Authority

So, I don't really know that much about Elvis -- I was never particularly interested in his music or movies. When Guralnick lays out his information, I don't really have much of a basis to say 'yes that sounds right,' or 'no, I don't agree with that interpretation,' because I just don't have many other facts on which to base an opinion. Instead, I will address the way Guralnick presents and lays out his information.

On the back cover, Last Train to Memphis is labeled as 'Biography/Music', and to me biography is associated with the idea of an historical text -- that is, a text that aims (ideally) to be an accurate and authoritative depiction of historical events, which in the case of biography would be the events of a person's life. My expectation is that the available facts will be laid out for me, preferably in an interesting/entertaining manner.

Near the end of Gurlanick's Author's Note, at the beginning of Last Train to Memphis, he states, "This is my story of Elvis Presley; it cannot be the story of Elvis Presley. There is no such thing; even autobiography, or perhaps autobiography most of all, represents an editing of the facts, a selection of detail, an attempt to make sense of the various, arbitrary developments of real life." This seems like a reasonable premise -- if he, Guralnick, can't gaurantee the 'facts' with 100% accuracy, then it seems logical to simply lay out his account of the story of the life of Elvis Presley and then have us simply take that for what it is.

However, in these first several chapters, it seems to me that Gurlanick is not living up to the claim he makes. The bulk of the narrative is presented in what seems like the classic biographical tone, which is to say that there is little acknowledgement that the information being presented is subjective: "Vernon Presley was never particularly well regarded in Tupelo. He was a man of few words and little evident ambition..." and so on.

When he isn't stating things as fact, Guralnick supplements the narrative with quotes from interviews he has conducted with relevant people, and yet he leaves out what I find most interesting about interviews -- the back and forth play between interviewer and subject, the revelation of character. Instead the living voices chime in on the unfolding events as disembodied entities from on high.

Occasionally the narrative itself seems to break down, with Guralnick pausing to elaborate on how the motive or reasoning for such and such action or opinion is questionable or unknown, and then he offers some of the possible intepretations (see page 58 for example). These are the moments that I find most aggravating -- it seems to me that part of the compact between author and reader of a biography is that the author should at least claim to know what he is talking about, but Guralnick consistently throws his hands up in the air and leaves the work to us.

What's most notable about all of this is that the presence of Guralnick himself is strangely absent from all of it -- though he claims this is 'his' story of Elvis as opposed to 'the' story, it isn't until page 58 (that I could find) that Guralnick himself enters the narrative, and then only for a brief moment, with the preposterously unfortunate statement of "I don't know." Really? That's the best he's got?

In his author's note, Guralnick abdicates the the traditional role of the biographer as authoritative/authorial dispenser of objective truth, so that he might at least present the subjective truth, his subjective truth -- only to simultaneously revert to the traditional biographic role as well as to discredit his own claim to authority. So I guess I'm a bit disappointed. The preface/author's note gave me the idea that we'd be treated to the account of Guralnick himself diving into the history books and brushing away the 'dreary bondage of myth' and the 'oppressive aftershock of cultural significance' so that we could finally see the 'real' Elvis, but so far I'm not seeing it.