Dylan once said, memorably, “all my songs are protest songs.” Common consensus is he was referring not to genre so much as to an attitude, not content so much as ethos. And, in fact, analyzing Dylan through the lens of attitude or ethos has gotten more screen time than genre studies. But what if he was indeed talking about genre? I wonder how that would affect our engagement with the songs. On one hand, does genre help us to understand Dylan better or, on the other, does Dylan shed new light on genre. Or both? Certainly at times Dylan’s generic innovations can be as startling as his reinvention of “Lord Randal,” which changed folk music, then rock music, then American culture.
Taking my cue from Dylan in an attempt, purely for experimental purposes, to refocus Dylan studies on genre, I want to reinvent the wheel—the Virgilian wheel, or rota as it was known in the past (when Latin was the lingua franca). The Virgilian wheel consists of the three major poems Virgil wrote: the Eclogues (pastoral), the Georgics (georgic/farming), and the Aeneid (epic). Poets in the Renaissance especially, all across Europe, tried to emulate Virgil’s progression from pastoral to georgic to epic as the ideal formula for becoming a great poet.
Can we fit Dylan’s songs into the old Virgilian categories? Surprisingly yes, though admittedly with some Procrustean [and Dylanesque] adjustment. Is there any critical percentage in analyzing Dylan’s art through traditional genres? I think so, as this column shows briefly.
William Empson says in Some Versions of Pastoral (I borrowed the title) that “good proletarian art is usually Covert Pastoral.”[1] This is a tricky phrase, thanks to the word “covert,” but the idea of a masked pastoral form fits Dylan’s art. Whether Dylan’s is “proletarian art” is another question: the early albums up to Another Side advertised a working-class solidarity; and, much later, “Workingman’s Blues #2” seems to bemoan the proletarian dilemma, not to mention “Union Sundown.” Even the Nobel Committee, while raising Dylan to the world of high art and culture, paradoxically seemed to imply that the troubadours and oral poets preceding Dylan sang for the people.
In any case, amid the tsunami of books on Dylan, especially recent ones, few analyze Dylan’s songs as contributions to pastoral poetry, proletarian or otherwise. But why pastoral? Because, Empson notwithstanding, pastoral’s flexibility as a genre has been neglected. Philip Roth wrote a stunning novel called American Pastoral (1999), which extended and challenged the generic implications of its title brilliantly. But the genre has remained on the sideline in a kind of critical (and, apart from Roth and a few landscape poets, literary) obsolescence, dismissed as over-stylized, frivolous, staid, restrictive, and even elitist.
Some Versions of Pastoral was first published in 1935. Odd, perhaps, or amusingly belated for me to be applying Empson’s idea of Covert Pastoral to Dylan’s songs now, as if it were hot off the press. Max Weber believed that no academic book should last more than fifty years (of course his books belied that pronouncement). But, pace Max, maybe Empson’s ideas about genre are still current. Dylan’s songs have garnered scores of literary analyses, many brilliant enough to take your breath away. But curiously, despite the acknowledgment of Dylan’s literariness, critics tend to approach his lyrics idiosyncratically, either in categories tied to their own reading or peculiar to Dylan and unconnected to standard genres. Maybe the time has come for a little Empsonization.
Does Dylan deliberately engage conventional genres? Or does he intuitively rewrite conventions and leave it to us to find the literary patterns? I’m not sure. But intention is a subject for another column. I will say this, however. Whether with poetic intent or not, his choices underscore Christopher Ricks’s idea that “Like the great athlete, the great artist is at once highly trained and deeply instinctual. So if I am asked whether I believe that Dylan is conscious of all the subtle effects of wording and timing that I suggest, I am perfectly happy to say that he probably isn’t…What matters is that Dylan is doing the imagining, not that he be fully deliberately conscious of the countless intimations that are in his art.”[2]
Probably, in Ricks’s terms, Dylan’s relationship with pastoral poetry isn’t “fully deliberately conscious” of the ways he engages, and upends, the traditional mode. At least not always—at some times, in certain songs, his awareness of conventions and stereotypes seems undeniable. This is particularly true of his many lyrics setting the city and its jaundiced denizens against the wide-eyed innocent from the country: in “Mississippi,” for instance, the speaker complains “I was raised in the country, I been workin’ in the town / I been in trouble ever since I set my suitcase down.” These country-versus-city songs indicate a deliberate technique and, arguably, qualify as examples of covert (proletarian) pastoral.
