The Dylanista – The Dylan Review

Dylan Review Vol. 6.1, Spring/Summer 2024, The Dylanista

Think about all those names, all those all those cities, all those streets and small towns and all those people. How many of them mean something more than simply a proper name? How many proper names are properly proper names, rather than what one critic of onomastics identified as “the place names found in ballads and folksongs…regularly functioning as poetic devices”?^[1] For example:

I’ll look for you in old Honolulu
San Francisco, Ashtabula

Not only, on Blood on the Tracks, does Dylan manage to rhyme “Honolulu” with “Ashtabula,” but, stunningly, he finds two four-syllable city names to end the lines, each name made up of two trochees and three separate, matching pitches. But is this reason or rhyme? That is, are the cities necessary to the meaning of the verse, or does Dylan choose their names for their prosodical fit, to satisfy the meter and rhyme? Compare this name:

Crash on the levee, mama
Water’s gonna overflow
Swamp’s gonna rise
No boat’s gonna row
Now, you can train on down
To Williams Point
You can bust your feet
You can rock this joint

The “point-joint” rhyme is perfect, as is the meter (not to mention the idiolectal use of “train” as a verb). But where is Williams Point? Or which Williams Point is the speaker referring to? The most likely one is in Virginia, at the tip of a peninsula in Currioman Bay (the other tip of the peninsula is Asparagus Point). But there are other places called Williams Point. In fact, there are two more in the vicinity – one near Ocean City, Maryland, and another near Chincoteague, Virginia. All these Williams Points are at low elevation and close enough to the water to need a levee.

These place names seem to be both representative toponyms–the names associated with particular topography–and realistic places in the songs. They are what might be called onomastic pointers. Onomastics is the study of proper names: their origins, transformations, corruptions, and meanings. So, while riding on a train going east, a traveler might pass through Williams Point after the levee crashed somewhere nearby, or, alternatively, she could have been in Williams Point when the levee crashed. But it’s difficult to avoid the sense of an arbitrary toponym and a convenient rhyme. Still, how rigorously should we interrogate these names? Michel Grimaud (a scholar of onomastics), in a self-deprecating reflection on his (temporary) abandonment of the field of onomastics, suggests that “research in the potential symbolic meanings of literary names [is] unlikely to reflect the reader’s experience of the text; [is] all too often facile; and ordinarily fail[s] to be central to a study of the major aspects of a literary text, i.e., those which, as critics, we ought to concentrate on first.”^[2] Although Grimaud reverses his negative opinion of onomastics, he first adds that “ways of arriving at the symbolic meaning of names [are] not only too easy, they [are] methodologically weak and unconvincing in most cases.”

Songs are not literary texts, or not only literary texts. I think we can agree that unlocking the symbolic meaning of names in songs isn’t always “too easy,” and despite Grimaud’s view, can be very revealing. When we hear “Tangled Up in Blue,” the proper names not only melt into the narrative but underscore the meaning of that elusive speaker’s journey:

So I drifted down to New Orleans
Where I happened to be employed
Workin’ for a while on a fishin’ boat
Right outside of Delacroix

The “employed-Delacroix” rhyme works well, slightly slanted, and the serendipity of a famous Louisiana port town adds color to the peripatetic narrative.^[3] It’s difficult to call this an arbitrary toponym when it fits the story so well. But I’m not sure we can reach the same conclusion about the opening lines to “If You See Her, Say Hello”:

If you see her, say hello, she might be in Tangier
She left here last early spring, is livin’ there, I hear.^[4]

There is a temptation to resort to biography, in this case, by suggesting that this couplet refers to Dylan’s soon-to-be-ex-wife, Sara, who, for reasons unexplained in the song, was living in Tangier, Morocco. If that were the case, the casual idiomatic rhyme, “I hear,” might seem appropriate. But, absent a definitive autobiographical voice, “Tangier” seems arbitrary and the rhyme somewhat facile – unless, perhaps, Dylan hopes listeners will augment the ruefulness of the verses with the remoteness and exoticism of a Moroccan escape. Even then, however, any supposedly exotic toponym might work: in Wallace Stevens’s words, “An apple serves as well as any skull.”^[5]

Yet the use of “Tangier” is exactly what scholars of onomastics refer to as using a name to function connotatively, rather than denotatively, in a song, as, for example, part of “‘the stylized limbo’ of the ballad world.”^[6] Interpreting Dylan’s names through the concept of a “ballad world” can be clarifying: what better than “stylized limbo” to describe lines like “When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez / And it’s Eastertime too,” and “Don’t put on any airs / When you’re down on Rue Morgue Avenue.” The names and places might seem arbitrary – denotatively – but there’s nothing facile in them connotatively, nor is it too easy to interpret the names: they are indeed central to the listeners’ experience of the song. At times, the ballad world overlaps with other mythical worlds, as in “Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)”:

Señor, señor, do you know where we’re headin’?
Lincoln County Road or Armageddon?

From the local present to the end-times, from the peaceful county road to the final battlefield, from tangible reality to the stylized limbo of myth. Dylan mixes the denotative name with the richly connotative one, a kind of onomastic polarization, The ballad world all but overwhelms the quotidian, except for the speaker’s sense of repetition: “Seems like I been down this way before / Is there any truth in that, señor?”

Few Dylan listeners could fail to associate the feeling of repetition with this spectacularly famous stanza:

Now the bricks lay on Grand Street
Where the neon madmen climb
They all fall there so perfectly
It all seems so well timed
An’ here I sit so patiently
Waiting to find out what price
You have to pay to get out of
Going through all these things twice
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end
To be stuck inside of Mobile
With the Memphis blues again

(“Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”)

The world-weary frustration of “Waiting to find out what price / You have to pay to get out of / Going through all these things twice,” which anticipates the line in “Señor,” occurs in a frame of three names: Grand Street, Mobile, and Memphis. The proper names are known places – Grand Street in downtown Manhattan (SoHo) – and the two magical-mystery cities tying together Gulf Coast Alabama with Beale Street and Elvis Presley. Does the denotative meaning of these names preclude a connotative association? Dylan clearly hasn’t chosen the names at random, and his manipulation of toponyms produces both a referential congruency and “demonstrate[es] persuasively how such names help to establish a mental ballad map that, albeit quite fictitious, maintains more than adequately the spatial relationships necessary to sustain a narrative.”^[7] Before we’ve heard one note of the song, the title creates a mental ballad map and suggests the spatial relationships that will initiate a narrative. And, once again, Dylan uses names, denotatively, to polarize connotations:

Oh, Mama, can this really be the end
To be stuck inside of Mobile
With the Memphis blues again

He even uses the word “end” at the end of the line, a nice bit of prosodical cheek. But the meaning of the lines is all about the names. David Atkinson has observed that “place names stripped at least in part of their denotative function can also serve as structural devices in ballad verse, creating sound patterns like…stanza endings … or providing refrain elements.”^[8] The speaker is trapped inside “Mobeel” with the Memphis blues, and as everyone knows, the Memphis blues are either a longing to be in Memphis or the actual blues music that historically came through Memphis, Tennessee, and is now caging the speaker.

In discussing the American folk song, Walter Allen Read notes that “the Child ballads, upon their transit to America, offer remarkable onomastic evidence.” His example resonates for all Dylanistas: “In places where British names were retained,” Read reflects, “even these would seem exotic enough. What is the ‘North Countree’ to an American – even to one living in the North Country”?^[9] This is almost too perfect a question to ask lifetime listeners of “Girl from the North Country” and “North Country Blues.” Until now I thought I knew very well where the North Country was:

Well, if you’re travelin’ in the north country fair
Where the winds hit heavy on the borderline

Minnesota, the “fair” north country, where the winds hit that mysterious borderline, that liminal place and uncrossable threshold blocking the past: “You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way,” as Dylan puts it thirty years later in “Mississippi.” But Read’s “North Countree” observation adds a layer to Dylan’s song. The genealogy of “north country” tracks back through the British Isles and the Child ballads: just when we thought we had an unproblematic definition and a biographically secure place name, the legacy of North Country adds new meaning to the borderline.

One of the tasks of onomastics in ballad study is to untangle the aliases of, for example, a particular Child number. Regarding “Lord Randal,” for instance, W.F.H. Nicolaisen quotes Bertrand Bronson as calling the “variety of names for the protagonist ‘kaleidoscopic’ and [commenting] somewhat tongue-in-cheek that ‘a page could be filled with his aliases.’”^[10] The notion of a ballad hero’s aliases, and Lord Randal’s in particular, is irresistibly provocative when thinking about Dylan. As Stephen Scobie’s superbly titled book Alias Bob Dylan implies, Dylan enjoys being an enigma where names are concerned–we could almost say onomastically. It’s well known that his character in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is somewhat coyly named Alias. But Dylan began using aliases long before Rudy Wurlitzer’s script. He changed his own name a couple of times as a young performer, and even after his establishment as Bob Dylan occasionally recorded using now familiar alter egos. But his most significant alias shattered the folk music world and reinvented lyrical language, adding brilliantly to the “kaleidoscopic” variety of Lord Randal’s aliases. “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” replaces the pitifully doomed voice of the poisoned Scottish lover with a new, radically powerful “blue-eyed son.” The extraordinary supersession of the folk idiom by a speaker entrenched in current social experience speaking with utterly new, poetically striving lyrical combinations, presented the listening world with a redoubtable alias. Countless critics have acknowledged the emancipatory character of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” from the lyrical innovations to the reworked ballad standard. But I wonder how many of us have recognized that onomastics contributed heavily to Dylan’s revolutionizing folk music.

In his poem “To Larry Rivers,” Frank O’Hara compares the poet’s skills unfavorably to the painter’s:

And what poet ever sat down

in front of a Titian, pulled out

his verifying tablet and began

to drone? Don’t complain, my dear,

You do what I can only name.

I don’t doubt O’Hara wants to pay tribute to Rivers. Still I wonder, and I wonder. Even here, where O’Hara seems determined to subordinate poetic to painterly competence, the use of a proper name emerges with unexpected consequences. O’Hara was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, so his choice of an artist to cite as an example should carry some weight – which makes Titian an interesting choice, even if sixteenth-century painting would not have been on display at MoMA. O’Hara, who earned a Harvard degree in English after a stint in the Navy, was not trained as an art historian. Although he was renowned for his eye for modern and contemporary art, I expect he’d also have been aware of the historical controversy surrounding the identification of “true” Titians. Too many of the so-called “Titians” in circulation, though produced in Titian’s Venetian workshop, were completed – or completely painted – by workshop assistants. In art history circles, the proper name “Titian” is almost a code word for “unnamable” – which gives special resonance to O’Hara’s curious phrase “verifying tablet” to refer to the poet’s notebook. The phrase strikes an odd note in a poem not apparently about verification and therefore seems to sow doubt. Maybe the act of copying a Titian and verifying one’s model, because “a Titian” might not necessarily be by Titian, ultimately puts the painter on shakier ground even than the poet who “can only name.” Maybe, O’Hara implies, it’s all in the name, or naming.

A poet’s use of proper names can puzzle or inspire, amuse or carry ominous portent. Poetry and onomastics can overlap in tandem with prosody and meaning. What seem serendipitous intersections often reveal poetic skills measured by the capacity to manipulate meter, rhyme effectively but not facilely, to augment meaning, and to give doggerel a wide berth. In “Mississippi” Dylan writes, “All my powers of expression and thoughts so sublime / Could never do you justice in reason or rhyme.” The parallel between reason and rhyme is striking, as if the speaker (or Dylan) credits rhyme with the same authority as reason. Possibly, Dylan is remembering Shakespeare’s As You Like It with these lines:

ORLANDO  Fair youth, I would I could make thee believe
I love.
ROSALIND, ⌜as Ganymede⌝  Me believe it? You may as
soon make her that you love believe it, which I
warrant she is apter to do than to confess she does.
That is one of the points in the which women still
give the lie to their consciences. But, in good sooth,
are you he that hangs the verses on the trees
wherein Rosalind is so admired?
ORLANDO  I swear to thee, youth, by the white hand of
Rosalind, I am that he, that unfortunate he.
ROSALIND, ⌜as Ganymede⌝  But are you so much in love
as your rhymes speak?
ORLANDO  Neither rhyme nor reason can express how
much.^[11]

Orlando speaks his line about “rhyme nor reason” to Rosalind disguised as Ganymede – in other words, to an alias. This sort of absent identity, a name that screens a name, might have piqued Dylan’s interest if in fact his line in “Mississippi” recalls As You Like It. And the hidden “Rosalind” could be an important namesake in the song.

It remains counterintuitive to compare reason and rhyme metaphysically, unless we were to give rhyme the power of portent, of casting charms (“Double, double toil and trouble; / Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.”^[12]). Typically, reason, deductive thinking, and contemplation all represent a different kind or degree of rationality than rhyme, whose attributes have traditionally been aural/musical pleasure and memory aid. Yet the inference of the line in “Mississippi” is that there might be a flaw in that conventionally hierarchical division.

This possibility resonates in one of Dylan’s meditations on naming later in the song, with another Shakespearean link.

Well, the devil’s in the alley, mule’s in the stall
Say anything you wanna, I have heard it all

I was thinkin’ about the things that Rosie said
I was dreaming I was sleeping in Rosie’s bed
Walking through the leaves, falling from the trees
Feeling like a stranger nobody sees

Hidden in these extraordinary lines is a meditation on naming, joined to a chapeau to a literary precursor. Let’s begin by thinking back and linking this alley, with the devil in it, to another alley containing the most famous poet of all time:

Well, Shakespeare, he’s in the alley
With his pointed shoes and his bells
Speaking to some French girl
Who says she knows me well

(“Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”)

The devil has replaced Shakespeare in the alley, and the unwelcome and unnamed French girl becomes, in the later song, Rosie, whose name is repeated twice in two lines: “I was thinkin’ about the things that Rosie said / I was dreaming I was sleeping in Rosie’s bed.” The name Rosie at first seems arbitrary, as if any trochaic name would do, especially since Rosie doesn’t play a further narrative role in the song. The speaker might have been “thinkin’ about the things Annie said,” or “dreaming about sleeping in Sara’s bed.” But I don’t think Rosie is arbitrary. On the contrary, I think Dylan is making a subtle bid to engage Shakespeare’s best-known onomastic remark, uttered by Juliet from her balcony: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet” (Romeo and Juliet 2.2.46-47). If we reach back to Shakespeare in the alley, “Rosie” becomes a kind of onomastic inevitability, standing for all women’s names and none, challenging the value of naming in the very act of repurposing Shakespeare’s rose.

And Rosie could also be a a nickname for Rosalind – either the invisible Rosalind from the “Neither reason nor rhyme” passage in As You Like It or the (also invisible) Rosaline who rejects Romeo at the beginning of Romeo and Juliet. The loss of Rosaline causes Romeo to say, pertinently to a discussion of names, “Tut, I have lost myself. I am not here. / This is not Romeo.” But I think we can go even further. The balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, or at least Juliet’s speech, is predominantly about identity. She explains the family situation to Romeo and effectively un-names him:

’Tis but thy name that is my enemy.
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face. O, be some other name
Belonging to a man.
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet.
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And, for thy name, which is no part of thee,
Take all myself.

