Apollo and the Sad-Eyed Lady: Nietzsche Listening to Dylan
By Stephen Rive
We do not always keep our eyes . . . from finishing off the poem; and then it is no longer eternal imperfection that we carry across the river of becoming—we then feel that we are carrying a goddess, and are proud and childlike in performing this service.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
And your flesh like silk, and your face like glass,
Who could they get to carry you?
—Bob Dylan, “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”
“Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” (Blonde on Blonde, 1966) is widely regarded as an anomaly in Dylan’s work, with some critics even deeming it a failure—famously, Michael Gray initially dismissed it as “sexy, fur-lined wallpaper” (158).[1] The critics are right: “something is happening here,” there’s something that sets the song apart, though, with some exceptions, most notably Christopher Ricks (97-108), who interprets the song as a meditation on the sin of covetousness, the relative lack of commentary suggests that “[they] don’t know what it is.” They seem to be defeated by the song’s dizzying array of images and allusions, such that almost none venture—beyond the observation that the song is an anomaly—to say what the song might be about, even hinting that it might be about nothing at all, or that it is simply a strange kind of love song. But the generally observed differences in tone (musical, vocal) and figurative language that distinguish “Sad-Eyed Lady” from what came before and what came after add up to more than mere oddity; collectively, they contribute to an important statement about a topic that has to be acknowledged as important to Dylan: art. Identifying that topic does not, of course, suddenly dispel the mystery. What the song has to say about art, a statement made at a critical juncture in Dylan’s early career, does, however, come into focus when we look at the song through the intertext of Friedrich Nietzsche’s aesthetic theory of the Dionysian. My claim in this essay is twofold: (i) in its form, “Sad-Eyed Lady” is an Apollonian work as that term is understood in Nietzsche’s aesthetics; and (ii) the song is an expression of two essentially Apollonian themes: first, it draws attention to the fragility of art in the face of the mission that Nietzsche sees for it when he declares, several times in The Birth of Tragedy, that “only as an aesthetic phenomenon do existence and the world appear justified” (BT 113.[2] See also 33 and 114.); second, the song tells us that the only cure for the fragility of art is more art. I also claim for “Sad-Eyed Lady” an important role as pivot, or turning point, in Dylan’s development as an artist at a critical juncture in his early career, a role that becomes clear in the light of the Nietzschean intertext.
It must be stressed that I am not arguing that Nietzsche is a source or influence for Dylan; in fact, it seems highly unlikely that this is the case. (See Appendix, “Nietzsche as a Source for Dylan”). My approach, instead, is to use Nietzsche’s Dionysian aesthetic as an intertext with which to “read,” or—to give Dylan’s artform, song, the respect it deserves—“listen to” “Sad-Eyed Lady.” B. J. Leggett, in Early Stevens: The Nietzschean Intertext, draws attention to “the multiplicity of conceptions and practices that operate under the name intertextual” (20, emphasis in original), and he catalogues no fewer than six ways of looking at Nietzsche as an intertext for Wallace Stevens (18-19). Within Dylan studies itself, and largely due to Dylan’s borrowings from other sources in recent decades, one very important such “conception” of intertextuality has been, in Richard Thomas’s term, “creative reuse.”[3] Since I am not concerned in this essay with Nietzsche as an influence or source for Dylan, I am also not concerned with intertextuality as borrowing or “reuse.” Rather, I will use the Nietzschean intertext as, in Leggett’s term, an “interpretive strategy” for listening to Dylan. I will remain firmly in “the realm of parallel ideas, instructive analogies, of similar motives and values” (Leggett 12, 15) that tie Dylan to Nietzsche, the elucidation of which enhances our appreciation of “Sad-Eyed Lady” and its meaning.[4] Ricks paves the way for this approach when he offers Swinburne’s “Dolores” as an intertext (not his word) for interpreting “Sad-Eyed Lady,” noting, correctly in my view, that the poem “would not have to be a source for Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands (leave alone an act of allusion by Dylan) for it to illuminate the song’s art” (100). To put it another way, if Nietzsche is truly “onto something” with his Dionysian aesthetic, then it should not surprise us that we find artists like Dylan whose work exhibits, quite independent of any influence, the characteristics Nietzsche so admiringly described.
In this essay I will not consider “Sad-Eyed Lady” from a biographical perspective. In support of this approach, I note that in their quite different interpretations of “Sad-Eyed Lady” Ricks, mentioned above, and Gray (158-160) ignore biography altogether, and Stephen Scobie (144-146) relegates it to a footnote (324n15). It must be acknowledged, nevertheless, for those who hear biographical resonances in the song, that “Sad-Eyed Lady” is generally understood to be a love song about Dylan’s first wife, Sara. The seal on this view is, of course, Dylan’s famous revelation in “Sara” (Desire, 1976) that he had written the song for her. Biographical references encoded in the song include the sad-eyed lady’s “magazine husband,” who is taken to be Sara’s first husband, Hans Lownds, a fashion photographer (“lowlands” is no doubt a reference to the similar-sounding “Lownds,” the name that Sara bore when Dylan met her); the “hoodlum” in the line, “And with the child of the hoodlum, wrapped up in your arms,” which points, again, to Lownds, with whom Sara had one child (Varesi 98-99); and the mentions of “sheet-metal” and “sheets like metal” tied to Sara being the daughter of a scrap metal dealer (Sounes 204-205). I don’t deny these connections; my concern in this essay simply lies elsewhere, with the meaning of “Sad-Eyed Lady,” and not with what it tells us about Dylan’s life.
Apollo and the Sad-Eyed Lady
Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, which, with “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” opens on a Dionysian note in the crude, “bacchanalian” sense of the word, ends with a view of a magnificent temple to Apollo: “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” In what sense is “Sad-Eyed Lady” an Apollonian work as Nietzsche understands that term?
All art for Nietzsche is a means of addressing suffering in the face of our insight—the destructive power of which he associates with the Greek god Dionysus, who also gives Nietzsche’s aesthetic its name—into the terrible truth that confronts us after the death of God: the meaninglessness and absurdity of life, the unfathomable enigma that anything exists at all, our vulnerability to suffering, and our mortality. Only art, in Nietzsche’s view, by achieving what he calls “artistic distance” (GS 107), can save us from the abyss of the Dionysian insight in a healthy and life-affirming manner: art is “the great stimulus to life” (TI, “Expeditions,” 24) and the “saving sorceress . . . [who] can re-direct those repulsive thoughts about the terrible or absurd nature of existence into representations with which man can live” (BT 40). The Apollonian work for Nietzsche fulfills art’s role of providing a “stimulus to life” by overriding the terrible Dionysian insight with beautiful forms and surfaces designed to delight the eye. The Apollonian is characterized by balance, order, artifice, and illusion—features that Nietzsche associates with painting, sculpture, and epic poetry, represented ideally, for him, by the Greek myths of the Olympians and the epics of Homer (BT 24-25). Under the rubric of Nietzsche’s Dionysian aesthetic there is a counterpart to the Apollonian work, the somewhat confusingly named Dionysian work, in which the pessimistic Dionysian insight into the terrible truth of our existence is recognized, or acknowledged—hence the label “Dionysian” for such works—but at the same time mediated (not overridden, as it is in the Apollonian work) by the selecting, ordering, surface beauty, and illusions of Apollonian artifice. For Nietzsche, art of this kind—“the Apolline embodiment of Dionysiac insights and effects” (BT 44)—reached its apotheosis in fifth-century Greek tragedy, in which the terrible Dionysian insight, in its “pure” form, represented by the music and singing of the chorus, is tempered by Apollonian stagecraft, masks, and speeches. Within Nietzsche’s two-part aesthetic, it is the features of the Apollonian work—the balance, order, beautiful surfaces, and emphasis on vision—that we recognize in “Sad-Eyed Lady.”
