A comment on my previous post included, "Dylan's New Orleans comment is disingenuous or, rather, deliberately ironic/paradoxical because the home of the blues and the blues itself, so dear to Dylan, are home to/rooted in voodoo."
The statement in question, regarding how Dylan writes about New Orleans not having "the psychic current of holy places," needs to be considered in the context of what he writes about the city just a few pages earlier in Chronicles: Volume One: "New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don't have the magic anymore, still has got it."
The passage that contains the latter sentence is constructed in a most amazing way, using many elements from Sax Rohmer's 1916 novel The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu and a little bit of Mark Twain. Dylan's use of Sax Rohmer material was first noticed by Edward Cook a couple of years ago. Cook pointed out a passage that was clearly taken from Rohmer's 1919 novel Dope. Last year I post a couple of stray lines from Chronicles: Volume One that I discovered had parallels in The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu (they can be found in a thread on expectingrain.com regarding Dylan's use of material from the March 31, 1961 issue of Time magazine) and I've since found many more. Edward Cook and I have shared notes and have pinpointed material from a number of Rohmer's other novels being used in Chronicles:Volume One, but none are used as much as The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu. Dylan researcher Fred Bals has noted that "it's likely that the name of Dylan's production company, 'Grey Water Park' is a reference to a setting used by Sax Rohmer in several 'Fu-Manchu' stories."
Nowhere in Dylan's memoir is the use of Sax Rohmer material as dense as it is in this passage regarding New Orleans -
Chronicles: Volume One, pp. 179 - 180:
"Right now, I strolled into the dusk. The air was murky and intoxicating. At the corner of the block, a giant, gaunt cat crouched on a concrete ledge. I got up close to it and stopped and the cat didn't move. I wished I had a jug of milk. My eyes and ears were open, my consciousness fully alive.
The first thing you notice about New Orleans are the burying grounds — the cemeteries — and they're a cold proposition, one of the best things there are here. Going by, you try to be as quiet as possible, better to let them sleep. Greek, Roman, sepulchers — palatial mausoleums made to order, phantomesque, signs and symbols of hidden decay — ghosts of women and men who have sinned and who've died and are now living in tombs. The past doesn't pass away so quickly here. You could be dead for a long time. The ghosts race towards the light, you can almost hear the heavy breathing spirits, all determined to get somewhere. New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don't have the magic anymore, still has got it. Night can swallow you up, yet none of it touches you. "
==
From The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu:
My heart thumping furiously in my breast, I bent over him; and for the second time since our coming to Cragmire Tower, my thoughts flew to "The Fenman."
There are shades in the fen; ghosts of women and men
Who have sinned and have died, but are living again.
O'er the waters they tread, with their lanterns of dread,
And they peer in the pools--in the pools of the dead....
A light was dancing out upon the moor, a witch-light that came and went unaccountably, up and down, in and out, now clearly visible, now masked in the darkness!
"Lock the door!" snapped my companion--"if there's a key."
I crept across the room and fumbled for a moment; then--
"There is no key," I reported.
"Then wedge the chair under the knob and let no one enter until I return!" he said amazingly.
With that he opened the window to its fullest extent, threw his leg over the sill, and went creeping along a wide concrete ledge, in which ran a leaded gutter, in the direction of the tower on the right!
Not pausing to follow his instructions respecting the chair, I craned out of the window, watching his progress, and wondering with what sudden madness he was bitten. Indeed, I could not credit my senses, could not believe that I heard and saw aright. Yet there out in the darkness on the moor moved the will-o'-the-wisp, and ten yards along the gutter crept my friend, like a great gaunt cat. Unknown to me he must have prospected the route by daylight, for now I saw his design. The ledge terminated only where it met the ancient wall of the tower, and it was possible for an agile climber to step from it to the edge of the unglazed window some four feet below, and to scramble from that point to the stone fence and thence on to the path by which we had come from Saul.
This difficult operation Nayland Smith successfully performed, and, to my unbounded amazement, went racing into the darkness toward the dancing light, headlong, like a madman! The night swallowed him up, and between my wonder and my fear my hands trembled so violently that I could scarce support myself where I rested, with my full weight upon the sill.
I seemed now to be moving through the fevered phases of a nightmare. Around and below me Cragmire Tower was profoundly silent, but a faint odour of cookery was now perceptible. Outside, from the night, came a faint whispering as of the distant sea, but no moon and no stars relieved the impenetrable blackness. Only out over the moor the mysterious light still danced and moved.