Explaining that his name is her enemy, Juliet offers all of herself to a nameless “Romeo.” But what is a nameless Romeo, a figure who has “doffed” his name, other than a figure Dylan imagines “Walking through the leaves, falling from the trees / Feeling like a stranger nobody sees”? The song corkscrews back from the devil to Shakespeare, from Rosie to that “other word” that would smell as sweet, from title to nameless lover, from identity to invisibility. The balcony scene continues into a kind of onomastic aporia: Romeo claims to be “new baptized” as someone who “never will be Romeo”; Juliet asks, reasonably, “What man art thou…bescreened at night?”; and Romeo responds “By a name / I know not how to tell thee who I am.”

Shakespeare, being Shakespeare, one-ups everyone in the exploration of naming, and all within a few lines. From “a rose by any other word” to Romeo’s namelessness, his “bescreened” identity, is effectively a clinic in onomastics. It is possible that Dylan senses this Shakespearean tour de force and uses the name Rosie before reducing his speaker to “a stranger nobody sees.” Perhaps, if this is a tribute to the balcony scene, he hopes to sweep his own early writing (“Stuck Inside of Mobile”) and the later “Mississippi” into an onomastic genealogy.

In Dylan’s songs, sometimes names really are denotative alone, meaning nothing more than they appear to mean. Other times the names seem haphazard, or unimportant cum names:

There’s a note left in the bottle

You can give it to Estelle

She’s the one you been wonderin’ about

But there’s really nothin’ much to tell

We both heard voices for awhile

The rest is history

Somebody’s got to cry some tears

I guess it must be up to me

Reason or rhyme? Is Estelle merely a metrical convenience, an iambic foot with an easy rhyme? Or is there more to her name? The note in the bottle could be a metaphor for the very idea of metaphor, a message “carried over” across the water from an unknown place that ends up with Estelle. But the enigma of the note seems to melt into the narrative itself. As in “Tangled Up in Blue,” the speakers seem to shift from outside – “She’s the one you been wonderin’ about” – to inside – “We both heard voices” and “Somebody’s got to cry some tears / I guess it must be up to me.” The second-person singular dissolves into the first-person plural (a combination of the “I’ narrator and Estelle?), which ends in the “up to me” refrain.

Yet, even while acting the narrative juggler, Dylan manages an onomastic coup, giving reason to believe that the name Estelle is more than just convenient prosody. It turns out that it isn’t prosody but translation that leads to the turning of the key. “Estelle” derives from “star” in Latin and Italian (stella).^[13] The name is an anglicized or faux French version of “star,” which takes an alert listener back to the crucial second stanza of the song:

If I’d a’ thought about it

I never woulda done it

I guess I woulda let it slide

If I’d a’ paid attention

To what others were thinkin’

But I was just too stubborn

To ever be governed

By enforced insanity

Someone had to reach for the risin’ star

I guess it was up to me.

The “risin’ star” in stanza two is a proleptic reference to Estelle. It links the driven ambitious spirit of the song’s opening narrative to the “star” who, after a dizzying spiral of episodes in the intervening stanzas, gets the message in the bottle. We must work out for ourselves what it means that reaching for the rising star leads to an enigma in a bottle, and, ultimately, to the tragedy or sad event for which “Somebody’s got to cry some tears.” But that’s hermeneutics, not onomastics. The name “Estelle” in “Up to Me” does all a proper name can do in a song. It carries us into the stylized limbo of the narrative because when the “stubborn” speaker says, “The heart inside me woulda died,” the hearts inside us live the ballad myth.

I must go on, I can’t go on – to quote a phrase. Dylan’s proper names seem to multiply geometrically as I think through the albums, the songs, the decades: New York town, Kingsport Town, Santa Fe, dear, dear, dear, dear, dear Santa Fe. These are real cities, and real topoi in the songs’ narratives, but should we hear them connotatively as well as denotatively? Surely we experience “the stylized limbo of the ballad world” in each of these proper names as Dylan deploys them in the lyrics. Add to those such naming as “(Positively) 4^th Street,” a song in which the street itself never appears, rendering the title part of a ballad myth. Similarly, think of “Spanish Harlem Incident” which begins “Gypsy gal, the hands of Harlem / Cannot hold you to its heat”: again, the place is real enough, though in the early 60s Spanish Harlem, just south of Harlem on the east side of Manhattan, would have been a dangerous neighborhood and the “Gypsy gal” wouldn’t have been a Roma “gal,” but Dylan’s romantic Hispanic “wildcat” (probably straight out of West Side Story). The entire atmosphere of the song is connotative. The song transforms the denotative “Spanish Harlem” itself into a toponym from a ballad world.

Inevitably, if we think about the Gypsy gal we recall that other, more important figure from “Went to See the Gypsy.” Critical opinion seems to have settled on identifying the unnamed gypsy as Elvis Presley. There is no solid evidence for this in the song, except maybe the lines “He did it in Las Vegas / And he can do it here.” But it’s irresistible to speculate on a meeting in the “big hotel” of the two rock idols face to face – though in utterly unspectacular circumstances:

His room was dark and crowded
Lights were low and dim
“How are you?” he said to me
I said it back to him

No fireworks of recognition. But, while we might not be treated to an exciting meeting between the “Gypsy” and the enigmatic “I,” the song ends with a tease:

the gypsy was gone
And that pretty dancing girl
She could not be found
So I watched the sun come rising
From that little Minnesota town

Guess what town he’s talking about. The absence of the name fills out the ballad myth: the “Minnesota town” doesn’t provide a definite qualification so much as a plausible set of biographical or autobiographical identities. Again, it’s all about the use and manipulation of proper names: Las Vegas, the Gypsy, Minnesota.

It’s impossible to be exhaustive, but I hope these few examples will spark thinking about the sheer onomastic range in the songs, and moreover of Dylan’s poetic aims in using names as often and as pointedly as he does. But don’t let the question of whether his onomastic choices are meant as “reason or rhyme” keep you up all night leaning on the windowsill. Reason and rhyme, or rationality and mystical charm, are overlapping phenomena in the stylized limbo of the ballad world. The denotative meaning of proper names quickly develops a connotative meaning, deepening and expanding the narrative of every song until it’s impossible to separate the name itself from the limbo of the myth. We live inside the myth of 4^th Street to “know [positively] what a drag it is to see you,” just as we believe rationally as believers inside the myth that “In Paterson that’s just the way things go.” But are 4^th Street and Paterson toponyms, metaphors, or metonyms: places, analogies for those kinds of places, or contiguities substituting for the real name?

Raphael Falco

[1] David Atkinson, “Toponymy of the Child Ballads: Problems of Representation in Written and Oral Texts,” Folklore 120 (December 2009): 254. Atkinson cites W.F.H. Nicolaisen, “‘As I cam’ in by Ythanside’: On the Function of Place Names in the Greig–Duncan Folk Song Collection.” In Emily Lyle: The Persistent Scholar, ed. Frances J. Fischer and Sigrid Rieuwerts BASIS, vol. 5 ( Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2007), 231-40, 231.

[2] Michel Grimaud, “Whither Literary Onomastics? “Prufrock” Revisited,” Names 41.1 (March 1993): 5-6.

[3] On More Blood, More Tracks: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 14, the song omits this passage: instead Dylan sings “So he drifted down to LA / Where he reckoned to try his luck / Workin’ for a while in an airplane plant / Loading cargo onto a truck.” I think the “employed-Delacroix” rhyme is stronger than the “luck-truck” rhyme, although the use of “LA” as a kind of spondee is interesting.

[4] Although the quoted lines are the most familiar, appearing on the original album and also on More Blood, More Tracks, the Official Dylan website has these opening lines: “If you see her, say hello, she might be in Tangier / It’s the city ’cross the water, not too far from here.” Less personal, though more metaphorically suggestive.

[5] “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,” stanza IV, line 5.

[6] Atkinson, 254, again citing Nicolaisen.

[7] Atkinson, 255, who cites W.F.H. Nicolaisen, “‘There Was a Lord in Ambertown’: Fictitious Place Names in the Ballad Landscape.” In Narrative Folksong: New Directions, Essays in Appreciation of W. Edson Richmond, ed. Carol L. Edwards and Kathleen E. B. Manley (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1985), 71-81..

[8] Atkinson, 254.

[9] Allen Walker Read, “The Onomastic World of the American Folksong,” in Names/ Northeast, 1984, 1.

[10] W.F.H. Nicolaisen, “The genealogy of ‘Lord Randal’; Onomastic Evidence and Dissemination,” Lore and Language 12 (1994): 159-72. He is quoting Bronson, The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads Vol. I (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959), 191.

[11] As You Like It, 3.2. 392-406.

[12] Macbeth, 4.1, the three witches together.

[13] Vide, Philip Sidney’s famous sonnet sequence, Astrophil and Stella [Star-lover and Star]. I’m not suggesting Dylan knew Sidney’s work – although critics have credited him with having read far obscurer works – I think the song supports his association of stella with Estelle.

March 2, 2025/by Nicole Font

THE DYLANISTA – The Diegetic Fallacy

Dylan Review Vol. 5.2, Fall/Winter 2023-2024, The Dylanista

Somebody once said Frank Sinatra was the only singer of his time who understood the words he sang. Hyperbole? Probably, but more striking is how alien, even dated this statement sounds today. Now we’re saturated with singer-songwriters in all musical milieu, from revived grunge cafes to rap studios to myriad self-promotions on YouTube. “Covers” might be flourishing, but there’s also a preponderance of original songs sung by the songwriters. And – maybe optimistically – we tend to infer that all singers singing their own songs understand the words they themselves wrote better than “cover artists” ever could.

Is this inference baseless? Is it a hermeneutic delusion that would have Roland Barthes (“the birth of the reader is the death of the author”) and Hans-Georg Gadamer spinning in their graves? Here’s Gadamer in full throat:

Unlike the divine word, the human word is essentially incomplete. No human word can express our mind completely. But as the image of the mirror shows, this does not mean that the word as such is incomplete. The word reflects completely what the mind is thinking. Rather, the imperfection of the human mind consists in its never being completely present to itself but in being dispersed into thinking this or that. From this essential imperfection it follows that the human word is not one, like the divine word, but must necessarily be many words. Hence the variety of words does not in any way mean that the individual word has some remediable deficiency, in that it did not completely express what the mind is thinking; but because our intellect is imperfect – i.e., is not completely present to itself in what it knows – it needs the multiplicity of words. It does not really know what it knows.[1]

This might seem like intellectual woolly-headedness at its worst – when Gadamer tells us “our intellect…does not really know what it knows” we can’t help wanting to put on the brakes before we skid into total aporia. But Gadamer is making a valid point. In effect, he says, “Imagine a divine word; then compare that divine word to human speech.” The difference is that this “divine word” (if it could exist) would always be complete, while the “human word” is “essentially incomplete.” What Gadamer means, then, is that where the Deity needs one word only, we humans need multiple words to express a simple truth. And the upshot of that multiplicity is we cannot control the meaning of our speech, poetry, or prose – let alone songwriting, with the additional meaning-giver of music.

We don’t have to agree with Gadamer to acknowledge that writers, poets particularly, can’t know the multiplicity of meanings and resonances their language creates. And we can reasonably conclude that even songwriters themselves might not understand their own lyrics, or fully command the meaning of their utterances from performance to performance. For example, did these lines ever again mean the same thing they meant when written and recorded – if, in fact, they meant something then?

With a time-rusted compass blade

Aladdin and his lamp

Sits with Utopian hermit monks

Sidesaddle on the Golden Calf

And on their promises of paradise

You will not hear a laugh

All except inside the Gates of Eden

No one can answer this question, least of all Dylan, who, it must be said, has always acknowledged his limits as an interpreter of his own songs. Poets are notoriously untrustworthy readers of their own work, which is why criticism and commentary have been coevals of art in all cultures.

Nevertheless, even if we admit that poets can’t corral or stabilize the meaning of their lines, we continue to deem singer-songwriters transparently sincere in their performances, delivering an intended meaning without complications. But this is a romantic – even Romantic – ideal. It doesn’t stand up to hermeneutic scrutiny.

Crucially, this Romantic ideal leads to the Diegetic Fallacy, too-frequent invader of Dylan commentary. In literary theory, the rhetorical term diegesis refers to narratives, especially about characters and their thoughts and actions. Songs are often narratives in which the speaker is embedded into the story or fabula. Marie-Laure Ryan describes embedded narratives as “any story-like representation produced in the mind of a character and reproduced in the mind of a reader.”[2] We might supplement this definition with “in the mind of a listener,” and ask ourselves who exactly is speaking when, for example, we listen to:

Then they’ll raise their hands

Sayin’ we’ll meet all your demands

But we’ll shout from the bow your days are numbered

And like Pharaoh’s tribe

They’ll be drownded in the tide

And like Goliath, they’ll be conquered

Or when we listen to this:

What was it you wanted

I ain’t keeping score

Are you the same person

That was here before?

Is it something important?

Maybe not

What was it you wanted?

Tell me again I forgot

Whatever you wanted

What could it be

Did somebody tell you

That you could get it from me

Is it something that comes natural

Is it easy to say

Why do you want it

Who are you anyway?

It seems obvious, from even the most superficial differences in tone and imagery, we can’t think of these two texts as produced by the same speaker. The portentous voice of “we’ll shout from the bow your days are numbered” becomes a rallying cry, a shared experience of triumph. In contrast, the isolated, begrudging speaker who asks, none too politely, “What was it you wanted / I ain’t keeping score / Are you the same person / That was here before?” is miles apart from that righteous political speaker in “When the Ship Comes In.”

Neither speaker is Bob Dylan, obviously. It would be irrational to think Dylan is speaking, yet…yet…yet…Why do so many listeners, sometimes even critics who should know better, identify the speaker of the songs as Bob Dylan rather than as an embedded narrator? When this happens, narrated ethics, attitudes, and postures get all mixed up with the singer himself. Biographical facts coupled to audience expectations infiltrate diegetic fabulation. The consequent confusion, which I’ve termed the Diegetic Fallacy, distorts our understanding – and our appreciation – of all Dylan’s song lyrics.

The culprit responsible for this distortion is the inference of sincerity common to singer-songwriters. From Joan Baez to Dylan to Fred Neil, Peter La Farge (“The Ballad of Ira Hayes”), and Joni Mitchell, the identity of the writing with the performance offered a refreshing genuineness, a belief that the singer could identify with the lyrics. Sinatra might have made “My Way” his own, although the song was written for Liza Minelli, but his colonization of the song deliberately traded on his reputation, his public persona, to add “identity” to the lyrics and authority to his delivery.

