“Early Dylan and the Aesthetics of Invective”

 

Truly sharp-tongued verse is rare among songwriters, prevalent as it has always been in poetry. Few twentieth-century song lyrics contain harsh criticism or ad hominem hostility. Dylan, in contrast, seemed to develop an aesthetics of invective from early in his songwriting career.¹ As I’ve suggested for other topics, try a Sortes Dylanae: open a volume of, say, Dylan’s Lyrics 1962-1985 to a random page, toss a penny or a heavy flat-pick and you’re likely to land on insult-fueled or accusatory verse on almost every page.

Invective has a long literary history reaching back to Cicero and Sallust, Juvenal, Petrarch (who wrote four Invective [Latin plural]), Ben Jonson, George Chapman, and countless others. Dylan’s scathing lyrics are so unusual among his peers (let alone among Tin Pan Alley lyricists or the Aldon music teams at 1650 Broadway) that it’s tempting to see a line of literary descent. But Dylan doesn’t make an attempt to hitch his wagon to the literary tradition. His use of invective is distinctive, less a literary exercise and more an affect, a composite of insult, accusation, curses, sneering, and just plain nastiness: e.g., “the jelly-faced women all sneeze / Hear the one with the mustache say, “Jeeze / I can’t find my knees”(“Visions of Johanna”). This mocking old fat women sounds pointlessly rude to me (but either I’m too sensitive, or else I’m getting soft).

Dylan doesn’t seem to be playing a literary game. And we can be certain that in some cases he really feels the emotions underlying his lyrics’ mordant anger, even if we can’t positively identify Dylan as the song’s speaker: “Can’t recall a useful thing you ever did for me / ’Cept pat me on the back one time when I was on my knees” (“Dirge’); or, more renowned:

 

Well, if you, my love, must think that-a-way

I’m sure your mind is roamin’

I’m sure your heart is not with me

But with the country to where you’re goin’

So take heed, take heed of the western wind

Take heed of the stormy weather

And yes, there’s something you can send back to me

Spanish boots of Spanish leather

 

Undoubtedly, like traditional invective-writers, Dylan also uses songwriting as an assault reflecting the desire to play a certain role. Dylan’s words had a real-life effect, as the protest songs showed in the 60s. But did he—does he—sling sharp-tongued language to escape being “stuck inside a painting / That’s hanging in the Louvre” and to make a difference beyond the aesthetic of the song, as words do when they hurt actual people? Maybe that’s the imperative that always drives invective-writers. Maybe making a difference upon social relationships is the humane side of the snarl of satire and sneer of invective.

Twentieth-century songwriters don’t set up targets for their venom, nor do they attack each other the way poets have done through the centuries. German poetic tradition even has a name for it: das “Schmähgedicht.” Although American poetry doesn’t have a name for it, in early modern England, this kind of venomous writing was known as railing or reviling. And it reached the level of an Olympic sport. Maria Prendergast speaks of an “aesthetics of railing”: she demonstrates the wide-ranging variations and intensity of invective in the literary world, including pamphlet wars, libelous aggression, and ubiquitous ad hominem poetic debates.² Trading satiric contempt and personal insults peppered the drama and poetry of the period. In 1623, for example, in a “railing” response to Ben Jonson’s play, “An Execration upon Vulcan,” George Chapman composed an “expostulation” in verse.” He pulls no punches in telling Jonson how he feels about him as a playwright:

 

Thou must be Muzzelde Ringd and lett In Chaines

Lest dames with childe a bide untymely paynes

and Children perrish:

 

In other words, if Jonson isn’t muzzled and chained up, women who hear his plays will give birth prematurely and children will be born dead. With “splene stupide,” says Chapman, Jonson transforms the most “wrathfull fumes to Jests.” As a result—and treasonously—the foulest common language is served up as humor to the “Royall eare,” thus contaminating the king.

This kind of harsh language had a cousin in the political broadsides of the same period, including the famous marching song “Lilli bolero,” a satirical anti-Irish, anti-Catholic lyric (with a melody by Henry Purcell) said to have spurred the Glorious Revolution. “Lilli bolero” was sung in the streets of London in 1688 and, at the same time, many other broadsides appeared in print from fly-by-night presses. If we were looking for historical antecedents to Dylan’s early songs, this might be a place to begin.

Many of the traditional folk songs and union songs Dylan heard in his Dinkytown and Village days crackled with acrimony and what Stephen Cracolici, describing Petrarch, calls “actual anger.” ³ But even before he began playing in coffeehouses, and years before he began writing, the generation of artists before his had already made a fine art of anger, insult, and invective. The cult of the angry young man produced in movies a mumbling lingo all its own, not a Kunstsprache so much as an attitude, an instant cliché. The brooding young men of Dylan’s adolescence, like Marlon Brando and James Dean, shuffled around rejecting everything: they were anti-authority, anti-convention, positively anti-intellectual. Films propagated this clichéd male figure, if they didn’t in fact create him. In contrast, on the stage, where mere shuffling and brooding don’t quite make it across the footlights, the angry young man species managed a particular brand of linguistic athleticism, especially in the mouths of such protagonists as John Osborne’s and Harold Pinter’s devil-tongued working-class men. For instance, Richard Burton’s immaculate enunciation in Osborne’s Look Back in Anger is a far cry from the blurred speeches of Brando in The Wild One or Dean in any of his three famous films. (Brando’s speech in A Streetcar Named Desire [1951] is crystal clear, but he first played that role on the stage.)

As much as Dylan might have absorbed the Hollywood image of the angry young man, it seems plausible that the stage necessity of intelligible dialogue provided him with an alternative to the inarticulate, and inarticulable, anger of the movie idols. I suggest this because Dylan’s personae in his early songs glory in articulateness. His speakers wield the American idiom with impeccable precision, sometimes a cutlass, sometimes a rapier, but always with a razor-sharp cutting edge. And Dylan goes the playwrights one better: his invective is set to music and—to quote John Donne—“fit for verse.”

