by Bell, Ian
The writer intended to vindicate Dylan as an artist who was ‘rearranging the entire American musical and literary landscape of the past 150 years’ with Time Out of Mind, ‘Love and Theft’ and Modern Times. Reading Polito’s lists of the great and gone, however, a reader was liable to wonder if the case for the defence might not hang the accused in the end. The abundance of ‘sources’ was daunting. Here they were, like a celestial greatest-hits package or the perfected version of what Dylan had attempted back in 1970 with his Self Portrait: ‘Crosby, Sinatra, Charlie Patton, Woody Guthrie, Blind Willie McTell, Doc Boggs, Leroy Carr, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Elvis Presley, Blind Willie Johnson, Big Joe Turner, Wilbert Harrison, the Carter Family, and Gene Austin alongside anonymous traditional tunes and nursery rhymes.’
Polito wasn’t done. He had noticed a range of reference in the so-called Dylan trilogy that had already been spotted, as a collective effort, by other avid fans, but the writer called Dylan’s use of ‘fragments’ a revelation, not plagiarism. So here were more famous names and famous titles: ‘W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, assorted film noirs, As You Like It, Othello, Robert Burns, Lewis Carroll, Timrod, Ovid, T.D. Rice’s blackface Otello, Huckleberry Finn, The Aeneid, The Great Gatsby, the Japanese true crime paperback Confessions of a Yakuza by Junichi Saga, Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, and [Flannery O’Connor’s novel] Wise Blood.’
Polito also talked about ‘folk process’, but accepted that the term was inadequate as a description of Dylan’s methods. T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were therefore recruited once again to the artist’s cause. The three albums were thereby defined as ‘Modernist collages’, as ‘verbal echo chambers of harmonizing and clashing reverberations’. Within this elaborate verbal machinery, in Polito’s account, Timrod’s presence ‘works as a citation we’re ultimately intended to notice, though no song depends on that notice’. For Polito, none of this ‘conjuring’ counted as plagiarism.
Nevertheless, one remark made by the writer almost as a joke would intrigue Scott Warmuth. Of ‘Love and Theft’, Polito wrote that he ‘wouldn’t be surprised if someday we learn that every bit of speech on the album – no matter how intimate or Dylanesque – can be tracked back to another song, poem, movie, or novel’. Warmuth returned to his listening, his reading and his Google searches.
For his part, Dylan would in due course tell Rolling Stone’s Mikal Gilmore that when it came to the appropriation of nineteenth-century texts, only ‘wussies and pussies complain about that stuff’. The artist would challenge the journalist, asking, ‘as far as Henry Timrod is concerned, have you even heard of him?’
Who’s been reading him lately? And who’s pushed him to the forefront? Who’s been making you read him? And ask his descendants what they think of the hoopla. And if you think it’s so easy to quote him and it can help your work, do it yourself and see how far you can get … It’s an old thing – it’s part of the tradition.
After conflating those who laid plagiarism charges with those who had called him Judas for taking up the electric guitar in the mid-’60s – ‘All those evil motherfuckers can rot in hell’ – Dylan stuck to a bold and simple claim. The most interesting thing about his defence, the most important thing, was the simple fact that in making use of Timrod or of anyone else he had known exactly what he was doing. Dylan was not taking refuge in the excuse that the habit was remotely ‘unconscious’.
I’m working within my art form. It’s that simple. I work within the rules and limitations of it. There are authoritarian figures that can explain that kind of art form better to you than I can. It’s called songwriting. It has to do with melody and rhythm, and then after that, anything goes. You make everything yours. We all do it.17
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Cast your mind back to the young man who set out late in the 1950s to turn himself into Bob Dylan, folk singer. The word sponge, so often used, is probably inadequate, as is the word dedication. His intensity in the pursuit of musical knowledge more closely resembled an obsession. One of his college contemporaries would tell Robert Shelton in 1966, for example, that Dylan was ‘the purest of the pure’ where folk was concerned, that while living a version of the bohemian life in the Dinkytown area of Minneapolis he ‘had to get the oldest record and, if possible, the Library of Congress record, or go find the original people who knew the original song’.18 It sounds less like fascination than a kind of need, less like a desire for knowledge a young singer could use than a desire to know everything there was to know. Dylan was greedy: he wanted it all.
He was in love with folk and blues music, of that there is no doubt. It has remained the one enduring, unquestioned affection in his existence for better than half a century. It is hard, nevertheless, to escape the feeling that Dylan’s desperate thirst for knowledge arose from an equally desperate need to complete himself, to give substance to the identity he was attempting to inhabit. Either there was more to it than just an instinct for art, or the instinct was central to the evolution of the figure called Bob Dylan. Even the fantastical tales the kid would tell about himself in his earliest days in Greenwich Village required documentation, background knowledge, as complete as he could make it or fake it. The stories of the musicians he would claim to have met and played with out on the road – to complicate matters, a few of the stories were true – needed a deep understanding of what they played and how they played. Above all, for Robert Zimmerman himself to believe in Bob Dylan called for the kind of knowledge only that unlikely character could possibly possess. Study, obsessive study, was a way of giving authority to the identity the young Dylan was trying to mould around himself.
