Robert Reginio. Bob Dylan Outside the Law: The Poetics of John Wesley Harding, Palgrave Macmillan, 2025, 281 pp.
Review by Nicholas Birns, New York University
Robert Reginio offers a reading of Dylan’s John Wesley Harding (1967) that is capacious, provocative, and helps us recognize the significant place of the album, or, as Reginio calls it, the “song-series” (5) in Dylan’s career and oeuvre. Reginio’s book at once complements and contrasts with the reading of the album offered by Louis Renza in the final chapter of his book Dylan’s Autobiographical Vocation (2017). Both share a theoretical awareness, prodigious learning, and a profound grasp of the many possible meanings of Dylan’s lyrics. Renza is such a good literary critic that some of his treatment of the album is more pertinent to the question of literary criticism as such than as commentary on Dylan. Reginio, on the other hand, though an ingenious and resourceful reader, always keeps his focus on Dylan. His book will be of interest to admirers of the album who might have some interest in literary criticism, but who are not themselves literary critics.
Parable Versus Allegory
Both Renza and Reginio read the words of the album’s songs as not self-sufficient, but pointing to other meanings, as evinced in long-attested literary forms. Whereas Renza emphasizes allegory, Reginio foregrounds parable. Reginio defines the parables as texts “promising legible analogy but torqued into labyrinthine textual paradoxes” (19). But he also suggests that whereas what allegory explains through something else is intrinsically meaningful, a parable’s ability to explain something through something else is a means to an end. This might seem to be only a slight difference. Both allegory and parable, after all, read one thing in terms of something else. Reginio’s focus on parable, though, emerges as superior to Renza’s on allegory in several ways. Allegories often are out to convey a dogma or truth, whereas parables are out to convey a meaning. An allegory calls out for a supplementary reading precisely because its overt terms are unsatisfying. A parable, whether from the New Testament or Kafka, as both Regino and Dylan himself have adduced, can be satisfying even to a reader unaware or uninterested in any further meaning. Simpler and more supple than the more ostentatious and elaborate allegory, parables can do more with less and avoid one overall conceptual frame. Indeed, Reginio says that the album uses allegorical techniques, but that these undo any overall attempt at allegory. The album’s parables are a “response” to outward events that sculpt an explication or traceable framing of them. John Wesley Harding’s canny and maneuverable use of parables to extract meaning from outward circumstances places the album in the context of “wisdom literature” (67). Reginio, however, sees John Wesley Harding as taking an “ironic stance” (122) towards a straightforward parabolic mode. “All Along the Watchtower” and “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine,” for instance, are lyrical and laden with Biblical overtones. But there is no way to easily understand what they mean. This indicates for Reginio that there are many motives and generic styles operating in Dylan’s work. What would be for Woody Guthrie a “song of protest” (17) is for Dylan “weighted with existential significance.” (17)
Reginio’s introductory Chapter 1, “Before the Flood,” percipiently recognizes how this overdetermination of motive and meaning in Dylan’s songs can be fruitfully addressed by the tools of poststructuralist theory. The impossibility of either escaping the political manifestation of social meaning or expressing a determinate truth outside the mesh of language, necessarily unfolds in the complicated unfolding of Dylan’s lyrics.
Reginio demonstrates this particularly in “I Dreamed I Saw Saint Augustine,” which “wavers between solitary utterance and public pronouncement” (78). Roland Barthes read Balzac’s “Sarrasine” with no more ardor or attention than Reginio reads these songs. The mixture of close reading with public, archival, and social criticism is a heady one, and Reginio’s reader will feel the full arsenal of possible approaches to the album has been deployed. Reginio’s knowledge of modernist literature and 20th century history and politics is wide-ranging and enriches his commentary on the album. Reginio’s archival explorations are particularly rewarding and subtle. He describes how the Poughkeepsie Journal, which Dylan, living in the Catskills, would conceivably have read, reported on the Newark riots of the 1960s. That Reginio can pivot between reading Dylan in the light of Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, and Julia Kristeva while doing this sort of hyper-minute reconstructive archival work, imagining Dylan reading a Hudson Valley newspaper covering riots in New Jersey, is testimony to his breadth as a critic. Theory and practice, speculation and hyperlocal attention, are brilliantly juxtaposed. Reginio’s citation of Derrida’s compelling 1992 essay “Force of Law” is especially fruitful in that the figure of the outlaw and the complicated relation of violence and justice are at the forefront of the album’s narrative and ethical weave, and its relation to the tumult of the 1960s as exemplified by the Newark riots.
