Bob Dylan: Don’t Judge a Song by Its Cover
Dylanologists have been transfixed by Bob’s word-slinging style and his vagabondesque life for nearly fifty years now. Many have come to see that Dylan’s words are not accidents; they are constructive collisions of meaning. The road he travels through life is a similar one to that which yields emission through his lyrics. Dylan bids us remember with him a time when words were spoken more often than written. Roland Barthes might view Dylan’s poetry through the lens of the “writerly” (616) rather than the “readerly” (616), due to the fact that Dylan’s lyrics inspire thought (and subsequent writing) far past the initial sensation of thought and sound. Throughout his work, there is a sense that Dylan is travelling down the road to both new places and new identities alike. Although Dylan is a singer and not a poet by trade, his lyrics warrant contemplation from a literary perspective. A straight line may be drawn starting from Dylan’s use of “moving from place to place” in his lyrics, to his self-reinventions. Dylan’s enlistment of Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotopic motif, specifically “moving on,” or “the road,” is directly illustrated by his use of character masks, and this motif is paralleled in personae by his frequent redefinitions of himself.
Meanings in words are slippery, especially when the words of Bob Dylan are those in question. Noam Chomsky’s basic view on language considers that all speakers are creators. If all speakers are creators, the subsequent implication is that any search for “face value,” in reference to words, is arbitrary. There is context to contend with stirred in with intonation. Words strung together such as Dylan sings must be evaluated in the right manner, that is, with the provision for multiple meanings. Dylan’s use of semiotics provides multiple topics for evaluation in his work: “Yonder stands your orphan with his gun / Crying like a fire in the sun” (It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue). Your orphan: a bastardized version of “your”self? Like a fire in the sun: to “you” because “you” won’t listen? The “meaning” of a word at one point in time often becomes something entirely transformed in the next stanza. This happens at a near-constant rate in Dylan lyrics. Dylan is the facilitator of the acorn who would become an oak. Roman Jakobson would put this phenomenon into words:
Ambiguity is an intrinsic, inalienable character of any self-focused message, briefly a corollary feature of poetry. Let us repeat with Empson: ‘The machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.’ Not only the message itself but the addresser and the addressee become ambiguous…Virtually any poetic message is a quasi-quoted discourse with all those peculiar, intricate problems which ‘speech within speech’ offers to the linguist (167).
Is it possible to put a song on repeat for an entire hour without becoming bored? After a couple hours of Desolation Row, the question answers itself. Aside from Desolation Row’s presence in the Oxford Book of American Poetry, it is validated as poetry even through its title. The title begs the question: What is a desolation row? Desolation implies lonely, uninhabited, barren, devastated, or hopeless. Row can mean what happened before the desolation (a quarrel or fight), but this is seemingly antonymous with desolation (emptiness) in the present sense, because, as the idiom informs us, “it takes two to tango.” Row, in the “ducks in a row” sense, suggests order, whereas desolation designates past chaos. If the title of the song is an epigram that can stand by itself, then the poetry begins before the poem even starts.
Christopher Ricks alludes to Dylan’s use of metaphorical, multi-meaning epigrams in Dylan’s song It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue: “The highway is for gamblers, better use your sense” (Dylan). Exhortations to pound the pavement are widely strewn throughout Dylan’s lyrics, in this occurrence, it is more than happenstance, and the ambiguous nature of the phrases are also more than happenstance. Gamblers are the same as bettors, and they use cents. On the other hand, those on the highway had better use their sense. Not only is this phrase generously filled with meaning, it follows suit with Dylan’s propensity to use “moving on,” or “the road,” as described by Mikhail Bakhtin as a chronotopic motif:
Time, as it were, fuses together with space and flows in it (forming the road); this is the source of the rich metaphorical expansion on the image of the road as a course: “the course of life,” “to set out on a new course,” “the course of history” and so on; varied and multi-leveled are the ways in which road is turned into a metaphor, but its fundamental pivot is the flow of time. (244)
The flow of time is present in the title of the song; It’s All Over Now Baby Blue. When is it time to hit the road? Now is the time to hit the road, and now is also the time for the rich expansion of meaning in Dylan’s lyrics as they metamorphose into something metaphorical.
Of course, “moving on” brings to mind why it was necessary to leave in the first place. Nick Smart sheds light on place, and Dylan’s predilection to provide employment for place in his lyrics: ‘‘‘Oh, Mama, can this really be the end/to be stuck inside of Mobile/with the Memphis blues again.’ Place, this lament tells us, is where you should leave from” (qtd. in Smart 179). Smart alludes to place as a literary theme, citing Dylan’s allusions to the Bible, specifically Adam’s departure from the Garden of Eden.