Dylan’s identity with country-versus-city lyrics seems to have been real enough. In “Diamonds and Rust,” Joan Baez’s rueful speaker remembers the young Dylan as an outsider:
you burst on the scene
Already a legend
The unwashed phenomenon
The original vagabond
The “scene” that the “original vagabond” bursts on, though fictional in the song, is presumably Greenwich Village and the “unwashed phenomenon” has just arrived from the (iron-ore) country. The historical Dylan, as is voluminously documented, began his career singing with unplaceable Iron Range accents and acting the canny hayseed among the urban folk music crowd. He cultivated an outsider posture, both in person and in quasi-autobiographical songs:
Ramblin’ outa the wild West
Leavin’ the towns I love the best
Thought I’d seen some ups and downs
’Til I come into New York town
(“Talkin’ New York”)
The half-innocent rustic who’d “seen some ups and downs” arrives in “New York town” where he heads down to Greenwich Village ( mispronounced “Green-Which” like a rube) and “ended up / In one of them coffee-houses on the block.” Nothing could be more urban than a coffeehouse, and nothing more alien to the Manhattan audience than the unwashed phenomenon: “Man there said, ‘Come back some other day / You sound like a hillbilly / We want folk singers here’” (“Talkin’ New York”).
This scene, adjusted to fit MacDougal Street, is a familiar one: if he hadn’t read Mark Twain, Dylan probably knew a few Hollywood versions of the innocent abroad. In the formulaic tale, the rustic figure brings country humility and innocent values to the jaded cosmopolitan scene. Generically, despite its familiarity, this formula is a reversal of pastoral convention. In pastoral, the site of the action is bucolic, not urban, and—to oversimplify twenty centuries of poetic variations—the smug visitor from the city or court gets a humbling lesson from an honest rustic or a sharp rejection from a maidenly shepherdess. Sometimes pure virtue, sometimes country wit, undo the superior attitude of the unwelcome visitor.
Although “Talkin’ New York” fits the pattern of the innocent abroad, and as much as Dylan might have burst on the scene “already a legend,” the fiction of the humble hayseed doesn’t survive beyond his earliest songs. Dylan’s lyrical intuition was to problematize the myth, to challenge the facile polarities with his own version of dialectical engagement. His lyrics quickly moved away from the hick-among-high-buildings pose to a complex narrative that realigns the contours of the conventional pastoral mode.
There’s an old, much-debated question in literary studies: “What is pastoral?” According to Frank Kermode, “The first condition of pastoral poetry is that there should be a sharp difference between two ways of life, the rustic and the urban. The city is an artificial product, and the pastoral poet invariably lives in it, or is the product of its schools and universities.”[3] This is a crucial point: pastoral poets are city-educated and write from urban settings about an idealized countryside. The earliest pastoral poet, the Sicilian-Greek Theocritus, was a city poet writing about imaginary shepherds. Virgil, too, though raised on a farm in Mantua, wrote his Eclogues in Rome, as an urban poet. Paul Alpers, who wrote a book called What is Pastoral? (and another called What Else is Pastoral?) objects to what he calls Kermode’s overly quick explanation that, “in the space of two pages,” moves from “contrasts between the natural and the cultivated” to “the opposition of the country and city to the Golden Age to Juvenalian satire.”[4] Alpers prefers a much more complicated explanation, eschewing the long history of romantic (and Romantic) definitions of pastoral that stem from Friedrich Schiller’s On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry and Wordsworth’s Prelude. His quibble with this history is that it favors landscape—e.g., Arcadia and Golden Age bucolics—as well as “a longing for the ideal, prompted by a reaction against the ways of civilization, to be at the heart of pastoral”(30). Alpers, in contrast, insists that “we will have a far truer idea of pastoral if we take its representative anecdote to be herdsmen and their lives, rather than landscape or idealized nature”(22).
But Alpers’s categorical division doesn’t seem to hold in practice, as “Talkin’ New York” shows. The song clearly contains both categories, and stereotypes overlap. There’s a landscape “anecdote” pitting the “wild West” and “towns I love the best” against Greenwich Village. But there is also another anecdote—of the “herdsmen and their lives,” so to speak. The song uses the speaker’s country humility to satirize the city’s corrupt “ways of civilization,” manifest in the urban snickering, if that’s what it was, of the misguided “man there” in the coffeehouse, who might have been an unsympathetic MC at a hootenanny or open mike night.