Theory and Politics
Yet is it gauche of me to wish that Reginio ushered Derrida off the stage a bit earlier? To feel that Derrida is invoked so often as to obtrude on the reader? Nobody believes more than I do in the total relevance of Derrida to Dylan’s songs and to literature in general. And, as compared to Renza (also deeply grounded in poststructuralism), Reginio’s explorations into “generative aporia” (13) end up saying, appropriately, more about Dylan than they do about theory as such. But if half of the references to Derrida had been eliminated, the book would, I think, seem crisper and more alert. In a broader sense, sometimes one wishes that when Reginio adduces 20th century European thinkers and poets as elucidators of Dylan, he would make a connection between them and Dylan as people. For instance, Reginio links Paul Celan to Dylan in that they both share an attunement to “the unreconciled voices of a traumatic past” (253). But comparing the two artists as Jews, as lyricists, as gnomic truthtellers might have fleshed this argument out a bit more. Analogously, Dylan and Derrida might—despite the very different circumstances of their upbringing—be connected by their shared Jewishness, their very offbeat ways of registering that identity. So more concrete links to personages such as Celan and Derrida would have been welcome. On the other hand, it is good that Reginio is willing to operate in the reaches of abstraction and speculation that can grapple with the ultimate meanings of the songs.
Like Renza, Reginio does read the album in moral and ethical terms, but unlike Renza he does not get into a political reading. In contrasting John Wesley Harding to the contemporaneous Basement Tapes, Reginio sees the Basement Tapes as absorbing all the explicit political references to the Vietnam War and the racial tensions of the era, with John Wesley Harding shucking off any immediate politics in favor of a broader, more essential, more theoretical politics of violence, the outsider, and justice. Reginio is not trying to say the album is not political. He distinguishes his reading of the album’s relation to its 1960s milieu against one of “ahistorical nostalgia” (8). Instead, Reginio appreciates John Wesley Harding as an album that is “tensile, shifting and often revisionary” (9). Reginio also reads Dylan’s 1992 album Good As I Been To You as a counterstatement of nostalgia for the 1960s. This anti-Sixties nostalgia reading intends to alter our understanding of John Wesley Harding, as at once an extraction from and counterstatement of the Basement Tapes. It turns the album away from any association with a “seemingly directionless” violence against the system and towards a “colloquy” (9) between insider and outsider that would be at ease “navigating” (9) around violence rather than embracing it. Reginio also rebukes the historian and Dylanologist Sean Wilentz for assuming that the injustice decried in the album is the sort that can be squarely remedied by “incremental reform” (199) and not by identifying anything as more systemic. Reginio sees Wilentz’s literal focus on determinate political events as limiting the album’s fundamentally broader critique of injustice and violence.
Politics and Spirituality
Reginio, though, tends to see violence here as mainly revolutionary violence from the Left, even as, both before and after the 1960s, a greater violence, both literal and symbolic, came from the Right. But for Dylan, the left-wing violence seemed to unravel the “peace and love” consensus of the left at the time in a way that was more disturbing to those who saw themselves as movement people. In this light, the nature of Dylan’s migration to this folky, rootsy material bears a second glance. Dylan’s country-roots persona in John Wesley Harding is inevitably epigenous and ersatz. In this, he is in the tradition of folk music as both inherited and transcended. William Hogeland points out that the Almanac Singers, colleagues and collaborators of Woody Guthrie, employed fake Southern accents and concocted biographies of hard travel” (Hogeland 57). Dylan, though at this in his early career flirting with an exhibition of the genuine, is more focused on evoking the style and the feeling of the genuine without necessarily calling on it as an organic source. Reginio cites the argument of Benjamin Filene that a yearning for musical roots and source in folk ballads itself is a phenomenon of modernity, of a nostalgia excited by urban alienation and deracination. Thus, one can understand the feeling of some in 1967 who might have thought John Wesley Harding was an evasion of what was going on at that time in San Francisco, New York City, Detroit—and Vietnam. But this ersatz element also represents an attempt to politically broaden the implied stance of the real thing. “I Pity the Poor Immigrant,” though with a different political valence today than in 1967, was an example of this. It is a song done in the style of old-time music, but with a broader, more compassionate message.