One--two--three--four--five minutes passed. The light vanished and did not appear again. Five more age-long minutes elapsed in absolute silence, whilst I peered into the darkness of the night and listened, muscles tensed, for the return of Nayland Smith. Yet two more minutes, which embraced an agony of suspense, passed in the same fashion; then a shadowy form grew, phantomesque, out of the gloom; a moment more, and I distinctly heard the heavy breathing of a man nearly spent, and saw my friend scrambling up toward the black embrasure in the tower. His voice came huskily, pantingly:
"Creep along and lend me a hand, Petrie! I am nearly winded."
==
There is a lot to chew on there. If you are not familiar with Rohmer's characters, Nayland Smith is a bit like Sherlock Holmes and Petrie is his Watson. The most interesting thing that I see here has to do with the gaunt cat. In the book Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and Culture by Tina Chen this line in Rohmer's novel is brought up when she discusses how Rohmer positions Smith and Fu Manchu as mirror images, albeit ones that are "perhaps inverted and/or distorted." Chen writes, "Petrie's description of Smith as 'a great, gaunt cat' yokes together two of the signature characteristics ascribed to the Doctor: his 'gaunt' frame and 'cat like gait.'" One can also see this mirror image played out in the 1980 film The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu, in which Peter Sellers plays both Nayland Smith and Dr. Fu Manchu.
Of course Dylan would wish that he had a jug of milk to give that big, bony kitty, he is clearly attracted and that type of identity play. That Dylan has further masked the Nayland Smith/Fu Manchu gaunt cat by changing "great" to "giant" is also a nice touch. There is much more to explore here, especially how the hidden use of the Rohmer material might tie in with the passages in Chronicles: Volume One in which Sun Pie talks with Dylan about how to prepare for the coming invasion of millions of Chinese. "The Unparalleled Invasion" by Jack London is also worth looking at.
Dylan places the phrase "signs and symbols of hidden decay" in between elements from taken from Rohmer and I believe that he is quoting from Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi. Here is how Twain used the phrase, it appears in the final paragraph of chapter nine:
"No, the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat. Since those days, I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush in a beauty's cheek mean to a doctor but a 'break' that ripples above some deadly disease. Are not all her visible charms sown thick with what are to him the signs and symbols of hidden decay? Does he ever see her beauty at all, or doesn't he simply view her professionally, and comment upon her unwholesome condition all to himself? And doesn't he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?"
An element from Life on the Mississippi showing up in the portion of the book regarding cemeteries, ghosts and death on the Mississippi has Dylan's signature all over it. I also love that Dylan that used "signs and symbols" as a sign and symbol; Dan Brown has got nothing on Bob Dylan. I reiterate my contention that much of Dylan's memoir is constructed in this manner, with hundreds of examples from cover to cover.
Life on the Mississippi does have some other things to consider. Twain writes, "Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river!"
I don't think that I am anywhere near mastering the language of Chronicles: Volume One, but I have carefully gone through it, word by word, page by page over a long period of time. The grace, beauty and poetry are all still there. If anything I am even more enchanted, and the path that I have been brought down by learning more about how Dylan works has included a number of interesting encounters and moments. There's more detail about this in an article I've written for New Haven Review that should be released in the next few weeks.
The statement in question, regarding how Dylan writes about New Orleans not having "the psychic current of holy places," needs to be considered in the context of what he writes about the city just a few pages earlier in Chronicles: Volume One: "New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don't have the magic anymore, still has got it."
The passage that contains the latter sentence is constructed in a most amazing way, using many elements from Sax Rohmer's 1916 novel The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu and a little bit of Mark Twain. Dylan's use of Sax Rohmer material was first noticed by Edward Cook a couple of years ago. Cook pointed out a passage that was clearly taken from Rohmer's 1919 novel Dope. Last year I post a couple of stray lines from Chronicles: Volume One that I discovered had parallels in The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu (they can be found in a thread on expectingrain.com regarding Dylan's use of material from the March 31, 1961 issue of Time magazine) and I've since found many more. Edward Cook and I have shared notes and have pinpointed material from a number of Rohmer's other novels being used in Chronicles:Volume One, but none are used as much as The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu. Dylan researcher Fred Bals has noted that "it's likely that the name of Dylan's production company, 'Grey Water Park' is a reference to a setting used by Sax Rohmer in several 'Fu-Manchu' stories."
