21st-Century Dylan

Late and Timely

Laurence Estanove, Adrian Grafe, Andrew McKeown, Claire Hélie, Laurence Estanove, Adrian Grafe, Andrew McKeown, Claire Hélie

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501363702
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Bob Dylan has constantly reinvented the persona known as "Bob Dylan, " renewing the performance possibilities inherent in his songs, from acoustic folk, to electric rock and a late, hybrid style which even hints at so-called world music and Latin American tones. Then in 2016, his achievements outside of performance – as a songwriter – were acknowledged when he was awarded the Nobel Literature Prize. Dylan has never ceased to broaden the range of his creative identity, taking in painting, film, acting and prose writing, as well as advertising and even own-brand commercial production. The book highlights how Dylan has brought his persona(e) to different art forms and cultural arenas, and how they in turn have also created these personae. This volume consists of multidisciplinary essays written by cultural historians, musicologists, literary academics and film experts, including contributions by critics Christopher Ricks and Nina Goss. Together, the essays reveal Dylan's continuing artistic development and self-fashioning, as well as the making of a certain legitimized Dylan through critical and public recognition in the new millennium.

Part One

Honest with Me: Late Dylan’s
Performing Personae

1

‘I Made It So Easy for You to Follow Me’: Making a Case for Dylan’s Revisionist Art (2012)

Nina Goss

In his review of More Blood, More Tracks: Bootleg Series 14 (2018), New Yorker music critic Alex Ross judges the set as ‘both more and less than what Dylan obsessives have been tiresomely clamoring for’ (Ross 2018). If Ross archly includes himself among the clamouring herd of obsessives, the archness is too subtle for me. What comes through is the familiar critical register conveying both sensibility and expertise that are uncorrupted by obsession. This kind of hygienic distance is peculiarly common in Dylan studies, in which the condescending and objectionable term ‘Dylanologists’ is generally used to maintain the normative epistemic hierarchy of popular culture. Obsessives accumulate unvetted quantities of knowledge and experience in an irrational field of desire. The professional critics discriminate, evaluate, provide rational structures of meaning and value and justify/modulate their own ardour, should they bear any.

I choose instead Roland Barthes on obsessive excess: in A Lover’s Discourse, he writes: ‘I pass beyond the limits of satiety, and instead of finding disgust, nausea, or even drunkenness, I discover … Coincidence … I adhere to the Image, our proportions are the same: exactitude, accuracy, music: I am through with not enough’ (Barthes 1978: 55; orig. emphasis).

I use Barthes as a companion in this chapter, rather than a methodology, because elements of his work can be a good friend to the swarming, fervent and combative field that Bob Dylan’s audience has made of Bob Dylan. In the passage above from A Lover’s Discourse, Barthes offers a relation to an image – an apprehended face – that certainly differs from the ethical severity of Levinasian alterity, in which facing down the presented Other entails submitting to that Other’s singular inviolability. Barthes, I hope, restores eros to the confrontation with Image. Beyond the limit of even the most comprehensive and engaged apprehension is ‘coincidence’ of the lover and the beloved: a climactic be-coming of the self and the Image that consummates via ‘exactitude’, and not through a sublime flooding or mingling of the self and the beloved Other. Barthes manages to have his alterity and eat it too. I insist this is the consummation of the art encounter, in which we are revised by the precise lineaments of an exquisite too-much of an artefact or a performance. As Ross demonstrates, critics task themselves with defining where exactitude and eros are permitted to ignite in the listener/viewer/reader, and when the condition of obsession demeans an audience to a clamouring indistinct mass. Bob Dylan’s audience is a special case of exactitude and clamour. Although Dylan’s audience is voracious, expert and minutely attentive, a combination that brings an insatiable and very sensitive appetite to his work, we can be tiresome to those who do not pass with us beyond the limits of satiety. In this chapter, I test satiety and take on what is arguably the most discouraging post-2000 project bearing the name Bob Dylan: Revisionist Art. Appearing in 2012, Revisionist Art comprises silk-screened mock magazine covers, in some cases legitimate publications whose logos are accurately reproduced, as well as fabricated samples. The project entailed gallery exhibitions and an exhibition catalogue produced by Gagosian Gallery, which mounted the exhibition in New York, and which does not reproduce every item from the combined exhibitions. Absent one textual allusion, Bob Dylan’s presence is his name displayed as the author of the project, and to whom ‘All artworks’ are copyrighted. Inscribing Bob Dylan into this project ultimately tests only the peculiar gains of the ordeal of inscribing.¹

Barthes writes also in A Lover’s Discourse: ‘The ego discourses only when it is hurt; when I am fulfilled or remember having been so, language seems pusillanimous: I am transported, beyond language’ (Barthes 1978: 55; my emphasis).

