REVIEW BY Kathryn Lofton, Yale University
Scholars can sort studies of Bob Dylan’s relationship to religion into several piles. Some assume that Dylan is a significant religious figure within American culture. Such works – like Christopher Ricks’s Dylan’s Visions of Sin (2004) – extract theological commentary from his lyrics and do so without regard for his religious biography. Other authors perceive a particular religious perspective in Dylan’s oeuvre and reconstruct that specific outlook from his broad canon. For example, Steven Heine’s Bargainin’ for Salvation: Bob Dylan, Zen Master? (2009) argues that Dylan’s songbook offers a coherent sectarian vision: to Heine, Dylan is a denominational voice cloaked in the distracting guise of a secular rock star. In partial contrast, Mike Marqusee’s Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and the 1960s (2005) characterizes Dylan as an unresolved religious actor who is best understood as a spiritual seeker. While readings like Ricks’s considering Dylan a significant religious figure provide extraordinary exegeses of Dylan’s work, most historians and rock critics have deferred to seeing Dylan as Marqusee does. As one scholar explained, “The conventional wisdom has long tagged Dylan as unknowable when it comes to music, politics and, especially, religion.”[1]
Unconventionally then, About Man & God & Law: The Spiritual Wisdom of Bob Dylan offers an interpretation that shows what is religiously knowable from Dylan’s songs. As church attendance declines in the US, one assumption of Arnoff’s book is that Dylan’s songs offer people an alternative source of wisdom. Dylan’s lyrics, through Arnoff’s commentary, present an inspired account of how humans struggle with social life and supernatural questions. Through Dylan, Arnoff meditates on salvation, faith, death, memory, and America, among many other themes he discerns in Dylan’s catalog. These readings intend to “release power embedded in art” through interpretation (180). Arnoff’s special knack is pulling a classical voice – Virgil, say – together with Dylan’s to dramatize the depth of Dylan’s intertextual practice. Many readers of Dylan have identified his ranging citations of classical and modern sources. Arnoff suggests that, through his connection of such sources, Dylan equals them in wisdom and perception. Arnoff isn’t unearthing Dylan’s footnotes. Rather, he’s arguing Dylan belongs in the canon of great religious thinkers. Dylan constructs his “musical roadmap for the soul” from a series of riddles, “keeping his listeners asking more questions, transcending and producing and reproducing esoteric truths within the traditions upon which our culture is based” (215).
Religious scholars agree with Arnoff that popular music offers a porthole through which spiritual seekers discover “the possibilities of their own depths while also embracing something greater than themselves” (5). Popular culture, especially as expressed by fan investment, connects people who affirm song. “Popular music is about creating intimacy with the masses by sharing intimacy with the masses,” writes Arnoff (55, Arnoff’s italics). United by that listening, they establish community. One word for such community is religion.
This book is lively, written in an accessible, engaging style by a scholar who loves to spin a Dylan record and is also a deep humanist. One of the best attributes of About Man & God & Law is how its analytical voice sounds like that of a hype fan connecting the dots as they listen for the nine hundredth time to the same track, discovering as they do what is the big idea in the lyrical particulars. Arnoff’s fandom isn’t possessive but opening, showing in paragraph after paragraph how Dylan reflects the best ideas in thinkers as diverse as medieval Italian poet Dante and contemporary Belgian-American relationship expert Esther Perel. It isn’t that Dylan always takes directly from existing canonical thought, but that, as Arnoff shows, Dylan implicates himself as representative of the best thought history records. Strong evidence for Arnoff’s case is how Dylan’s canon integrates such a vast number of different “musical threads revealing patterns and dialogues” (180). In the Dylan musicology, a sense of devotional entanglement to precedent is a given: he was always trying to cite other genres in his songwriting, deploying tones and tempos that remind listeners of infrequently visited folkways and bygone bards. The resulting “classical symposium” offers a relentlessly intriguing set of images and ideas to reckon with and reconcile. “Bob Dylan is a scavenger, a collector of shards,” Arnoff observes, echoing many previous critical listeners (112). Arnoff shares this famous magpie attribute, bringing to this brisk volume a superabundance of connections to illuminate what he thinks Dylan argues as a preacher of God and life.
The question for this reader is whether Dylan possesses the “spiritual wisdom” Arnoff’s title enshrines. Sam Cooke reportedly said that, after Dylan, it didn’t matter how good a singer’s voice was. What mattered was believing that the voice singing told the truth (10). This suggests Dylan’s infamous nasal tone possessed alongside its apparent unloveliness a bracing frankness. Yet as Arnoff and other biographers repeatedly point out, Dylan prevaricated on his way to making the figure he thought would lead fans to believe his truth. “It was Dylan who concocted Dylan, inventing himself and his self-creation story in a mode familiar to students of religion and myth,” Arnoff writes (30). Dylan’s letters to a Minnesota friend reveal that he chose a new last name for himself because “having a name like Zimmerman attracted exactly the wrong kind of attention in show business” (88). From the beginning, Dylan sought to convey himself as a secular subject, a person without a particular religious attachment. He did this to render himself universal, someone to whom people of all religions could attach.