“Sad-Eyed Lady” derives much of its Apollonian nature from the literary genre in which it participates, the courtly love song, usually understood to have originated with the troubadours of southern France in the Middle Ages, which represents an important part of the Western songwriting tradition that Dylan inherited.[5] Typical features of the courtly love song that appear in “Sad-Eyed Lady” are the otherworldly, unattainable, and exalted woman; the male singer/narrator who worships her and defers to her, as her devotee and servant; and the sublimation of the physical aspects of love into beautiful surfaces, woven out of two kinds of thread: refined, elaborate literary artifice, on the one hand, and, on the other, restrained, measured, and graceful music. It is the beautiful surface that gives the courtly love song, and, by extension, “Sad-Eyed Lady,” their Apollonian character. Nietzsche was, in fact, an admirer of the troubadours and their poetic art, their term for which was “la gaya scienza,” a term that Nietzsche took up as the subtitle, and, in German translation (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft), the title, of one of his most important books, The Gay Science. The term summarized for him “that unity of singer, knight, and free spirit that is distinctive of the wonderful early culture of Provence” (EH, “The Gay Science”).[6]
Another mark of the Apollonian in “Sad-Eyed Lady” is the primary sense to which it appeals—vision. With the exception of “prayers like rhymes,” “voice like chimes,” “matchbox songs,” “gypsy hymns,” and “phony false alarm,” all the figurative language in the song refers to things seen, not heard; and the singer’s “warehouse eyes,” referenced at the end of each chorus, are a trope for the singer’s prodigious ability to collect and store visual imagery, an ability to which the song itself, with its long list of visual attributes of the sad-eyed lady, lovingly laid out on view, gives ample testimony.[7] Vision is the paramount Apollonian sense for Nietzsche. The Apollonian, he tells us, “alerts above all the eye, so that it acquires power of vision. The painter, the sculptor, the epic poet are visionaries par excellence” (TI “Expeditions” 10). As I will argue below, the cumulative effect of “Sad-Eyed Lady”’s exhaustive “layering” of image upon image of the sad-eyed lady reflects an Apollonian “power of vision” on a monumental scale. Each of the song’s repeated “with your”s, followed by a descriptor, is like a brush stroke added to a vast canvas that slowly takes shape before the mind’s eye. And of course, in the chorus, the singer’s “warehouse eyes” are joined by the sad eyes of the sad-eyed lady herself and of the “sad-eyed prophets,” reflecting vision of a very different sort: the sad eyes of the lady and the prophets express the suffering, but also the tragic wisdom, associated with our insight into the terrible, Dionysian truth of our existence.
As an Apollonian work based on the courtly love song genre, “Sad-Eyed Lady,” I will argue, makes two distinct claims, which, together, constitute its theme: first, in exploring the elusive, mysterious meaning of art—represented by the eponymous sad-eyed lady, the song’s “love interest,” but also Nietzsche’s “saving sorceress” referred to above—as a response to the human yearning for stability and perfection in the face of suffering and endless flux, it draws attention to the fragility of art in playing the justificatory role that Nietzsche sees for it; second, it tells us that the only cure for the fragility of art is more art. If, as I hope to convince the reader in the discussion that follows, the theme of “Sad-Eyed Lady” is as I have claimed, then its treatment of its theme, particularly the second part, is thoroughly and fittingly Apollonian—the Nietzschean artform that emphasizes artifice above all. Like all Apollonian art, “Sad-Eyed Lady” confronts a terrible mystery that it seeks to transform into beautiful surfaces to delight the eye and, in so doing, achieve Nietzsche’s Apollonian aesthetic ideal of expressing gratitude and love for its subject by immortalizing it. (I will have more to say about that ideal below). I will argue that the specific mystery that “Sad-Eyed Lady” confronts is the mystery of art, and what the song immortalizes and celebrates, through a monumental accumulation of images, is art, or artifice, itself.
Fragility
What I mean by the “fragility” of art is the elusiveness of its consolations, or its capacity to fail as a response to suffering. Sometimes the work fails us: however well intended, some art fails to capture our imagination or to bring us under its spell. Conversely, sometimes we fail the work: even works that we know and admire may not achieve their effects at certain times—when we are tired, overwhelmed, or distracted, for example. But there is a far more important kind of failure and disappointment associated with art and its fragility that arises from the fact that its consolations rely on a bubble—Apollo’s illusions and artifice—that can burst at any time. It is this last point of failure that looms large in “Sad-Eyed Lady.”
The singer in “Sad-Eyed Lady” tells us several things about the eponymous lady and his relationship to her that are critical to her as a symbol for art, and to the theme of art’s fragility. Consider the first verse:
With your mercury mouth in The Missionary Times,
And your eyes like smoke, and your prayers like rhymes,
And your silver cross, and your voice like chimes,
Oh who, do they think, could bury you?
With your pockets well protected at last,
And your streetcar visions, which you place on the grass,
And your flesh like silk, and your face like glass,
Who could they get to carry you?[8]
Most obviously, the verse tells us that the singer finds the sad-eyed lady beautiful, and, in some respects, strangely so: while “flesh like silk” reads like a straightforward, even cliched, description of feminine beauty, “eyes like smoke,” and “face like glass” are more ambiguous, suggesting, from the outset, both the evanescence and the brittleness of the sad-eyed lady’s capacity to enchant. Overall, the singer is fascinated by the sad-eyed lady’s physical attributes, initiating in this first verse what will, in the course of the song, grow into a long list of descriptors.
The sad-eyed lady also represents something of great value to the singer, something which inspires awe (she is powerful, irrepressible, no one could “bury” her), but also devotion (no one is worthy of carrying her), suggesting a quasi-religious feeling of reverence. In connection with these notions of reverence and devotion, there are the references in the first verse to the “Missionary Times,” the sad-eyed lady’s “silver cross,” and her “prayers like rhymes.” More generally, “Sad-Eyed Lady” abounds, across all its verses and its chorus, with biblical and religious imagery (“the sad-eyed prophets”; “the kings of Tyrus”;[9] “the dead angels”; and “Gypsy hymns”) and, more specifically, Catholic imagery (the sad-eyed lady’s “holy medallion” and “saintlike face”), related either to the sad-eyed lady herself or to her world. Further, the singer’s question, “Who could they get to carry you?” evokes the icons, paintings, and statues carried in processions on Christian holy days. All this imagery emphasizes the sad-eyed lady’s spirituality and otherworldliness and the feelings of awe and devotion that she inspires.