 

Prominent among the earlier songs, perhaps, is “Like a Rolling Stone,” Dylan’s towering achievement of acrimony. Note the hammering of you, often twice in a line:

Once upon a time you dressed so fine

Threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?

People call say “beware doll, you’re bound to fall”

You thought they were all kidding you

You used to laugh about

Everybody that was hanging out

Now you don’t talk so loud

Now you don’t seem so proud

About having to be scrounging your next meal

 

How does it feel, how does it feel?

To be without a home

Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone

 

Ahh you’ve gone to the finest schools, alright Miss Lonely

But you know you only used to get juiced in it

Nobody’s ever taught you how to live out on the street

And now you’re gonna have to get used to it

You say you never compromise

With the mystery tramp, but now you realize

He’s not selling any alibis

As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes

And say do you want to make a deal?

 

The speaker’s contempt for the hapless you sets a benchmark for 60s invective. Dripping with blame, the lyrics are unforgiving, vengeful, condescending, and unrelentingly insulting. There’s also something unmistakably Dylanesque here: gloating, a byproduct of his unmitigated assault on Miss Lonely’s past hypocrisy. He rams home her dilemma unsparingly: “Nobody’s ever taught you how to live out on the street / And now you’re gonna have to get used to it” And then comes the bullying chorus: “How does it feel, how does it feel?” But, like “jesting Pilate,” in Francis Bacon’s famous essay “On Truth,” Dylan’s indignant speaker “would not stay for an answer.”

Dylan had a knack for gloating invective earlier than “Like a Rolling Stone.” His speaker in “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” comes across as slightly less confrontational:

 

You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last

But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast

Yonder stands your orphan with his gun

Crying like a fire in the sun…

 

Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you

Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you

The vagabond who’s rapping at your door

Is standing in the clothes that you once wore

 

The repetition of you builds to a kind of warning, combined with mild gloating about “it” being all over. Is “Baby Blue” an example of invective? It is in the sense that it contains an ad hominem critique of Baby Blue, though the insults are cryptic and metaphorical rather than, e.g.,“Thou must be Muzzelde Ringd and lett In Chaines.,” which is unambiguous. Dylan bases the lyric structure on urgency and imperatives—“You must leave” . . . “you better grab it” . . . “Leave your stepping stones” . . . Forget the dead.” The denotation of the words indicates a need for haste while, at the same time, there is a connotation of superiority in the tone, the speaker incredulous that Baby Blue hasn’t seen the signs.

Less buried than the “railing” in “Baby Blue,” and at least as confrontational as “Rolling Stone,” is “Positively 4^th Street.” This song is Dylan’s clinic in the use of invective. The entire lyric is a sneering critique directed at one nameless (and luckless) person, Dylan’s characteristic you-as-target. The second-person pronoun provides the frame for the crescendo of accusatory observations from stanza to stanza. From the uncompromising opening:

 

You got a lotta nerve

To say you are my friend

When I was down

You just stood there grinning

 

You got a lotta nerve

To say you got a helping hand to lend

You just want to be on

The side that’s winning . . .

 

Through unwavering accusation in the middle stanzas:

You say you lost your faith

But that’s not where it’s at

You had no faith to lose

And you know it . . .

 

To the coup de grace of the final invective:

I wish that for just one time

You could stand inside my shoes

And just for that one moment

I could be you

 

Yes, I wish that for just one time

You could stand inside my shoes

You’d know what a drag it is

To see you

 

The speaker’s fantasy of bodily exchange—but not personality exchange—animates both viewpoints, with the aim of highlighting the capstone insult of “You’d know what a drag it is / To see you.”

Putting aside the nagging riddle of biographical “facts,” songs lashing out with acrimony and anger are everywhere.⁴ Some we interpret as transparently personal, as with “Ballad in Plain D”: “For her parasite sister, I had no respect / Bound by her boredom, her pride to protect.” Even without reconstructing the Rotolo family dynamic, “parasite sister” gets its “actual anger” across.

Also personal, evidencing Dylan’s inimitable accusatory you, is “Idiot Wind.” The song contains an invective woven into an extended metaphor that would be fully at home in a Renaissance work of railing and reviling:

 

I woke up on the roadside, daydreamin’ ‘bout the way things sometimes are

Visions of your chestnut mare shoot through my head and are makin’ me see stars

You hurt the ones that I love best and cover up the truth with lies

One day you’ll be in the ditch, flies buzzin’ around your eyes

Blood on your saddle

 

Idiot wind, blowing through the flowers on your tomb

Blowing through the curtains in your room

Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth

You’re an idiot, babe

It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe

 

The lines leading from “Visions of your chestnut mare” to “flies buzzin’ around your eyes / Blood on your saddle” trace the metaphor from horsewoman to cowpoke. The metaphor is fueled by the shocking anger of the ominous “One day you’ll be in the ditch.” The images conflate the hobbyist horsewoman with a stereotypical villain from a western movie. Is the blood on the saddle the result of being shot off the horse, the logical end to a shootout? Or is it something else, something more sinister? “Blood on your saddle” disturbingly suggests menstrual blood and womanhood-motherhood. And, in that connection, “You hurt the ones that I love best” recalls Dylan’s earlier curse linking children and blood in “Masters of War”:

 

You’ve thrown the worst fear

That can ever be hurled

Fear to bring children

Into the world

For threatening my baby

Unborn and unnamed

You ain’t worth the blood

That runs in your veins.

