Speaking in Tongues: Dead Elvis and the Greil Quest

Linda Ray Pratt

Department of English
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
<lpratt@unlcdc2>

 

Marcus, Greil. Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession. New York: Doubleday, 1991.

 

`You gotta learn how to speak in tongues.’
`I already know how,’ Elvis says.

 

–Greil Marcus, Jungle Music

 

the communication

Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language

of the living.

 

–T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

 

From the evidence in Greil Marcus’s new book, the dead Elvis is a Postmodern Elvis, a hermeneutic object in whose emptiness even fictions becomes simulacra. Subtitled A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession, Dead Elvis collects Marcus’s writings on Elvis from 1977 to 1990, but they are inspired by the wide range of representations that make this book more of a cultural conversation than a chronicle. Marcus calls the invention of dead Elvis “a great common art project, the work of scores of people operating independently of each other, linked only by their determination to solve the same problem: who was he, and why do I still care?” The collective representation both legitimizes and subverts “Elvis,” the cultural production that would make discerning who the man was irrelevant were it not for the imagination invested in the project.

 

For those who still care, the questions are sometimes really, really big ones: is Elvis in Heaven or Hell? (we’ve given up on the K-Mart in Kalamazoo). Is Elvis more like Hitler or Jesus? The questions are openly joking but mask the still unsettled doubt about what it means that we want Elvis, alive or dead. Should we think about him with Melville, Lincoln, and Faulkner (as Marcus did so brilliantly in Mystery Train) or was he just a piece of Southern white trash (as Albert Goldman wishes) or, like Byron, “an epicene and disrupter,” one of the “revolutionary men of beauty” who burn godlike (as Camille Paglia argues). This book doesn’t really explain who he was, or even why we still care. Its strength is in showing how the art project is coming along, what image of Elvis, dead, we are keeping alive. Too recent for the book was the phenomenon of Americans voting on which image to keep alive. The heady choice of young or old Elvis on “the stamp” engaged us more than our political elections and plays like a last ritual of mass investiture, a kind of cultural laying out of the robes in which Dead Elvis will officially ascend, transcend, and return to sender.

 

The book contains reviews Marcus has written on Nik Cohn’s King Death, Goldman’s Elvis, Peter Guralnick’s Lost Highways, and Nick Tosches’s Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story. These reviews are often occasions for Marcus to comment both on the various authors’ uses and abuses of Elvis and on his own continuing fascination with the king who wouldn’t die. Combined with the many visual representations in paintings, album covers, and other less classifiable forms, the book itself becomes part of the art project. Marcus assembles a set of Elvis images that range from the stupid to the clever. The article in Publish! Desktop Publishing on “Clones: The PostScript Impersonators” that is illustrated with computeresque-Elvis clones is an unexpected triple pun in what would otherwise be the dullest of pieces. The exhibition advertisement for “Outside the Clock: Beyond Good and Elvis,” rewrites Nietzsche’s wisdom in a pop vernacular. Holding all of this together is Marcus’s own cultural obsession; more than a decade after his death, “Elvis was everywhere, and each mask was simply the thing the thing wore over its true face, which no one could see” (188).

 

“The thing” speaks in tongues both vulgar and sublime, and Marcus is struggling with the translation. Questing after what it was in the music that holds us, Marcus writes abstractly of “the grain of his voice.” His Elvis remains an “inner mystery . . . where the secrets are outside of words. . . .” The problem is how to account for the magnitude of Elvis’s “cultural conquest” when it “remains impossible” to believe that Elvis “understood” what he was doing. “Is it possible that Elvis Presley appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show not as a country boy eager for his big chance but as a man ready to disorder and dismember the culture that from his first moment had tried to dismember him, to fix him as a creature of resentment, rage, and fatalism, and that had failed?” (195). But it is not possible to attribute social design to the fallout of an explosion of self, and neither Living nor Dead Elvis yields up his secrets in service to sociology.