Reginio sees the album “juxtaposing two utopian visions,” rather than cementing a narrative of American exceptionalism (268). Dylan creates a rural, old-time persona that presents American life as more liberal and diverse than it truly was—an important accomplishment reflected in this album and his music overall. Indeed, the idea of a conjectural space in the heartland of American music, which is more inclusive than that heartland, is fundamental to the history of rock and roll, and John Wesley Harding plays a pivotal role in fashioning this framework. Reginio evokes this specter without falling into the error, described by Timothy Hampton, of seeing Dylan’s work “as a parable about American identity and inclusiveness” (Hampton 11).
The songs on John Wesley Harding also seem more acts of spiritual seeking than do most folk ballads. Indeed, the collective nature of the ballad precludes the sense of individual quest in the songs of the album, with “I Am a Lonesome Hobo,” “As I Went Out One Morning,” “I Pity the Poor Immigrant,” and “I Dreamed I Saw Saint Augustine” all explicitly in the first person. There might be spirituality beyond the spiritual genres (proverbs and allegories) that Reginio brings to bear on the album. “I Dreamed I Saw Saint Augustine” and “All Along the Watchtower” explicitly invoke a Christian saint and a passage from the Hebrew Bible, and the religious aspects of the album foreshadow Dylan’s later work. Also, a Jewish reading of this album would have recognized that the JWH initials of John Wesley Harding come close to the four letters of the Tetragrammaton, the ineffable Hebrew name of God. Previous critics (see Curtis 98) have raised this point, but Reginio seems to deliberately avoid it.
Reginio quotes the African American writer Julius Lester’s comment that his white friends would have to feel a similar sense of vulnerability to understand Black people living in the inner city. It was not enough, in other words, for there to be compassion and solidarity; there had to be real suffering, Reginio’s pivotal insight about John Wesley Harding is that the album is trying to intervene at precisely this stage, when rational political analysis has failed, and only art attuned to a sense of emergency can inform the listener. Thus John Wesley Harding, precisely by avoiding a tick-the-boxes checklist of 60s radicalism, and by abjuring editorial page truisms and earnest pleas for moderation, goes very deep indeed. Reginio explores in Chapter 2, “Down in The Flood,” two Dylan songs from 1967 not on the John Wesley Harding album: “This Wheel’s On Fire” and “Too Much of Nothing.” By analyzing these songs from the Basement Tapes, songs fraught with the hope, pain, and frustration of the political and temporal moment, Reginio gives a wider sense of the social background and how Dylan was and was not responding to it in his songs. Attending to these “precursor songs” (47) not only allows Reginio to explore the nature and consequences of Dylan’s collaboration with Robbie Robertson and other members of the Band but also allows us to see his full response to the “violence and violent collapse accruing in American cities” (48) in the summer of 1967.
Reading The Album
In this way, John Wesley Harding, from the perspective of the albums to come, is indeed a fairly typical Dylan album. Reginio limns this typicality by exploring the album’s deployment of various personae, anticipating the veiled protagonists, observers, and villains of Dylan’s albums of the 1970s and 1980s. Chapter 3, “Ballads Before The Law,” underscores these precedents. The pairings of Frankie and Judas Priest, Tom Paine, and the damsel in “As I Went Out One Morning” promise drama but provide little resolution. The songs offer either “no message” or “elliptical proverbs in a sardonic tone” (133). The damsel, speaking from the corners of her mouth, offers “surreptitious, desperate voicing” (162). This is identified by Reginio as a surrogate for the perspective of the album itself. By remaining “not restricted to historical particulars” (182) and speaking from the corners rather than the center, the album finds an asymmetrical but insightful vantage point.
Reginio also discusses the nature of reference and discursive name-dropping in the songs. His descriptions of the figures of Tom Paine and Saint Augustine referenced in the album are best seen as “stylized sketches” rather than as “allusions held fast” (169). This is where literary critics can help listeners of the songs understand the mechanics of reference and meaning in these lyrics. Reginio discusses how Paine, positioned as a menacing figure, is more an oppressor than a liberator. But the point here is not that Dylan is venturing into the historiography of Thomas Paine, but that he is using the name as a “metonym for American self-emancipation” (144), including that self-emancipation’s dark side. Similarly, the use of the name of Saint Augustine commits Dylan neither to Christian belief nor even to his own lyrics as an Augustine-style “Confession,” a reading which would be inapt. Reginio ranges widely, but this book is of real help to students and appreciators of the album as it augments our sense of what it expresses and means.