During the singer-songwriter era, however, Sinatra’s back-formed sincerity withered in comparison to “real” identities. Songs like Dylan’s “My Back Pages” or “Bob Dylan’s Dream” seemed intentionally to introduce an autobiographical element. It’s no wonder then that listeners identified that same “Bob Dylan” saying “I’ll stand by your grave until I’m sure that you’re dead,” or even “Two riders were approaching / The wind began to howl.” And Dylan was not alone as a misconstrued speaker: Compare, for example, the frankly autobiographical language of Joan Baez singing “Diamonds and Rust,” with lyrics thinly disguising the early Dylan-Baez relationship:

Now I see you standing

With brown leaves falling all around

And snow in your hair

Now you’re smiling out the window

Of that crummy hotel

Over Washington Square

Our breath comes out white clouds

Mingles and hangs in the air

Speaking strictly for me

We both could have died then and there

The absoluteness of that last line, right after the qualifier “Speaking strictly for me,” brings it all back home to a fundamentally, nostalgically personal level. Joanie’s sincerity is unquestionable.

A comparably palpable sincerity also exists in Joni Mitchell’s postlapsarian paean, “Woodstock”:

I came upon a child of God

He was walking along the road

And I asked him, “Where are you going?”

And this he told me

I’m going on down to Yasgur’s Farm

I’m gonna join in a rock and roll band

I’m gonna camp out on the land

I’m gonna try and get my soul free

We are stardust

We are golden

And we’ve got to get ourselves

Back to the garden

Clearly a present speaker – the one who wrote and is singing the song – wants to “get [herself] / Back to the garden.” There is a paradigm shift from Sinatra’s “My Way” to “Woodstock” – which, ironically, is what Woodstock was all about (even if it was short lived).

But how can we trust this paradigm shift when we recall Gadamer’s words? If our sense of singer-songwriters’ complete understanding of their own songs is a Romantic ideal responsible for an inflated belief in their personal sincerity, is it still misguided to claim their superiority to Sinatra-era vocalists who sang the words of others? Were the singers of the 30s, 40s, and 50s just performers tout court, lacking in the sincerity we think we hear in performers who write and perform their own songs?

It’s pretty to think so – but we’re probably fooling ourselves. The very term singer songwriter inaccurately privileges speech over writing, as though the vocal expression of a song preceded its composition. Ordinarily we might not think of singing a song as speech per se. But identifying the songwriter and the singer as a single voice characterizes the song as a form of speech: this identity of song and speech dovetails with the idea of singers’ unique sincerity in performing songs they wrote.

Now it’s Jacques Derrida’s turn to spin in his grave. According to Derrida, writing has as much claim to presence as speech, which means that, like speech, writing is always incomplete. Songwriter-singers, from this (deconstructed) perspective, might have only as much control over meaning, sincerity, and conscious understanding as other vocalists. Understanding-the-words is not definitively the privilege of songwriters who sing their own songs, nor, by the same token, is sincerity.

Could Frank O’Hara, for instance, have felt what he felt and remembered the experience of Billie Holiday if the singer hadn’t shared some kind of nous, some evidence of sapient delivery? Without at least some understanding of the animating impulse behind Billie’s performances, could O’Hara have delivered his own extraordinary performance?

and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine

for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do

think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or

Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres

of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine

after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE

Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and

then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue

and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and

casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton

of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of

leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT

while she whispered a song along the keyboard

to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

This is from “The Day Lady Died,” published in Lunch Poems (1964) but marking an earlier date. The poem begins “It is 12:20 in New York a Friday / three days after Bastille day, yes / it is 1959.” July 17, three days after the anniversary of the French Revolution. The detail is purposeful and typically cryptic, something to etch the date into the reader’s memory as it’s etched into the speaker’s: the Revolution has begun, soon to be followed by the Reign of Terror (la Terreur) and public executions. Later in the poem this unexpected detail clashes with O’Hara’s idea of agelessness and empathy. The lines “practically going to sleep with quandariness” and “everyone and I stopped breathing” frame a unique tribute to the singer, extending “quandariness” into a kind of permanent stasis, stunned wonderment, when everyone stops breathing in sync with the now dead Billie Holiday.

O’Hara’s poem and his preternatural sensibility, though hardly proof positive, help make the case that Holiday, like Sinatra, understood the words. But doubts remain when we compare singer-songwriters to other singers. Can we say Ella Fitzgerald, whose voice had no peer, understood the words she sang the way Frank and Billie understood theirs? What about Bing Crosby (a favorite of Dylan’s), whose jazzy baritone changed the course of popular music before Sinatra even showed up? Crosby’s winking sense of humor insinuates itself into his performances, but not with much depth. The list could go on, and it’s well worth listening closely and asking the question of, say, Billy Eckstine, Doris Day (before Hollywood), Tony Bennett, Debbie Reynolds, Gene Kelly, and, unavoidably, Judy Garland. I’ve heard Garland called “the greatest performer of the 20th century,” another bit of hyperbole, probably suggested by an interested party. Her popularity was bolstered by her very public decline from beloved child star (born somewhere over the rainbow) to drug-addled crooner. But did her undeniable emotional suffering translate to genuine lyric intelligence, to the kind of sapience O’Hara seems to intuit?

Perhaps the most interesting figure of the era – even earlier than Crosby – is Fred Astaire. Though not even remembered as much of a singer these days, Astaire was Cole Porter’s first choice to sing his songs. And Cole Porter, as a friend of mine once observed, is the best poet Yale ever produced. Would he have favored a singer who didn’t understand the words?

But the past is prologue, as the homicidal Antonio says in The Tempest. Or, to echo Hamlet:

Yea, from the table of my memory

I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,

All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,

That youth and observation copied there.

Hamlet is alone when he makes this promise, but – appropriately when compared to our present relationship with Sinatra-era singers – he’s responding to a ghost.

The past for us is not even prologue. It’s more like an ectoplasmic phantom. Since the rise of singer-songwriters in the 60s and their colonization of the popular music scene, the insinuation that the singer might not understand the words would strike most contemporary listeners as contradictory and insulting. And I’m using the word “colonization” advisedly, with all its resonance of Columbus (Colón), the first encounters, and myriad predations against the newly colonized. The rout of the professional songwriters of the Aldon music teams at 1650 Broadway, who included such later singer-songwriting luminaries as Carol King and Neil Diamond, along with the utter demolition of Tin Pan Alley, testify to the overwhelming force of the recording artists who wrote and performed their own songs. Significantly, the overriding motif of the revolution was sincerity, foundationed deep, and based largely on the singers’ personal identity with the composition of the music.

As is well known, Dylan was the enfant terrible of the New Order, first among equals aux barricades. His arrival on the Greenwich Village scene and his Columbia recording contract – there’s that word Columbus again – arguably with even greater effect than the Beatles and the British Invasion, threatened to disenfranchise the ventriloquizing songwriters of Tin Pan Alley. With a staggering display of arrogance from a 21-year-old – who, by his own admission, had only been writing songs for a few years – Dylan boldly calls out those uptown songwriters in the spoken introduction to “Bob Dylan’s Blues” on Freewheelin’. Using his ironical Iron Range twang, he says, “Unlike most of the songs nowadays bein’ written in Tin Pan Alley – that’s where most of the folk songs come from nowadays – this, this is a song, this wasn’t written up there, this was written somewhere down in the United States.” The battle lines were drawn: “folk songs” could not be mass-produced in Tin Pan Alley song factories. Full stop. Dylan’s resistance to the established music culture, his Woody- (or Wobblie-) like stance, was not lost on fans who were hungry for the real experience, the natural experience, a return to the folk purity of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Merle Travis, Doc Watson, and Lightnin’ Hopkins. Nor would the likes of Dave Van Ronk, Tom Paxton, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, or Fred Neil have been ungrateful for Columbia’s marketing of a stylistic and philosophical distinction they’d been trying to popularize for years.

In the subsequent agon, Dylan and many of his cohort not only survived against all odds but superseded the song-factories among the record-buying public. Sinatra’s generation, who matched performative brilliance with superior musical sophistication, continued to hold mainstream media prominence. Yet the subculture juggernaut, swarming over the charts, branded them as artificial and impure.

In contrast – facile though it may seem now – the songwriters who wrote their own tunes and sang their own lyrics brought a longed-for genuineness to music, a promise that they understood the words sung in every stanza because they wrote the words themselves. It’s easy now to object that singers like W.C. Handy, Robert Johnson, Blind Willie McTell, Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, Mississippi John Hurt, and so on, wrote, sang, and recorded their own songs long before the 60s rise of the singer-songwriters. But these musicians flew far below the radar of popular music, and not simply because many of them were Black – after all, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Nat Cole, among others, made their mark during more or less the same era. Despite being the root of jazz, however, the acoustic blues repertoire was considered primitive, underproduced, and coarsely executed. The powerful music business elites dismissed the acoustic performers as provincial country pickers and ignored them. The result of this neglect is now the stuff of legends. Notoriously, many of the recordings we have of these early singer songwriters are the product, not of studio sessions, but of folklorists’ research with single mikes and reel-to-reel machines in Southern hotel-rooms. (Robert Johnson’s most important songs were recorded in Room 414 of the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio.) A few artists managed to get studio time and better production values, but the record distribution was meager, and the disks were soon remaindered, along with the singers themselves.

That all changed, of course, when rock ‘n roll took center stage and the blues became the basis of popular music. The lost singer-songwriters of the 30s and 40s were lionized and those still living were tracked down from the Appalachians to the Mississippi Delta. The project of rediscovery and renaissance came up like a groundswell. Not only twelve-bar blues, but the English and Scottish ballads, many drawn from their American mountain versions, began showing up in folksingers’ repertoires – viz. the paradigm-shift of “Hard Rain” from the repurposed Lord Randal. New possibilities opened up for songwriters, and – without hyperbole – for musical culture itself when mostly white twenty-something “songwriter-singers” wrote themselves into the songs they wove from prior blues and ballads.

They “wipe[d] away all trivial fond records,” making the songs they wrote and sang inflexible benchmarks of genuineness and sincerity. But all was not peace and love. In the first half of the 60s, the acoustic performers, eschewing showbiz insincerity and loud pounding music, squared off against the rock ’n’ roll performers and the noisy staginess of their bands. It’s easy to forget the contempt the folkies felt for rock ’n’ roll: Dylan himself mocked rock singers in “Talkin’ World War III Blues”:

Well, I remember seein’ some ad

So I turned on my Conelrad

But I didn’t pay my Con Ed bill

So the radio didn’t work so well

Turned on my record player –

It was Rock-a-day Johnny singin’, “Tell Your Ma, Tell Your Pa

Our Love’s A-gonna Grow Ooh-wah, Ooh-wah”

That was in 1963. Two years later, in July 1965 at the Newport Folk Festival, he unleashed an electric set with The Butterfield Blues Band as his backing group. He was booed off the stage. Although he returned that night and played a few acoustic favorites to mollify the audience, the die had been cast. As Clinton Heylin puts it, “Dylan was no longer the sole property of folkies… and they weren’t amused.”[3] Dylan fans know the dénouement of this over-scrutinized drama all too well: in concert after concert on his 1966 tour, after he “went electric,” audiences booed and regarded Dylan as a traitor.

But a traitor to what exactly? Is it even possible nowadays to remember the depth of commitment to folk music, let alone recall the force of the hostility among the self-declaredly betrayed?

It remains a phenomenon of that phenomenal period in music history that so many fans (not to mention other folk performers) had so much invested in preserving what they heard as folk music’s sincerity. What they saw as Dylan’s turncoat action threatened the insularity of the folk movement and undermined any claim to sincerity or purity that Dylan might have had. Few people at the time recognized how Dylan’s experimental electric tour advanced the sincerity and lyric power of folk music in the cantons of popular music. There was too much heat at the time, and not enough light. One would have to do more than merely remember the dug-in positions of the Second Folk movement. One would have to recall the apostolic devotion of the folkies to Dylan’s music, to his inimitable voice, to his pared-down sincerity—all of which seemed to be lost in the new electric language. The sea of boos were an attack on Dylan’s loss of straightforwardness, his abandonment of the socio-political stance represented by acoustic music, and his apparent capitulation to the same record-industry standards he himself had helped overthrow.

This bizarrely violent reaction to a musician of all people was the direct result of the Diegetic Fallacy. Fans, critics, and even skeptical fellow folk musicians had mistaken the fabula for reality. They only heard the narrative intermittently, or misjudged its speaker for the singer. Ryan explains Seymour Chapman’s characterization of a fabula as a discourse that is made to be believed:

For a discourse to evoke a fabula, it must bring a universe to life and convey to the reader the sense that at the center of the universe resides an actual or real world, a realm of factual states and events, whose chronological succession determines a history. This world is inhabited by intelligent beings who produce a variety of mental representations, such as beliefs, wishes, projections, intents, obligations, dreams, and fantasies.[4]

Think about songs as fabula, each of them bringing to life a separate universe, a new world of “factual states and events.” Allow this world to be “inhabited by intelligent beings” – by different speakers in every song – producing an array of “beliefs, wishes, projections, intents, obligations, dreams, and fantasies.”

Now let Dylan’s songs be inhabited by this variety of intelligent beings and ask who is speaking in, say, “All Along the Watchtower,” “Sara,” “To Ramona,” “My Back Pages,” “Tangled Up in Blue,” “License to Kill,” “Blind Willie McTell,” “Mississippi,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.”

And keep asking five or six hundred times.

[1] Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York, Continuum Publishing, 1994), 425.

[2] Laure-Marie Ryan, “Embedded Narratives and Tellability,” Style 20.3 (1986), 320.

[3] Clinton Heylin, Judas! From Forest Hills to the Free Trade Hall: A Historical View of the Big Boo (New York: Lesser Gods, 2016), 16.

[4] Ryan, 320.

August 6, 2024/by Nicole Font

THE DYLANISTA – Bob Dylan and the Weatherman Paradox

Dylan Review Vol. 5.1, Spring/Summer 2023, The Dylanista

An unexpectedly misleading line in the early Dylan oeuvre is “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” If it refers to literal weather-forecasting, then yes, one might be able to hold a finger in the air to determine the wind’s direction rather than check the radio or television. But if, as seems built into the line, the weatherman represents a stand-in for a prophet, with the weather his portent, then the line is paradoxical and even disingenuous. It might also be one of the most misunderstood moments in the popular anthropology of 60s culture. If the so-called “Judas” moment of Dylan-goes-electric has been analyzed into hammered gold and gold enameling (or digested to pulp), the “You don’t need a weatherman” line, which became a cultural topos, has received comparatively little challenge or critical tooth-gnashing. While it might seem unfair to compare an action on stage to a single lyric, through no fault of Dylan’s, an offshoot of the Students for a Democratic Society appropriated Dylan’s “weatherman” line for their social activism, thus augmenting it into a kind of action in itself.[1]

The line deserves a closer look – though maybe not quite the hammering of Grecian goldsmiths – but not because of its distortion by self-styled revolutionaries. It deserves attention because, from one perspective, it marks a reinvestment by Dylan as profoundly altering as going electric or bringing it all back home. With the merciless x-ray vision of hindsight, we can now see that a weatherman was exactly what Dylan’s hungry listeners needed, exactly the kind of visionary authority they were looking for. And – also with hindsight – we can see that Dylan was advertising himself as that Necessary-Unnecessary Weatherman.

