For his whole career he’s been a fibber, a master dissembler, and a raffish raconteur: “I was more a cowpuncher than a Pied Piper,” he writes, and here at least, we might take him at his word.Crouch should not have taken Dylan at his word, in that those nine words from page 115 of Chronicles: Volume One are part of a cryptic hidden message.
What Dylan is doing here, in part, is making commentary regarding the book The Cowboy and the Dandy: Crossing Over from Romanticism to Rock and Roll by Perry Meisel, Professor of English at NYU. In the book Meisel writes about Dylan at length, and calls him the "manifest crossing of cowboy and dandy" at one point.
The word "cowpuncher" is your first clue. In the book Meisel writes about the Willa Cather novel The Professor's House, and makes this observation regarding the character Tom Overland.
The Cowboy and the Dandy, p. 93:
Nor is Tom just a cowpuncher; reflecting the book's own double stance, he is also a scientist who invents a revolutionary airplane engine and a reader of Virgil in Latin, thanks to a Spanish priest who once tutored him in New Mexico.To make sure that you catch the nod to Meisel Dylan makes a very clever and subtle move. He incorporates two distinctive elements from pages very close to Meisel's use of "cowpuncher," but he makes sure that he doesn't use any of Meisel's own words. Dylan lifts parts from Meisel's quotations of Cather. The less determined Dylan detective could perhaps catch the use of Cather, but might never tie it to Meisel.
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 116:
I really was never any more than what I was — a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze.Chronicles: Volume One, p. 114:
It seemed like every day there was a new riot in another city, everything on the edge of danger and change — the jungles of America being cleared away.The Cowboy and the Dandy: p. 92:
In a reflective enactment of it, Cather paints London in decidedly Paterian terms, recognizable by trope, terms that emphasize relief, perspective, comparison as the central mechanisms of life: Alexander sees "Parliament catch fire with the sunset," "the slender tower . . . washed by a rain of golden light and licked by little flickering flames"; "the bleached gray pinnacles" even "floated in a luminous haze" (35). Indeed, the latter metaphor is the same Paterian one that Woolf uses in "Modern Fiction" to describe life itself - "a luminous halo" (1919, 2:106). No wonder the stirrings of past love reawaken in Alexander only after his return home to Boston, including "the vibration of unnatural excitement" and "a sense of quickened life" (68).Dylan has also worked a little bit of Jack London into one of the above lines as well.
But Alexander cannot handle the new awareness brought on by the heightened role - and rule - of contrasts. So concerned does he grow about the tensions that structure him that he eventually gives their effects plain voice: "'I am never at peace,'" he says in a letter to Hilda ; "'I feel always on the edge of danger and change'" (101).
The Sea-Wolf by Jack London:
And at once, as in an instant's leap, the sun was blotted out, there was no sky, even our mastheads were lost to view, and our horizon was such as tear-blinded eyes may see. The gray mist drove by us like a rain.Some purloined Jack London appears every couple of pages in Chronicles: Volume One, frequently paired with material from another writer. In his book Bob Dylan in America Sean Wilentz writes, "Discovering a few phrases lifted from Mark Twain and Jack London in a book so engaging, fluid, and generous as Chronicles would not have been sufficient grounds for daring to knock a national treasure." Wilentz has not examined the material closely enough, and his staunch and spirited defense is off-target and based out of ignorance. It is one of the elements that will make his book date poorly. Chronicles: Volume One is a national treasure because it appears to be fluid and generous, but is actually written in code from cover to cover. It is a treasure map.
In a featurette on the DVD for Dylan's film Masked and Anonymous co-writer Larry Charles remarks, regarding the script, "I always said to everybody, 'Treat the text like a treasure map.'" I've been approaching Dylan's late work as a treasure map and I've found riches that are, clearly for some, beyond belief. In this case the golden nugget is a tip on a book that you might want to read and a nod to an author that Dylan paid attention to. Dylan's generosity is beneath the surface.
The cowboy and the cowpuncher, the dandy and the Pied Piper; yet another instance of Dylan at play. It should also stand as a clear example of why one should never underestimate Dylan or take him at his word. The scope of his schemes is so vast that it is going to take years to unravel them, especially when writers like Wilentz insist on poisoning the well and selling their subject short.
"They say that [plagiarism] is the last refuge, to which a scoundrel clings.
ReplyDeleteSteal a little and they throw you in jail, steal a lot and they make you [a best-selling author]."
As a university professor, I would flunk any student who stole as much material as Bob Dylan did in Chronicles without crediting his sources. It's one thing to rework the Samuel Johnson line ("patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel) for dramatic effect; it's quite another to write a best-selling book that steals other people's words without compensating them in any way.
i) The above prof would never know the student's essay or work were plagiarized - and would consequently give a good mark.
ReplyDeleteii) Wilentz? Well, those well-known Dylan writers who are most vocal about NOT shoveling a glimpse into the ditch of meaning (because Dylan was clearly commending his lover for so not doing) are the ones paying you the closest attention. (I, who "know" Dylan was not recommending her laziness or just [anyone's] plain censorship of others, take my time to keep up with you.) Why? Because "if the media doesn't know about it, it's not happening". Which is why it's so important to keep things OUT of the Wall St journal, for example. When you make loud noises about Dylan lyrics that have no meaning because they meant nothing to you, then you're in for a fall. But of course you'd never be able to own up to it.
iii) The London stuff does seem boring overall and to smack of cut-and-paste without a twist unless I, we, have missed the twists. Of course there are twists like Jann Wenner the unrepentant, and New Orleans psychic currents of self contradiction. Are there more, or are the glimpse-shovel censors, who still obsessively sniff your drainpipes, right about this majority of cases they were not originally referring to because Chronicles hadn't been written when they originally pontificated?