Nowhere in Dylan's memoir is the use of Sax Rohmer material as dense as it is in this passage regarding New Orleans -
Chronicles: Volume One, pp. 179 - 180:
"Right now, I strolled into the dusk. The air was murky and intoxicating. At the corner of the block, a giant, gaunt cat crouched on a concrete ledge. I got up close to it and stopped and the cat didn't move. I wished I had a jug of milk. My eyes and ears were open, my consciousness fully alive.
The first thing you notice about New Orleans are the burying grounds — the cemeteries — and they're a cold proposition, one of the best things there are here. Going by, you try to be as quiet as possible, better to let them sleep. Greek, Roman, sepulchers — palatial mausoleums made to order, phantomesque, signs and symbols of hidden decay — ghosts of women and men who have sinned and who've died and are now living in tombs. The past doesn't pass away so quickly here. You could be dead for a long time. The ghosts race towards the light, you can almost hear the heavy breathing spirits, all determined to get somewhere. New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don't have the magic anymore, still has got it. Night can swallow you up, yet none of it touches you. "
==
From The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu:
My heart thumping furiously in my breast, I bent over him; and for the second time since our coming to Cragmire Tower, my thoughts flew to "The Fenman."
There are shades in the fen; ghosts of women and men
Who have sinned and have died, but are living again.
O'er the waters they tread, with their lanterns of dread,
And they peer in the pools--in the pools of the dead....
A light was dancing out upon the moor, a witch-light that came and went unaccountably, up and down, in and out, now clearly visible, now masked in the darkness!
"Lock the door!" snapped my companion--"if there's a key."
I crept across the room and fumbled for a moment; then--
"There is no key," I reported.
"Then wedge the chair under the knob and let no one enter until I return!" he said amazingly.
With that he opened the window to its fullest extent, threw his leg over the sill, and went creeping along a wide concrete ledge, in which ran a leaded gutter, in the direction of the tower on the right!
Not pausing to follow his instructions respecting the chair, I craned out of the window, watching his progress, and wondering with what sudden madness he was bitten. Indeed, I could not credit my senses, could not believe that I heard and saw aright. Yet there out in the darkness on the moor moved the will-o'-the-wisp, and ten yards along the gutter crept my friend, like a great gaunt cat. Unknown to me he must have prospected the route by daylight, for now I saw his design. The ledge terminated only where it met the ancient wall of the tower, and it was possible for an agile climber to step from it to the edge of the unglazed window some four feet below, and to scramble from that point to the stone fence and thence on to the path by which we had come from Saul.
This difficult operation Nayland Smith successfully performed, and, to my unbounded amazement, went racing into the darkness toward the dancing light, headlong, like a madman! The night swallowed him up, and between my wonder and my fear my hands trembled so violently that I could scarce support myself where I rested, with my full weight upon the sill.
I seemed now to be moving through the fevered phases of a nightmare. Around and below me Cragmire Tower was profoundly silent, but a faint odour of cookery was now perceptible. Outside, from the night, came a faint whispering as of the distant sea, but no moon and no stars relieved the impenetrable blackness. Only out over the moor the mysterious light still danced and moved.
One--two--three--four--five minutes passed. The light vanished and did not appear again. Five more age-long minutes elapsed in absolute silence, whilst I peered into the darkness of the night and listened, muscles tensed, for the return of Nayland Smith. Yet two more minutes, which embraced an agony of suspense, passed in the same fashion; then a shadowy form grew, phantomesque, out of the gloom; a moment more, and I distinctly heard the heavy breathing of a man nearly spent, and saw my friend scrambling up toward the black embrasure in the tower. His voice came huskily, pantingly:
"Creep along and lend me a hand, Petrie! I am nearly winded."
==
There is a lot to chew on there. If you are not familiar with Rohmer's characters, Nayland Smith is a bit like Sherlock Holmes and Petrie is his Watson. The most interesting thing that I see here has to do with the gaunt cat. In the book Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and Culture by Tina Chen this line in Rohmer's novel is brought up when she discusses how Rohmer positions Smith and Fu Manchu as mirror images, albeit ones that are "perhaps inverted and/or distorted." Chen writes, "Petrie's description of Smith as 'a great, gaunt cat' yokes together two of the signature characteristics ascribed to the Doctor: his 'gaunt' frame and 'cat like gait.'" One can also see this mirror image played out in the 1980 film The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu, in which Peter Sellers plays both Nayland Smith and Dr. Fu Manchu.