Another way that the song expresses awe and devotion is through its music and Dylan’s vocal performance. The melody and rhythm of “Sad-Eyed Lady” set a calm, serious, restrained, elegiac tone that is characteristic of what Nietzsche calls “the music of Apollo,” which he describes as having “a wave-like rhythm with an image-making power” that “keeps at a distance . . . the very element which defines the character of Dionysiac music,” that being “the power of its sound to shake us to our very foundations” (BT 21). This is the tone that Andy Gill hears when he comments on the song’s “measured grace and stately pace” and “depth of devotion,” which he contrasts with the “jokey nihilism” that characterizes the other songs on Blonde on Blonde and on the album that preceded it, Highway 61 Revisited (1965) (131), and that Tim Riley notes when he refers to the song’s “withheld intensity” (141). The intro consists of the whisper of Dylan’s harmonica playing the melody of the first line. When Dylan begins singing, his voice is solemn and reverent: there is not a trace of a sneer or blame, or bitterness, or the sarcastic glee of parody or satire—all hallmarks of Dylan’s voice in the Dionysian songs of Blonde on Blonde. In addition, the song is counted in 6/8 time, which has the steady, “one-two” feel of the heartbeat of a healthy body at rest, suitable to a mood that is contemplative and adoring. The overall effect of voice and music in “Sad-Eyed Lady,” consistent with the song’s use of religious imagery, is to impress upon the listener a “depth of devotion,” in Gill’s words, toward its subject, the sad-eyed lady.
Finally, notwithstanding her other-worldly attributes that inspire devotion, the first verse tells us that the sad-eyed lady is very much of this world. Like art, the transcendence she offers is grounded in the mundane. She has “street car visions,” her pockets are “well protected at last,” suggesting she was once vulnerable to the very worldly harm of theft, and we learn in the second verse that she wears “basement clothes.”
Further, the sad-eyed lady is not worldly in the sense that, Mary-like, she shares in the world’s sufferings and perhaps even offers comfort from them (whatever it is that the singer wants—redemption, salvation—from his deity, it remains “unrequited”; she offers nothing and remains silent throughout); rather, she is a spiritual figure who is herself tainted and corrupted by the world. In the third verse, for example, the singer reminds her that the other-worldly devotion she inspires can degenerate into this-worldly sexual attraction:
The kings of Tyrus, with their convict list,
Are waiting in line for that geranium kiss.
And you wouldn’t know it would happen like this,
But who among them really wants just to kiss you?
Note that, for the singer, the sad-eyed lady appears not to have anticipated this sexual turn, though, he seems to chide her, she probably should have.
Another example of the sad-eyed lady appearing tainted in the singer’s eyes occurs in the fifth and final verse, where the singer mentions the sad-eyed lady’s “magazine husband, who one day just had to go.” If, for a moment, we use Dylan himself as an intertext to read Dylan, then, given the broadly anti-commercial, anti-mass culture tenor of many of his earlier songs, we can hear in the epithet “magazine husband,” a strong suggestion of a failed marriage to someone who—in the singer’s eyes at least—had more “gloss” than substance and who projected an idealized form of masculinity created for mass consumption, raising questions about the sad-eyed lady’s judgement.
The sad-eyed lady seems oblivious to the faults the singer finds in her relationships with the kings of Tyrus and the magazine husband, and her obliviousness, as much as the faults themselves, clearly hurts him: there is, for example, a strong tone of reproach in Dylan’s voice when he sings the line, “But who among them really wants just to kiss you?” That tone, and, more generally, the disappointment aroused in the singer by the men who loom on the sad-eyed lady’s horizons, provide the song with some conflict and dramatic tension. It is important, nevertheless, to stress that disappointment never completely overwhelms the expression of awe and reverence for someone who is powerfully attractive and endlessly fascinating (the song, of extraordinary length, is entirely concerned with the sad-eyed lady’s appearance, accoutrements, and doings), but the actual possession of whom—by the singer, by the other men—is never even a question. When, in the chorus, the singer asks,
Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands,
Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes,
My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums,
Should I put them by your gate,
Or, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?
his repeated acknowledgement that she resides where “no man comes,” (not just the singer, but no man) and the recurring reference to the “gate,” through which the singer never passes, and which seems to serve as a kind of shrine where offerings (the “warehouse eyes,” the “Arabian drums”) are left, show that he clearly believes that the sad-eyed lady, consistent with the conventions of the courtly love song discussed above, is ultimately beyond both his reach, and the reach of anyone else.
While the sad-eyed lady could be understood as an essentialized “eternal feminine” or female deity, she is, as we have seen, also one for whom the sacred always appears to be at risk of veering into the profane. On one level, the elusive sad-eyed lady is like life itself, with its pleasures and pains, its beauty and ugliness, and, counter to all of our yearnings, its refusal to “stay put” or “make sense.” At the same time, the song emphasizes features of the sad-eyed lady that make her, with her capacity to enchant and disappoint, an apt symbol for both art and the fragility of the spell art casts—especially the art of Nietzsche’s Dionysian aesthetic, which, while holding out the possibility of the non-supernatural “transcendence we can believe in” (the sacred), does not shy away from what is ugly, terrifying, or mysterious in life (the worldly, the profane). Both the sad-eyed lady and the Apollonian and Dionysian works are beautiful; both hold the spectator in a kind of devotional spell; both are “worldly” in important respects; as a consequence of their worldliness, however, both have the capacity to fail and to disappoint. Therein lies their fragility.
The fragility of art is underscored by the song’s figurative language. The features of the sad-eyed lady are rendered impressionistically, and the singer struggles to pin them down: over the song’s five verses there are two descriptions of the sad-eyed lady’s mouth (“mercury”; “cowboy”), three descriptions of her eyes (“like smoke”; “where the moonlight swims”; and, of course, “sad”), and three descriptions of her face (“like glass”; “hollow”; “saintlike”). Further, many of the descriptive words importantly suggest something elusive, fleeting, or hard to grasp: “mercury,” “smoke,” “moonlight.” Much of the figurative language is surreal—often wildly, incongruously so (“warehouse eyes”; “geranium kiss”; “curfew plugs”)—and reminiscent of Nietzsche’s idea of language in the Dionysian work “straining to its limits to imitate music” (BT 34), in the sense that it evokes feelings or intuitions, but defies straightforward paraphrase. Both the impressionistic language, which struggles to realize its elusive subject, and the wild surrealism reflect how Nietzsche’s “artistic distance” depends on a fragile balance that is always at risk of collapse.