 

Marcus’s book is an intellectual quest by the critic of culture uncomfortable with the Dionysian confusion in the spectacle. Elvis did not plan a cultural revolution, but he did mean to be sexy, and what his intellect did not design, his body knew instinctively. The images of Dead Elvis are often either a defacement of his youthful body or a restoration of it. Paglia talks about the power of his sexual beauty in terms that rock critics (mainly a male world) shy away from. Marcus knows that it was his dazzling sexuality that made Elvis different from other early rockers, but he is more comfortable discussing him in the context of America as a culture than he is as a post- Protestant Dionysian god. Was it the culture of Melville and Lincoln, or even Eisenhower, that Elvis dismembered, or was it the culture which dismembered him in order to consume him sexually? Wouldn’t a book seeking to explain him have to be subtitled, “The Chronicle of a Sexual Obsession”? Or how about “The Culture of a Sexual Chronicle”? “Cultural” reads like an intellectual displacement, just as the comparison of Elvis with Jesus conceals the worship of the body instead of the soul. Marcus calls the Cortez photographs of Elvis among the Munich whores “repulsive and irresistible,” a seedy, corrupt image that makes you “want to turn away.” This won’t “mesh with the Elvis we carry in our heads,” Marcus says, but perhaps what doesn’t mesh is the crude eroticism of these pictures with the myths of Elvis we invented to conceal the thing in the shadow of the thing.

 

One of those myths that everyone still wants to look away from is that of Elvis’s devotion to his mother. Marcus reviews Elaine Dundy’s Elvis and Gladys, a book designed “to rescue Gladys Presley from her usual dismissal as a dumb, sentimental woman” who drowned her son in overprotection. Dundy’s thesis suggests to Marcus that “Elvis’s infantile adult life had far more to do with class . . . ,” an idea that opens up for Marcus his own interest in “a degeneration of democratic values” from the Southern frontiersman to the sterile aristocrat of modern Memphis. (Marcus has this backwards: in the South, it’s the degeneration of aristocratic values unhinged by urban development and big capital. Elvis came out of the one and made the other, becoming in the process an icon of the “New South.”) But what we’ve learned about Elvis’s sexual identity makes him sound more like an unprotected victim of incestuous abuse than an overprotected beloved child. Gladys Presley was an alcoholic with a weak husband and the most beautiful boy in the world. The legend says that Elvis first recorded “My Happiness” for her birthday, but maybe the record he did for her was “That’s All Right, Mama,” with its combination of angry self-assertion (“I’m leaving town for sure”) and pleasured acquiescence (“That’s alright now Mama, just any way you do”). That “grain” Marcus hears in his voice has the complex emotional intensity that stops us dead with its authenticity, something like the inescapable edge we hear in Sylvia Plath’s. His voice mixes desire and rejection, suffering and rage, that overpowers the conventions of musical form or pop language. Its rhythm is an emotional pulse of inconsolable misery and delighted abandonment. Elvis’s music, like Plath’s poetry, is full of threats of revenge that dissolve in need and sadness: “I’m leaving town for good” and then you’ll be sorry for the way you treated me. When Elvis called Mama every day he was on the road, who was taking care of whom? Did she walk him to school every day to see that he was safe and got his education, or to see that he did not throw her over? Perhaps she never touched her boy, but he came to us profoundly aware of his sexual attractiveness and too damaged to handle the power his body could command. Elvis’s psychological pattern was denial: working to reduce the audience to screaming ecstasy, he told us he wasn’t doing anything “sexual” on stage; consuming handfuls of pills, he flashed his badge as a drug agent; wearing the black leather suit at the peak of his physical beauty, he was sexually dysfunctional with his wife. When he was declaring his love of his mother, what was the rest of the formula?

 

The question is if any of this matters. Culture’s quest is not to understand “the reality” of its idols but to make them up to fit its needs. Perhaps the cultural obsession is about not wanting to know who the real Elvis was, and so the questions Marcus poses are not really the ones he pursues. Creating Dead Elvis is what we’ve been doing instead of asking, “who was he, and why do I still care?” Those who speak in tongues give voice to messages we can only bear in hints and guesses. The word made flesh moved from the sexual to the excremental, and the body’s beauty was held hostage to the heart’s misery and mind’s decay. The pop representation of Elvis is the lie we tell about this, the collective story that conceals just how well we did know who he was, how much we did translate the “grain” of his voice, and how it felt to see him die. But such knowledge is too elemental, too crude and unrelenting to be borne, and so we deface and adorn to make the thing itself smaller than a man or larger than life.

 

The cultural joke that is the Dead Elvis is as irrepressible as nervous laughter at a funeral. Marcus tells us of the bold little girl in his fourth grade class in 1955 who “went off to see Elvis.” Nervous and confused by their own responses, the students made her the object of mockery and jealousy and lied to themselves to conceal their own unnameable emotions. Not much has changed in all this, except that the emotions became more complex and her classmate has thought longer and harder. But Marcus is still not easy in his mind about Elvis, and that drives him to ask better questions and play with more suggestive answers than anyone else who thinks about such things. Dead Elvis serves the art project well, mystifying further what it cannot really want to strip away, rewriting a funny ending to an absurd tragedy in which the king died in his bathroom before the town was saved.