 

It’s impossible to know if Dylan meant to compound the two songs written over a decade apart. But notwithstanding, as invectives go, there’s nothing I know as ruthlessly severe as “Idiot Wind” in American poetry, let alone American song lyrics.⁵

“Idiot Wind” is unique for its personal, almost embarrassingly private, antipathy. But less personal (very unlucky) uses of you abound in Dylan’s canon. (And here again a Sortes would produce a long list.) The woman in the “Gypsy café” might come to mind, from “Love is Just a Four-Letter Word”:

 

She sat with a baby heavy on her knee

Yet spoke of life most free from slavery

With eyes that showed no trace of misery

A phrase in connection first with she I heard

That love is just a four letter word

 

Once again, Dylan invokes a child, in this case an infant, and once again he makes a troubling association: motherhood, misery, and slavery. The invective is embodied in the scene itself, the speaker’s recognition of the young mother’s deluded ideal of love. For him, it would seem, it is ironic that she should speak of freedom from slavery when she’s now enslaved by her “baby heavy on her knee.” I doubt the word “heavy” refers to the baby’s weight in ounces and pounds.

“Love is Just a Four Letter Word” is invective masked as existential self-recognition. Even the opaque criticisms redound in the unforgiving eye of the speaker (“I don’t cheat on myself, I don’t run and hide” as a much later song says). In this song the search for the honest self is just beginning, but at the price of tearing down the deluded people around the speaker:

 

Though I never knew just what you meant

When you were speaking to your man

I can only think in terms of me

And now I understand

After waking enough times to think I see

The Holy Kiss that’s supposed to last eternity

Blow up in smoke, its destiny

Falls on strangers, travels free

Yes, I know now, traps are only set by me

And I do not really need to be

Assured that love is just a four letter word

 

Love is a false trail, the Holy Kiss blows up in smoke, traps are only set by “me,” and therefore he knows that love is not love (“which alters when it alteration finds”). The idealistic speaker here disdains the victimized new mother and, apparently, plans to continue looking for “the marriage of true minds.”⁶

“Love is Just a Four Letter Word” contains a kind of roman à clef invective referring to the new mother and “the one who was the father of your kid.” Compare “Tangled Up in Blue,” which also seems to allude to someone in particular:

 

I lived with them on Montague Street

In a basement down the stairs

There was music in the cafés at night

And revolution in the air

Then he started into dealing with slaves

And something inside of him died

 

The “them” is a mystery given the song’s alternating speakers and tenses. Yet the implication couldn’t be clearer, or more profoundly critical. Whatever “dealing with slaves” refers to precisely, the insinuation is ugly, much more so in this song than in “Love is Just a Four Letter Word.” And to claim “something inside of [someone] died” curses the target of this denunciation, not with the “actual anger” of the speaker in “Seven Curses” but with a survivor’s backward glance. You can almost hear the narrator in “Tangled Up in Blue,” as he escapes from Brooklyn, singing Townes Van Zandt’s lines: “There’s . . . no prettier sight than lookin’ back on a town you’ve left behind” (“I’ll Be Here in the Morning”).

Critics and scholars—not to mention the Nobel Prize Committee—have duly acknowledged Dylan as a pioneer in the lyrical transformation of traditional American music. But few have focused specifically on Dylan’s approach to the violence of the blues and traditional folk songs. He refashions those traditions by creating a new persona who instrumentalizes invective to channel the violence, vigilantism, and weird sequences of the folk and country traditions. He repeatedly demonstrates a displaced violence in accusatory and contemptuous lyrics, coining a language unlike any among contemporary poets. His lyrical innovations translate the horrors and bizarre violence of traditional American music into searing invective. This is an aesthetic peculiar to Dylan.

Before Dylan, cleverness, irony, and humor tended to mask the angriest protests, as in the Depression-era “Rock Candy Mountain.” Even Woody Guthrie rarely writes invective-laced lyrics, though his most pointed songs have clear targets. For example, his justification for the predations of the thief and murderer Pretty Boy Floyd concludes with only a ruminative contrast of legal profiteers and crooks:

Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered

I’ve seen lots of funny men;

Some will rob you with a six-gun,

And some with a fountain pen.

And as through your life you travel,

Yes, as through your life you roam,

You won’t never see an outlaw

Drive a family from their home.

 

Woody’s critique accuses bankers of evicting families when they can’t pay their mortgage, a common Dust Bowl complaint (viz. The Grapes of Wrath). But the critique seems unconvincing against Floyd’s thuggery. And in the end, it is mild by literary standards of invective.

Mild by Dylan’s standards too. “Masters of War” is an early example of his skill in weaving invective into social critique. The song ups the ante from stanza to stanza:

 

Like Judas of old

You lie and deceive

A world war can be won

You want me to believe

But I see through your eyes

And I see through your brain

Like I see through the water

That runs down my drain

 

As with many of Dylan’s best (or worst) invectives, the you here again recurs like a finger poking harder as the verses reach a crescendo. From “I can see through your brain,” “Masters of War” continues with the chilling assessment that “Even Jesus would never forgive / What you do”—a crime (or sin) so unimaginable that it transcends even the foundation of Christianity: mercy. The song concludes with lines that strive by means of invective to enforce political conscience, hammering home the second person pronouns:

 

And I hope that you die

And your death’ll come soon

I will follow your casket

In the pale afternoon

And I’ll watch while you’re lowered

Down to your deathbed

And I’ll stand o’er your grave

’Til I’m sure that you’re dead

 

As generations of listeners have attested, the “actual anger” in these verses is palpable. Donald Beecher points out “how closely invective is related to honour combat and physical assault even to the death.”⁷ “Masters of War” is the equivalent of the angry speaker’s “honour combat [with arms manufacturers] and physical assault even to the death” and beyond, straight into the grave. There’s a shadow of Allen Ginsberg’s Moloch from Howl in the image of the arms manufacturers, though Dylan’s target is more demotic than supernatural. On The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Dylan’s driving, yet nuanced, acoustic performance enforces the accusatory invective of the lyrics. Eddie Vedder delivered a fine if less ruthless version at the Dylan tribute in 1992, and other rockers like Joan Osborne and Lucinda Williams have also covered the song. Dylan himself performed the song at the Grammy Awards in 1991, when the country was in the throes of the first Iraq war.