“Talkin’ New York” offers a Covert Pastoral by inverting the site of the naïve poet’s experience. Rather than discovering the poet in the landscape of bucolic innocence, the modern (covert) version of the pastoral myth sets the innocent poet in the heart of a cityscape replete with urban criticism and bigotry toward hillbillies. The stranger from the country appears on the scene and, in an inversion of the city-country pastoral paradigm, levels his satire at the jaundiced city folk.
Significantly, Dylan’s speakers don’t move from naivete to sentimentality, don’t abandon the “representative anecdote” of moral experience in favor of ossified ideals—to whit, “all my songs are protest songs.” But Dylan’s approach to the city-country conflict soon developed beyond the simple inversion of “Talkin’ New York.” He tested the boundaries of this version of pastoral. For instance, one of his earliest train songs, “Bob Dylan’s Dream” from the Freewheelin’ album, gives a preview of a dialectic of pastoral values evident throughout his later work:
While riding on a train goin’ west
I fell asleep for to take my rest
I dreamed a dream that made me sad
Concerning myself and the first few friends I had
With half-damp eyes I stared to the room
Where my friends and I spent many an afternoon
Where we together weathered many a storm
Laughin’ and singin’ till the early hours of the morn
The narrative here transplants innocence from the country to the city. The train is “goin’ west,” as if toward the open American spaces, and the speaker looks back sadly at a room probably (or plausibly) in an urban setting. There is an unmistakable naivete, reminiscent of “My Back Pages,” in the lines “As easy it was to tell black from white / It was all that easy to tell wrong from right.” But, unlike traditional pastoral poetry, the innocence exists in the crowded room, the stand-in for culture, and it is lost as the speaker travels west into America—which, under normal circumstances, would represent rustic innocence.
There’s a strong temptation to read this song autobiographically—which complicates things, since Dylan was from mining country and “goin’ west” could mean going home, unless he’s going to a new kind of country. It is also irresistible—and confirmed by biography—to compare the room where the speaker and his friends “weathered many a storm” to the coffeehouse in Greenwich Village where the uncut harmonica player first encounters alien city mores. The reversal of innocent pastoral sites—the “wild West” and the room with the “Laughin’ and singin’”—mirrors the reversal of the two different speakers’ moral status. The expression of Covert Pastoral on full display in “Bob Dylan’s Dream” enacts a dialectic of elegiac mode and satire, of pastoral naivete and urbanity.
At times, Dylan’s lyrics can capture this dialectic almost too subtly. Think about a song like “Time Passes Slowly” which should be easy to categorize as elegiac pastoral romancing:
Time passes slowly up here in the mountains
We sit beside bridges and walk beside fountains
Catch the wild fishes that float through the stream
Time passes slowly when you’re lost in a dream
The repetition at the beginning and end of the stanzas of the phrase “Time passes slowly” seems to reinforce the pace of pastoral life, maybe alluding to the inevitable turning of the seasons. The speaker, “up here in the mountains,” would seem to be an updated version of famous rustics like Colin Clout or Lycidas, not a herdsman but definitely enjoying the characteristic otium of the genre. But something is amiss in Dylan’s version of pastoral (at least in this song). He builds the lyrics around the passing of Time, evidently an invasive extra-pastoral force unwelcome in the locus amoenus—the idyllic safe and shaded landscape of bucolic tranquility. Further, and more damning, Dylan’s bucolic scene occurs “when you’re lost in a dream.” This is the heart of the pastoral dialectic, the struggle between reality and the unreal site of leisure, a state of mind John Donne refers to as sucking on “country pleasures / childishly” (“The Good-Morrow”).
In “Time Passes Slowly,” however, the valence favors reality over pastoral innocence, because Time impinges on the dream. This isn’t the typical pastoral relationship in which rustic pleasures revamp city woes, and simple country values neutralize the skepticism and superciliousness of urban visitors. On the contrary, “Time Passes Slowly” is ultimately a skeptical song: unlike “Bob Dylan’s Dream,” in which the romance is set back east in the (urban) room, “Time Passes Slowly” romances the rustic setting of bridges and fountains (a good rhyme for mountains, but aren’t fountains the product of human architecture?). Yet the presence of Time is like a shadow over everything. It may be that Time passes slowly in a dream, but in reality Time passes, and with it the pastoral dream. This is one of Dylan’s versions of “Covert Pastoral.”