I want to link to Edward Said’s On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain (2007) Barthes’s claim that, in love, we speak when we are not fulfilled, when the beloved forbids ‘adher[ing]’ to his/her ‘Image’ (Barthes 1978: 55). Said’s thoughts on ‘late style’ were influenced by Adorno’s writing on Beethoven’s late works. Said takes on the tiny set of supreme artists who in hard old age still suffered intensities of productivity and consciousness that manifest in ‘an inherent tension in late style that abjures mere bourgeois aging’ (Said 2007: 17). These works ‘[insist] on the increasing sense of apartness and exile and anachronism, which late style expresses’ (17). Said cannot merely submit to relishing the ‘essentially unrepeatable, uniquely articulated aesthetic works written not at the beginning but at the end of a career’. Instead, he writes of the ‘paradox’ (Said 2007: 17–18) by which these ‘unrepeatable, uniquely articulated’ late works can yet be accessible influences for new artists. He further insists on terms of alienation, such as apartness, exile, anachronism, unacceptable, and intransigence and emphasizes the impermeability in the work of, in this case, the elder Beethoven. Said speaks like a lover vexed by implacable potency and appetite in a beloved who has aged out of natural potency and appetite: he pits vitality against currency. Said is not seeking a technical musicological vocabulary for the choices made by Beethoven in, say, 1822. He is theorizing a strangeness in the greatness of no-longer-young artists, which he cannot assimilate.

Bob Dylan post-2000 is prosaically unacceptable, as at this point we must never accept what he gives us as is. Henry Timrod, Abraham Lincoln, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Fagles’ Homer, John Greenleaf Whittier – all of these voices and more are camouflaged in the late style of Bob Dylan’s compositions and we presume they await our discovery and analysis. Christopher Ricks’s elegant benediction that Dylan ‘repay[s] attention’ (Ricks 2004: 311) has perhaps unfortunately come to describe a festering ritual of picking through a new Dylan work for whatever plundered loot he’s hiding in plain sight, and then domesticating this new misbred creation into the canon. In our exhausting toil of inscribing and reinscribing late Bob Dylan, we can identify ourselves by linking Said’s vexations with Barthes’s now classic assertion in ‘Death of the Author’ that ‘the reader is simply that someone who holds gathered into a single field all the paths of which the text is constituted’ (Barthes 1967: 6). Bob Dylan sings his songs, paints his paintings, attaches his name to a set of mock magazine covers, and we stand at the ready as the agents of his late-style relevance; we inscribe the ‘single field’ that is not Bob Dylan, but inscriptions that we name ‘Bob Dylan’.

The first image reproduced in the Revisionist Art catalogue is the actual 6 November 1964 Life magazine cover showing actress Shirley Eaton as Jill Masterson from the Bond film Goldfinger. The photo and date are authentic (although the scarlet lipstick appears enhanced) and are accompanied by fake headlines including ‘Revolutionary new procedure turns flesh to gold.’ In S/Z, Barthes writes: ‘Meaning is golden …’ (Barthes 1974: 9) – and indeed it is. To confer meaning on anything is the only way to give it life and value in the marketplace of signs; gold has been the marketplace’s standard of value. Read this Revisionist image against Rembrandt’s Danaë (1636), who raises her hand in a gesture, ambiguously greeting and alarmed, at the cascade of gold in her chamber. Danaë is the elected permeable one for the god who, as transcendent signified, can will himself into becoming the currency of supreme value. The first fake cover, then, is the woman consummated with the showered gold, which makes her the living sign. A golden woman is the best of all possible worlds: sex, illumination, money. She’s lit up with the affected rapture of being the gate to Revisionist Art’s ersatz world and the title, Life, becomes an irony both trite and radical. It may be easy to write her as the composite portrait of Dylan’s lineage of frozen idealized female characters. These are the women in his songs who are pinned, inviolable and manipulated all at once, from the self-sufficient artist who belongs to the songwriter, to the ageless girl from the Red River shore whose life becomes a shadow for the restive exhausted singer. Can we begin our inscribing by suggesting that, when framed with the name Bob Dylan, Shirley Eaton’s phony Danaë speaks to Johanna, or the woman who might be in Tangier, or the lover drifting like a satellite, or the girl from the Red River shore? Or, by opening the published text (i.e. the version that is fixed in time and place, as a gallery ...