring self is known, the function of 'the author' is fixed and stable even if 'the self is historically and artistically capricious. Thus it is of no methodological consequence that the authoring self once known as Elvis Costello but now known as Declan MacManus has, in the process of changing names, undergone a change in selfhood. It is, however, of valuation significance insofar as this most historically recent version of the authoring self is supposed to coincide with an artistic 'return to form.' By a continuation of this reasoning, then, King of America is the latest expression of an authoring self who is capricious (and therefore capable of producing work of varying 'quality') but whose authorial functionalism nevertheless remains a constant. The 'debut' album by Declan MacManus, in other words, belongs to the oeuvre of Elvis Costello.
But insofar as the designated self of an author's name is an index of critical procedures in respect of a single text, so it is indexical of specialist operations performed across the complete works of an oeuvre. This is to argue that the textual groupings of author-centred criticism are the products of what we have found to be an indefensible assumption: authored work lays bare a self. Contrary to a reading of King of America which derives from a biography of Declan MacManus and an appreciation of the oeuvre of Elvis Costello, we have argued that the album generates its meaning from effects of signification, convention, and relational differences. It is in these terms - as a site of intersecting knowledges of and discourses on the self, art, and society - that the album should be analyzed. The kind of 'de-naming' invoked by such a study we can therefore call a de-nomination of The Author, from which point may emerge an analysis of pop music as a discourse on representational practices attributed to an 'authoring self who is always already the product of humanist discourses on art. That such an analysis is timely can be argued from the fact that while the notion of authorship has been dismantled in respect of literature and film (cf. the papers by Foucault and Williamson), it remains intact in the humanist criticism of pop music. That it may also be modish is not for me to say.
Niall Lucy teaches part-time at the University of New South Wales. He is researching his doctorate at the University of Sydney
Notes
1. It should be noted that although Belz enlarged the discography for the second edition of his book, he did not revise its defence.
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The period to which he refers (1964-68), then, actually extends to 1971.
2. Frye's taxonomy of fictional modes is replete with stereotypical characters, agents, or what for our purposes might better be termed subject positions. One such type is that of the alazon,'which means impostor, someone who pretends or tries to be something more than he is' (Frye, 1973:39). Another is the eiron: 'the man who deprecates himself ... makes himself in vulnerable, and, though Aristotle disapproves of him, there is no question that he is a predestined artist, just as the alazon is one of his predestined victims' (ibid., p.40).
3. On the six constitutive functions of any act of communication, see Robert Scholes' summary of Jakobson's theory in Scholes, 1974:24-27. The emotive function is that in which the message is oriented towards the sender (e.g. a love song might tell us about a singer's thwarted or fulfilled desire).
References
Belz, C., (1973) The Story of Rock, New York: Harper and Row.
Calloway, A., (1969) 'An Introduction to Soul,' in Smiling Through the Apocalypse: Esquire's History of the Sixties,
Harold Hayes (ed.), New York: McCall.
Foucault, M., (1977) 'What is an Author?' in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, D.F. Bouchard (ed.), New York: Cornell University Press, pp.113-38.
Fricke, D., (1986) 'This Year's Model,' Rolling Stone, May, pp.23-24.
Frye, N., (1973) Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
James, C., (1983) Brilliant Creatures, London: Pan.
Kelly, D., (1986) 'Singles [Reviews of],' New Musical Express, 1 February, p.19.
Kent, N., (1986) 'The Happy Death of Elvis Costello,' The Face, March, pp. 10-17.
Marcus, Greil (1976) Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music, New York: E.P. Dutton.
Scholes, R., (1974) Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Williamson, D., (1986) 'Authorship and Criticism,' Local Consumption Occasional Paper, No. 7.
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