Dylan similarly refers to this dis-habitation, this time in reference to his emigration from the folk music scene: ‘‘Adam had to leave the garden. It was just too perfect’’ (qtd. in Smart 184). Dylan had a tendency to do exactly what his fans and critics didn’t want him to do. Howard Sounes captures the reaction of hippie folk fans at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Amid the war protesters, revolutionaries, and civil rights activists, Dylan’s presence came crashing in:
Nothing could be more shocking than what happened next. Bob came on stage wearing a black leather jacket… “It was the antithesis of what the festival was supposed to be doing,” says Oscar Brand. “The electric guitar represented capitalism…the people who were selling out.” (Sounes 182)
Dylan constantly runs against the grain, even if the place he runs against is as unassuming and peace-loving as the Newport Folk Festival.
Dylan has an antagonism to critics, probably because they are always trying to wrap their brains around him. The definitions that critics tagged Dylan with stuck for years before he was able to shed them and pick up the next. In 1967, Dylan was tagged “voice of a generation,” and he responded by obscuring himself from the public eye for three years, and then releasing Self Portrait (a facetiously named album consisting of cover songs), “so people would just at that time stop buying my records, and they did” (qtd. in Kitts 302), Dylan explains. There is a feeling that Dylan was wordlessly criticizing the counterculture movement, who had ostensibly been caught conforming in their nonconformity.
Later, when the birth of postmodernism (in music specifically) yielded a rear of an ugly head in music on a wide scale in the early 80’s, Dylan shifted to Christianity. The remainder of his leftist following that had remained after his fall-out from folk music was appalled. This return of Dylan back to tradition (although not his own) was a violation of art at the time, and Dylan was considered a traitor to the realm he had once reigned in.
Ben Child similarly points out Dylan’s tendency toward modernity over postmodernity: “the peculiarly modern work of offering an imagined space where not only do different strands of culture meet but also discrete temporal cultures overlap and interact” (Child 202). In the mind of Child, Dylan’s production of Love and Theft in 2001 was another example of the actual Dylan as opposed to the supposed Dylan. He traversed from the “step ahead of the game” position to “two steps behind the game” on his road to nowhere that led to him somewhere. Perhaps it was a different kind of place, one of the “secret places which material reality conceals but art will reveal in time” (Smart 179), as Nick Smart suggests of Dylan.
Dylan’s constant redefinitions of himself are reflected in his lyrics through his use of character masks (even represented by an electric guitar or a Bible in hand). These masks provide insulation from the pursuing definitions that are always dogging close behind him. Dylan calls on a cast of characters as widespread as it is rich in Desolation Row.
The blind commissioner…Lady and I…Cinderella…Romeo…Cain and Abel…Hunchback of Notre Dame…Ophelia (a probable reference to Hamlet)…Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood…Dr. Filth…The Phantom of the Opera…Casanova…Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot (Dylan, Desolation Row).
These characters (not character masks) are all able to meet on “the road” or “the row,” specifically in this case, because roads bring people together. The conglomeration of space and time is in harmony on this road, and one could even add the third and fourth dimensions of fiction married to reality, which also seem to have met on this road (Cinderella meets Romeo). Richard Elliot brings to mind the byproduct of being on such a road, engaging in Dylan’s “theme of moving on and its association with accumulated experience” (251). Perhaps Dylan’s accumulated experience is a product of Shakespeare, Eliot, Einstein, and Hugo more than the harrowing counterculture hippie culture that has often attempted to hijack his identity.
Dylan’s identity can only be described as here and there. The “here and there” nature of Dylan’s nomadic lifestyle is a parallel to the occupation of double entendre regularly employed in his lyrics. Meanings in words are similarly ambiguous, or “here and there,” and the “here and there” meaningfully describes the vast amount of meanings that can come out of various laconic quips recurrent in his work. One of the more controversial examples of ambiguous meaning is his repeated exhortation of “Everybody must get stoned” (Dylan Rainy Day Women No. 12 & 35). Stoned in the Biblical capital punishment sense, or stoned in the stimulation of the senses sense? Is it possible that in the search for the “here” or the “there” will always be inconclusive? Dylan is running from the “here” to get to the “there,” because it neither in the here nor the there that he wants to be.
The sense of Dylan’s identity is clouded by its shifting camouflage of hitch-hiking hobo, transient troubadour, and revolutionary rock and roller. He invites interpretation: “Come writers and critics who prophesy with your pen” (The Times They Are A-changin’), but he also sends a warning: “I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken” (Dylan A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall). Critics have submitted their ballots, and the outcome is not an outcome. Those who would audit Dylan’s elucidation of himself, or lack thereof, will cite his lost-sheep tendency to stray from their own preconceived fold. Some will miss the old Dylan. Others will acknowledge that life is too short to be the same person for its entirety, and Dylan provides exhibit A for this persuasion.
No comments:
Post a Comment