More Art
Having addressed the first of my claims regarding “Sad-Eyed Lady”’s theme—art is fragile—I will now turn to the second: the answer to the fragility of art is more art. What I mean by “more art” is “Sad-Eyed Lady”’s lavish, multi-faceted use of literary and musical artifice to create a monumental, enduring bulwark against the terrible Dionysian forces that rule our lives. In a critical passage of The Gay Science, Nietzsche grounds the order and beautiful illusions of the Apollonian work—“spreading a Homeric light and splendor over all things”—in a desire on the part of the “Dionysian man” and artist for “fixing, for immortalizing, for being,” prompted by “gratitude and love” (GS 370).[10] Together, the desire to immortalize and the gratitude and love that prompt that desire form Nietzsche’s ideal for the Apollonian work, and “Sad-Eyed Lady” brings both to bear on the theme of “more art.” Gratitude and love express the theme through the song’s awe-struck celebration, noted above, of the sad-eyed lady/art/artifice. It is the Apollonian drive to immortalize, however, that is most emphatic in “Sad-Eyed Lady.” “Sad-Eyed Lady” achieves its immortalizing effect by two means: its sense of “stopped time,” and its monumentalism.
The primary conceit of the Apollonian “immortalizing” and “fixing” impulse is that time and its ravages can be stopped. There are two elements of “Sad-Eyed Lady” that convey the sense of “stopped” time: its music and its treatment of narrative. It is the musical sense of stopped time—“Sad-Eyed Lady”’s dreamy, mesmerizing rhythm and melody—that most immediately strikes the listener and has also caught the attention of critics. Wilfrid Mellers, for example, aptly states that “Sad-Eyed Lady”’s music “effaces Time” and “enters a mythological once-upon-a-time where the clock doesn’t tick” (403); Sean Latham cites “Sad-Eyed Lady” as an example, like “Tempest” (Tempest, 2012) and “Highlands” (Time Out of Mind, 1997), of one of Dylan’s “sprawling epics,” to which, in words that echo Mellers’s, he attributes a “looping musical structure that could seemingly go on forever” (7); and Ricks observes that “Sad-Eyed Lady,” like Swinburne’s “Dolores,” “moves in time to that of which it speaks, ‘To a tune that enthralls and entices’” (98, internal quotation from “Dolores”). The sense of stopped time evoked by the music in “Sad-Eyed Lady” comes into sharp focus when we contrast it with the relentless forward momentum of the music that drives Miss Lonely headlong into the abyss in Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” (Highway 61 Revisited).
A very different kind of stopped time, one that Latham also takes note of when he says of “Sad-Eyed Lady,” that, like “Highlands,” its “length fills time as the singer waits for something to happen” (7), stems from “Sad-Eyed Lady”’s almost entire lack of event or narrative. The song is made up, for the most part, either of static descriptions, or of equally static hypothetical actions: “Should I leave”; “should I wait?”; “Who could they get to carry you?”; “Who among them would try to impress you?” (emphasis added). The song offers just two passages in which event and conflict intrude on the otherwise sovereign, seamless flow of imagery. Although things “happen” in these passages, the ultimate effect of both is to reinforce the Apollonian value of immortalization and stopping time. One narrative passage involves the “kings of Tyrus,” which I quoted above; the other involves the sad-eyed lady’s resistance to the blandishments of the oddly feckless “farmers” and “businessmen”:
Oh, the farmers and the businessmen, they all did decide
To show you where the dead angels are that they used to hide.
But why did they pick you to sympathize with their side?
How could they ever mistake you?
They wished you’d accepted the blame for the farm,
But with the sea at your feet, and the phony false alarm,
And with the child of the hoodlum, wrapped up in your arms,
How could they ever have persuaded you?
Both passages are set in what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the “absolute past” of the epic[11]—one of the ideal types of Apollonian art for Nietzsche—which, in its “epic completeness,” is sealed off from the “spontaneity of the inconclusive present” (13, 27).[12] A key consequence of the “epic” qualities of these two narrative passages in “Sad-Eyed Lady” is that they project an atmosphere of stasis, but also, importantly, of distance, such that neither, ultimately, disturbs the overall beauty and calm of the surface imagery.
True to epic form, both narrative intrusions begin in medias res: we are not told how the kings of Tyrus came to be “waiting in line,” nor do we know what went wrong with “the farm,” or why the sad-eyed lady should take the blame for it. Importantly, we do not learn how either story ends. Both narratives are moments of larger stories, frozen and sealed off in the distance of Bakhtin’s “absolute past.” First, there is distance between the listener and the events related. The kings of Tyrus are biblical figures (see note 9 above), but even for the listener who lacks the background to make this connection, the kings—neither contemporary, nor historical—sound epic and distant. Second, there is distance between the sad-eyed lady and calamity: the song portrays the kings passively “waiting in line”—as hapless as the singer, who, in the chorus, repeatedly offers to wait before he makes his offering. There is nothing in this waiting to suggest the rush of transformative events in Bakhtin’s “inconclusive present.” As for the farmers and the businessmen, they are faceless, generic characters without a past or future, and the song presents the sad-eyed lady’s misadventure with them, whatever it involved exactly, as something safely behind her now.
The sad-eyed lady’s present position of safety, just noted, and the overall sense the song gives us that, whatever her past, the sad-eyed lady, “With [her] pockets well protected at last,” has attained a certain degree of autonomy, stability, and even invulnerability (“Who among them could ever think he could destroy you?”), provide another touchpoint, relevant to the idea of immortalization, with Bakhtin’s understanding of the epic. For Bakhtin, the stasis and distance that are true of epic plot are also true of epic characters: whatever happens to the epic hero, Bakhtin tells us, he remains the same “fully finished and completed being” (34). (In support of Bakhtin’s view, we can contrast, for example, the fixity of Achilles or Odysseus as characters with a tragic, Dionysian character like Oedipus, who is transformed by his ordeal.) “Sad-Eyed Lady” provides a beautiful illustration of Bakhtin’s static, epic character when the singer admires the sad-eyed lady: “With your silhouette, when the sunlight dims / Into your eyes, where the moonlight swims.” In classic Apollonian form, the description presents the sad-eyed lady as a statue or a monument, around which the light changes during the day, revealing new surfaces to be admired and revered, but who herself remains, like Bakhtin’s epic hero, the same “fully finished and completed being.”
In the light of the foregoing discussion, it is instructive, once again, to contrast “Sad-Eyed Lady” with “Like a Rolling Stone.” While the Apollonian sad-eyed lady appears before us like sculpture, “fully finished and completed,” “Like a Rolling Stone” presents the Dionysian Miss Lonely at a tragic, threshold moment of crisis and flux—as a character she remains “in play,” in Bakhtin’s “spontaneity of the inconclusive present.” (The two characters may, in fact, be related. The sad-eyed lady could be a sadder, wiser version of Miss Lonely—a later self who has gained tragic wisdom after her downfall.)