Although Freewheelin’ was released in 1963, in a distant political galaxy, the combativeness and anger unleashed in “Masters of War” seem to reinvent themselves with every new generation, for every new and unpopular military crisis. This is rare: invective per se tends to be topical, tied to its moment and interlocutors. The portability of “Masters of War” seems to reveal not only cross-cultural antiestablishment anger, but also a ready-made expression of it.

“Seven Curses” also contains a list of angry condemnations leading to the grave, though the song has not had the ongoing topical force of “Masters of War.” The third-person speaker reels off a string of embittered curses “to the death”: “These be seven curses on a judge so cruel . . . That six diggers will not bury him / And that seven deaths shall never kill him.” The penultimate line probably alludes to “See That My Grave is Kept Clean” which includes the verse “See that my diggers are well paid”: Dylan’s curse in “Seven Curses” implies that the judge’s diggers will not be well paid and his grave will not be kept clean. The finality of the curses, like the end of “Masters of War,” leads beyond death, irreversibly beyond redemption.

But these endings “to the death” are rare for songs, even Dylan songs. Most of Dylan’s invective sublimates combat in scalding criticism. But not every song can conceal the anger. Think for example of “When the Ship Comes In”:

 

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 Pharoah’s tribe

They’ll be drownded in the tide

And like Goliath, they’ll be conquered

 

The song’s much-analyzed Biblical idiom invokes not only revolutionary triumph and portentous threat (“your days are numbered”) but also mass murder and honor combat. The latter is particularly significant because there’s a vein of honor combat—chivalry—that runs through all Dylan’s invective, sometimes as social outrage, sometimes as career rivalry, sometimes as (self-righteous) personal outrage. The story of the hotel desk clerk comes to mind here: Dylan supposedly wrote “When the Ship Comes In” in an indignant huff after being snubbed at check-in. Pettiness that plays so rough.

Dylan once said in an interview, “All my songs are protest songs.” But it might be more accurate to say that all his songs are honor-combat songs, even some of the love-and-loss songs and romantic ballads. Listen for the muted sounds of combat here:

 

I’m a-thinkin’ and a-wond’rin’ all the way down the road

I once loved a woman, a child I’m told

I give her my heart but she wanted my soul

But don’t think twice, it’s all right . . .

I ain’t sayin’ you treated me unkind

You could have done better but I don’t mind

You just kinda wasted my precious time

But don’t think twice, it’s all right

(“Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”)

 

As much as “Don’t Think Twice” sounds like an authentic old folk song, the lyric is completely modern, utterly incommensurate with blues (or bluegrass) breakups—in which, inter alia, Frankie guns down Johnny, or, as Robert Johnson says about his mistress, “If she gets unruly. . . Take my 32-20 now / and cut her half in two” (“32-20 Blues”). In complete contrast, Dylan’s speaker is mildly bitter but resigned, an attitude much more realistic to his Village milieu where none of the men (or women) carried handguns, and probably didn’t consider murder the appropriate response to infidelity. Yet they all performed songs in which these appalling acts were committed—and performed them well, assuming these alien personae during their moments on stage. Dylan revised all that. His critique in “Don’t Think Twice,” for example, is hardly stinging and certainly doesn’t threaten violence. It boils down to “I once loved a woman, a child I am told”—obviously insulting the woman’s maturity—and “You just kinda wasted my precious time.” As well as filling out the meter, that “kinda” is probably Dylan’s best known expression of shrugging indifference, which, in a love affair, comes across as degrading. But the musical setting of the song, and Dylan’s performance, align it with a folk (and blues) tradition in which there’s very little shrugging indifference in love affairs. Usually, in fact, somebody gets shot or drowned or ends up serving ninety-nine years in jail.

While medieval and especially early modern invective are often so hyperbolic that they’re too silly to be effective—e.g., Chapman’s assertion that listening to Jonson’s plays will cause premature births—the writers’ revulsion that generated them is never in doubt. Comparably, Dylan too sometimes clutters his contempt with absurd and even amusing imagery. But the underlying force of his invective never wavers. “Like a Rolling Stone” is a consummate example:

 

Ah you never turned around to see the frowns

On the jugglers and the clowns when they all did tricks for you

You never understood that it ain’t no good

You shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you

You used to ride on a chrome horse with your diplomat

Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat

Ain’t it hard when you discovered that

He really wasn’t where it’s at

After he took from you everything he could steal

 

Clearly meant to offend, the language convinces despite its obscurity: “chrome horse with your diplomat”?; with a “Siamese cat” on his shoulder? There’s nothing puzzling about the speaker’s scornful attitude here, even if the piled-up absurdity almost (but not quite) dulls the critique. That’s not always the case, however, in “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”:

 

With your childhood flames on your midnight rug

And your Spanish manners and your mother’s drugs

And your cowboy mouth and your curfew plugs

Who among them do you think could resist you?

 

Is this sentiment negative or positive? What are “childhood flames,” not to mention “curfew plugs”? The whole passage seems to be an invective—that is, if Spanish manners, mother’s drugs, and a cowboy mouth are criticisms of the sad-eyed lady. Still, the question in the last line seems to imply that, warts and all, she’s desirable.

