(contains mild spoilers for Argylle the novel)
The end of this month will see the release of the film Argylle, directed and produced by Matthew Vaughn. It’s a spy thriller based on a debut novel by American author Elly Conway. So far, so normal. However, when you find out that the film rights were purchased by Apple in 2021 for $200 million, years before the novel was even released, and that there are no pictures of, or interviews with, Elly Conway available online, despite her instagram account having over 40,000 followers, things start to look a little strange. As anyone who knows anything about publishing will tell you, Apple do not pay millions of dollars for the film rights to as-yet-unpublished debut novels by nobodies, and if you want to publish any book these days, good luck to you if you’re not willing to take every chance for self-promotion that you can, including plastering your face all over social media. Who the hell, then, is Elly Conway?
I wouldn’t be writing about it here if there weren’t a Swiftie element, so I’ll get straight to the point. A substantial corner of the internet has decided that Elly Conway must be the pen name of Taylor Swift, and that Swift is in fact the brains behind Argylle. There are a number of ‘easter eggs’ in the film promo cited by fans as the rationale for this (you can read more about them here). That would explain the muted social media presence, the astronomical sum for the film rights, and the air of mystery that clings to Argylle even now the book has been published for several weeks. It’s Swift, writing under a pseudonym. Since everything she touches sparks a gold rush, of course Apple paid $200 million.
A few weeks ago, I was asked to read the novel and discuss on Canadian radio whether I thought Swift really was the author. You can listen here, but I’ll give you a quick summary. If Argylle was written by Swift, then in my humble opinion (as someone who has written neither a novel nor any songs) she should definitely stick to songwriting. While I enjoyed the novel – it’s fast-paced and a page-turner, as you’d hope from any average spy thriller – there is not an ounce of originality about it. It deploys every spy cliché in the book – I saw the reveal of the mole in Argylle’s team coming a mile off, since it’s a standard trope from almost every Bond film – and reads almost as if the author had tried to see how many spy tropes he or she could tick off in one book. It’s derivative, silly, far-fetched, and to me doesn’t have a whiff of Taylor Swift about it, other than once using the phrase ‘all too well’. Without the aggressive promo of the film (Vaughn said it would ‘redefine the spy genre’, and I am genuinely struggling to understand how), I imagine it would have fallen by the wayside.
Yet the buzz about Swift as its potential author has catapulted Argylle into a new realm. When I looked up the novel’s reviews on Goodreads, only a day after its release, most of them simply gave five stars alongside the comment ‘Apparently this is Taylor Swift?!?!?’ or ‘Can’t wait to read Taylor Swift’s book!’ I would hazard a guess that a substantial proportion of Conway’s 40k followers are Swifties, since most of the comments on her posts identify apparent ‘easter eggs’ proving that Swift and Conway are one and the same (someone claims you can see the reflection of blonde hair in a wine glass in one of her photos – sign this commenter up for service in the CIA alongside the fictional Aubrey Argylle!)
I don’t believe Swift is Elly Conway, though I’m delighted to see another Elly with a Y out there in the world; perhaps Elly being a Swiftie pseudonym might lend it a legitimacy that means people will stop misspelling my name. For what it’s worth, my theory on the mysterious author is very similar to that voiced by Constance Grady, who has written about it here. I have also seen theories that the novel was written entirely by AI, which would explain its dense proportion of clichés and tropes (and would make for a fascinating experiment).
But I’m less interested in unmasking the Argylle author than I am in considering how all this intrigue goes back to debates we’ve been having in literary theory for quite some time, and how it’s an excellent example of our continued fascination with ‘The Author’ – and of the potential pitfalls of this fetishisation.
Argylle is an interesting insight into the modern operations of what we call the ‘author function’. Writing in the 1960s, scholar Michel Foucault identified this as something that ‘permits one to group together a certain number of texts, define them, differentiate them from and contrast them to others’. Not only does this serve a useful categorising function (on, for example, bookshop and library shelves), it also helps us to figure out what a text is ‘about’; to which genre it belongs.
For example: if we know a work is by Jane Austen, we can expect it to deal with the themes of marriage, social mobility and family relationships, and we are likely to pay particular attention to its social commentary and representation of women. If we know it’s by Stephen King, we will certainly expect elements of horror and/or fantasy. Some authors have even adopted conscious strategies that acknowledge and facilitate such neat typecasting and categorisation: author Iain Banks publishes mainstream fiction under this name, while using ‘Iain M. Banks’ for his science fiction work.
Why do we set so much store by the author? Foucault argues that ‘the author is the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning’. Or, in other words, we are ultimately somewhat anxious about just how many possibilities there are for interpreting a work of literature. It can be overwhelming. As rational human beings, we want answers: we want to know what a book is ‘about’; what the author meant when he or she wrote it. We don’t necessarily want to entertain the troubling notion that there is no one meaning behind a literary work, that it could be about literally whatever the reader wants it to be about. So we fetishise the figure of the author. It’s a safe way of enabling us to put books into ‘boxes’, a shortcut to understanding them that appeals to our brain’s tendency towards efficiency and the categorisation of background information. Our brains don’t have to work as hard, once we put this framework of expectations into place. Much of the interpretive legwork has been done for us as soon as we read the author’s name.