Many listeners are struck by “Sad-Eyed Lady”’s monumentalism, yet another key feature of the song’s immortalizing effect. There is of course something monumental in the sheer length of the song—at just over eleven minutes, only “Desolation Row” (Highway 61 Revisited) matches “Sad-Eyed Lady” in length among the songs that came before it. More importantly, however, the images of the sad-eyed lady, though individually impressionistic and elusive, collectively form a monumental structure. Dylan’s strategy in “Sad-Eyed Lady” is to exhaust the suffering and the mystery that his song confronts by multiplying and layering before the listener image upon image of the song’s principal subject. Scobie: “[the sad-eyed lady] almost disappears in the haze of images that surround her” (144). The first verse, quoted above, is typical in this respect: every line involves a description of some aspect of the woman around whom the song revolves. The song’s solution to the problem of the fragility of art, then, is more art, or more artifice, in the form of a monumental accumulation of images of the sad-eyed lady. In this sense “Sad-Eyed Lady” is its own answer to the problem that it sets for itself. It transforms the pain of artistic failure and art’s fragility, represented both by the mystery and elusiveness of the sad-eyed lady, and by her worldliness, into a monumental set of beautiful images, to be contemplated with gratitude and serenity. To achieve Apollonian immortalization by building a monument out of that which is ephemeral, impressionistic, and fleeting, is to provide reassurance, in symbolic form, of the power of Apollonian artifice, or art more generally, to enchant.
“Sad-Eyed Lady”’s structural elements—the repeated “With your”s and “your”s and its rhyme scheme—while imposing order on the profusion of imagery, also contribute to the song’s monumentalism. “Sad-Eyed Lady”’s verses are comprised of a pair of tetrameter quatrains, with an a a a b c c c b rhyme scheme. The “laying on” of the thrice-repeated a and c rhymes echoes the “laying on” of images discussed above, and contributes to the feeling of the monumental in the same way. But note also how far apart the b rhymes are set from one another. In the way that they anticipate and call back to each other across a great distance, they appear as sturdy, stone pillars supporting a temple. Note further the ingenious, “ambidextrous” rhyme scheme of the chorus, in which the line “Where the sad-eyed prophets say that no man comes,” manages to achieve both a slant, polysyllabic rhyme with the end of the line that precedes it (“lady of the lowlands”; “say that no man”),[13] and a different, masculine end rhyme with the line that follows it (“comes” and “drums”). The result is a kind of monumental “double reinforcement” of the lines of the chorus.
The final dimension of the monumental in “Sad-Eyed Lady” is its melody. In a New Yorker article, Alex Ross draws attention to the “grand” rising and descending scale of the song’s chorus and to how, in the final chorus that follows the fifth verse,
as the band keeps playing the [descending] scale, [Dylan] skates back up to the top D with each syllable. He sings on one note as the rest of the harmony moves around him: it’s as if he’s surveying the music from a summit. (n. pag.)
To this lovely, apt image, we can add two other features of the melody of “Sad-Eyed Lady” that are important to the role that it plays in the song. First, with respect to the melody of the chorus, in addition to noting the ascending and descending pattern that Ross highlights, it is important to note that the melody ascends sharply—more than an octave—from the word “comes” to the syllable “ware” of “warehouse,” and then, with the exception of the fifth and final chorus, in which Dylan holds the high D as Ross says, it descends gradually—one note short of a full octave, without missing any “steps” in the scale as it does so—between the syllable “ware” of “warehouse” and the word “drums.” Second, the melody of the verses of “Sad-Eyed Lady” also features a rising and descending pattern that peaks on the high D (on the syllable “sil” of “silver” and the word “flesh,” if we take the first verse as an example), although the interval of the ascent to the high D is smaller in the verses than it is in the chorus, and the downward movement is much shorter, and it “meanders” a bit (again, taking the first verse as an example, touching bottom on the words “chimes” and “glass”).
The rising and descending melodic feature that is mirrored in the verses and in the chorus of “Sad-Eyed Lady” has several consequences. First, the mirroring helps bind the song together and adds to the sense of monumentalism; at the same time, it is subtle: the ascent and descent in the verses is an attenuated version of the “big” ascent and descent of the chorus, and, as a result, the braces holding the song together are partially hidden. Second, the bigger ascent and descent in the chorus, compared with the verses, contributes to the feeling of building to the “summit” that Ross observes. Third, however, the melodic ascent takes the singer to the summit on the word “warehouse,” which, as an adjective to describe the singer’s eyes, is a symbol for the singer’s Apollonian power of vision. Ross’s “summit” is one from which singer and listener alike can survey the music, but it is also one from which they can survey the beautiful, monumental Apollonian surfaces that the singer’s words have spread before our mind’s eye. (This effect is amplified when, after the fifth verse, as Ross notes, Dylan’s voice holds the D on each syllable, while the band follows the scale down.) The sharp ascent of the melody in the chorus contrasts powerfully with its gradual, stepwise descent. Here, the melody seems to acknowledge the law—common to gravity, music, and life—that what goes up must come down. But with its measured descent, it wears that law lightly. To cite what was said about another famous ascent and descent, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy” (Camus, 91).
The Place of “Sad-Eyed Lady” in Dylan’s Early Career
If we can fruitfully understand “Sad-Eyed Lady” as an Apollonian work from the perspective of Nietzsche’s Dionysian aesthetic, then we can also say that it is Dylan’s first song of this kind and that it marks a turning point in his early career. Critics have noted that “Sad-Eyed Lady” stands out vis-à-vis the songs that precede it on Blonde on Blonde and on Dylan’s two prior albums, Bringing It All Back Home (1965) and Highway 61 Revisited. Ricks tells us that “Sad-Eyed Lady” is “unmistakably [Dylan’s] and yet nothing like any other achievement of his” (101). Neil Corcoran hears in “Sad-Eyed Lady” an attempt at “self-abandonment,” which is “perhaps actually realized in the weird (even for Dylan) and in some ways hilarious, and never repeated, vocal styling of [‘Sad-Eyed Lady’]” (169). As noted above, Gill comments on the lack in “Sad-Eyed Lady” of the “jokey nihilism” that characterizes many of Dylan’s earlier songs.
“Sad-Eyed Lady” stands out as an Apollonian work because it appears against an immediate backdrop of so many songs that have the characteristics of the counterpart to the Apollonian work in Nietzsche’s Dionysian aesthetic: the darker and more fragile Dionysian work, in which, as discussed above, the terrible Dionysian insight into the truth of our existence is mediated, but not overridden, by Apollonian artifice. Nietzsche grounds the Dionysian work in a desire on the part of the Dionysian man or artist “for destruction, for change, for novelty, for future, for becoming,” which is “the expression of an overflowing energy pregnant with the future” (GS 370). The Dionysian man’s desire for destruction is not nihilistic; rather, it is ultimately a creative desire—one “pregnant with the future,” as Nietzsche says—to replace what is with something new, in order to taste and experience all the possibilities that life has to offer.
