From: heard@qut.edu.au
Newsgroups: rec.music.dylan
Subject: "The Genius of Dylan"
Date: 13 Apr 92 18:20:15 EST
Organization: Queensland University of Technology

From: "The Australian" Weekend Review, March 28--29, 1992. An article
by Imre Saluszinsky, Senior Lecturer in English at the University of
Newcastle (NSW, Australia). 

Words are Saluszinsky's, typos are mine.

The Genius of Dylan

Robert Allen Zimmerman (B. May 24, 1941) is the most important poet to
have emerged in the United States since the death of Wallace Stevens
in 1954. And he is a very unusual fellow --- especially for a poet.

Unlike most major American poets, Zimmerman was born a Jew, and into 
the lower-middle classes (his father was the part-owner of a hardware 
store). Unlike most major American poets, Zimmerman is from the 
Midwest, not from any of the traditional centres of culture, along the 
north-eastern seaboard. Unlike most major American poets, he does not 
have a tertiary education. And unlike most major American poets --- or 
poets anywhere --- he is rich and famous.

For all these oddities, though, Zimmerman's claim to poetic greatness 
is beyond question. He is the author of 26 collections of poetry, 
which have appeared between 1962 and 1991. Although all of them 
contain fine poems, two alone, "Blood on the Tracks" (1975) and 
"Desire" (1976) would be enough to ensure Zimmerman's lasting poetic 
greatness.

But Zimmerman's most compelling creation is to be found in none of the 
26 texts mentioned. His masterpiece is a character --- a character 
called Bob Dylan. At the moment he became Bob Dylan, sometime in late 
1959, Robert Allen Zimmerman created one of the most complicated and 
fascinating personae in 20th-century poetry.

Now the time has come for critics to begin the serious work of picking 
apart the complicated skein of traditions that contribute to Dylan's 
art. Evasive about many things, Dylan has been perfectly open about 
his early influences: "I came out of the wilderness, and just 
naturally fell in with the Beat scene . . . it was Jack Kerouac, 
Ginsberg, Corso and Ferlinghetti . . . I got in at the tail end of that 
and it was magic." 

The Dylan of the early and mid-'60s is a Beat poet. Indeed with his
chains and loops of surreal, stream-of-consciousness imagery, with his
street-talk idiom, with his hostility to "straight"
social-conditioning , and with his sense of the continent of America 
as a challenge that had to be faced and crossed --- early Dylan is 
_the_ beat poet:

    Johnny's in the basement
    Mixing up the Medicine
    I'm on the pavement
    Thinking about the government

    The man in the trench coat
    Badge out, laid off
    Says he's got a bad cough
    Wants to get paid off

It is hardly surprising that an unusually creative young poet, just 
breaking out of a claustrophobic, small-town upbringing in the late 
'50s, should have turned to the Beat aesthetic for inspiration. After 
all it was the most exciting, subversive thing in the air; but it was 
not the only thing. For example, Dylan also picked up form the 
Modernist poets such as T.S. Eliot (and his French symbolist 
precursors) a sense of the self as unstable, elusive, and capable of 
limitless reinvigoration:

    Ah, but I was so much older then
    I'm younger than that now.

This sense of the endless twists and permutations of the self --- so 
that, for example, two people who meet again after a separation may 
have become quite different people --- eventually climaxes in those 
masterpieces scattered across "Blood on the Tracks": poems like 
"Tangled up in Blue" and "Shelter from the Storm".

Also among the early influences was '60s Existentialism, which warned 
Dylan about all the malign forces that threaten to fix and stabilise 
the self unless its authenticity is jealously guarded. These forces 
include social canons of patriotism and decency: "the enemy I see 
wears a cloak of decency".