The same kind of reversion is found in Shakespeare’s famous “sonnet of false compare”:

 

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

Sonnet 130

 

As in the stanza from “Sad-Eyed Lady,” insult topples over insult, but for a good cause. The speaker neutralizes twelve lines of negativity and enhances the “mistress”—also cementing their bond—with a final couplet: “And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare / As any she belied with false compare.” Shakespeare’s line is even more of a redemption than Dylan’s “Who among them do you think could resist you?”

In truth, Dylan rarely if ever fully redeems the target of his invective.

 

I couldn’t see what you could show me

Your scarf had kept your mouth well hid

I couldn’t see how you could know me

But you said you knew me and I believed you did

When you whispered in my ear

And asked me if I was leavin’ with you or her

I didn’t realize just what I did hear

I didn’t realize how young you were

 

But, sooner or later, one of us must know

You just did what you’re supposed to do

Sooner or later, one of us must know

That I really did try to get close to you

(“One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)”)

 

Again Dylan’s speaker dwells on immaturity as an insult, as in “Don’t Think Twice.” It might be that “sooner or later” they’d agree they each behaved as they had to. But there’s an underhand, acrimonious suggestion that the speaker “really did try to get close to you,” even if “you” were too immature or blind to see it.

*

The prevalence and the steely edge of Dylan’s invective become less audible after Blood on the Tracks. But his tendency to hurl invective never really disappears, even if it becomes more covert. My favorite example from Dylan’s middle period is “What Was It You Wanted?” Despite the absence of direct attacks, the song strikes me as an extended tour de force of invective-inspired interrogatives:

 

What was it you wanted?

Tell me again so I’ll know . . .

Could you say it again?

I’ll be back in a minute

You can get it together by then

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?

 

The speaker’s contempt for the you increases incrementally from stanza to stanza, with the final “Who are you anyway?” topping off the song’s not-quite-articulated insults. On Oh Mercy, Dylan all but chants the lyrics, as if refusing to vouchsafe a melody to this persistent suitor. The barebones musical setting brings the barrage of dismissive verses into sharper relief. Without being explicit, the speaker manages a kind of scathing impatience—How does it feel?

 

Raphael Falco

---

¹ The most prominent present-day practitioners of invective tradition are probably Rap lyricists: their coarse and profane insults (often against other rappers), their insistent topicality, their boasting self-aggrandizement, recall the postures of many invective-slingers of the Renaissance and early modern period. Perhaps Dylan provided a model for rap artists, though this is debatable. Ultimately, in any case, Dylan’s invective is very different from hip-hop or rap: Dylan tends to eschew topical reference and never uses profanity (except occasionally in unreleased recordings). Further, though opinions on this could certainly differ, I’d add that Dylan’s dexterity with meter, rhyme, and especially melody will continue to preserve his invective-laced songs from generation to generation.

² Maria Teresa Micaela Prendergast, Railing, Reviling, and Invective in English Literary Culture, 1588-1617: The Anti-Poetics of Theater and Print (Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2012), 9 and passim.

³ Stefano Cracolici, “The Art of Invective: Invective contra medicum,” in Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, edited by Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2009): 257.

⁴ On a related topic, see Paul Haney, “‘Blood on Your Saddle’: Bob Dylan’s Homicidal Voices,” Dylan Review vol 5.1 (Spring/Summer 2023): https://thedylanreview.org/2023/08/26/world-of-bob-dylan-blood-on-your-saddle-bob-dylans-homicidal-voices/

⁵ For example, Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” seems almost bathetic set against Dylan’s many accusatory lyrics. An example from an older song lyric of an accusatory second-person you is Frank Loesser’s “Luck Be a Lady Tonight.” But even with the sexual innuendo of “blow on some other guy’s dice,” there’s little evidence of “actual anger”:

They call you Lady Luck

But there is room for doubt

At times, you’ve had a very unlady-like way of running out

You’re on this date with me

The pickin’s have been lush

And yet before this evening is over

You might give me the brush . . .

You might forget your manners You might refuse to stay . . .

A lady doesn’t leave her escort It isn’t fair, it isn’t nice

A lady doesn’t wander all over the room

And blow on some other guy’s dice

⁶ See Shakespeare, Sonnet 116.

⁷ Donald Beecher, “The Limits of Invective: Ben Jonson’s Poetaster and the Temper of the Times,” in Savage Words: Invectives as a Literary Genre, 46-47.

The Dylanista

“Dylan’s craft or Sullen Art”

 

Kudos to Timothée Chalamet for creating a Bob Dylan role tremblingly balanced between total immersion and dramatic restraint. Chalamet’s portrayal is memorable as much for the unexpected gentleness of his young Bob as for the familiar saber-toothed ambition.

 

Let’s not forget, though, that Chalamet is working from a script, and not only the script written by Jay Cocks and Jerry Mangold, the director. In fact, the script is an old one. As Joan Baez puts in her song “Diamonds and Rust”:

 

you burst on the scene
Already a legend
The unwashed phenomenon
The original vagabond

 

She’s describing the Dylan of the early Village days, the same period as Chalamet’s portrayal. But in the film Dylan isn’t the “original vagabond.” On the contrary, in one of the film’s earliest scenes he goes to visit the real original vagabond, the Great Historical Bum himself, Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy). As Dylan stands awkwardly at the foot of Woody’s bed in the squalid Greystone hospital room, Pete Seeger (played by Edward Norton) asks him why he came. Chalamet mumbles, “Maybe to catch a spark.”

 

The “spark” is a conventional image of inspiration. In the hospital scene, the spark comes from Woody, but more often the Muses, or ancient deities, or Christian God supply the source of inspiration for poetry and song. Whatever their names, though, the implication is that poets compose their masterpieces through the intervention of outside forces.