Tragedy is the archetypical destructive Dionysian artform for Nietzsche, of which “Like a Rolling Stone,” in which the singer plays the role of chorus to Miss Lonely’s downfall, is the classic example in Dylan’s work. But for Nietzsche the destructive Dionysian impulse finds creative outlet in other ways as well, including parody, satire, and farce—highly corrosive examples of which we find in Dylan songs like “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” (Bringing It All Back Home), “Highway 61 Revisited” (Highway 61 Revisited), and “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” (Blonde on Blonde). All of these songs feature a carnivalesque overturning of social norms and a picaresque singer, who lives by his wits, and who is buffeted about by, and disrupts, established authority and hierarchies. Many of them are also notable for their combination of raucous, rock backing and Dylan’s accusatory, mocking, and sarcastic vocal performance, which is all of a piece with their destructive nature. But “Mr. Tambourine Man” (Bringing It All Back Home), which features an acoustic folk musical arrangement, is equally Dionysian, albeit concerned with destruction of a different kind. Here Dionysus himself, Nietzsche’s “tempter god and born pied piper of consciences” (BGE 295), appears in the guise of the eponymous Tambourine Man, who holds out the promise of “jingle-jangle morning” and new beginnings, a promise built on the destruction of “evening’s empire,” which, Ozymandias-like, has “returned into sand.”
The contrast between these Dionysian songs and the Apollonian “Sad-Eyed Lady” is stark, helping to make the case for “Sad-Eyed Lady” as an Apollonian “first” for Dylan. But there is another song on Blonde on Blonde, “Visions of Johanna,” that appears to challenge “Sad-Eyed Lady”’s claim to “first place.”[14] The point is not merely that “Johanna” exhibits elements of Apollonian artifice—that is true of all Dionysian works—but rather that certain of these elements loom large enough to give the impression, superficially at least, that “Johanna,” like “Sad-Eyed Lady,” is a purely Apollonian work.
The Apollonian characteristics that figure prominently in “Johanna” include a sense of the monumental,[15] the dramatis personae of the courtly love song (the exalted, elusive, unattainable woman and the male singer who is devoted to her), and a subdued, solemn, “serious” musical treatment.
At the same time, “Johanna” departs from the Apollonian aesthetic ideal in a number of important ways. For example, “Johanna” is multi-voiced—both with respect to Dylan’s vocal performance, and with respect to the language that he uses—such that the singer’s overall tone is by turns awe-struck and reverent, as in “Sad-Eyed Lady” (when referring to Johanna); sneering and sarcastic (as Scobie observes, vis-à-vis the “jelly-faced women” and “Little Boy Lost” [268]); anguished and self-pitying (“Oh, how can I explain? It’s so hard to get on.”); ironic, but also somewhat didactic (the museums/Mona Lisa episode); and world-wearily cynical (the peddler and countess episode). In addition to speaking in different voices of his own, reflecting different moods or attitudes, the singer channels the voices of others (“Voices echo”; “Hear the one with the mustache say”; “The peddler now speaks . . ., saying”; “like Louise always says”), each with their own intonation and vocabulary. In “Sad-Eyed Lady,” however, a single awe-struck and reverent voice and language prevail, contributing to both the sense of gratitude and love, and the uniformity of surface, so important to the Apollonian aesthetic. “Johanna” also exhibits, in contrast with the epic Apollonian ethos of distance on display in “Sad-Eyed Lady,” an “up-close,” novelistic concern with the idiosyncrasies of place and person. We have no sense at all of where or when “Sad-Eyed Lady” takes place—the very question seems wrong; but the famous first verse of “Johanna” transports us to what is unmistakably a mid-60s, New York bohemia at a very recognizable hour of the night. Further, the characters in “Sad-Eyed Lady” are few and distant, whereas in “Johanna” there are many characters, some of whom recur across verses, like Louise, but all of whom are rendered in telling details of speech, action, and appearance. “Visions of Johanna” is also full of dialogue and open-ended conflict. The conflicts are both interpersonal in nature (the singer and Little Boy Lost, for example), and philosophical (an abstract idea—“Infinity”—is tested, literally, when it “goes up on trial”; and the peddler’s dialogue with the countess raises a question about what it means to “say a prayer” for someone “that’s not a parasite”[16]). In other words, and notwithstanding its themes of being “stranded” and stuck, “Johanna” as a work brims with movement of one kind or another—the shifting scenes and characters, the clash of argument—which, as we have seen, is almost entirely absent from the “time-stopping,” immortalizing “Sad-Eyed Lady.” Indeed, when the question of immortalization comes up in the “museums/Mona Lisa” episode, “Johanna” treats it ironically and with suspicion, as simply mind-numbing “Infinity,” about which “Voices echo, ‘This is what salvation [i.e., immortalization in a religious sense] must be like after a while.’”[17] Finally, “Visions of Johanna” confronts us with a failure of Apollonian “power of vision,” not its triumph: remarkably, and despite all the singer’s talk about his “visions” of the titular woman, we never actually see anything of her. We only hear, repeatedly, at the end of each verse, about the various effects that the visions have on him. He can only tell, not show.[18] In contrast, the singer in “Sad-Eyed Lady” parades before the mind’s eye of the listener, and presumably the sad eyes of the sad-eyed lady, who is his second-person audience, the fluid and fluent Niagara of imagery discussed above.
It is beyond my scope here to provide a full analysis of “Johanna.” But the failure of vision just noted points to at least one way of interpreting the song that also explains why, while it may look and sound in some respects like the purely Apollonian “Sad-Eyed Lady,” it remains solidly Dionysian.[19] “Johanna” presents a first-person self-portrait of a character whose tragedy is his failed ambition to be an artist, a failure that can be understood to represent, more broadly, the sin of “lifelessness,” the sin of failing to find meaningful engagement, of some kind, with life. (Under this interpretation, the literary soulmate of “Visions of Johanna” is Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground—another vivid masterpiece, told in the first person, about a resentful, life-denying man.) The singer/artist in “Visions of Johanna” wants to create a work of pure praise that will live up to his exalted visions of the woman who is the focus of the song. It is from this desire that the song derives its form of the courtly love song, which also gives it the characteristics of the Apollonian work. In a sense, Dylan the artist allows his character, the singer, to dictate form. But that character is incapable of filling his form with content. His error, and what sets him apart from the singer in “Sad-Eyed Lady,” is that he believes that the material for art lies in some ineffable “beyond” and not with what is at hand. He says of the very “this-worldly” Louise, for example, “she’s just near” (emphasis added)—i.e., merely near, which means that “near” is never adequate for him. On this last point, Pamela Thurschwell quite astutely says of Louise that she is “too fleshly to fulfil the . . . muse function” for the singer and “too accessible” (268).