The “weatherman” line indicates a crisis moment. It captures Dylan’s voice and lyric in the paradoxical act of prophetic demurral. When Dylan demurs, he rejects an overt prophetic stance. Instead, he creates a negative space – like a photo negative – of the performative and lyrical posture he struck in his back pages. This posture characterizes virtually all his later work: my term for it is the Weatherman Paradox, not only because it emerges with “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” but especially because, by masking his prophetic authority, Dylan refashions his Whitmanian (or Mosaic) voice into a more discreet cultural barometer – a “weatherman” whose predictions contain no advocacy. As the defensive/aggressive speaker of “False Prophet” says, “I ain’t no false prophet – I just know what I know / I go where only the lonely can go,” adding, to underscore the point, “I ain’t no false prophet – I just said what I said / I’m here to bring vengeance on somebody’s head.” The warring verb tenses – the present tense of “I ain’t no false prophet” and the past tense of “I just said what I said” – are a temptation to commit the misdemeanor of biographical interpretation. We remember how often Dylan claimed not to be anyone’s prophet, not to speak for anyone beside himself. We remember that Another Side, though not Dylan’s preferred title, was an album turning away from the fiery protests of earlier times. The ambiguity in “False Prophet” seems to straddle the “sides” of Bob Dylan luring us to ask when the speaker “said what [he] said” and to wonder if the current aim “to bring vengeance on somebody’s head” harks back to when he had biblical style foes, before he recognized, and regretted, the self-ordained professor’s voice.

As everyone knows, Dylan’s angry alter-ego started out shouting from the bow, “Your days are numbered,” in “When the Ship Comes In,” and urging Woody-esque social change in scores of harshly prophetic verses (“The line it is drawn / The curse it is cast … The first one now will later be last”). But after Bringing It All Back Home that vocal posture goes underground – “subterranean” – and Dylan refashions himself as a pressure gauge of cultural conditions. Except for the anomalous Christian period, when an unrecognizable Bob Dylan preached from stage between songs, the prophetic voice of the anthems appears only in demurral.

“Señor, señor,” he asks on Street Legal, “do you know where we’re headin’? / Lincoln County Road or Armageddon?” In Spanish, the word “Señor” can be a euphemism for the Christian God: in fact, Michael Gray sees the song as evidence of Dylan’s “unfailing sense of the need for moral clarity,” and he refers to Señor as “the wise peasant Christ.”[2] At the same time, the word “Señor” can be simply a term of address to an anonymous stranger. Steven Scobie seems to take it this way when he characterizes the song’s narrator as a “Mexican hired gun” addressing his “surrogate father.”[3]

The song’s governing rhetorical figure is antithesis. Dylan’s speaker offers the classic choices about existence in his question: Señor, señor, are you the “Señor”? If so, answer me this: are we bound to the earth (Lincoln County Road) or is there afterlife awaiting us? If the latter, Señor, señor, will there be pastoral peace or endless punishment (Armageddon)? Or, “Señor,” are you just another human being goin’ down the road feeling bad?

One thing seems certain: the subject of “Señor” isn’t Yankee power – or not only that. Allow me to suggest instead that the tenor of the lyric is prophecy itself, making the song’s combination of antitheses and interrogatives an exercise in demurral. There are nine questions in “Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)” just as there are nine famous questions in “Blowin’ in the Wind” – coincidence? In fact, in the later song, “There’s a wicked wind still blowin’ on that upper deck,” and one is tempted to wonder if that’s the same wind and if it’s the upper deck of the ship the young Dylan (who was older then) was waiting for to “come in.” The last question in “Señor” is “Can you tell me what we’re waiting for, señor?” We might also ask ourselves if they’re still waiting for their ship to come in, still waiting to watch their enemies “like Pharaoh’s tribe … drownded in the tide.” In any case, ambiguity has entered the world and the certainties of the speaker’s (and everyone else’s) back pages end in prophetic demurral.

But justifiably, one could voice robust objections to the idea of any kind of prophecy in the later Dylan, demurred or not. By the time Dylan sang that “weatherman” line in “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” he had already sung “I aimed my hand / At the mongrel dogs who teach / Fearing not that I’d become my enemy / In the instant that I preach” in “My Back Pages.” The line seems to refer to the “preaching” of his anthem period when, in his protest songs, “good and bad [he] defined those terms quite clear no doubt somehow.” So it might be presumptuous – not to say heretical under prevailing Dylan canon law – to suggest that the shuffled-off preaching of the young Jeremiah had evolved into a new kind of sermon delivered from the pulpit.

Yet Bringing It All Back Home reveals itself as a workshop of portentous verse. The album is remarkable for its range of vocal attitudes. The diversity of speakers runs from the gentle to the resigned to the flamboyantly associative and the indignantly contemptuous. “Subterranean Homesick Blues” is almost too telegraphic to pinpoint, although Dylan flings his “weatherman” line with the hint of a “Positively 4th Street” sneer:

Look out kid

Don’t matter what you did

Walk on your tiptoes

Don’t try “No-Doz”

Better stay away from those

That carry around a fire hose

Keep a clean nose

Watch the plain clothes

You don’t need a weatherman

To know which way the wind blows

The passage starts out as a warning, as if the speaker were on the same side as the “kid,” watching out for the “kid” and the audience too. There’s a sense of an experienced voice offering urgent practical advice: walk on your tiptoes (don’t call attention to yourself?), don’t try “No-Doz” (a long-forgotten over-the-counter upper), keep a clean nose, etc. But that practical advice ends abruptly with “You don’t need a weatherman / To know which way the wind blows.” Suddenly, the chummy life coach, familiar with survival on the mean streets, had morphed into the prophet pontificating from the mountaintop.

This is not pure prophecy, however. The speaker’s patronizing tone negates its own prophetic authority by announcing what the kid doesn’t need. But the negativity of the statement reinforces the gravity of the voice, the unavoidable importance of the weatherman “you [supposedly] don’t need.”

This technique of demurral has a long history in English poetry (though I’m not suggesting the 23 year-old Dylan knew the poetic tradition). The seventeenth-century poet Ben Jonson begins his epideictic country-house poem “To Penshurst” by describing precisely what is absent from and unneeded by Penshurst Place (a mansion in Kent, England):

Thou art not, Penshurst, built for envious show,

Of touch, or marble, nor canst boast a row

Of polished pillars, or a roof of gold;

Thou hast no lantern, whereof tales are told,

Or stair, or courts.

This five-line list of negatives turns out to be a form of demurred praise, for, while Penshurst might not be constructed of marble or have polished pillars and a golden roof, it “stand’st an ancient pile, / And, these grudged at, art reverenced the while.” Jonson is not indulging a prophetic tone in the poem, but instead using the parvenu architectural atrocities near Penshurst to provide a photo negative of the “ancient pile” which is “reverenced” for its dignity and antiquity. By underlining what is absent, by using negatives, Jonson enforces the presence and the permanence of his object of praise (which, incidentally, was the birthplace of fellow poet Sir Philip Sidney).

In a loftier vein, John Milton pays tribute to Shakespeare by eschewing the very idea of a material tomb for him. “What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones,” he asks, “The labor of an age in pilèd stones, / Or that his hallowed relics should be hid / Under a starypointing pyramid?” No pile of stones, built over an age like a pointed pyramid, should hide Shakespeare’s remains. A constructed tomb would constitute unnecessary commemoration because “Dear son of Memory, great heir of fame … Thou in our wonder and astonishment / Hast built thyself a live-long monument.”

Printed as one of the introductory poems to the Second Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, Milton’s poem declares the Bard’s works by themselves to be tomb enough, the site of “unvalued” (impossible to put a value on) achievement and the envy of kings who’d like to have a tomb as long lasting as his “easy numbers,” his effortless verses: “thou … sepúlchred in such pomp dost lie, / That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.” Notably, by pronouncing Shakespeare’s tomb unnecessary but nevertheless ever present and enduring, Milton manages to give his own voice vatic resonance – a characteristically Miltonic gesture.

I don’t want to be accused of comparing great things to small. Nevertheless, while Dylan may not be reaching (exceeding his youthful grasp) for a Miltonic voice in “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” his repudiated weatherman fulfills the same need as Shakespeare’s unneeded tomb. And, like Milton, Dylan’s speaker accrues prophetic authority in the instant that he rejects the need for a weatherman. It may be that this demurral of overt portentousness prevents the speaker from hating himself in the instant that he preaches. Demurral conceals the preaching and in effect ensures that this song’s speaker – and all Dylan’s speakers – can avoid being charged as false prophets.

The Weatherman Paradox suffuses the language of the songs and supplies an excuse for hearing portent without embracing, or even identifying, the prophet. Who better, for instance, than a paradoxically hidden weatherman to warn that there’s “High water risin’ – risin’ night and day … It’s rough out there / High water everywhere”? Or to give the maritime report from “Mississippi”?

Well my ship’s been split to splinters and it’s sinking fast

I’m drownin’ in the poison, got no future, got no past

But my heart is not weary, it’s light and it’s free

I’ve got nothin’ but affection for all those who’ve sailed with me

Or who else, sticking with the portentous maritime theme, could have delivered the stunning first stanza of “Jokerman”:

Standing on the waters casting your bread

While the eyes of the idol with the iron head are glowing

Distant ships sailing into the mist

You were born with a snake in both of your fists while a hurricane was blowing

Freedom just around the corner for you

But with the truth so far off, what good will it do?

The speaker of the song is spellbound, it would seem, effusing, “Jokerman, dance to the nightingale tune / Bird fly high by the light of the moon / Oh, oh, oh, Jokerman.” And while the Jokerman himself seems to have numinous (and cryptic) authority, in fact the speaker – and the performed vocal – carry the demurral that inflects the Jokerman, and “Jokerman,” with portentousness.

Yet are the Weatherman and the Jokerman interchangeable in terms of prophetic demurral? Can we speak of the Jokerman Paradox too? Perhaps. But Dylan’s songs contain many more nameless prophets-in demurral than we can give names to. Who is speaking the last lines of “All Along the Watchtower,” laden as they are with eerie portentousness: “Two riders were approaching / A wildcat did howl.” I won’t spill yet more ink on who the riders might be or what the wildcat means. The ominousness of the lines and the abruptness of the song’s ending contain a sort of visionary reticence, another prophetic demurral. And that last word “howl” resonates irresistibly with Allen Ginsberg’s darkly Whitmanian poem Howl.

Like any other longtime listener, indeed, like any Dylanista, I could multiply examples of the Weatherman Paradox. But maybe it is enough to recognize this as a lyrical and performative phenomenon, and, with that, to understand how Dylan manages not to be our prophet. He creates a negative space from which he can “tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it / And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it.” But the mountain has melted back into the night and all that remains is the sound of prophetic demurral. But there’s nothing, really nothing to turn off.

–RF

[1] The group, later known as the Weather Underground, moved from the nonviolence of SDS to violent means of fostering social change. See Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground.

[2] Michael Gray, Song and Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan (London: Continuum, 2000), 208; 435.

[3] Steven Scobie, Alias Bob Dylan Revisited (Calgary, Canada: Red Deer Press, 2003), 164. See also, John Hinchey, Like a Complete Unknown (Ann Arbor, MI: Stealing Home Press, 2002), 133: Hinchey characterizes the Señor as a Blakean “emanation,” and “an antagonistic alter-ego and/or friend.”

February 21, 2024/by Nicole Font

THE DYLANISTA – Is There a Young Generation of Bob Dylan Scholars?

Dylan Review Vol. 4.2, Fall/Winter 2022-2023, The Dylanista

I would like to use my column in this issue as a call to action. Warning bells are sounding in Dylan studies, but the field has been late to respond.

Beginnings seem to be multiplying around us. There is the establishment of the Bob Dylan Archive, a kind of engineered fons et origo allowing researchers to approach Dylan studies with utterly new material and with fresh eyes. Similarly, the Bob Dylan Institute at the University of Tulsa, just founded in 2018 as if waiting to be born, has already hosted two significant World of Bob Dylan conferences. Five years ago, Lisa O’Neill Sanders founded this journal, still the only peer-reviewed publication in Dylan studies. Add to these developments the recent flurry of conferences in Europe during the last decade and the explosion of print publications on Dylan since his Nobel Prize in 2016, and you get a distinct sense of pastures new, as if the field of Dylan studies were starting from scratch.

Of course, this is only an illusion, or a half-illusion. The field of Dylan studies is not new, despite the sudden unprecedented opportunities and outlets for research. While the formal institutionalization of Dylan studies might be new, the field itself is sixty years old. Biographers, scholars, reviewers, and all manner of critics have written about Dylan, often providing deeply informative texts regardless of the format of the publication, with or without the use of a consistent scholarly apparatus.

Yet there’s a conflict between the long history of Dylan studies and the new newness. In fact, a crisis has been born, and borne upon us, in the wake of the exciting coherence in our field. And the crisis is best expressed as a paradox: the newly forged wave of research developments in Dylan studies is largely the work of an aging generation of (mostly male, white) scholars, critics, and enthusiasts. Yet, despite the efforts of professors and other Dylan disseminators to the young, the continuation of Dylan studies remains uncertain. Can we say with any confidence that, as the current aging generation disappears, seven new people will be born? Or seventy? Or seven hundred?

The great pitcher Leroy “Satchel” Paige, who played his last Major League Baseball game at 59, supposedly asked the question, “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were?” This isn’t a new idea, but Paige’s formulation is catchy. A more common way to express the same idea is “You’re only as old as you feel.” Either way, the bulk of the Dylan community seems to have embraced this sentiment. Most Dylan scholars, enthusiasts, Dylanologists, and even concert audiences are older. Yet, admirably, they don’t let being an aging – and even aged – group of followers slow down their interest and engagement with Dylan. After all, Dylan himself is in his eighties.

But a problem has emerged that is inseparable from the resilience of Dylan’s aging audience. After the recent World of Bob Dylan conference in Tulsa, several people I trust made a point of sounding the alarm about the advancing age of their fellow participants, in effect highlighting a crisis at the center of Bob Dylan studies. According to unscientific estimates, 60 to 70 per cent of the conference participants were males over the age of fifty. This is a perilously lopsided number.

Certainly, there are promising indications of a young generation of Dylan aficionados out there. For example – to start close to home – three of the co-editors of this journal are in their twenties or thirties. Similarly, the Italian branch of Dylan studies boasts recent doctoral graduates who are fast becoming indispensable to the field, having organized a conference on Dylan and the fine arts and produced a volume of essays. The archive librarians at both the Bob Dylan Center and the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa are young scholars who see a future in the field – and, concomitantly, are the future of the field. The TU Bob Dylan Institute, founded and run by Sean Latham, not only hosts the WoBD conferences, but also operates within a university, presumably recruiting and involving undergraduates. My younger colleagues assure me that social media channels bristle with exchanges on our articles with every release of an issue of the Dylan Review. Similarly, Dylan’s tour has generated conversations across an international group of followers. These engagements need not be confined to publication events or concert tours but could be expanded into ongoing projects in more permanent modes, forming a foundation of interest in Dylan studies among younger audiences.