The manner of Reginio’s book—a close reading of a work with significant and extravagant theoretical armature—is notable as it is one, in general, less prevalent in literary studies today. Indeed, studies of long-canonical authors such as Milton or Chaucer in the 2020s would tend to be more tightly-knit. This is not a criticism a priori, as this book’s ambition is its greatest virtue. It is just to say that it is not the sort of literary exegesis really being produced now. Since John Wesley Harding, as an album, was hardly the sort of rock album produced in 1967, perhaps this is fitting. I admire Reginio’s courage in not thinking small, not just producing analysis geared to a cautiously formalist or narrowly historicist way, not sticking a label on his methodological approach. So many people are either naturally suspicious of this sort of reading or have been trained by media narratives to be so suspicious that Reginio’s pursuit of this endeavor is rather brave. Yet, because the book’s first half is basically devoted to theorizing and putting the album in broad historical and cultural contexts, a close reading of the songs (perhaps also limited by copyright issues with quoting words) is delayed. In Chapter 4, “Abjection,” we find readings of “As I Went Out One Morning” and “I Dreamed I Saw Saint Augustine.” This is the strongest chapter of the book, reading very moving and complex songs with the rigor and insight they deserve, and its designated theorist, Julia Kristeva, is used decorously in a generative and heuristic manner. Chapter 5, “Entreaties,” contains readings of “Drifter’s Escape,” “I Am a Lonesome Hobo,” and “Dear Landlord,” with Giorgio Agamben filling the Kristeva role. Chapter 6, “Outside the Law,” contains readings of “I Pity the Poor Immigrant” and “All Along the Watchtower.” As cogent as Reginio’s reading of “All Along the Watchtower” is, it seems frustrating that we have had to wait until page 243 to receive a full reading of one of John Wesley Harding’s strongest, best-known, and most moving songs. The effect here is somewhat of a concert where the singer spends so much time on experimental work that challenges and at times perplexes his audience, and only near the end of a three-hour concert reels off the hits in a way that gratifies our pent-up need but also feels slightly rushed. That there is a sense of the book simply running out of time is also signaled by how “Down Along the Cove” and “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” are stashed in a sprightly but overly deferred Coda.
Reginio clearly, and commendably, is not simply writing a guide to the album, and he does not simply want to analyze John Wesley Harding song by song. He insightfully realizes that the album’s place in Dylan’s oeuvre, in the 1960s, and in the American cultural tradition solicits a far wider, more conjectural, more comprehensive reading. But there are times when Reginio is undertaking just such a reading that he seems to feel the need to swerve back to close commentary on the songs, and this to-and-fro, and the staccato series of close readings coming so late in the book, make the readings seem almost obligatory. One should not have to be obligatory in Dylan studies, and ideally, the book could have worked out a mode of exposition in which the theory was less top-heavy and the song-by-song reading more thoroughly aligned with and integrated into the overall analysis. From the beginning, Reginio has argued for not pursuing “a linear or allegorical reading that would foreground the sequences of songs on the album” (39), in the service of a broader critique which would at once respect the autonomy of every single song(39) yet on the other hand could reach the broadest possible context. That the last two songs analyzed in the Coda, “Down Along the Cove” and “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight,” are also the last two songs on the album suggests that Reginio’s argumentative structure ends up reoccupying precisely that which it eschewed.
Still, Reginio’s book should be applauded for its ambition, its conceptual and moral vision, and its grasp of the values, urgencies, and preoccupations that Dylan brings to and expounds on in the album. John Wesley Harding disrupted expectations of Dylan and his relation to rock and roll, politics, and modernity by its anchoring in (some rendition of) the American folk traditions. Its lyrics, by evading the minutiae of current political reference, enact, as Reginio shows, a far wider interrogation of unjust and violent norms. Reginio’s reading takes the album from an intriguing exception in Dylan’s spiral trajectory to a consummate statement of his vision and values.
Works Cited
Curtis, Jim, Decoding Dylan: Making Sense of the Songs That Changed Modern Culture
(McFarland, 2019).
Hampton, Timothy, Bob Dylan’s Poetics: How the Songs Work (Zone Books, 2019).
Hogeland, William, Inventing American History (MIT Press, 2009).
Filene, Benjamin, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music,
(University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
Renza, Louis, Dylan’s Autobiography of a Vocation: A Reading of the Lyrics 165-67-
(Bloomsbury, 2017) .