If we apply to “Visions of Johanna” Timothy Hampton’s very useful historical framework for understanding visionary literature, we can see the singer, far behind his rightful time, taking, or trying and failing to take, an earlier and outmoded approach to the visionary work, epitomized by Blake, under which the visionary experience—through God, or through “Romantic notions of ‘imagination’ and ‘fancy’”—“overtakes” the visionary from outside. In contrast, Dylan’s visionary aesthetic is “modernist,” Hampton argues, taking a this-worldly cue from Rimbaud, “the first great nonmetaphysical visionary” (Bob Dylan, 88). The result for Dylan is a “poetry of the everyday,” with which, Hampton observes, he “teach[es] us that beauty is all around us” (“‘Nothing, Really Nothing’”). Dylan the artist appreciates how rich the singer’s “here and now” is in settings, people, conversation, and ideas, all of which he transforms into a work of extraordinary beauty. It is precisely this richness that the singer, in his obsession with the other-worldly Johanna, treats with contempt or indifference. To cite just one example of the singer’s blindness to the beauty around him, consider his reaction when Louise “holds a handful of rain, tempting you to defy it.” Louise’s lovely, fragile, dexterous piece of performance art, which in a somewhat scrambled fashion seems to enact Cummings’s line “nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands,” crackles with intertextual electricity, yet does nothing to move or to enchant the singer; rather, the challenge in Louise’s performance (while she defies physics, she tempts her audience, the singer, to defy that she is doing so), which is the defiant challenge of all genuine art, is one that the singer would prefer to ignore. For the singer, Louise’s gesture is just one more annoying distraction on the dreary list that immediately follows the “handful of rain” line, one more of the “tricks” that the night plays, along with the coughing heat pipes, “when you’re trying to be so quiet” (presumably the better to attend to the absent Johanna). Notwithstanding its Apollonian features, “Visions of Johanna” is ultimately a cautionary tale that showcases a form of Dionysian destruction that is too dark to be anything but tragic. The singer is ultimately undone by the visions that he is incapable of realizing as art: “And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain.”
If we accept “Sad-Eyed Lady” as an Apollonian “first” for Dylan, the story of its place in his early career is still not straightforward. First, as we have seen, “Visions of Johanna,” which Dylan wrote before “Sad-Eyed Lady,” and which appears before that song on Blonde on Blonde, already marks a noticeable move, within the bounds of what remains nevertheless a Dionysian work, toward a greater emphasis on Apollonian effects. Second, although things would never be the same again, “Sad-Eyed Lady” did not immediately usher in a period of Apollonian songs for Dylan. Instead, with the turn toward Apollo in “Sad-Eyed Lady,” Dylan made a break with the past that opened the door to the radically new Dionysian songs that appear on John Wesley Harding (1967), the album with which he followed Blonde on Blonde. Like all Dionysian artworks, these songs temper the destructive Dionysian insight with the beauty of Apollonian artifice; but unlike their pre-“Sad-Eyed Lady” predecessors, including “Johanna,” they foreground Apollonian balance, restraint, and order as a means of achieving “artistic distance” from the profoundly tragic, Dionysian worldview that underlies them. They inherit from the Apollonian “Sad-Eyed Lady” its more subdued music and Dylan’s new “chastened,” elegiac vocal tone (the sneer, the sarcasm, which still figure in “Visions of Johanna,” are gone), but they replace its lush orchestration with one that is radically simplified, and its surreal, impressionistic language with a spare, unadorned lyrical form. To borrow words Nietzsche uses to describe the “deeper secrets” of the tragedies of Aeschylus, what we find in the songs of John Wesley Harding is “something incommensurable in every feature and every line, a certain deceiving definiteness, and at the same time a puzzling depth, indeed infinity, in the background” (BT 58). It is precisely this “puzzling depth” that “Sad-Eyed Lady” is lacking and that both distinguishes it, as an Apollonian song, from the Dionysian songs of John Wesley Harding, and marks it as a turning point—different from what came before, but different as well, in different ways (most notably in its continued use of highly surreal language), from what followed.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the editors of The Dylan Review and the two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments and suggestions for revision. I am also very grateful to Paul Headrick and Bruce Baugh for their generous engagement with my broader explorations of Dylan and Nietzsche, and for their insightful comments and feedback on earlier drafts of this essay. Special thanks to Paul Headrick for his unflagging encouragement and moral support.
Appendix: Nietzsche as a Source for Dylan
Over the years, Dylan has made a handful of references to Nietzsche and at least one reference to the Dionysian:
- Dylan’s liner notes for Highway 61 Revisited (1965) feature a vignette in which a character named Paul Sargent “comes by . . . in an umpire’s suit & some college kid who’s read all about Nietzsche comes by & says ‘Nietzsche never wore an umpire’s suit’ & Paul says ‘You wanna buy some clothes, kid?’”
- In “Joey” (Desire, 1976), Joey Gallo does “ten years in Attica, / Reading Nietzsche and Wilhelm Reich.”
- Dylan mentions Nietzsche in a talk at a concert in Toronto in 1980, during his Christian period, in which he describes speaking to a hostile audience at a concert he had given the year before in Tempe, Arizona: It says things in the Bible that I didn’t really learn until recently, and I really mentioned these [at the concert the year before] because there are higher learning people there, preaching their philosophy. So people can study all the different philosophies . . . Well, I definitely recall reading Nietzsche and those people like that. (quoted in Heylin, Shades 353)
- In his notes on “Stack A Lee,” from World Gone Wrong (1993), Dylan says of the eponymous murderer, “Stack’s in a cell, no wall phone. he is not some egotistical degraded existentialist dionysian idiot, neither does he represent any alternative lifestyle scam . . . .”
- In Chronicles: Volume One (2004) Dylan makes two mentions of Nietzsche. The first: “In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche talks about feeling old at the beginning of his life . . . I felt like that, too” (73, ellipsis in original). The second: [Dave] Van Ronk’s wife, Terri, . . . was just as outspoken and opinionated as Dave was, especially about politics—not so much the political issues but rather the highfalutin’ theological ideas behind political systems. Nietzschean politics. Politics with a hanging heaviness. (263)
- In The Philosophy of Modern Song (2022), in his discussion of “Where or When,” performed by Dion and the Belmonts, Dylan notes that one of the characters in the 1937 Rodgers and Hart musical, Babes in Arms, from which the song originated, is a “Nietzsche-spouting communist” (331). Further, the lyrics of “Where or When” echo, in a loose way, Nietzsche’s idea of the “eternal return”: “Some things that happen for the first time / Seems [sic] to be happening again,” (Belmonts); and Dylan, in his commentary, describes the song as “one repetitious drone through space, plugging the same old theme, nonstop over and over again . . . ,” in which “[h]istory keeps repeating itself” (327).
What are we to make of all this?