 

This is a misprision of artistic production, diminishing the importance of human skill.  Unfortunately, Dylan has from time to time endorsed a comparable view of his own creativity. He never quite claims that any specific gods (or G-d, his spelling in the manuscripts) speak through him “as through trumpets,” to quote the Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino on the subject. Yet Dylan has openly surrendered agency when trying to account for his early songs. In a 2004 interview with Ed Bradley for 60 Minutes, he quotes “It’s All Right, Ma” (1964):

 

All those early songs were almost magically written. Ah… ‘Darkness at the break of noon, shadows even the silver spoon, a handmade blade, the child’s balloon…’ Well, try to sit down and write something like that. There’s a magic to that, and it’s not Siegfried and Roy kind of magic, you know? It’s a different kind of a penetrating magic. And, you know, I did it. I did it at one time.

 

It’s a curious statement: Dylan accounts for the song’s lyrics as having been “magically written.” But he seems to take credit for the magic, while conceding that kind of thing is now beyond his present powers: “I did it. I did it at one time.” Is he mixing up the medicine? Does he mean that in 1964 he had power over the “penetrating magic,” that he deployed it or tapped into it? Or does magical production of any kind preclude Dylan’s agency?

 

At other times, Dylan has been less ambiguous, crediting “ghosts” with the composition of the early songs. When, in 2004, Robert Hillburn asked about “Like A Rolling Stone,” Dylan replied: “It’s like a ghost is writing a song like that. It gives you the song and it goes away, it goes away. You don’t know what it means. Except the ghost picked me to write the song.”

 

But he also told Hillburn that, while working on “Like a Rolling Stone,” “I’m not thinking about what I want to say, I’m just thinking “Is this OK for the meter?’”^[1]

 

One couldn’t ask for a sharper contrast between otherworldly inspiration and poetic craft.

 

The contrast wasn’t as clear in Dylan’s interview with Jeff Rosen in No Direction Home (late 2000). While discussing growing up in Minnesota, Dylan says it was “the last days of carney shows,” where you could see “everything from the snake woman to pygmies … the fat man … it’d be hard core burlesque … guys in blackface, George Washington in blackface, Napoleon in blackface, weird Shakespearean things.” He adds, it was “stuff that didn’t make any sense at the time.” Then he quickly revises that: “But actually I retained a lot of it because when I started writing songs, I started subliminally writing a lotta songs I wouldn’t have attempted even to think about unless I had some concept of that type of reality.” When we remember “Napoleon in rags” or “Fat man eating his last meal,” Dylan’s reflections might seem too pat. But the upshot of his statement is that his creative process was and, at the same time, was not under his control: subliminal effects are not the same as conscious creativity. In the same interview that briefly discusses his early career, Dylan says he wrote a lot of songs “in a short amount of time.” As in the Bradley interview, he says, “I could do that then.” But his reason is more extensive: “The process was new to me. I felt like I’d discovered something no one else had ever discovered and I was in an arena no one else had ever been in before. Ever … I thought I needed to press on, you know, and get into it as far as I could.”^[2] Dylan’s final assessment here skirts the question of mysterious sources, and seems to give the young songwriter a great deal of control over his exploration of the “arena no one else had ever been in before.” He  seems reluctant – in 2000, at least – to give up possession of his talent, as if even in the throes of “penetrating magic,” his consciousness contributes to the final product. As Dylan put it to Jonathan Cott in Rolling Stone in 1978: “It took me a long time to get to do consciously what I used to be able to do unconsciously.” After all, as he has said many times, his songs are written to be performed by him, which surely indicates an element of human agency.

 

This ambiguity has a long history. Wondering where the songs come from resonates with the ancient debate about the source of art, precisely, the relationship between divine inspiration and conscious agency. The first and most influential voice in the debate was Plato’s, and he probably deserves the most blame for removing human agency from poetic production. In the Phaedrus, furor poeticus is the third of four forms of madness.^[3] The frenzied poet is virtually insane. In the Ion, which is probably the most damaging to the idea of human agency, Plato adds that both lyric and epic poets compose not by art but through divine possession; he compares poets to Corybantic revelers, insisting that “God” takes away the minds of poets and speaks through them while they, like divine prophets, remain in a state of unconsciousness.^[4]

 

The original meaning of the word genius somewhat revises Plato and might help us capture the valence of Dylan’s creativity. The word derives from two Latin roots, genius and ingenium. The first comes from gens, or family, whose otherworldly tutelary spirits are identified with and embodied in (mostly) men and worshiped on each birthday. In this sense, the Roman genius is comparable to the Greek daimon (demon), a spirit that directs one’s actions from outside. The other root of genius, the Latin ingenium, referred more clearly to “natural talent or aptitude and proficiency.” While the maxim poeta nascitur non fit (the poet is born, not made) increased in popularity from antiquity to the eighteenth century, poets sometimes countered it pluckily by insisting on the importance of acquired skill. The classically trained Ben Jonson in the early seventeenth century coined the phrase poeta fit non nascitur (a poet is made, not born).^[5]

 

The division between genius as the poet’s inner world, his or her agency, and something external to the poet remains part of the meaning of genius today. More to the point for Dylan studies, these alternate versions of genius, the choice between inspiration and agency, continue to reflect – or afflict – ideas of Dylan’s creativity. Despite brilliant critical forays into the songbook, despite a half-century of parsed lyrics and revelations about old performances, a stubborn strain of furor poeticus seems to persist in the appreciation of the oeuvre.