Here’s another version. Explaining “the marriage of the myths of heroic and pastoral,” Empson contends that “the double plot … is needed for a general view of pastoral because the interaction of the two plots gives a particularly clear setting for, or machine for imposing, the social and metaphysical ideas on which pastoral depends” (30). A double plot juxtaposes the two modes of pastoral and heroic, in a sense collapsing the spokes of the Virgilian wheel. This kind of juxtaposition, if Empson is right, is crucial to introducing pastoral, especially Covert Pastoral. A song like “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” might come to mind. Not only does the song have an active double plot—the heroic outlaw subplot of Jack’s men who “by the riverbed they waited on the ground” interlaced with the erotic/jealousy main plot of Rosemary and Big Jim. But it also captures a pastoral version that valorizes the success of extra-urban qualities in the thick of town corruption (“The hangin’ judge came in unnoticed and was being wined and dined”). For all his mystery, however, the Jack of Hearts is really only an enhanced copy of the misunderstood performer in the coffeehouse: if the performer arrives in New York to outwit the wits, the Jack of Hearts out-performs the performers, steals their hearts, and “heroically” steals money from the bank. This is what Empson means by “the marriage of the myths of heroic and pastoral”—served up in Dylan’s Americanized version.
As is well known, “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” doesn’t fit the contours of the typical outlaw ballad. But there’s more to it than just a revision of songs like “Pretty Boy Floyd,” Woody Guthrie’s straightforward Depression-era tale of a ruined agrarian culture and a face-off between unfair laws and benevolent lawlessness. “Pretty Boy Floyd” is a protest song, justifying the acts of a notorious villain who was forced “to live a life of shame.” But Woody, ever the political activist, heightens the contrasts between the haves and have-nots, defining the myth of the agrarian by introducing a myth of the hero:
But a many a starvin’ farmer
The same old story told
How the outlaw paid their mortgage
And saved their little homes.
Others tell you ‘bout a stranger
That come to beg a meal,
Underneath his napkin
Left a thousand-dollar bill.
This isn’t a double plot, though, because the agrarian figures have no agency in the song. Like most outlaw ballads such as “Whiskey in the Jar” or “Jesse James” or “John Wesley Harding,” Woody’s song has a single plot. You could even say a single-minded plot: the justification of crime and villainy in an unjust society.
Dylan’s song, in contrast, takes the framework of the outlaw ballad and, by introducing a double plot and giving agency to the figures in both plots, transforms it into a Covert Pastoral. In Empson’s terms, he uses the double plot as a “machine for imposing the social and metaphysical ideas on which pastoral depends.” The song has, of course, inspired many interpretations. Timothy Hampton calls it a “shaggy-dog tale,” and ties it to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and the “maps of both writers.”[5] Stephen Scobie categorizes it as an outlaw narrative, highlighting its “indeterminacy” and emphasizing the jumps in time, while Michael Gray calls the song “a deft movie script.” [6] But, ironically, the more critics seek up-to-date genres or subgenres (“shaggy-dog tale”) with which to categorize the song, the clearer it becomes that we can hear Dylan’s song as a version of an existing genre. Perhaps we can’t know if, for example, Dylan is just alluding to pastoral stereotypes, or if pastoral is an organizing force here and elsewhere in his work. Nor can we be sure, finally, if he’s “fully deliberately conscious” of pastoral traditions when he writes. Or if he’s ever stumbled over Virgil’s rota rolling by.
But imagine. Some versions of georgic: Dylan on farmers and farming (“Gospel Plow,” “Hollis Brown,” “Maggie’s Farm”). And imagine too, though no one sings Homeric songs anymore, Some versions of epic (the ballads, yes, but also “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” “Frankie Lee and Judas Priest,” “Highlands,” “Tangled Up in Blue,” “Isis,” “Hurricane”). Maybe, as we look for new ways to listen to Dylan, we might think about the oldest poetic genres, like the Virgilian rota of pastoral, georgic, and epic. Maybe we should go back, even if we can’t go back all the way.
Raphael Falco
[1] William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (New York: New Directions, 1935;1974), 6.
[2] Christopher Ricks, Dylan’s Visions of Sin (New York: HarperCollins Books, 2003), 8.
[3] English Pastoral Poetry: From the Beginnings to Marvell, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: W.W. Norton, 1952; 1972), 14.
[4] Paul Alpers, What is Pastoral? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 32. Further references in the text.
[5] Timothy Hampton, Bob Dylan’s Poetics: How the Songs Work (New York: Zone Books, 2019), 124.
[6] Stephen Scobie, Alias Bob Dylan Revisited (Calgary, Canada: Red Deer Press, 2003), 161-62; Michael Gray, Song and Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan (London: Continuum, 2000), 185.