Based solely on Dylan’s reference to Nietzsche in the liner notes to Highway 61 Revisited, Clinton Heylin suggests that Nietzsche influenced the writing of “Desolation Row,” a song on the same album (Revolution, 248), but Heylin’s inference relies on the slimmest of circumstantial evidence. Heylin also suggests that the title of Dylan’s book Tarantula is a reference to the chapter “On the Tarantulas” from Part II of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and that Nietzsche’s book may have “served as some kind of model” for Dylan’s (Shades, 124), but he provides no support for these suggestions.[20] It is clear, nevertheless, that by the time Dylan released Highway 61 Revisited in 1965 he had at least heard of Nietzsche and had some idea of how college students might bandy his name about and invoke it as a kind of “trump card” in arguments. Perhaps as well, given his comments on “Where or When,” Dylan is aware of Nietzsche’s eternal return, but it is just as possible that he is simply responding to the themes of the song, which, although it does not explicitly mention Nietzsche or the eternal return, may bear an actual Nietzschean influence, since Nietzsche is in fact discussed in Babes in Arms (See Wikipedia entry). It’s telling, however, that Dylan’s “college kid” has “read all about” Nietzsche, but hasn’t necessarily read Nietzsche. In fact, the same may be true of Dylan himself. All of Dylan’s references to Nietzsche above have a superficial feel to them (“Nietzsche and those people like that”), as if Nietzsche is little more than a name that Dylan can recognize in a line-up of philosophers. Even Dylan’s quotation, or paraphrase, from Beyond Good and Evil is suspect: I have not been able to find anything even remotely resembling it in that book. But even if Dylan has read Nietzsche, as he implies with his paraphrase from Beyond Good and Evil, and as he claimed to have to the audience in Toronto, there is nothing of Nietzsche that comes through in these references and “Nietzsche sightings” that would suggest a serious influence.
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Varesi, Anthony. The Bob Dylan Albums, 2nd. Edition. Toronto: Guernica Editions, 2022.
[1] Gray later revised his opinion, arguing for the power of Dylan’s performance to redeem the “shortcomings” of the song’s lyrics (see Christopher Ricks, 101). The idea that the song’s vocal performance and/or its music rescue its weak lyrics is a recurring theme in discussions of “Sad-Eyed Lady”: see Lee Marshall (102-103), Clinton Heylin (Revolution, 294), and Andrew Muir (151). For a rebuttal to this idea, see Ricks (102).
[2] In citations I use the following abbreviations for Nietzsche’s works: Beyond Good and Evil (BGE), The Birth of Tragedy (BT), Ecce Homo (EH), The Gay Science (GS), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Z), Twilight of the Idols (TI). Numbers refer to pages in BT and to sections in all the other works. Nietzsche was a great lover of emphasis; in quotations, unless indicated otherwise, all emphasis is in the original.
[3] Kevin Dettmar, in his discussion of Dylan’s borrowing, equates “intertextuality” with “textual influence” (212), suggesting, like Thomas, that it involves an explicit and traceable, causal relationship between one text and another.
[4] In the only other extended discussion of Nietzsche and Dylan that I have found, David Goldblatt and Edward Necarsulmer’s “Language on the Lam(b): Tarantula in Dylan and Nietzsche,” the authors remain in a similar realm, making no claim for influence. Further, they do not address the question of Dylan and Nietzsche’s Dionysian aesthetic. In fact, they make an explicit point of eschewing aesthetic theory, on the grounds that an “intuitive” and “spontaneous” artist like Dylan “evades theory in a certain way” (157).
[5] Michael Coyle and Debra Rae Cohen, who interpret the song in biographical terms as a “celebration of [Dylan’s] new wife,” recognize “Sad-Eyed Lady”’s debt to the courtly love genre when they refer to the song’s “Petrarchan catalogue of [Sara’s] qualities” (149).
[6] I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer who raised the importance of the courtly love song to “Sad-Eyed Lady”’s Apollonian nature and who reminded me of the link between Nietzsche’s Gay Science and the art of the troubadours.
[7] The “warehouse eyes” are something of a two-edged sword, suggesting capaciousness and appreciation, but also, more negatively, acquisitiveness and a desire to possess. The latter feeling is ever-present in “Sad-Eyed Lady,” associated as it is with the theme of art’s fragility, as we shall see below. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer who opened my eyes to the “two-sidedness” in “warehouse eyes.”
[8] Blonde on Blonde. All quotations of song lyrics, including the choice of line breaks and punctuation, are, unless indicated otherwise, my transcriptions from the recording referenced. In assigning line breaks, I have been guided by rhyme scheme and by the musical measures within which a line falls, and not by word or syllable count.
[9] “Tyrus” is the name in the King James Version of the Bible for the Lebanese port city Tyre. Ezekiel 28 denounces the king, or prince, of Tyrus for mistaking the accumulation of wealth for godliness and for hubristically declaring himself a god; the chapter prophesies the ultimate destruction of Tyrus at the hands of foreign armies carrying out God’s will (Berlin and Brettler).
[10] Nietzsche does not use the term “Apollonian” in this passage. But it is clearly Apollo who appears before us in the form of the Dionysian man under the influence of the desire to immortalize—with his “Homeric light and splendor”—who so strongly resembles the Apollonian artist, typified by Homer, whom Nietzsche extols in The Birth of Tragedy.
[11] The “kings of Tyrus” passage is written in the present tense. Given, however, the many features that it shares with Bakhtin’s epic, as I will set out below, it is reasonable to hear the historical present tense in these lines.
[12] Bakhtin: [o]ne may begin the [epic] story at almost any moment, and finish at almost any moment. The Iliad is a random excerpt from the Trojan cycle. . . . But epic completeness suffers not the slightest as a result. The specific “impulse to end”—How does the war end? Who wins? What will happen to Achilles? and so forth—is absolutely excluded from the epic. (31-32)
[13] This rhyme is more evident when Dylan sings it than it is when spoken—highlighting the importance of performance to Dylan’s work.
[14] All references to “Visions of Johanna” in the discussion that follows are to the version on Blonde on Blonde.
[15] Although “Johanna” is shorter than “Sad-Eyed Lady,” it is among the longer songs on Blonde on Blonde, and the relatively long lines that open and close each of its verses contribute to a feeling of grandeur.
[16] For some insightful observations on the ambiguity in the peddler’s offer to “say a prayer,” see Scobie (270).
[17] John Herdman argues that the song implicitly associates Johanna herself with “the monotony and the lifelessness of the fixed and permanent” (30), a point that is relevant to my discussion below of the singer’s lifelessness.
[18] There is one (very famous) moment in which the light of creativity blazes—one moment for the singer I stress, and not for Dylan as the creator of the song, who triumphs throughout—when the singer says, “The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face.” So he can do it. But this brief breakthrough of Apollonian vision only makes what he is not able to do “all too concise and too clear.”
[19] Many interpretations are, of course, possible. For a particularly luminous and close reading of “Johanna” and its themes, see Scobie (254-275).
[20] Goldblatt and Necarsulmer also point to the similarity in the titles of the two works, but, as noted above, they make no claims of influence.