Of course Dylan would wish that he had a jug of milk to give that big, bony kitty, he is clearly attracted and that type of identity play. That Dylan has further masked the Nayland Smith/Fu Manchu gaunt cat by changing "great" to "giant" is also a nice touch. There is much more to explore here, especially how the hidden use of the Rohmer material might tie in with the passages in Chronicles: Volume One in which Sun Pie talks with Dylan about how to prepare for the coming invasion of millions of Chinese. "The Unparalleled Invasion" by Jack London is also worth looking at.
Dylan places the phrase "signs and symbols of hidden decay" in between elements from taken from Rohmer and I believe that he is quoting from Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi. Here is how Twain used the phrase, it appears in the final paragraph of chapter nine:
"No, the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat. Since those days, I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush in a beauty's cheek mean to a doctor but a 'break' that ripples above some deadly disease. Are not all her visible charms sown thick with what are to him the signs and symbols of hidden decay? Does he ever see her beauty at all, or doesn't he simply view her professionally, and comment upon her unwholesome condition all to himself? And doesn't he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?"
An element from Life on the Mississippi showing up in the portion of the book regarding cemeteries, ghosts and death on the Mississippi has Dylan's signature all over it. I also love that Dylan that used "signs and symbols" as a sign and symbol; Dan Brown has got nothing on Bob Dylan. I reiterate my contention that much of Dylan's memoir is constructed in this manner, with hundreds of examples from cover to cover.
Life on the Mississippi does have some other things to consider. Twain writes, "Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river!"
I don't think that I am anywhere near mastering the language of Chronicles: Volume One, but I have carefully gone through it, word by word, page by page over a long period of time. The grace, beauty and poetry are all still there. If anything I am even more enchanted, and the path that I have been brought down by learning more about how Dylan works has included a number of interesting encounters and moments. There's more detail about this in an article I've written for New Haven Review that should be released in the next few weeks.
Scott great. I've only discovered you since about Friday, but you may be, of the Dylan writers I've come across, I like to think the best ones (as you can't read 'em all), you could be the closest to the way I think about Dylan, although I also felt some affinity with John Gibbens (but not always); he's a little too laconic just when he's getting good. It seems fitting somehow that I should, as the writer of those New Orleans comments you quote, be the first to comment on this new (door)post.
ReplyDeleteThe Fenman quote is particularly intriguing for me because it leaps out at me with a psychic current (just like the one I get when reading a stranger nobody sees); I have mountains of unpublished material on this area. What might I mean by 'this area'? Well, I seem to be the only person to have tapped into it, as the books out there miss this out almost as if by censorship; it could damage the agenda (to mention it one time).
Let's say all this would go way over the heads of post-structuralist zombie Dylanologists. But surely you recognize the importance of the Fenman passage, in cadence and words, for the penning of a very important Dylan song? For me, Dylan's greatest conceptual masterpiece. And I need to 'steal' your finding here and incorporate it. Badmouth me to the music press, but I'll just carry on - never complaining, never explaining (what the Brit royals do). I could be explicit, but what's the hurry? I've peed my pheromone calling card on it by writing this, so a leg cock is enough for the moment. This should be of great interest to a Dylan heavyweight, and the import apparent to him. But to acknowledge it could militate against his thesis - unless he can incorporate it. But Dylan clearly stated the origin of the song's inspiration - which is never mentioned one time. Shine your darkness: expertise in the blues? Hoodoo men say that I am?
I leave it to others to have the chance to say first what I am for now only saying elliptically. Maybe it won't leap out at anyone else, but why ever not? For me this has amazing import. But I'll never acknowledge you in the liner notes ...
Scott, as always thanks for some fantastic digging. Your reaction is shared. Look forward to reading the new article.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous, I am guessing you mean "Every Grain of Sand"?
Fred, no I don't. But thanks for commenting. Maybe it's time I uploaded some of my own material and cyber-linked with the worldwide Dylan 'community', gaunt and screechy as it may be? But I would reiterate that, had it been me, I would not have penny whistled on Yakuza.
