I have spent the last week (re)reading Lorraine York’s work on literary celebrity: Literary Celebrity in Canada (2006) and Margaret Atwood and the Labour of Literary Celebrity (2013). In Literary Celebrity in Canada there is a quote that really caught my attention. As it turns out, the same quote appears on the first page of the introduction to York’s second book Margaret Atwood and the Labour of Literary Celebrity. The quote, by Graeme Turner in Understanding Celebrity, reads: “When we conceptualize celebrity as something to be professionally managed, rather than discursively deconstructed, we think about it differently” (Turner qtd. in York, Margaret Atwood, 3). The way in which York employs this quote implies that yes, celebrity should be approached industrially, as “professionally managed.” Yet, the decision to approach celebrity as such appears to come at the cost of rejecting celebrity as something that is discursively constructed, as the two approaches are dichotomized this way. Here, we are given the choice to view celebrity in regard to one these understandings but not in terms of both. Can celebrity not be conceived as something that is both professionally managed and discursively constructed? Further, the quote does not read discursively constructed (as I initially misread it) but deconstructed. Should it read: “rather than something to be discursively deconstructed,” implying that we are the ones doing the deconstructing?

Why this quote has prompted me to ponder it so intently is because it forces me to question my whole approach to celebrity, one that is grounded in the belief that celebrity is discursively constituted. At the same time, for me this belief does not preclude an understanding of the ways in which celebrity is also professionally managed and how this management interconnects with the discursive constitution of celebrity.

In her newest book, York emphasizes the “industrial relations that enable and reproduce literary celebrity” and conceptualizes celebrity “as the product of the labour of many other agents in dialogue with a celebrated individual,” including literary agents, editors, publishers, assistants, etc. (8). Drawing on Tom Mole’s definition of celebrity as a cultural apparatus that is comprised of an individual, an industry, and an audience, she places her focus firmly on the industry, identifying how it interacts with the individual and the audience (although I would argue that discussions of the audience are left wanting) (11). York’s industrial analysis has provoked reflection on how my own approach (dis)connects with hers. While York’s study of celebrity is still very much grounded in the individual (she/he), I am interested in the larger phenomenon (it) of which the celebrity is a part. As of yet, I am not sure if I have any answers, but York’s work certainly has given me much to think about.

Near the end of Margaret Atwood and the Labour of Literary Celebrity, York contends that the television interview is the “battleground of literary celebrity” (175). According to York, the television interview “places the writer in a particular risky position of potentially disavowing either cultural of economic capital, when the most advantageous plan, for a writer of literary fiction, is to keep the two in constant, kinetic exchange” (175).

Keeping this in mind, I will leave you with two television interviews with Leonard Cohen from the CBC digital archives. The first takes place in 1963 and revolves around the topic of Cohen’s first novel, The Favourite Game, and the second is from 1966 and discusses Beautiful Losers.