 

We know all about the Dylan myth and the magical thinking attached to his creativity. There’s a scene in A Complete Unknown that extends it. When Dylan retreats from McCann’s Bar to Sylvie’s apartment, only to find that “anyway [she’s] not alone,” he sits for a moment quietly, holding a towel to his mouth, still traumatized from the punch-up fiasco in the club. With Sylvie (Elle Fanning) hovering, he dabs his mouth, looking aggrieved. He almost whispers: “Everyone asks where the songs come from, Sylvie. But if you watch their faces, they’re not asking where the songs come from. They’re asking why the songs didn’t come to them.”

 

Although Sylvie does not look moved by this bitter observation, the remark capitalizes on the mystique of Bob Dylan’s early genius. The filmmakers milk the ghost-inspiration myth. But to be clear, they aren’t asking why these songs came to Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minnesota, of all the people strumming and singing on Bleeker Street. As Joanie says, many people recognized Dylan – or wanted to recognize him – as “already a legend.”

 

Chalamet’s insight doesn’t deny that the songs come from somewhere. In fact, seeing his friends’ jealousy about the songs not coming to them, he tacitly acknowledges that they “come to him.” Alas, then, A Complete Unknown further promulgates the fiction of daimon, mythologizing Dylan’s genius.

 

In his review in these pages (DR 6.2), Jonathan Hodgers sums up the problem: “A Complete Unknown is a deft piece of propaganda,” he says, “because it’s a form of promotion in the service of an ideology: Dylan-as-enigma, Dylan-as-genius, Dylan-as-lightning rod, Dylan-as-sexy-revolutionary.” Ironically, this flaw in the film reflects the reality of uncritical opinion about Dylan’s poetic production, and the division between furor poeticus and human agency: there is no man around who can track or chain him down. His enigmatic genius precludes investigation, as if a singer is born, not made.

 

This is the dilemma: Either poets, e.g. Dylan, remain in a state of unconsciousness and are mere vessels through which an otherworldly spirit speaks. Or they – while admittedly taking a measure of inspiration from the gods or Muses – use their own skills to fashion immortal verse. (There is, of course, the third option, yearned for inimitably by John Keats: “O for a beaker full of the warm South, / Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene.” In other words, inspiration from wine mixed with water from the Muses’ spring – “O, for a draught of vintage!” But this isn’t the place to explore Dylan’s and everyone else’s use of the various substances standing in for the “blushful Hippocrene” in the 60s and 70s.)^[6]

 

Apart from artificial inspiration, however, there has always been a fine line separating the furor poeticus and furor divinus from human craft. Take John Milton’s dubious assertion of how he wrote Paradise Lost. In his introduction to Book 9 he calls on Urania, his muse, to inspire him to find suitable verse to narrate something as unspeakable as Satan’s temptation of Eve:

 

If answerable style I can obtain

Of my celestial patroness, who deigns

Her nightly visitation unimplored,

And dictates to me slumbering; or inspires

Easy my unpremeditated verse.

 

The problem with the passage is the word “or” in the penultimate line, a characteristic linguistic sleight-of-hand from Milton. A scholar once suggested that with Milton we should read “and” for “or,” which makes sense in these lines and teases the question of how heavily inspiration contributes to poetic accomplishment. Like many a reader before me, I’d like to ask Mr. Milton, “Does Urania ‘dictate’ to you ‘slumbering’ so that you wake up with that morning’s unpremeditated lines totally finished and ready to be dictated in turn to your daughters, your nephew, or some other amanuensis?” Furthermore, “Did she, on certain days, also dictate appropriate revisions?” If not, and Urania didn’t impart revisions to Milton but only finished lines, why did it take him so long to finish the work (almost ten years, when you can read through Paradise Lost in a matter of days or weeks)? Inspiration is one thing; editorial labor is an entirely different matter.

 

Keats noticed the conflict in Milton’s invocation. In his all but worshipful poem “On Seeing a Lock of Milton’s Hair,” he calls Milton the “chief of organic numbers.” “Old Scholar of the Spheres!” he enthuses, “Thy spirit never slumbers.”^[7] In Keats’s revision, Milton’s spirit never nods off. He is invoking, not magical dictation, but the age-old confrontation between inspiration and agency, between unconsciousness and wakeful skill.

 

In general, Milton scholars are not as revisionist as Keats. We observe a code of silence and ignore Milton’s spectacularly inaccurate claim regarding Urania’s part in the poem’s composition. Even believers in supernatural beings and otherworldly forces are highly skeptical about the “nightly visitation[s].” From a critical perspective, it seems more sensible to sideline Urania and endorse Dylan Thomas’s much less magical source for his poetry:

 

In my craft or sullen art

Exercised in the still night

When only the moon rages

And the lovers lie abed

With all their griefs in their arms,

I labour by singing light.^[8]

 

There’s no magic here, despite Thomas’s references to a raging moon and “singing light.” “In My Craft or Sullen Art” reduces millennia of superlunary inspiration and divine light to laborious earthly effort, to a craft or “sullen” art practiced while “lovers lie abed / With all their griefs in their arms.” We can read “and” for “or” in this poem too, especially because the word “art” is derived from the Latin word ars, which can mean “craft.” In any case, there’s nothing magical here, nothing portentous (or pretentious), no Urania, and no ghosts. Thomas was notoriously – and self-destructively – fond of “the blushful Hippocrene,” but alcoholic inspiration is terrestrially bound. In fact, the terra (earth) and terroir (soil and environment of vines) literally bring it all back home from astronomy to topography. Thomas’s sullen art is “Exercised in the still night” by a poet laboring wide awake, perhaps stimulated by grape or barleycorn, but definitely not “slumbering” and waiting to have his poem “dictated” to him from the stars.

 

Dylan Thomas honors the poet laboring through the night. The heuristic of his poem is resistance to magical thinking and to the conflation of human agency – or skill – with heaven-sent moments. Although it’s still unproven if Dylan Thomas’s first name supplied Bob Dylan’s adopted surname, his poem “In My Craft or Sullen Art” could provide a valuable model for realigning our appreciation of Dylan as a craftsman.