ReplyDeleteSome intertextual puns are welling up from inside. But I'd hate to spoil the fun by ruining brilliant Bob Dylan material and upsetting post-structuralists particularly. But what do I care? I would refer you to the following, from Scott's other post, including the title from which it is derived:
QUOTE: As the writer and critic Susan Sontag observed, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art and the world: 'To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world - in order to set up a shadow world of "meanings"'. UNQUOTE.
Of course I disagree with this more than I agree with it. Cf also Gibbens's closing comments in googlable article Bow Down to Her On Sunday. Although his point is not without merit, I feel he is fudging with a false dichotomy without actually being very clear where he stands; his comments are laden with dramatic irony. Decoding does not render the original code redundant - unless the code is entirely spurious, ie dreamed up by the 'decoder'. But what if plagiarist cut-and-paste L&T Dylan were tapped into a particular, eccentric (meaning off-centre), interpretation of Lowlands which he appropriated into his songwriting without comment, WITHOUT pre-interpreting it for you, and then leaving YOU to spot that SeLotLowlands is not, contrary to routine assumption, alluding to Andrew Motion's famous poem Sonnet to a Hans Lownds but to something rather different and ingeniously so, albeit not without thematic links to the former? All this without ever breathing a dickybird. Would that not be worthy of Dylan's reputation as a true genius, largely amongst the same people who will just deflect with, 'I think he's just writing songs?' Add to that: critics in the learned intro to Confessions of a Stonewaller saying the likes of, 'It should never be stated what a work means, for that would be to destroy', even though in that same intro they might state that X seems to stands for the motifs of Hans Lownds, Woodstock, tie-dye t-shirts etc while Dylan had silently spotted what it REALLY stood for: AJ Weberman rummaging thru Jakob's diapers? Then just incorporated X into his lyrics, leaving you to assume it alluded to Andrew Motion? Mick Brown, 1984: "The messianic tone grew more intense. 'When I'm dead and gone ... ' ".
I once emailed Andrew Motion asking if he would like to peruse my work documenting the recurring motif of Jakob's soiled diapers throughout Dylan's work and the permutations of this throughout literature and the centuries preceding Dylan. His reply? 'I'd like to, but owing to work commitments I think I'd better say no'.
Amazing work you're doing here, Scott. You're laying a foundation that scholars are going to be building on for many many years. At this point, having only read Chronicles twice, I can only watch in amazement at what you dig up and say you make a convincing case for the way Dylan writes, at least in his latter day works. I'll add one more thought: this is not plagiarism. This is very complex form of literary allusion, the exact meaning of which is very difficult if not impossible to determine. But it will be fun trying. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteMike Roos
ps: I read Chronicles only once, about a year after it came out; I was too busy examining Sonnet to Jakob's Soiled Diapers to be in a rush. (For that matter I have not yet bought Together Thru Life). But I went through it with a biro, marking anything curious. I certainly marked the stuff to which you have referred here; it is most significant. There was something I was expecting to find in Chronicles, and I was not disappointed. But, although I could upload to the web what I wrote on this a few years ago, relatively trivial compared to what really interests me, I cannot prove to you that I had already thought this before reading Chronicles. But I will say this: a certain type of nut in conjunction with a certain president of the US.
ReplyDeleteNow I want someone to nut that out and post it.
signs and symbols of hidden decay; if you analyze below the surface does that destroy the overall beauty or enhance it?
ReplyDeleteI wish I’d have been a doctor
Maybe I’d have saved some life that had been lost
Maybe I’d have done some good in the world
’Stead of burning every bridge I crossed
...
Let’s try to get beneath the surface waste, girl
No more booby traps and bombs
No more decadence and charm
No more affection that’s misplaced, girl
No more mudcake creatures lying in your arms
What about that millionaire with the drumsticks in his pants?
He looked so baffled and so bewildered
When he played and we didn’t dance
You can find more voodoo in those lines; I'll be uploading it. Dylan's voodoo album (amongst other things). Band is playin' Dixie. The horns they blowin' that sound. Sultans of Swing. Way on down south, of the river. London-Mississippi town. Eng-lit grad Mark knew, also as Dylan disciple, how to conflate (like African trees in/with the Wild West).
ps: the not-so-fiendish plot is devilishly fiendish indeed.
ReplyDeleteYour blog subscribers remind me of a comment once made about me at school: 'She doesn't say much, but she sponges it all up' (tho at the time it was said in American double quotes).
ReplyDeleteThanks scott...Bob is above reproach.
ReplyDeleteillumination of his sources of inspiration
is fascinating.