Satellite Dylan (Page 2)

Can Dylan's work sustain high scrutiny? Yes, if it's placed in a particular cultural context. Dylan's is a hybrid art, as Robert Christgau has observed. Synthesis is the key to its vitality. High and low are one; fishermen hold flowers. The best Dylan critics--e.g., Christgau, Marcus, Tim Riley--situate him in a musical/social tradition that includes, most notably, the blues. But there have always been intellectuals who insisted on yoking Dylan to the fine-art cart.

Consider Aidan Day's analysis of the song "Visions of Johanna": "a reduction of form to primal elements--as in an image that itself displaces Marcel Duchamp's rendering of the Mona Lisa in the painting LHOOQ." The music critic Alex Ross cites this groaner as an example of the wretched excess Dylan can inspire in inquiring minds. He always did. But lately this adoration has spawned a whole new school of Dylan crit, all the more powerful because it's based in the academy. Young Bob should have wailed: Twenty years of schoolin' and they put you in a syllabus!

The dean of this veneration scholarship is Christopher Ricks, an important critic of (mainly British) poetry. Like many acolytes, Ricks admits that Dylan is an obsession. But unlike the garbologists of yore, he has the intellectual means to venture a close textual analysis of the work itself. The result is Dylan's Visions of Sin, a formidable study whose flaws epitomize the problems with the discipline I'll call Ph.Dylanology.

It's a formalist school, and as such it privileges the syntax of the songs over their context. Taking this approach, Ricks finds not just hidden intricacies but significant connections between Dylan and the great poets, especially the Symbolists and Romantics. There are such connections, as there are for a number of rock artists from the 1960s. Consider John Lennon's link to Surrealism or Jim Morrison's debt to the Beats. Certainly Dylan is the most literary of songwriters, and he synthesizes the metaphorics of blues with the Western literary tradition in a remarkable way. It's one thing to acknowledge this achievement, quite another to maintain that it makes him the singular genius of his generation. But the point of Ph.Dylanology is to render him as an exceptional artist who communes with the immortals and stands apart from the creative processes of the crowd. Elitism is a dirty word in formalist circles, but that's what this is. And it doesn't get at Dylan's greatness.

He hasn't had much influence on literature. Few contemporary poets write like him. Dylan's major impact is on pop music, and his innovations--expanding the lyric line and infusing it with expressive, ambiguous imagery--are a mainstay of modern song. In pop, the sensual surface is every bit as important as the subtext, maybe more so. If you're going to tackle the Book of Revelation, you'd better make it rock. These values set a standard for pop-culture criticism: erotics over hermeneutics, to channel Susan Sontag. But most Ph.Dylanologists are oblivious to the ways of pop--and they ignore the "old, weird America," where Dylan's imagination resides. Overlooking this tradition does a grave disservice to the collective genius of American music. And it removes Dylan from the company of 1960s song-poets like Lennon (whose late style is every bit as primal and more radical), Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon (all of them wiser about the vicissitudes of intimacy). Because these artists are less literary than Dylan, they are presumed to be less worthy, and a whole aesthetic movement is dismissed.

I once saw Ricks lecture on the poetics of unstressed (or "feminine") endings in an early Dylan song called "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll." He never acknowledged that such upbeat endings are common in American song, or that the "axial moments" in a Dylan lyric--when an image encompasses its opposite--appear often in rock. Indeed, ambiguity is central to the sixties sensibility, and not just because of Dylan's sway. Ricks is hardly the first critic to be stuck inside of Mobile with the William Empson blues again, and I wouldn't be so hard on him if his pop illiteracy weren't the sign of a larger problem.

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