We must help to foster this – those of us who have been cathected onto Dylan since we were young. But how exactly? How can we preserve – let alone expand – engagement with Dylan studies in future generations if our ranks are so homogeneous in age and gender? How can we pass on skills, methods, and energy to a young generation of scholars and critics? I don’t have a pat answer to these crucial questions. But I know that if the times are not a-changin,’ or at least not fast enough, we’d better try to change them. We can do what mentors have done since, well, since Mentor. We can tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it – and, with persistence and luck, instill in those who didn’t live through the epochs of Dylan’s creativity our profound connection to his language and music.

In The Death of Tragedy, George Steiner suggests that John Dryden’s “situation” as a dramatist in the late seventeenth century was “artificial” because “he was required to restore that national tradition of drama which had been broken by the Cromwellian interlude.” The Puritans had closed the London theaters in 1642, and the Interregnum – what Steiner calls the “Cromwellian interlude” – had lasted from 1649 to 1660. So, for approximately twenty years there was a forced hiatus on the stage, cutting off a generation of playwrights and making the revival of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama a near impossibility for Dryden and his contemporaries. This is a complex argument, involving French and neo-classical influences on Dryden, and I won’t go into the nuances here – nor do I think Dryden’s “situation” is a perfect fit for the crisis in Dylan studies. I mention it only to underscore the destructive effect of a generational gap. Dryden was hopelessly hobbled by the lack of continuity from Shakespeare, whom he revered. Steiner calls Dryden “the first of the critic-playwrights,” a term he uses to damn with faint praise. Being a “critic-playwright” indicates the burden of distance from Elizabethan and Jacobean theater, which Steiner characterizes as “innocent of theoretical debate.” This contrast with Restoration dramatists is probably an oversimplification, or an over-polarization of the two theatrical periods. But Steiner’s schematic is valuable for Dylan studies if, for the sake of argument, we accept that the Cromwellian interlude created an unbridgeable gap for English dramatists.

My question then is: Are we heading for the same kind of unbridgeable gap? Will the establishment of Dylan institutions like the Archive, the Bob Dylan Center, and the TU Institute for Bob Dylan Studies mark the last hurrah – a kind of eloquent peroration – of a generation born in Dylan’s heyday?

Or will the outgoing generation manage to seed far-reaching and newly inclusive pastures of plenty with burgeoning Dylan scholars, critics, and serious enthusiasts?

Someone once said that every generation must read Virgil’s Aeneid for itself. The same might be said for every inescapable author from Dante to Shakespeare to Milton, or from Cervantes to Austen to Woolf. This is partly a matter of canonization, partly of fashion, partly of accessibility. Any English speaker can read, inter alia, Charles Dickens or Edna St. Vincent Millay, regardless of whether these authors are the flavor of the month. But few people can (or would) chance Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales without an expert’s help. Because of these obstacles, or despite them, literary fortunes rise and fall, and new interpretations surface to hail or condemn or revise. This is the key to generational renewal in the Republic of Letters.

We should ask ourselves – Turn, turn, turn – and ask of ourselves: Can we embed Dylan in a poetic firmament that continually renews and redefines itself? Can we ensure that every generation will need to hear and interpret Dylan’s songs for itself? Turn to face the rain and the wind.

This is not to dismiss the many stalwart university professors who, over the last decades, pioneered Dylan courses in the curriculum, sometimes over the loud sneers of more conventionally minded faculty. With a few exceptions – Classics, for instance – these courses are usually found in English literature departments, which makes sense, given that Dylan writes in English and won the Nobel Prize in Literature. But relegation to literature departments is a kind of misrepresentation: Dylan is a musician, and we understand his songs best only after experiencing them as performances. Which brings us to the signal differences between poetry and popular music. As much as fashions in poetry have changed, poetic value as a desideratum has remained relatively constant in scholarship and, to a less widespread extent, in society. The same can’t be said for popular music. Even if there were consensus about its value as an art form, musical styles, technology, and its means of preservation make it impossible to compare it to poetry over a long period. While Robert Herrick’s iambic tetrameter poems are obsolete in contemporary practice, they appear in anthologies and are perfectly readable four hundred years later. They’re out of fashion but not out of reach.

The same condition doesn’t apply to popular music. Fashion is the draconian law that applies to all recorded popular music – or at least has done so for the last century. It might be that the internet and YouTube will change this social structure and wrest music from the imperatives of the market. But no one really knows. In the meantime, Dylan studies remains in flux between vibrant research and obsolescence. Only a new generation of Dylan students can prevent the latter and infuse the former with energy.

Much depends on current mentors. But even when, with the most perspicacious pedagogical ambitions, professors inject Dylan’s songs into their curriculum, they encounter a range of obstacles, such as their students’ lack of training in explicating poetry or – precisely because they are literature majors – their understandable inexperience with music. Professors thus find themselves, even though they are usually not trained to do so, teaching the fundamentals of twelve-bar blues and basic rock forms, even as they struggle to shed light on verses laden with classical allusions (“Temporarily Like Achilles”) and topical references (“Positively 4th Street”). Then there is the question of historical perspective: to fathom Montague Street and revolution in the air, students must understand the sixty-year-old cultural milieu from which Dylan’s songs grew.

This is a tall order for any professor, especially in a one-semester course. Think about courses on other literary figures: students who study Elizabeth Gaskell’s novels in one class, for example, are likely to have read, in other classes, some of the shining lights from the same nineteenth-century literary milieu, such as Wollstonecraft, the Romantics, or Dickens. But teaching a rock and roll icon requires more than just a background in mid-twentieth-century literature. It requires that background plus the ability to illuminate the roots of popular music. Again, a tall order for literature professors.

Still, we beat on. But it’s difficult to say how wide a dissemination Dylan-in-school produces, or to identify the exact goal of teaching undergraduate classes on Dylan’s songs. Anthologies very rarely include Dylan’s lyrics among the twentieth- and twenty-first-century poets, which would at least give his oeuvre survey-course parity with Donne, Byron, Moore, Stevens, or Bishop. Current graduate programs are unlikely to encourage dissertations on Dylan, with the perfectly reasonable justification that, as a specialty, Bob Dylan wouldn’t be much use on the job market. But we don’t want that to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The ideal would be for the young ephebes emerging from their undergrad years’ Dylan classes to contemplate the Master not in splendid isolation but to think of him as part of a network, connected with contemporaries such Robert Lowell, Frank O’Hara, or Adrienne Rich, the way we think of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning – and the songs of Robert Burns.

Unfortunately, I don’t see this happening. I don’t see a busy, competitive flow of younger scholars and critics replacing the older generation. A hoped-for revolving legacy (so far) has failed to materialize in Dylan studies, despite the bursts of interest on social media. Discipleship is scarce among contemporary writers and researchers. This is troubling. It’s as if our urgent – and honorable – effort to institutionalize Bob Dylan had somehow overlooked a critical facet of institution building: the nurturing of a new and radically connected cohort.

What should we do? Obviously, just adding Dylan to the curriculum is not enough for the future. Maybe we need to speak about Dylan to our students unapologetically, not along the lines of “here’s why I am including him with other, clearly more established writers”, but as a matter of course, signaling to our students, as well as to ourselves, that this is precisely where he belongs: with the greats of contemporary literature. Let us learn to take him – and Dylan Studies – for granted, as something not dependent on the newest newness, but as something that is here to stay.

It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there. The rest is silence.

– RF

August 26, 2023/by Nicole Font

THE DYLANISTA – His Name It Is Something: Bob Dylan’s New Lyrical Voice

[2] https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/bob-dylan-allen-ginsberg-friendship/

Back in the hard old days, when ambition was in the air on MacDougal Street, a song began “Oh my name it is nothin’ / My age it means less.” Nothing prepared us for that opening line, the deeply ironic claim to anonymity by a voice instantly recognizable—a voice unmasking the singer and contradicting his words. Nor were we prepared for the searing skepticism of the song, the lyrics weighted with ironies to match the irony of anonymity. Of the nine verses, seven offered cherrypicked examples from unspeakable predations, ruinous wars, and the most grotesque horrors of the 20th century. The singer might be young, or he might be ageless, and his posture might be callow, but there was no resisting the gradual crescendo leading toward the inevitable challenge: “The words fill my head / And fall to the floor / If God’s on our side / He’ll stop the next war.”

But that was then and this is now. We beat on, yes, with rumors of wars and wars that have been. But when it comes to the erstwhile singer from MacDougal Street, does his name still mean nothing and his age even less? An interesting question comes to mind, now, long after the celebrated MacDougal Street dénouements: Is it true that his name is nothing and his age means less? Is Dylan still the erstwhile Outis of MacDougal Street?

In a word: No. Name and age mean increasingly more when we listen to—or read Dylan. But that is not only because he’s become part of our cultural repertoire, because his life has been uncrumpled in multiple biographies, to the extent that we know where he was on what day in a given year twenty or more years before. My contention is that Dylan himself has gradually let his personal identity seep into his songs, that, like the “Frog” in Dickinson’s poem (“I’m Nobody! Who are you?”), he has increasingly found pleasure in “telling [his] name” to “an admiring Bog.” His new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, released in October 2022, which has already received plenty of reviews online and in newspapers, is a case in point. Too many of the reviewers, unfortunately, have used their reviews as a platform to take potshots at Dylan rather than trying to understand the text. One critic, who shall remain nameless, complained that the book was “saturated with misogyny,” as if misogyny were a noxious fluvial excretion. A weird metaphor, and too close to ad hominem critique. But we can dismiss that sort of review. More interesting by far are the serious reviewers who read the book, as Dylan seems to encourage with the songs he analyzes, as a portrait of the artist in statu nascendi. The sense of identity informs and suffuses the book, providing a stepping-stone for readers intent on following the yellow brick road to Dylan’s musical, or magical, origins or, to follow, in Warren Zevon’s phrase, what “the mystics and statistics say.” The new book turns out to be a kind of prismatic version of Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One (2004), intertwining the young Zimmerman’s playlist with a series of later songs peppered with epigrammatic reflections from a marvelously informed and cryptically associative cicerone. In The Philosophy of Modern Song at least, Dylan’s name it is something and his age it means more.

This semi-autobiographical voice, however much it impinges, doesn’t seem out of place in the book, even if it undermines the intellectual disinterest flaunted by the book’s title. But the infusion of identity into Dylan’s “philosophy” should come as no surprise. It’s my impression that, for better or worse, about twenty-five years ago the songs too began to change in this direction. This change—again, to my mind—manifests itself most clearly in Time Out of Mind. The anonymity of the singer/speaker gives way to less blurred identification of the author as the singer: to wit, “Not Dark Yet” and especially “Highlands.” After decades of rejecting personal identification with the speakers in his songs, Dylan seems deliberately to experiment with a new form of expression—identity-driven, intimate, a new Whitmanian “I.” This break with the anonymous past, if I can call it that, has made little impression on us as critics, or even as listeners, except, predictably, in interpretations of “I Contain Multitudes” from Rough and Rowdy Ways.

On one hand, Dylan’s lyrical experimentation as “Bob Dylan” might not seem new, given the array of early songs with “Bob Dylan” in their titles—not to mention the continuing fascination with Dylan’s “mercurial” identity, starting with his own Carnegie Hall Halloween concert joke “I’m wearing my Bob Dylan mask” in the 60s through Renaldo and Clara, which features Dylan as Renaldo watching a Bob Dylan show, and finally such identity-bending escapades as “Masked and Anonymous” and “I’m Not There.”

On the other hand, the identity that begins to emerge on Time Out of Mind is a far cry from the wacky, unreal “Bob Dylan,” of “Bob Dylan’s 116 th Dream” or of spoofs like “Motorpsycho Nightmare.” Not even the eponymous westward-bound hero of “Bob Dylan’s Dream” provides a believable identity. Still, most listeners probably can name a song in which they hear Bob Dylan identify himself and speak without anonymity—“Ballad in Plain D,” for example, or “Sara,” a song whose historical reality confutes its status as one of Dylan’s most nostalgic lyrics. But the voice of that song, despite the title’s naming of a real-life wife, repels intimacy and instinctively guards its lyrical anonymity. It’s almost as if Dylan were taking a page from the Ars amatoria where Ovid advises:

Si latet, ars prodest: adfert deprensa pudorem,
Atque adimit merito tempus in omne fidem.

[Art, if hidden, avails: if detected, it brings shame, and deservedly discredits you forever.] [1]

In “Sara” the impression of hidden art “availing” or, less archaically, being useful (“prodest” is most commonly translated as “is useful”) pervades the song’s intimate memories, as if the mask of poetic manipulation will spare the artist shame—not only as an artist, but precisely because as an artist he has revealed his identity as the divorced husband of Sara. In fact, thanks to his hidden art, Bob Dylan’s name it means nothin’, and his age it means less even when the singer discloses an irrefutable identity-marker:

I can still hear the sounds of those Methodist bells
I’d taken the cure and had just gotten through
Stayin’ up for days in the Chelsea Hotel
Writin’ “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” for you

The unexpectedly revealing mention of “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” leads to a quandary. As intimate as “Sara” purports to be, and as perfect an I.D. as “Sad-Eyed Lady” offers, the lyric slightly distorts historical reality, or hides it in images like “I can hear the sounds of those Methodist bells.” The Methodist bells could have been real, ringing out from the United Methodist Church on West 13 th Street. But the material reality of the bells, if it existed at all, merges with all those other highly significant bells in Dylan’s songs, from “Chimes of Freedom” to “Farewell Angelina / The bells of the crown” to, unforgettably, from the same album as “Sad- Eyed Lady,” “Shakespeare, he’s in the alley / With his pointed shoes and his bells.” The “Methodist bells” straddle a threshold between reality and abstraction, between Bob Dylan in a room at the Chelsea Hotel and an array of images associated with bells. This array of possible references, like slight abstractions from “the facts,” relieves the pressure on the singer to identify fully with the speaker.

The same cannot be said for “Highlands,” Dylan’s most ambitious narrative lyric after “Tangled Up in Blue.” The “I” in that song, carved out of the verses with such photographic clarity, merges into the singer’s “off-album” identity. This comes as quite a surprise. But part of the song’s power, its unparalleled sustaining voice including the subtle vocal, which is sometimes querulous, sometimes decisive depend on undoing anonymity in what seems an offhand, observational poetics. In American poetry, there is Whitman wandering through Manhattan and, almost a century later, Frank O’Hara. Dylan would probably have known Whitman, who, in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (1856)

Look’d on the haze on the hills southward and south-westward,

Saw the white sails of schooners and sloops, saw the ships at anchor,

The sailors at work in the rigging or out astride the spars,

The round masts, the swinging motion of the hulls, the slender serpentine
pennants,

The large and small steamers in motion, the pilots in their pilot-houses.