 

Have critics and audiences paid enough attention to Dylan’s craft? To his sullen art? Or have they (we) been too struck by his ever-elusive genius? Do magic, ghosts, and inspiration continue to exert too much influence?

 

The leap from genius to ingenium is apparently too difficult to make, even though creating a myth of genius masks Dylan’s craft, his labor by the singing light. But A Complete Unknown is not alone among the Dylan biopics that fail to interrogate the myth of the so-called enigma. Even anti-masquers like Todd Haynes, director of I’m Not There (2007), never really manage to plumb the depths of Dylan’s craft or articulate his methodology. Haynes is innovative, but as his film smashes apart the layers of Dylan’s supposed personas, inevitably it also creates them. Martin Scorsese’s faceted gem, No Direction Home (2005), catches Dylan in nuanced stages of development, with invaluable recollections by courtiers and co-conspirators along the way, not to mention Dylan’s candid reflections. But even this film, easily the best since Dont Look Back, did not explore Dylan’s craft, did not interrogate his poetic method. Maybe that kind of interrogation requires a different medium. Still, is it too much to ask that dramatic narratives explore the subtlety and laboriousness of craft in addition to hyping their enigmatic Dylans?

 

This is not to say that Dylan scholars have avoided poetic craft. On the contrary, Dylan’s excavations of musical influences and songwriters’ genealogical trees have proliferated brilliantly almost since the beginning of Dylan’s career. His lyrics have been the subject of myriad studies exploring, variously, his politics, Biblical debts, folk influences, and recurring themes. Yet the Dylan myth of furor poeticus persists, interfering with the kind of analyses of craft common with other poets.

 

This makes Dylan an anomaly, and, not unpredictably, diminishes his reputation as a serious literary figure. Inspiration is a conventional explanation for genius among canonical poets like Milton. But Dylan isn’t Milton – in fact, as a good friend of mine put it, Milton isn’t Milton, at least not the myth, as Keats recognized. Scholars have avoided talking about Milton’s inspiration, but they have analyzed his verse. Dylan Thomas’ sullen art, involving patient labor, might offer a better understanding of not just the origins of Dylan’s art but also how he was able to make it into an art in the first place. Isn’t it about time that we reward Dylan’s skill with our full (scholarly) skill? That we treat him as we are used to treating Milton?

 

Virtually no myths of otherworldly genius have survived critical analysis of poetic craft. Literary analysis deflates this kind of illusion and unmasks thought foxes. This is abundantly clear in the literary criticism of Homer, Virgil, Dante (known in Florence as the man who’d been to hell), Chaucer, Milton (the slumbering versifier), and latterly, Dickinson, Whitman, Yeats (who believed in charms), and Ted Hughes. Not even Shakespeare’s genius escapes the critique of craft: jealous critics started debunking the Shakespeare myth before Bardolatry got off the ground.

 

In contrast, the critique of craft in Dylan studies is a bit anemic. Surprisingly few analyses have tackled Dylan’s poetics. No book, to my knowledge, focuses on Dylan’s prosody, nor, for that matter, are there articles or individual chapters that concentrate on this crucial element of songwriting. Aspects of Dylan’s diction have received almost disproportionate attention, especially his repurposing of the American idiom and deployment of the demotic. Nevertheless, despite the obvious fact that songs are metrical forms, discussion of Dylan’s metrics is almost nonexistent, even though, as in the Hillburn interview, Dylan has acknowledged, “I’m just thinking ‘Is this OK for the meter?’” This is a significant neglect and a lost opportunity. It undermines the contention that Dylan is a major poet of his generation and a deserving recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Not verse form (apart from blues), nor rhyme schemes and choices, nor Dylan’s inventive deployment of iambs and trochees have received the consideration due an important poet’s craft. Has anyone ever analyzed Dylan’s use of, among other rhetorical devices, anaphora, metonymy, or even assonance and alliteration?

 

I doubt that this neglect can be laid solely at the door of the continuing over-emphasis on the furor poeticus or on the Dylan enigma. But our field does Dylan a disservice in avoiding detailed focus on prosody, stylistics, and rhetorical choices. A few critics have demonstrated how this could be done. But, evidently, too few to debunk the myth of Dylan’s otherworldly spark. Too much of Dylan’s critical, and not-so-critical, audience is like Dylan Thomas’s lovers, who, “their arms / Round the griefs of the ages … pay no praise or wages / Nor heed my craft or art.”

 

Well, to quote Badger Clark, I don’t look much like a lover. I’m a critic: it’s up to me to take heed, take heed of Dylan’s craft and sullen art.

                                                                                                                        Raphael Falco

 

---

[1] Robert Hilburn, “Rock’s Enigmatic Poet Opens a Long-Private Door,” Los Angeles Times, April 4, 2004. [https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2004-apr-04-ca-dylan04-story.html] Cited by Bill Lattanzi in this issue of the DR (7.1).

[2] No Direction Home, a film by Martin Scorsese, 2005. The Rosen interview was conducted in late 2000.

[3] See Phaedrus (244a<n->245a, 265a<n->b). For the discussion of furor poeticus and genius, I’ve referred to my articles in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.

[4] See Ion (533d, 534b)

[5] But Jonson might have had a chip on his shoulder about any sort of birthright, even poetic. His stepfather was a bricklayer and Jonson, who attended an excellent grammar school, was denied a university education. So his reversal of the ancient maxim might have sprung from a personal motivation.

[6] John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale,” lines 15-19.

[7] Keats, “On Seeing a Lock of Milton’s Hair,” lines 1-3.

[8] Dylan Thomas, “In My Craft or Sullen Art,” lines 1-6.