Hence Dylan's lifelong infatuation with rebels and outcasts who 
upbraid or discountenance social propriety: Woody Guthrie, Joey Gallo, 
Reuben Carter, Lenny Bruce, and, most notably, Jesus Christ. But Dylan 
also has an Existentialist's sense of the threats to the self and 
freedom that issue from the family ("I ain't gonna work for Maggie's 
pa no more / Well he puts his cigar / Out in your face just for 
kicks") and even more disturbingly, from the entrapments of love:

    She wears an Egyptian ring
    That sparkles before she speaks
    She's a hypnotist collector
    You are a walking antique

Most of these connections have been made before. What has not been
seen, I think is that they are all quite secondary. Because, above 
all, Dylan, as a poet is an American Romantic visionary, in the 
tradition of Dickinson, Hawthorne, Whitman and Thoreau. In other words 
he is one more among the distinguished progeny of Ralph Waldo Emerson 
(1803--1882). Dylan's debt to Emerson has hardly been noticed, and yet 
he is a thoroughly traditional Emersonian Transcendentalist. In all his 
guises, Dylan preaches the Emersonian gospel of "self-reliance". Here 
is Emerson: "Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string." 
And Dylan: "Trust yourself / Trust yourself to know the way that will 
prove true in the end."

In fact the Beat idea of the American continent as the ultimate source 
of all inspiration comes from Emerson, who singlehandedly convinced 
the young American poets and thinkers of the 19th century that they 
could forget Europe and history, and forge an original relation to 
nature. And the radical individualism of the Existentialists, with its 
sense of all worldly power as corrupt and corrupting: that is also 
there in Emerson, who writes, "Society everywhere is in conspiracy 
against the manhood of everyone of its members."

Emerson's chief lesson --- that memory and history are death to the 
creative spirit, which must be committed to novelty and change --- is 
evident everywhere in Dylan, who saw immediately that one way of 
changing the times is simply to assert that they already are 
a-changin'.

This spirit of Emerson and Hawthorne --- who looked West from New 
England and there, in the opposite direction to Europe, found a symbol 
of action and renewal --- is still alive in Dylan's verse:

    Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you,
    Forget the dead you've left, they will not follow you . . .
    Strike another match, go start anew
    And it's all over now, Baby Blue.

Self-reliance is not in every respect a comforting or easy truth to 
live by: it teaches that we must compete and struggle endlessly, if we 
are to escape the limiting influence of others.

This side of Emerson's legacy is apparent in all those characters
Dylan conjures who, once upon a time, had it all over him, who, once
upon a time, dressed so fine, and threw the bums a dime. But now they 
neither talk so loud nor seem so proud:

    You got a lotta nerve
    To say you are my friend
    When I was down
    You just stood there grinning.

But this is the kind of hard justice that operates in this world. But 
Dylan like Emerson is a Transcendentalist, and has always envisaged a 
more ultimate justice. Seen against this eternal background, worldly 
power looks tenuous and fragile, so that "even the President of the 
United States / Sometimes must have / To stand naked". Dylan's social 
commentary is less a form of protest than an apocalyptic challenge to 
America: return to a vision of innocence and honesty, or die.

When Dylan started to write poems that were directly about God in the 
late '70s and early '80s, he was written off by a section of his 
audience, who seemed not to have noticed that Dylan had never written 
about anything but God.

Looking for a theology across the body of Dylan's work, I do not think
it is possible to find anything that is orthodox from either a
Christian or a Jewish perspective. Dylan's religion --- the religion
that is in the poems --- so utterly privileges the individual's search
for spiritual authenticity, for the inner light, over any sense of 
community, that once again it is impossible to see it as anything but 
the highly displaced version of Protestantism we call Romanticism.

"Power ceases in the instant of repose," wrote Emerson. "It resides in 
the moment of transition from a past to a new state." This is why 
Robert Zimmerman's greatest work is Bob Dylan: nowhere more clearly 
than in Dylan's own ceaseless self-fashionings is the potency of the 
self, and its knowledge that "he not busy being born / is busy dying", 
visible. Dylan said once: "What hangs everybody up is that I'm not 
_stopping_." Now on his fourth visit to Australia, he has for some 
years been embarked on what he calls the "neverending tour". There 
could be no better description of the Emersonian authentic life.

Bob Dylan's artistic achievement now stretches across 30 years, and 
most of us who've lived those years with our eyes and ears open have 
managed to see something of our own inner visions and crises reflected 
in the spectacular light that has been cast by this courageous and 
original man.
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