Dylan claims to have known O’Hara’s work. [2] And the tenor of O’Hara’s observational itinerant poetry, like Whitman’s, seems to anticipate Dylan’s experiments with the form.

The gulls wheeled
several miles away
and the bridge, which
stood on wet-barked
trees, was broad and
cold. Rio de Janeiro
is just another fishing
village, said George.
The sun boomed calmly
in the wind around
the monument. Texans
and Australians climbed
to the top to look
at Beacon Hill and
the Common. Later we
walked round the base
of the hill to the Navy
Yard, and the black
and white twigs stuck
in the sky above the old
hull. Outside the gate
some children jumped
higher and higher off
the highway embankment.
Cars honked. Leaves
On trees shook. And
above us the elevated
trolley trundled along.
The wind waved steadily
from the sea. Today we
have seen Bunker Hill
and the Constitution,
said George. Tomorrow,
probably, our country
will declare war.

“A Walk on a Sunday Afternoon”

O’Hara’s descriptive associations lull the reader like a pleasant itinerary, until he makes a lightning leap from the certainty of quotidian space (“Today we / have seen Bunker Hill”) to the quantum uncertainty of what’s to come (“Tomorrow, / probably, our country / will declare war”).

Compare O’Hara’s dictional maneuvers to Dylan’s in “Highlands”:

Every day is the same thing out the door
Feel further away than ever before
Some things in life, it gets too late to learn
Well, I’m lost somewhere
I must have made a few bad turns

I see people in the park forgetting their troubles and woes
They’re drinking and dancing, wearing bright-colored clothes
All the young men with their young women looking so good
Well, I’d trade places with any of them
In a minute, if I could

I’m crossing the street to get away from a mangy dog
Talking to myself in a monologue
I think what I need might be a full-length leather coat
Somebody just asked me
If I registered to vote

“Highlands,” Time Out of Mind

In one light, “Highlands” can be seen as Dylan’s attempt to establish himself as a poet of the quotidian itinerary, a Whitmanian persona inserting himself between the trapper and his squaw (“I trade places with any of them / In a minute if I could”). This posture is a benchmark departure. Dylan long ago confirmed his credentials as a Whitmanian vatic poet, and his embrace of what might be called the “other Whitman” deserves attention. In contrast, O’Hara felt he lacked the vatic talent, and he accepted his inability to write with that kind of authority. In “For Bob Rauschenberg” he asks,

what should I be
if not alone in pain, apart from
the heavenly aspirations of
Spenser and Keats and Ginsberg,
who have a language that permits
them truth and beauty, double-coined?

O’Hara might have added Dylan’s name after Ginsberg’s. But “Highlands” seems to herald a new Dylan—not the anonymous prophetic voice of the anthems, nor the cunningly slippery persona of such songs as “Tangled Up in Blue” or “Jokerman.” Instead, “Highlands” introduces listeners to a voice whose name and age matter, both inside the song’s narrative, and outside, in the interpretation of that narrative. When faced with the universal, suddenly the “I” seems to have a real-world presence in “Highlands,” framed by a new quotidian diction and a very tricky narrative frankness, reminiscent, perhaps, of Whitman’s “of Manhattan the son.”

This narrative frankness often compels us now to listen to Dylan’s songs without critical detachment, identifying the speaker of the lyrics as a celebrated 80-year old Nobel laureate named Bob Dylan whose life history we know well. The meaning of the newer songs sometimes relies on this identification in a way that “Hard Rain,” “Baby Blue,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Highway 61,” “All Along the Watchtower,” and so on, did not. “Tangled Up in Blue,” of course, received the full biographical treatment from critics, but ultimately the sheer brilliance of the lyrics superseded reductive interpretations.

To my ear, however, many songs since “Highlands” have shed the chrysalis of anonymity and agelessness. Take “Murder Most Foul,” a song from the latest album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, in which the identity of the singer seems to me to be crucial. It’s as if Dylan’s signature inhabits certain verses, as if he were mounting an exhibition of his own art—not visual art this time, but aural and oral. The song exudes an 80-year-old’s pained memories and a laureate’s dab hand with metrical and allusive pyrotechnics. At first, the speaker is nameless, an embodiment of an epoch (or the Voice of a Generation):

Hush lil children, you’ll soon understand
The Beatles are coming they’re gonna hold your hand
Slide down the banister, go get your coat
Ferry ‘cross the Mersey and go for the throat
There’s three bums comin’ all dressed in rags
Pick up the pieces and lower the flags
I’m going to Woodstock, it’s the Aquarian Age
Then I’ll go over to Altamont and sit near the stage

Dylan—famously, and despite a tsunami of rumors—did not perform at Woodstock (although he lived there and, in Big Pink, produced the colossally influential Basement Tapes). The nameless speaker charts a familiar cultural journey through the 60s, lacing the lines with quotations and suggestive rhymes like “rags/flags” and “Aquarian Age/stage” (the latter a reference to the song “The Age of Aquarius” performed in the Broadway play Hair). The verse tumbles from the innocence of “lil’ children” who are led by the Pied-Piper Mop Tops out of Liverpool to an uglier, menacing place where “three bums [are] comin’ all dressed in rags.” The “three bums” probably refers to the infamous “three tramps” associated with the Kennedy assassination because they were caught in newspaper photographs while being escorted by a Dallas policeman on November 22, 1963. [3] The quick transition in the verse to the promise of peace and love and Aquarius at Woodstock followed by the horrible murder “near the stage” at the Rolling Stones concert in Altamont closes the circle, blasting the innocence of the first lines with a mirror of JFK’s assassination in the final line.

This is Dylan, if not precisely as the Voice of His Generation, then as the generation’s telegraphic chronicler. His identity is missing, except in the movement of the verse, which contains a subtle identifying marker: the narrative travels from the River Mersey to Woodstock and finally to Altamont, California. The narrator is bringing it all back home.

Later in the song, though, the first person speaker seems to reveal, and even underscore, his identity:

Zapruder’s film, I’ve seen that before
Seen it thirty three times, maybe more
It’s vile and deceitful—it’s cruel and it’s mean
Ugliest thing that you ever have seen
They killed him once, they killed him twice
Killed him like a human sacrifice
The day that they killed him, someone said to me, “Son, The age of the anti-Christ
has just only begun.”
Air Force One coming in through the gate
Johnson sworn in at two thirty-eight
Let me know when you decide to throw in the towel
It is what it is and it’s murder most foul

The number thirty-three has mystical Christological overtones, in this instance linking Jesus’s age when he was crucified to “human sacrifice” and “the age of the anti-Christ,” which is presumably a reversal of the Age of Aquarius. But to complement (and complicate) the magical, numerological thinking, the speaker quickly brings the song down to earth: he recalls watching the Zapruder film “maybe more” than thirty-three times, as if forced like Alex in A Clockwork Orange to sit through the “Ugliest thing that you ever have seen.” This detail provides a moment of recognition, another identity-marker, because watching the Zapruder film irresistibly calls to mind a particular moment in America and captures a long forgotten Zeitgeist. As a result, the “I’ve seen” of the verse’s opening line seems to embody both the song’s speaker and the singer/songwriter himself, who, like the film, is a relic of the early 60s and a witness to murder most foul.

At times “Murder Most Foul” can sound like a carefully packed portmanteau, while at other times it’s more of a potpourri. It seems fair to ask whether Dylan is vamping erudition in his array of allusions, or whether he genuinely wants the Kennedy assassination to symbolize the whole of American cultural experience as a series of post hoc ergo propter hoc portents by the Weird (or Wired) Sisters of Macbeth. It’s probably impossible to answer that question. But maybe Dylan anticipated just such an impossibility. Maybe the song’s achievement lies in its highlighting of a particularly American indeterminacy, a liminal space where coherence and symbolic aporia meet.

In terms of my original conjecture—that is, how far Dylan has come from “Oh my name it is nothin’ / My age it means less”—both “Murder Most Foul” and “I Contain Multitudes” are the most obvious recent examples of his anonymity shedding. These songs seem, at this stage, to bookend “Highlands” and “Not Dark Yet.” But I don’t want to overdetermine my readings or lose all claim to critical tact. Let me conclude instead with a tempting, but hardly definitive, suggestion of an identity-marker from “Crossing the Rubicon.” In the first verse Dylan sings, “I got up early so I could greet the Goddess of the Dawn.” In the Greek pantheon, the Goddess of Dawn was Eos (Aurora in the Roman pantheon). Her lover was Tithonus. The legend goes that Eos pleaded with Zeus to give Tithonus eternal life, which he granted. But Zeus did not give him eternal youth. So, while Eos was born anew every morning with the dawn, Tithonus grew older and older for all eternity. Tennyson voices this excruciating paradox perfectly:

Me only cruel immortality
Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world,
A white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dream
The ever-silent spaces of the East.

“Tithonus”

Does “Crossing the Rubicon” purposely begin with an image suggestive enough to make us think of the 80-year-old Dylan in the arms of an eternally young goddess? The paradox might amuse a singer/songwriter on a never-ending tour, aging from year to year as the performances are newly born at every gig from east to west. So what then are we to conclude from that? That Dylan’s career went from withdrawal to transparency, from hidden identity to a form of confessionalism, from Keats to the New York School? Or maybe something subtly different—that even the most self-revelatory Dylan lyrics keep a layer of obfuscation between the singer and his audience, that self-disclosure and self-mythologizing go hand in hand, to the extent that even the 80-year-old singer-poet views himself through the lens of Greek myth. As Whitman says, also in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,”

What gods can exceed these that clasp me by the hand, and with
voices I love call me promptly and loudly by my nighest
name as I approach?

What is Dylan’s “nighest name” today. He might have transitioned from nothing to something or multiple somethings—but that something still isn’t Dylan up close (and not, may the gods preserve us, Bobby Zimmerman).

[1] Ovid, Ars amatoria, Book II, lines 313-14, in Ovid in Six Volumes, vol. 2, The Art of Love and Other Poems, translated by J.H. Mozley, revised by G.P. Goold (Loeb Classical Library; Harvard UP, 1929; 2nd ed., 1979), pages 86-87.

[3] I am grateful to Cliff Radar for this reference. See Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_tramps.

February 1, 2023/by Nicole Font

Dylan Review Vol. 4.1, Spring/Summer 2022, The Dylanista

THE DYLANISTA – Bob Dylan and the Literary Canon

Dylan Review Vol. 3.2, Fall/Winter 2021-2022, The Dylanista

Literary canon formation is a curious thing, and Dylan’s Nobel Prize has certainly put the cat among the pigeons on that score. There’s no question about Dylan’s commanding presence in the rock ‘n roll “canon,” if that’s an appropriate word: the canonical rock ‘n roll artists can be corralled in the second half of the 20th century. Rock ‘n roll is no longer the most popular musical form, if it’s still being made at all, and we already know the primary names of the rock canon. Apart from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and its portmanteau approach to inflating the canon by heralding little-known musical influences, no expansion is realistically possible. Rock ‘n roll is now a static form, its history set in concrete, and expanding the rock canon would be like expanding, for example, the canon of Romantic poets. We might find an interesting rocker or early influence whose discovery enriches our understanding and challenges biases, but the definition of the period would remain intact.

Nor is there any question about Dylan’s centrality to the last years of the Second Folk Movement, which can be dated to the late fifties. In an odd (and well-rehearsed) paradox, Dylan probably did as much as anyone to kill off the Folk Movement while remaining, at least to those outside the world of Dylan-watchers, the consummate 60s folksinger. The name Bob Dylan still means “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “The Times They Are A-Changin,’” and “Mr. Tambourine Man,” even if the original cultural context of those songs is long lost – whether they can be revived with cultural force is yet to be determined. And although Sara Danius suggested Blonde on Blonde as a place to start Dylan appreciation, and resist as we might this reductive equation of Dylan with his acoustic-era songs, it must be admitted that, in Stockholm on that fateful night, Patti Smith sang “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” from the acoustic Freewheelin’ album. This is the Bob Dylan even Bob Dylan himself and Patti Smith seem to recognize as his “face value.”

But Dylan didn’t win the Nobel Prize for acoustic folk, folk rock, rock, or any other kind of music (the Swedes don’t give a medal for music). Lest we forget, Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature. This genre-bending acknowledgment, regardless of how much we admire the Nobel Committee’s bravery, means that we must think of Dylan as part of the literary canon. He isn’t simply the most significant songwriter of his generation, nor even, to quote Richard Thomas, “the supreme artist of the English language of my time.”[1] Dylan is now a sanctioned figure in the American literary canon.

Or is he? The newest Norton Anthology of American Literature (10th Edition) doesn’t include any Dylan songs (with or without music). Not that this college tome represents the last word in canonicity.[2] But the absence of Dylan’s name, amid the welter of much less well-known authors, none of whom has won the Nobel, inevitably undermines Dylan’s new literary status. To exclude the 2016 American laureate is tantamount to denying the literariness of his work—and defying the Swedish imprimatur. It’s a puzzling omission and a missed opportunity to expand and diversify the literary canon with a homegrown interdisciplinary art form. Is this evidence of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot fighting in the captain’s tower, or simply a case of something happening here, and they don’t know what it is?[3]

Either way, the cat’s among the pigeons. Dylan’s indefinable literary status highlights the conundrum of canon formation. In my view, the Norton omission is an editorial blunder, though it might not be in the short run. But in the longer run, questions about inclusion, exclusion, and interdisciplinary diversity will fill our heads until they fall to the floor.

Redefining the concept of “Literature” with a capital “L” is fundamental to Dylan’s bid for canonicity. Henry Louis Gates addressed a similar redefinition when he edited The Norton Anthology of African American Literature in the 1990s, announcing what was for the time “an innovation in anthology production.” Gates explained that “Because of the strong oral and vernacular base of so much of our literature, we shall include a cassette tape along with our anthology. This means that each period will include both the printed and spoken text of oral and musical selections of black vernacular culture: sermons, blues, spirituals, R&B, poets reading their own ‘dialect’ poems, speeches, and other performances.”[4] According to Gates, “The canon that we define will be ‘our’ canon, one possible set of selections among several possible sets of selections.” And he concludes, “Scholars make canons.”

While I’m skeptical about this last statement, I like Gates’s knitting together of printed text and oral performance to form the “vernacular base” of literature.[5] Dylan himself hints at the same sort of knitting-together in his Nobel lecture. As Richard Thomas points out, Dylan offers “a fascinating description of how he gained mastery of the ‘vernacular’ of the early folk artists by singing the songs: ‘You internalize it. You sing it in the ragtime blues, work songs, Georgia sea shanties, Appalachian ballads and cowboy songs. You hear all the finer points, and you learn the details.’” Dylan’s lecture provides a kind of road map of personalized canon formation. Thomas summarizes it this way: “Just as he becomes Odysseus later in the lecture – ‘You too have had the drugs dropped in your wine’ – so too here he has entered into the folk songs and ballads which he has hardwired and whose world he inhabits. This is what it means to live inside the world of literature and song.”[6]

Notable by their absence are the scholarly canon-makers. Dylan’s reflections demonstrate how an artist internalizes prior works and reimagines them in his own songs, and, as Thomas highlights, Dylan’s attention to the vernacular is invaluable. Gates and his co-editors expansively define “vernacular literature” to embody popular and highly influential Black musical forms. Yet, try as we might, it’s difficult to think of Robert Johnson or Billie Holliday or Duke Ellington as literary figures. Dylan, too, has a credibility problem in terms of literary status, his lyrical genius and Nobel Prize notwithstanding. Academic curricula and public impressions make it abundantly clear that – though hope springs eternal – the redefinition of “literature” is still a work in progress. Perhaps that’s as it should be – perhaps the precise definition of literature should always be in statu nascendi: in a dynamic state of coming into being. In any case, as is also abundantly clear, no canon can be determined by fiat.