I first heard of Stephen Arnoff when I read Scott M. Marshall’s Bob Dylan: A Spiritual Life (2017). Marshall describes hearing Arnoff give a lecture representing early thought on this book. In that talk, Arnoff explained how, despite the variety of styles and masks Dylan tried, thinking about religion is the one consistent thing he did.[2] Arnoff is right that religion is a powerful palette for Dylan. It is grist for the empowerment of his individual authorship and not a communal form to which his voice ever subordinates. Arnoff says Dylan’s lyrics explain that “how we love, learn, and die are the essential acts of our being,” and he also suggests Dylan follows an “outlaw code” that “is completely sui generis” (112, 186). Can an outlaw be a moral teacher? “Bob is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake,” Arnoff quotes Joni Mitchell as saying. “Everything about Bob is a deception” (126). How can a person whose self-invention is so elaborate be a source for truth? How can someone who faked a lot of people out with his mythologizing offer “reverence and awe” or teach people about “living a meaningful life” (xvi)?
In a 2006 article in The Nation, Richard Goldstein observed that Dylan was “cruising toward sainthood” and his acclaim existed irrespective of the quality of the music.[3] Goldstein finds the admiration of Dylan’s fans a problem in the same way many critics of religion find devotedly religious believers worrisome. For those who seek to evade any indication of devotional excess – people who sociologist of religion Joseph Blankholm finds sometimes self-describe as secular – a surplus of belief diminishes rational sensibility. Throughout his career, Dylan’s fandom, the most avid of whom David Kinney describes in his 2015 book, The Dylanologists, have faced criticism because their cultic regard for Dylan seemed to diminish their ability to perceive his failings. Arnoff, meanwhile, is a Dylanologist who reflects the positive value of loving an author so much. Consider, for example, this passage:
The central figure in Bob Dylan’s body of work has always been a solitary seeker narrating a life-stroll through the United States of Pompeii. His songs are glimpses into a journey through gaps between what has been upended, what is otherwise frozen in time, and what needs to be explained. While Dylan’s role as an artist reflects the archetypal task of the poet as personified by the figure of Simonides, the memory system Dylan employs is not as rigid as that of his forebear, who captured in his mind only the images of the elite faces around the table at a rich man’s feast.
This is one of many riffs where Arnoff elegantly seeks to capture the heart of Dylan’s practice. Arnoff reiterates how Dylan’s personal sovereignty mirrors that of the wandering minstrel whose weary witness of this world makes him a morally perceptive everyman. Dylan emerges from About Man & God & Law as an iconoclastic seeker whose “public dream of identity encourages more dreamers to dream their own selves” (32). The best teachers “ensure that you do” (83). Dylan is a great teacher because he cuts a type, the singer who writes their own songs, whose very occupation offered a form by which others can do as he did. Dylan’s lead inspired a whole host of singer-songwriters whose insights emerged by speaking from their solo stance. Arnoff exposes the wisdom a fan can find in the Dylan songbook, whether in the artistic model he sets or the sageness of his lyrics.
Arnoff doesn’t demonstrate that Dylan thinks such profundity is his purpose. As a part of the 2015 launch of Watson, a computer system developed by IBM, Dylan was told in a television commercial that spectral AI had metabolized all his songs and concluded: “Your major themes are that time passes and love fades.” “That sounds about right,” Dylan replied. We learn he did so “with a smile” (33). When Richard F. Thomas explored Why Bob Dylan Matters (2017), he argued that one of the reasons Bob Dylan matters is the “ability to capture with compelling artistry the universal human emotion that comes with absence, and with memory of a place lost.”[4] To quote Dylan, “Everything passes, everything changes.” In Dylan’s songs the speaker often wishes things didn’t change, but remains unable to stop them from doing so. Dylan’s lyrics often invoke the memory of good love, but little hope for love. Arnoff says, “Love, then, is a holy mystery, which requires us to invite into our intimacies something greater than ourselves in order for us to feel and be something greater” (54). Though this is a true idea with which many can agree, I’m not sure it’s Dylan, as opposed to Arnoff, who is singing such truth into being.
“Dylan does not seek that kind of comfort,” Arnoff writes. “He doesn’t want to be swallowed up by anyone or anything. In a practical way, he simply keeps moving” (157). What Arnoff doesn’t resolve is how someone like Dylan, so resistant to getting lost in the mystery, or to giving himself over to something greater than himself, offers words of truth about love. Perhaps it isn’t that Dylan gives such wisdom. Maybe, instead, he inspires others to name it in their process of resolving the riddles Dylan tells.
[1] Christine McCarthy McMorris, “The Varieties of Dylan’s Religious Experience”, Religion in the News 14:2 (Fall 2012), 26.
[2] Scott M. Marshall’s Bob Dylan: A Spiritual Life (Washington, DC: WND Books, 2017), 239-242.
[3] Quoted in Ian Bell, Time out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (New York: Pegasus, 2013), 486.
[4] Richard F. Thomas, Why Bob Dylan Matters (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2017), 191.
