The Perplexing Puzzle of Bob Dylan and Jann Wenner, The Unrepentant

One of the responses to the theory I presented in my previous post, regarding what I see as a hidden message in Chronicles:Volume One about song interpretation, included, "I'm not saying you're wrong about it, I'm just not convinced you're right." For my unconvinced reader I will present another puzzle that Dylan seems to have planted. Since today is the fifth day of May, a date that features prominently in the song "Isis," I am tempted to discuss Dylan's use of material from Madame Blavatsky's 1877 book Isis Unveiled. Blavatsky's charlatanism does tie in with some other themes that appear in the book's hidden subtext, but that discussion will have to wait until a future date. Instead I will present a puzzle that uses some of the same elements as my previous example; a similar grafting of material from contemporary music writing and the writing of Jack London.

Are these just examples of "the chance that mimics choice" that Vladimir Nabokov writes of in "The Vane Sisters," a short story which includes a number of deliberate puzzles, including a critical acrostic for the reader to discover? I think not.

The same comment on my previous post also included, "Is Dylan really trying to make a point with cryptographs? To whom? Puzzle enthusiasts?" I believe that this is precisely what Dylan is doing. Just like many of Nabokov's narratives are built with a strategy or scheme in mind, with masked chess moves or anagrams, Dylan too has embraced a love of puzzles and has incorporated a great number of them into his memoir in order for them to be solved by the careful reader. I believe that Dylan's scheme is for real.

There are number of parallels between Dylan and Nabokov that can be useful to consider. When I read Joni Mitchell's comment that "Bob is not authentic at all" Nabokov's disdain for authenticity and sincerity came to mind. There is an interesting passage in the forward to Nabokov's Mary where he contrasts the novel with his memoir Speak, Memory. He writes, "I had not consulted Mashenka when writing Chapter Twelve of the autobiography a quarter of a century later; and now that I have, I am fascinated by the fact that despite the superimposed inventions (such as the fight with the village rowdy or the tryst in the anonymous town among the glowworms) a headier extract of personal reality is contained in the romantization than in the autobiographer's scrupulously faithful account."

The fictional version was more real for Nabokov. This is certainly something to consider when looking at the number of experiences that Dylan passes off as his own in Chronicles: Volume One, experiences which turn out to be incorporated from other sources - that Dylan is presenting what perhaps is a stronger personal reality by using the anecdotes of others.

Nabokov, like Dylan, clearly did not want to be interpreted or have his ideas paraphrased - but he certainly wanted his work to be decoded. Chronicles: Volume One is loaded with things to be decoded, I think of it as The Da Vinci Code of rock 'n' roll.

Dylan uses material from an overwhelming number of sources in Chronicles: Volume One, but it is the work of Jack London that he returns to again and again, dozens and dozens of times. Nabokov takes a potshot at Jack London in his short story "The Doorbell" and a running gag in his novel Pnin involves people not knowing who London is. Pnin visits a book store and asks for, "...a celebrated work by the celebrated American writer Jack London." The bookseller draws a blank, holds her temples and repeats, "London, London, London." Nabokov once dismissed Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad as "the writers of books for boys" and I imagine that he would probably place Jack London in the same category.

In stark contrast, Dylan seems to be a fan of these books for boys, incorporating material from each of the three into Chronicles: Volume One, ranging from the quick nod to Heart of Darkness on page 124, to the lines from over a dozen Hemingway short stories that appear throughout the book, to the long laundry list of Jack London that I've compiled.

I am intrigued by how at one point in his memoir Dylan has crafted an puzzle worthy of Nabokov by using material from Jack London, a writer that Nabokov seemingly did not respect. In the portion of Chronicles: Volume One where Dylan discusses the recording of the album Oh Mercy he writes, "Even with all the churches and temples and cemeteries, New Orleans doesn't have the psychic current of holy places. That's a cold, frozen fact."