Not that Dylan’s serious audience ever worried much about that. We were convinced his survival outside the conventional canon was guaranteed because we had a card up our sleeves: the irresistibility of the songs themselves. The songs would straddle canonical limits and live on in (relative) perpetuity. As Milton said about Shakespeare in 1632, before the onslaught of Bardolatry:

What needs my Shakespeare for his honored bones,
The labor of an age in pilèd stones,
Or that his hallowed relics should be hid
Under a star-ypointing pyramid?[7]

Why should Shakespeare need a marble tomb to preserve his memory? Why should his “relics” be buried under a pyramid? Such preservation efforts are pointless: Milton apostrophizes Shakespeare, asserting “Thou…hast built thyself a livelong monument” with “easy numbers” and “the leaves of thy unvalued book.”

As has Dylan, with his 600-plus songs and his numberless recordings making up his “unvalued book.” And surely Dylan’s “easy numbers,” so riveting and transformative over the years, will be enough to build a “livelong monument.” Surely our bard, our vates, has written and played and sung himself into the canon.

But which canon? Formulated how? Sustained in what medium?

I repeat the refrain: canon formation is a curious thing. For example—if I can digress from literature – Ted Gioia recently wrote in The Atlantic that, mirabile dictu, old music was far outselling new music:

Old songs now represent 70 percent of the U.S. music market, according to the latest numbers from MRC Data, a music-analytics firm. Those who make a living from new music – especially that endangered species known as the working musician – should look at these figures with fear and trembling. But the news gets worse: The new-music market is actually shrinking. All the growth in the market is coming from old songs.

He records his surprise when a young cashier is singing “Message in a Bottle,” and then again at a diner, “where the entire staff was under 30 but every song was more than 40 years old.”[8]

Gioia marvels that “Never before in history have new tracks attained hit status while generating so little cultural impact. In fact, the audience seems to be embracing the hits of decades past instead. Success was always short-lived in the music business, but now even new songs that become bona fide hits can pass unnoticed by much of the population.” As fascinating as this phenomenon is, however, Gioia doesn’t address the converse situation, the elephant in the room regarding canonicity. It’s one thing to call attention to the unique historical situation where new tracks become hits “while generating so little cultural impact.” But there’s no reason to suppose that, conversely, the old songs now representing 70 percent of the US music market are generating any impact on contemporary culture. The old songs lack present identity: they’re interchangeable, it seems, a kind of musical wallpaper. Gioia asks his server in the diner, perhaps with cultural impact in the back of his mind, “‘Why are you playing this old music?’ She looked at me in surprise before answering: ‘Oh, I like these songs.’”

The banality of the server’s answer says it all: there’s no cultural connection to New Wave and the Police, just as singing along with “Norwegian Wood” would bring no thrill of contraband, no shared code – i.e., illegal marijauna. Would even the searing accusations of Neil Young’s “Ohio” be detected and understood? Fewer Dylan songs seem to stream through the restaurants and supermarkets, but if they did, how much cultural frisson could we expect from inadvertent listeners to “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Tangled Up in Blue,” or even “Masters of War.” The excitement, or incitement, of 60s, 70s, and 80s songs has been absorbed into the sponge of streaming culture.

Some of us have been resisting this kind of absorption for a long time, trying to keep the context alive. We’ve been teaching Dylan courses, and Dylan in courses, throughout our careers. But for my part, I can’t say confidently that my Dylan courses have become part of the curriculum. They certainly don’t have the prestige or regularity of standard department seminars on Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Woolf, or Morrison, and Dylan isn’t assigned alongside other 20th-century poets in survey courses. This absence is understandable, perhaps, since Dylan’s official elevation to literary ranks is recent and teaching him has, until now, been a niche vocation. Not to mention that bringing Dylan into the literary classroom has always presented a technical issue, while expecting literature students to know something about folk music and the blues is often a bridge too far. Nevertheless, like many another Dylanista, I keep my hand on that plow and hold on, continuing to translate Dylan into the literary classroom.

But this alone won’t make Dylan part of the literary canon. Pace Gates, scholars don’t make the canon and professors can’t shoehorn him in. The best we can do as scholars is to facilitate future canon-makers. The best we can do is hope that, by interpolating Dylan into our teaching and research, we can inspire future poets, novelists, playwrights (and maybe poet-musicians) to respond to Dylan’s work, thus giving them the chance to internalize Dylan, to “master” him as part of the vernacular. Dylan’s canonical status is in their hands.

I’d like to be sanguine about this process. I’d like to think the founding of the spectacular Bob Dylan Archive in 2017 will have a trickle-down effect. But the song it is long and there’s more to be sung.

Allow me to close with an anecdote, a personal tale of erosion. Not so long ago in my university courses I would occasionally quote lines like “The pumps don’t work ‘cause the vandals took the handles” or “there’s nothing, really nothing to turn off,” or, perhaps (with reference to upcoming grades), “A hard rain’s a-gonna fall.” I quoted Dylan—as one might quote “To be, or not to be”—to illustrate a point, serendipitously, in Paradise Lost, say, or to link a passage in Mary Wroth to the ”sound of the street.” The Dylan lines would resonate familiarly with the class, bringing a smile of recognition (and, ideally, an LED of connection). But gradually, and then abruptly, the recognition disappeared. It seemed to me to be a precipitous erosion, a mudslide. Like Hemingway’s going bankrupt: gradually, and then all at once. And while I’d like to believe Ted Gioia’s statistics about old music, I haven’t seen much evidence of it. As things stand now, alas, I get more resonance in class from straight Milton quotes than from Dylan: “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven” draws nods and smiles; “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” produces blank faces.

Canonicity always has an element of unpredictability – waiting for the right configuration of admirers to come along, for the times to be ready for the specific kind of innovation a writer offers. John Donne is one example of this. Known and admired in his lifetime, he never published his poetry, which only appeared in a posthumous volume. His reputation waned and by the 18th century he’d become all but invisible: Samuel Johnson didn’t even include Donne in The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets.[9] It took Herbert Grierson’s 1912 Oxford edition of Donne and T.S. Eliot’s book review of that edition to set Donne into the firmament. This is a good example of how scholars and poet/critics depend on each other. Anna Laetitia Barbauld offers another, perhaps more significant example. Celebrated in her day for her poetry and novels, she had a measurable influence on Romantic poets around the time of the French Revolution. But she was forgotten until the late 20th century, when her importance required a re-historicizing of the Romantic context and a reassessment of the Romantic canon, if not of canonicity itself.

It might be that a genuine classic like Milton reasserts himself, even if he temporarily goes out of fashion, while someone like Dylan hasn’t yet had that advantage. Time is a critical factor. Milton has had centuries to acquire his status, whether through other poets’ imitation or simply through habitual anthologizing. But Milton is a rarity. In other cases, there are lapses, as happened with Emily Dickinson or even Whitman, who was revered by a coterie after his death but needed William Carlos Williams and the Beats to acquire the canonicity he now enjoys. Melville became instantly famous with his first novel, yet when he died the New York Times misspelled his name. Critics always recognized how crucial he was to the American literary canon – Lewis Mumford’s 1929 book about him was a major effort to reestablish his importance in the public mind, as was F. O. Matthiessen’s 1941 American Renaissance. But it took John Huston’s 1956 film (script by Ray Bradbury), with Gregory Peck stumping around as Ahab, to affix Melville’s name in the cultural consciousness.

Despite the Nobel Committee’s top-down decision, Dylan’s time hasn’t yet come, at least not the way it has for others. As my own experience in class shows, in terms of Dylan’s cultural recognizability, we’re still in the cycle of ups and downs other many major cultural figures have survived. Maybe Dylan will never have the same status Milton does now, but meanwhile we’re doing all we can to ensure that the current upswing in Dylan’s reputation continues. And though we realize that scholars alone don’t make canons, the Dylan Review is our contribution – one of many from California to the New York island – to the current (and future) moment.

-RF

[1] Richard F. Thomas, Why Bob Dylan Matters (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), 322.

[2] None of the other anthologies I checked included Dylan, although I’ve seen his songs in the past. Notably, Edward Hirsch’s fairly selective The Heart of American Poetry (Library of America, 2022) includes Robert Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues [Take two]” but no Dylan.

[3] As an example of what I mean – a literary friend of mine read this last phrase and didn’t
recognize the reference.

[4] Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Canon-Formation, Literary History, and the Afro-American Tradition: From the Seen to the Told,” in Falling into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature, edited by David H. Richter (Boston: Bedford), 180. The cassette tapes have evolved into CDs and password-protected digital content accompanying each copy of the book.

[5] Though beside the point here, I’m more inclined to agree with Harold Bloom, the bête noire of the canon debate. Bloom used to tell his students, “Critics and scholars don’t make the canon. Poets do.” He expanded on this idea in many books, as for instance in The Western Canon: “Poems, stories, novels, plays come into being as a response to prior poems, stories, novels, and plays, and that response depends on acts of reading and interpretation by the later writers, acts that are identical with the new works.” See The Western Canon: The Books and Schools of the Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994), 9. This is a many-sided, complex debate, beyond the purview of this column. Cf., inter alia, John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Literary Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).

[6] Thomas, Why Bob Dylan Matters, 312-313; 314.

[7] John Milton, The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose, edited by William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen M. Fallon (New York: Modern Library, 2007), 34.

[8] Ted Gioia, Is Old Music Killing New Music? The Atlantic, January 23, 2022; date accessed: June 17, 2022. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/old-music-killing-new-music/621339/

[9] Johnson’s Lives, though indicative of a celebrated critic’s selection, is by no means definitive. He leaves out Ben Jonson too, while including the notorious John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. And, predictably, there are no women at all in Johnson’s Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779-81).

August 4, 2022/by Nicole Font

THE DYLANISTA – On the Proper Function of a Bob Dylan Critic

Dylan Review Vol. 3.1, Summer 2021, The Dylanista

Two years ago in this column I wondered what a Dylan scholar would look like in the coming years. Now I’m wondering something different: if a Dylan scholar is the same creature as a Dylan critic. And since critics multiply faster than scholars, what is the function of a Dylan critic—or, to use a phrase from D.H. Lawrence, what is the proper function of a Dylan critic?

In Studies in Classic American Literature, Lawrence advised—in what became one of his most quoted aphorisms—“Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.” Ripped from its context, this mot is, paradoxically, both enigmatic and prescriptive. In context, though, Lawrence’s terse directive describes a conundrum all too familiar in Dylan studies:

The artist usually sets out—or used to—to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tale, however, points the other way, as a rule. Two blankly opposing morals, the artist’s and the tale’s. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.^[1]

The phrase “To save the tale from the artist,” however, while brilliantly evocative, puts the cart before the horse. By implying it’s possible to dislodge the moral of the tale from the moral of the artist, Lawrence assumes there are two morals to begin with. But that assumption has no foundation, unless, as Charles Olson seems to have done, we give the “morals” different names. Olson claimed that Lawrence (along with Homer, Euripides, Plato, and Christ!) “somehow chose the advantage of moral perceptions to those of the intellect.”^[2] I take this to mean that the artist’s moral equates to Olson’s perceptions of the intellect, whereas, according to Lawrence, we should really focus on the tale’s moral—what Olson terms, simply, “moral perceptions.” For Lawrence, then, disentangling the moral perceptions (the tale’s) from the intellectual perceptions (the artist’s) of a work of fiction—or poetry, I presume—is tantamount to separating the two “blankly opposing morals” so that we can then trust the tale, not its producer.

But if this act of disentanglement is the proper function of the critic, then most Dylan critics stand on shaky ground. Unexamined conflation is prevalent. Moral perceptions and perceptions of the intellect tend to occupy the same space in expositions, explications, and analyses. Dylan criticism is rife with efforts linking Bob Dylan the artist to the meaning of a song, a lyric, a performance. To some, this hermeneutic phenomenon is inevitable—or irresistible—because of the ubiquitous first-person narrator who is identified (or confused) with the singer. Thus, “I met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow” means Dylan met a young girl who gave him a rainbow; and, while much heavy weather might be made of the rainbow symbol, few (if any) critics question the “I.” Similarly, the voice that sings “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there” or “I paint landscapes—I paint nudes . . . I contain multitudes” is, first, taken to be the same persona (thirty years apart) and, second, to be Dylan himself—composer and hero of his own lyric, despite the fact that he’s obviously quoting Walt Whitman. Dylan critics rarely try to “save the tale from the artist who created it,” or divide the moral import from the intellectual perception. On the contrary, the artist is consummately part of the tale. Lawrence would squirm in his grave (while Olson might compensate by scanning Dylan’s breathing as projective verse).

Of course, we aren’t bound to Lawrence as our guru (as much as he might relish the role). Many self-respecting critics at some time in their careers contribute a definitive treatise or ars poetica on “the function of criticism”—a popular Anglophone title. Matthew Arnold kicked it off with The Function of Criticism at the Present Time, in which he uttered the famous (or infamous) call for criticism “simply to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas.”^[3] Dylan critics have followed this guideline admirably, attending to “the best that is thought and known,” not only in Dylan’s work or in his ambient milieu but also for our cultural moment in general, thus creating a “current” of new ideas. The recent Bob Dylan conferences and the outpouring of books and articles testify to the vitality of this current of new ideas—Dylan critics are not just sitting by and watching the river flow; they—or we—are creating that new current, stirring the waters.

According to Arnold, however, criticism must obey one fundamental rule: disinterestedness—by which he means “keeping aloof from what is called ‘the practical view of things’” and, pertinently, “steadily refusing to lend itself to any of those ulterior, political, practical considerations about ideas . . . which criticism really has nothing to do with.” And it is here, in connection with this rule, that it becomes challenging to define the proper function of the Dylan critic. If disinterestedness means aloofness from ulterior, political, and practical considerations, then engagement with Dylan’s work makes the proper function of the critic a minefield of interestedness. The Dylan of the early 60s seemed very clearly, in Lawrence’s words, to “[set] out . . . to point a moral and adorn a tale.” The clarity blurred a bit as the decade went on. But what better way to define the anthemic songs and such social plaints as “North Country Blues” and “The Ballad of Hollis Brown”? The phrase “point a moral and adorn a tale” is, evidently, Lawrence’s revision of the more familiar translation of Horace’s famous phrase, “to instruct and delight” (prodesse…aut delectare).^[4] Most singer-songwriters of Dylan’s generation set out to instruct and to delight: some of the instruction was, to say the least, heavy-handed, but the music, for all its experimentation with supposedly primitive forms, set out to delight audiences, young and old alike.