Literary critics have been debating the author function for decades, if not centuries. It resurfaces frequently in modernity: consider the headlines every time a ‘hitherto undiscovered’ work that might be Shakespeare comes to light, or, conversely, every time ‘new evidence’ arises that Shakespeare may not have been the author of some of his attributed works. The very fact that this makes international news is clear evidence of how highly we prize the author, how closely intertwined our linkage of Shakespeare’s works with the ruffed figure of ‘The Bard’ is in our cultural imagination.
Yet the author function carries the potential to be incredibly limiting. Knowing a work is by Jane Austen will narrow us down to a particular line of enquiry, cause us to focus particularly on features such as irony and themes such as women’s limited roles in high society. It might cause us to miss out on other interpretations, to ignore other aspects of the text via a form of confirmation bias. To bring another Swift into the equation, reading a work published under the name ‘Jonathan Swift’ is likely to attune us to the presence of satire, again potentially at the expense of other themes and techniques. This is perhaps one of the reasons that Oxbridge interviews for potential English Literature undergraduates often involve candidates being presented with a poem from which all identifying information has been removed – no author or date – and asked to analyse it. Knowing the author will immediately skew the analysis and potentially prevent original insight or close reading.
Such are these pitfalls that scholar Roland Barthes, in 1967, wrote an essay in which he advocated for ‘the Death of the Author’. He argued that the author is a ‘modern character’: prior to the Middle Ages, narrative was primarily an oral mode performed by a ‘mediator’ such as a travelling bard; works were not attributed to the genius of an originary author. We have ‘invented’ the concept of the author, Barthes argues, at least partly to sate the demands of capitalism: ‘the author still reigns in manuals of literary history, in biographies of writers, magazine interviews’. And, he might have added, in the instagram accounts of debut spy novelists. We have also invented the author to help the act of literary criticism and interpretation: heaven forbid that we, as literary critics, simply offer up our own interpretation; after all, anyone can do that. Instead, we like to pretend that, with our advanced education and honed analysis skills, we are somehow getting closer to ‘unlocking’ some holy grail of essential meaning intended by the author: ‘once the Author is found, the text is “explained”, the critic has won’.
The author function is restrictive: Barthes famously stated that ‘to assign an Author to a text is to impose a brake on it […] to close writing’. It implies there is some kind of ‘secret’ or ultimate meaning in the text that we, the reader, are tasked with unlocking. To use a Swift example: consider the millions of hours and words spent by Swifties attempting to figure out who Taylor’s songs are about. There is a clear belief among many in the Swiftie community that Taylor intended a particular meaning and a particular object in her songs, and that we, with the right guesswork (and even ‘science’) might be able to unlock that fundamental meaning.
But to quote Taylor: ‘this is exhausting’.
To remove the author, Barthes argues, is to ‘utterly transform’ the text. Once we remove the idea of the author, we liberate ourselves from this exhausting and consuming process: the reader is where the real meaning of a text lies. As Barthes puts it, ‘the reader is the very space in which are inscribed, without any of them being lost, all the citations out of which a writing is made’. Ultimately, the text does not exist without the reader, and the ultimate interpretation lies with us. We must ‘reverse the myth’, Barthes advocates: ‘the birth of the reader must be requited by the death of the Author’.
Recent times have given us a plethora of examples that call the author function into question. Consider J.K. Rowling, publishing her series of detective novels under a pseudonym, Robert Galbraith, so that they might be judged on their own merit: she cited the ‘phenomenal amount of pressure’ resulting from being the author of Harry Potter, and her desire to ‘go away and creat[e] something very different, and just let it stand or fall on its own merits’. In fact, Rowling’s decision to publish Harry Potter using her initials only (see also E.L. James) is another example of how the author function can have a negative impact, with fiction written by women being taken less seriously than that by men (hence a strong tradition of writers such as the Brontë sisters and George Eliot publishing under male pseudonyms in the nineteenth century).
Think also of the ‘difficult second album’ phenomenon: I sometimes wonder if it took Arundhati Roy, whose first novel The God of Small Things (1996) stunned the critics and garnered multiple plaudits, including the Booker Prize, over twenty years to publish her second novel because of the intense pressure to produce something as groundbreakingly brilliant. Use of a pseudonym would certainly have removed some of that pressure.
The buzz around Argylle shows us the author function in real time, alive and well in today’s society. It raises fascinating questions about how we behave as readers, how we yearn for the comfort and security offered to us by a known author. It shows us both the positive and negative sides of this yearning: a novel that is not being judged on its own merit, but because it might be the work of one of the world’s most influential celebrities; how the merest whiff of attribution completely alters a text’s reception and afterlife. The very fact that a book can amass hundreds of positive Goodreads reviews by people who haven’t even read it shows us that something is perhaps rotten with the state of authorial demarcation. Perhaps we have let the author have too much authority.
I can’t help but enjoy the pleasing irony of Argylle the film portraying the book’s author, Elly Conway, being hunted down and her life endangered because her fiction took her too close to reality: it’s an 140-minute-long flirtation with the Death of the Author. The whole buzz around Argylle perhaps suggests that Barthes was right: we really do need to kill off the author. The film sounds like an enjoyable experiment in trying to do just that.
Swifterature 