Dylan has packed a lot into those two sentences. He is comparing New Orleans to Tangier by using material from an amazing article that Robert Palmer wrote for Rolling Stone, in which Palmer returns to Morocco to visit with the Master Musicians of Joujouka and experiences visions while in a trance state. Dylan then tags this with a reference to Jann Wenner. Here is how he did it -

From "Into The Mystic" by Robert Palmer, Rolling Stone, March 23, 1989:
"Tangier's cunningly balanced architecture of surfaces, arches, and crenelated towers serves as a kind of transformer for the spiritual electricity of the muezzin's call. In Morocco there are different kinds of electricity. This kind is called baraka, a kind of psychic current that certain holy places, sounds, and people absorb and hold like storage batteries. The receptive can plug into these sources - without getting fried, one hopes."

Dylan's sentence "That's a cold, frozen fact." is there to let you know that this reference to Robert Palmer's article is indeed intentional and not a fluke.

From the short story "Jan, the Unrepentant" by Jack London:
"He looked yearningly at that portion of Jan's anatomy which joins the head and shoulders. 'Give it up,' he repeated sadly to Lawson. 'Throw the rope down. Gawd never intended this here country for livin' purposes, an' that's a cold frozen fact.'

Jan grinned triumphantly. 'I tank I go mit der tent und haf a smoke.'

'Ostensiblee y'r correct, Bill, me son,' spoke up Lawson; 'but y'r a dummy, and you can lay to that for another cold frozen fact. Takes a sea farmer to learn you landsmen things. Ever hear of a pair of shears? Then clap y'r eyes to this.'"

The use of the line from "Jan, the Unrepentant" is meant to signify Jann Wenner. I had a great laugh at my own expense when reading London's story and trying to suss out why Dylan had used the passage. While reading the tale a second time I realized that since the character is Scandinavian his name would not have the hard "J" sound - that it wasn't Jan like "Jan-Michael Vincent," but rather Jan like..."Jann Wenner." It was a light bulb moment combined with egg on my face.

That Dylan has partnered Robert Palmer's line with a reference to the man who paid Palmer for writing it is glorious. What a clever way to pay respect to Palmer. I marvel at how much thought that Dylan must have put into that. Much of Dylan's book functions on this type of level.

I could just list page after page of similarities between the writing of Dylan and Jack London, but what that would result in is not my goal. "The suggestion of plagiarism is always sensational. When a half-page of deadly parallel is run in a newspaper, plagiarism is certainly suggested." Jack London wrote those words on April 10, 1906 in an angry letter regarding an item that had run in The New York World, one that showed more than a dozen uncanny similarities between one of London's short stories and a non-fiction article that had run in McClure's Magazine a few years earlier. I'll leave the sensational suggestions of plagiarism to Joni Mitchell and the knee jerk straw horse arguments to others, but just because it might be fodder for the media grist mill doesn't mean that we shouldn't continue to examine Dylan's work and have a discussion of what material he used from others and his possible reasons for doing it.

Adam Gopnik wrote an illuminating profile of magician Jamy Ian Swiss called "The Real Work" that ran in The New Yorker in 2008. In the article Gopnik writes about how David Blaine was preparing for an endurance feat involving sleep deprivation by reading A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson. I've been reading that book too, not only to learn about Joyce, but also to learn more about their approach to literary puzzle and problem solving, perhaps something that could be applied to learning more about Dylan the magician. One of my favorite lines in the A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake is, "Not until a sufficient number of readers have survived thousands of independent plunges will our Key become obsolete." I love the notion of plunging into a book thousands of times to see you might come up with. There is a section in Nabokov's "The Vane Sisters" regarding characters "examining old books for miraculous misprints" that touches on Finnegans Wake, mentioning "a prophetic sequence of the initial letters of Anna Livia Plurabelle" that I particularly enjoy, in that what Nabokov has his characters do is the antithesis of the measured approach that Campbell and Robinson took.

There is a passage in Lolita where Nabokov compares the stability of characters in books and how we sometimes try to impose the same expectations on people. In the book Humbert Humbert states, "Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us."

That our man Z is mercurial, labeled as Judas, engaging in things that have been taken as betrayals, whether that takes the form of going electric or finding religion or releasing a Christmas album, is hardly an original observation. Nabokov has Humbert say, "No matter how many times we reopen 'King Lear,' never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs." I suggest that the Dylan inside Chronicles: Volume One is not fixed like King Lear and if one plunges again and again into Chronicles: Volume One what one emerges with is an ever-changing Z.