***

In 1994 Dylan sang “John Brown” on MTV Unplugged. Little known at the time, the song is a bitter indictment not only of war itself, but more so of the proud mother who pushes her son to be a soldier: “Do what the captain says,” she urges, “and medals you will get.” Dylan is unsparing as he sets her up for a fall: “she bragged about her son with his uniform and gun / And this thing she called a good old-fashioned war.” But her bragging ends in shock and disgust. As if flinging the mother’s jingoism back in her (turned-away) face, Dylan ends the song with a graphic description of her horribly maimed soldier-son.

Oh his face was all shot up and his hands were all blown off

And he wore a metal brace around his waist

He whispered kind of slow, in a voice she didn’t know

And she couldn’t even recognize his face.

Finally, the son caps this nightmarish homecoming with a cruelly ironic gesture:

As he turned away to walk, his Ma was still in shock

At seein’ the metal brace that helped him stand

But as he turned to go, he called his mother close

And he dropped his medals down into her hand^[5]

What is the proper function of a Dylan critic in analyzing this song—and not just the song but also the context of the MTV Unplugged performance? For example, the Persian Gulf War occurred in 1991 and the US intervention in the Bosnian conflict in 1994-1995. Should this recent militarization be part of the critic’s analysis? After all, Dylan was deliberately reviving a very old 60s song written in an era of protest. The comparison to “Masters of War” is inevitable.

The 1962 live recording of the song, released on Live at the Gaslight, features Dylan alone on his acoustic guitar. His voice is more insistent, even more unforgiving than in the Unplugged version. This performance brings back the undistilled Dylan experience that mesmerized listeners and critics alike. And, pace Lawrence, I challenge critics to disentangle the artist from the performer, or the composer from the song, when the young Bob Dylan sings “John Brown.” I don’t hear “two blankly opposing morals.” What I hear instead is Yeats’s perennially pertinent question, “How can we know the dancer from the dance?”^[6]

Is it possible to write disinterested criticism of this performance? Does disinterested mean separating the singer from the songwriter? Does it mean separating the songwriter from the performer somehow, when, as with all singer-songwriters, the two roles are indivisible?

Which returns us to the act of disentanglement, of saving the tale (moral perspective) from the artist (intellectual perspective). Are there always “two blankly opposing morals” in Dylan’s songs, “the artist’s and the tale’s”? Is the moral perspective always distinguishable from that of the intellect? In what way does the moral of “When the Ship Comes In” point in a totally different direction from the composer’s intellectual perspective? How does the composer’s performance affect the artist-tale division? This kind of separation might be perceptible in, say, “Neighborhood Bully,” where the song seems to outstrip the topicality of the lyrics. But what about “All Along the Watchtower” or “Mississippi”?

Gérard Genette used the term metalepsis of the author to characterize the incapacity of critics to separate the artist from the hero in fiction. Invoking the nineteenth-century rhetorician Pierre Fontanier, Genette explains:

This variety of metalepsis consists—I remember it in Fontanier’s terms—in “transforming poets into heroes of the deeds that they celebrate or representing them as themselves carrying out the effects that they only paint or sing”; when an author “is represented or represents himself as himself producing that which he basically only tells or describes.”^[7]

Metalepsis is a bugbear of mine. It seems to me that, even more than Lawrence’s artist and tale, Genette’s (or Fontanier’s) objection to critics’ “transforming poets into heroes of the deeds they celebrate” has crucial importance to the proper function of Dylan criticism. It might be easy to separate the poet from the anti-hero in “Joey,” but do critics exercise the same disinterestedness with “You’re a Big Girl Now” or “Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight,” not to mention “Idiot Wind”? Doubtful: metalepsis is too often the rule in Dylan studies.

***

“How can we know the dancer from the dance?” Oscar Wilde would probably say we shouldn’t bother trying to answer Yeats’s question. In “The Critic as Artist,” Wilde rejected the whole idea of criticism, or at least rejected criticism as separate from the creative act. “Why,” he asked, “should the artist be troubled by the shrill clamor of criticism?” He imagined the unveiling of a statue in a critic-free Golden Age:

In the best days of art there were no art-critics. The sculptor hewed from the marble block the great white-limbed Hermes that slept within it. The waxers and gilders of images gave tone and texture to the statue, and the world, when it saw it, worshipped and was dumb.^[8]

But the Golden Age never existed, not in ancient Greece or in the streets of Rome or even on MacDougal Street.

One thing is for sure. There’s no room for worshipping and being struck dumb among Dylan critics. That time has passed and the new Dylan scholarship has justifiably hastened its exit. But the proper function of the Dylan critic needs to catch up with that development. Disentanglement might be futile. Separating the morals of the performing artist (intellectual perspective) from the morals of the tale (moral perspective) might not be worth the hermeneutic candle. But there is, I think, another choice. In my view, the proper function of the Dylan critic ought to be to trust the teller of the tale. And the teller is not the artist, or even the performing artist—only metalepsis allows a critic to think that. As Dylan once remarked about the nine questions in “Blowin’ in the Wind”: “The first way to answer these questions in the song is by asking them. But lots of people have to first find the wind.”^[9] The same might be said about Dylan criticism. And that wind we need to find is not the “divine afflatus” of poetic tradition, but the presence, unpredictable, mercurial, yet always palpable, that animates Dylan’s songs—in other words, the teller of the tale.

-RF

^[1] D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) (New York: Viking 1969), 2.

^[2] Charles Olson, “D.H. Lawrence and the High Temptation of the Mind,” in Collected Prose, ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 135.

^[3] Arnold’s essay first appeared in the National Review in 1864 but was reprinted several times between 1865 and 1923, when, inevitably, T.S. Eliot published “The Function of Criticism” in Criticism (vol. 2.5). Literary critics later took up the standard and produced treatises or essays of the same name, though often with wildly different aims: e.g., inter alia, Terry Eagleton’s The Function of Criticism (1984), whose first sentence is “Modern European criticism was born of a struggle against the absolutist state.”

^[4] Horace, Ars Poetica (or Epistle Ad Pisos), ll.333-34: “Aut prodesse volunt aut delectare poetae / aut simul et iucunda et idonea dicere vitae. [Poets aim either to benefit, or to amuse, or to utter words at once both pleasing and helpful to life.] See Horace, Satires, Epistles, and Ars Poetica, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Loeb Classical Library, 1978), 478-79.

^[5] Dylan sings slightly different lyrics in all the available versions of the song: Broadside Ballads vol. 1 (1963, singing under the pseudonym Blind Boy Grunt); Unplugged (1994); Live at the Gaslight 1962 (2005); The Bootleg Series Vol. 9, The Witmark Demos 1962-1964 (2010); Live 1962-1966: Rare Performances from the Copyright Collection (2018).

^[6] W.B. Yeats, “Among School Children,” The Collected Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner Paperback Poetry, 1983), 217.

^[7] Gérard Genette, Métalepse (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2004), 10: “Cette variété de métalepse consiste, je le rappelle dan les termes de Fontanier, ‘à transformer les poètes en héros de faits qu’ils célèbrent [ou à] les représenter comme operant eux-mêmes les effets qu’ils peignent ou chantent’, lorsque’un auteur ‘est représenté ou se représente comme produisant lui-même ce qu’il ne fait, au fond, que raconteur ou décrire.’” Translation is mine.

^[8] “The Critic as Artist” is a dialogue-essay included in Intentions (1891).

^[9] Liner notes, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

January 15, 2022/by Nicole Font

THE DYLANISTA – Poets or Pedants: How Will Bob Dylan Be Preserved?

Dylan Review Vol. 2.2, Winter 2020, The Dylanista

The film actress Kay Francis, reputedly the highest paid female star at Warner Bros. in the 1930s, once told an interviewer, “I can’t wait to be forgotten.” She has all but gotten her wish, since few can imagine Kay Francis was more of a box office draw than Bette Davis until 1938 (the year of Jezebel).

Unlike Kay Francis, celebrities usually want the opposite: to be remembered well past their sell-by date. There’s even a film about it, Sunset Boulevard, as complex a mixing of art and life as the medium ever offered (Gloria Swanson, a genuinely forgotten silent-screen idol plays a silent-screen idol whose servant is her old director, Max Von Stroheim, who was in fact a celebrated German silent-film director.) Not quite Don Quixote, but more than enough layering for a two-hour on-screen performance where you can’t turn back the pages.

John Milton called fame the “last infirmity of mortal man.” He was referring to poets seeking a permanent place in the literary firmament. This same infirmity still afflicts poets and writers hoping their work will last. Even when they are not literary celebrities, they would rather not be forgotten. There are exceptions, of course: the seventeenth-century English poet John Donne refused to publish even his less saucy verse. Now considered one of the finest lyrical poets in any language, Donne and his work sank from sight for more than two centuries. No one cited him in the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson did not include him in the Lives of the Poets, despite including such seventeenth-century giants as Wentworth Dillon (Earl of Roscommon), Thomas Otway, and George Stepney. Johnson also excluded all women poets, so Donne was in good company in terms of neglect. But the neglect meant that the Romantics didn’t read him, and Donne had no influence whatever on nineteenth-century authors like Tennyson, Whitman, or Dickinson.

Not until Herbert Grierson, a scholar, published his Oxford edition of John Donne did the poet’s fortunes begin to change. Grierson’s edition was reviewed by no less a celebrity than T.S. Eliot, and Donne’s brilliance shined from under the bushel.

But this is a rare, quirky emergence in the realm of literary culture. As the late Harold Bloom often pointed out, poets make the canon, not editors, professors, readers, or even Amazon. Earlier poems chosen by later poets — “belated,” in Bloom’s vocabulary — serve as models to be imitated, stolen from, reworked, or parodied. This is a cumulative process of formation, since those later poets in turn become the objects of imitation. All these imitated works come inescapably to make up the canon because, to read and study later poets, we must study the works that influenced them.

There are other ways to conceive of canon formation, including discovery-and-recovery missions like Grierson’s, but charting the influence of earlier poets is unavoidable. Walter Jackson Bate called this “the burden of the past.”

Will Bob Dylan’s influence survive as a “burden” on future generations? Will he, in the future, become an unavoidable figure of the American poetic and musical past? Is he already a canonical figure, or is there work to be done, Grierson-style? The Nobel Prize is no guarantee of a place in the literary firmament, as Pearl Buck, Sinclair Lewis, and (probably) John Steinbeck would testify.

Popular music presents an even trickier problem than literary works. Songs from earlier eras only outlast their first popularizers in nostalgic covers, or, rarely, as with the “standards,” in a new improvisatory art form like jazz.

So where does this leave Dylan’s songs? It’s difficult to imagine what demographic will be strumming “Blowin’ in the Wind” or “Mr. Tambourine Man” in twenty, thirty, fifty years (is there a generation of acoustic guitarists playing those songs even now?). Will there be rock ‘n’ roll bands reviving “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Tangled Up In Blue,” or “Not Dark Yet”? Given the direction of popular music, this kind of revival seems unlikely.

And what about the Dylan imitators? They used to be legion. Dylan’s phrasing and style, diction, even his inimitable voice demonstrably influenced a generation of guitar players and songwriters. The term Dylanesque became descriptive currency, referring not only to singing and songwriting, but also to something beyond music, an elusive, utterly distinct posture. But would a Dylanesque effort be recognizable today? What would it take for that characteristic to survive? More significantly, can anyone other than Dylan be Dylanesque successfully, or does the term a fortiori indicate a failure to create a personal musical style and distinctive posture? This latter alternative further confirms the threat of obscurity in Dylan’s future.

Ergo, maybe this 80th birthday year—hailed as a milestone by some, dismissed as a non-event by others—should get us wondering. Not wondering if Dylan will endure, but how we can make it happen. Because no one has ever survived without some help, whether from imitators or editors.

Here’s a curious fact. Despite all the voluminous attention Dylan has received, all the interpretation, poring-over, contextualization, and microscopic critical appraisal—and Christopher Ricks’s monumental The Lyrics: Since 1962, which includes variants of the songs. Despite all that, there hasn’t yet been an annotated edition of Dylan’s lyrics. That is, an edition with commentary and interpretation, along the lines of the Yale Milton or the Oxford Ben Jonson or even, more modestly, the myriad Shakespeare textbook editions.

Maybe this gap in Dylan studies is a result of copyright restrictions. Still, I can’t help but wonder if we’re toying with canonical survival. It’s all well and good to sneer about infinity going up on trial, or to impute permanence to works we deem unsurpassable. But are we tempting fate to think song lyrics live in the music and die in explications on the page?

There have been translations of the lyrics, most notably into Italian and French. And there are footnotes galore in sixty years of articles and books. But no sifting and collocation has emerged in the form of a single edition designed, at least in part, for future listeners (and readers). This is a desideratum. For example, an annotated edition might include this kind of information:

Item:

POSITIVELY 4th STREET*

* 4th Street an east-west running street in New York City’s Greenwich Village, a quarter known for its bohemian inhabitants and, during the 1960s, home to cafes and folk clubs. Dylan owned a house on 4th Street.

Item:

Inside the museum,* infinity goes up on trial

* museum private or public building that cares for or conserves artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific importance; curates exhibitions for viewing audiences who walk through the galleries at their own pace.

Don’t laugh: before about 1800, the word museum referred to Greco-Roman temples. Scores of other Dylan lines come to mind, many of which, even today, might benefit from annotation.

Item:

And if you hear vague traces of skippin’ reels* of rhyme
To your tambourine in time, it’s just a ragged clown behind

* skippin’ reels a) a reel-to-reel tape recorder, the state-of-the-art technology in the 1960s, both in studios and for home recordings; b) a traditional dance, e.g., the Highland Reel.

It’s all well and good to eschew becoming self-ordained professors’ tongues. And it’s certainly a blast to debate interpretations on Einstein “sniffing drainpipes and reciting the alphabet,” or the importance of the “13th-century poet,” or why the trial’s “in a Sicilian court.” Not that these debates should stop — on the contrary, poetry and criticism grow together like the rose and the briar. But hermeneutics alone won’t preserve Dylan. Soon enough, it will be necessary to define Bette Davis, now probably almost as obscure as Kay Francis. And other basic definitions will be called for: what are electric violins, for instance, where’s Montagu Street, what exactly is “a topless place,” who were “Ginsberg, Corso and Kerouac” (not to mention “Louie and Jimmy and Buddy”), and what about “the land of Oz”? This is not pedantry. It’s preservation. Dylan’s 80th birthday might not be a genuine climacteric. But perhaps we should use it as a bourne at the roadside, a marker to urge selfless planning for future listeners to the music, future readers of the lyrics, future scholars — future Dylanistas.

– RF

July 25, 2021/by Nicole Font

THE DYLANISTA – Bob Dylan Songs More or Less Forgotten