But why would the ageing man wall himself behind quotations, allusions, borrowed texts and lifted phrases? It might be, for he has said so often enough, that he finds writing harder now than he found it when he was creating automatically and unselfconsciously in the ’60s. But as we have seen with a song like ‘Floater’, a big pile of verses only depends to a very limited degree – as best we know – on what has been borrowed. You can understand why he might want to add texture for poetic effect by drawing on a variety of sources. As Polito argued, it is a legitimate stratagem. As Vega described matters, it is also commonplace and acceptable within limits. It troubles a lot of Dylan’s fans, however. They wonder if he lards his song with the work of others as an artistic choice or because, these days, he lacks the resources to manage a Bob Dylan song unaided. His defence of the habit when talking to Mikal Gilmore – ‘You make everything yours’ – has an echo throughout literature. There remains the distinct possibility, nevertheless, that Dylan is still completing himself with the gleanings of his relentless studies, that it is a way of maintaining the edifice of his identity and the bigger, ever-present cultural edifice that bears his name.
Perhaps Polito had a point. Perhaps Dylan expects his borrowings to be ‘noticed’. Perhaps, too, he expects the people who buy his albums either to understand the folk process and the tactics of Modernism, or – and why not? – to fail to give a damn about a song’s origins if it’s a song worth hearing. Dylan is right about one thing. If simple plagiarism was the only issue, anyone could pull a book from the shelf and manufacture a Bob Dylan song. Whether Chronicles can be justified in the same manner is another question.
*
In the summer 2010 issue of the New Haven Review there appeared an essay by Scott Warmuth. You must presume the title was his. It amounted to the boldest headline yet where Dylan and his multiplicity of sources were concerned. ‘Bob Charlatan,’ it read, ‘Deconstructing Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One.’ Clearly, Warmuth had moved on from defending the artist as an exemplar of ‘folk process’. The notion that a bunch of people armed with The Poems of Henry Timrod couldn’t come up with Bob Dylan songs no matter how hard they tried was no longer a relevant detail, it seemed, where the artist’s book was concerned. Charlatan is a word with no positive connotations.
On his blog, Goon Talk, much as in the September 2006 New York Times piece, Warmut
h describes himself as a writer, musician and disc jockey.19 He scarcely does himself justice. Along with another blogger, Edward Cook, Warmuth has subjected a major artist to the kind of extensive crowd-sourced textual analysis that attracts attention. The attention, in turn, raises some serious questions where Bob Dylan’s art is concerned. After all, another word for charlatan is fraud.
Warmuth had made an appearance on the Dylan fan website Expecting Rain at the end of July 2009 with a series of observations on Chronicles: Volume One. It is fair to say they caused a good deal of interest among the faithful and a good deal of consternation. Warmuth observed, first, that a March 1961 issue of Time magazine had obviously been used to plug a great many gaps in Dylan’s memory while providing the basis for certain Chronicles anecdotes and the phrases employed in the telling. The blogger went on to explain that Ed Cook had been hard at work unearthing the debts owed by Dylan to a well-known book called Really the Blues, an autobiography written by the horn player Mezz Mezzrow with the help of the novelist Bernard Wolfe and published in 1946. Warmuth had added to the list of borrowings. Then the two men had uncovered more than a few traces of Sax Rohmer’s Fu-Manchu stories, and of a book called Raised on Radio, and of a volume entitled Daily Life in Civil War America, and of numerous lines from Jack London. Walt Whitman, Herman Melville and Timrod would be added to the list. Links with Marcel Proust and several Robert Louis Stevenson stories would be made. Most of the examples were better than plausible. As a certain kind of detective used to say, the game was afoot.
In his New Haven Review article, Warmuth came to the point quickly. Between them, he and Cook – entirely appropriately, a co-author of The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation – had discovered in Chronicles20
an author, Bob Dylan, who has embraced camouflage to an astounding degree, in a book that is meticulously fabricated, with one surface concealing another, from cover to cover.
Dozens upon dozens of quotations and anecdotes have been incorporated from other sources. Dylan has hidden many puzzles, jokes, secret messages, secondary meanings, and bizarre subtexts in his book.
Warmuth called it ‘autobiographical alchemy’. To penetrate the mystery, he had ‘studied cryptography and puzzle-solving’, he had ‘explored techniques used by crossword-puzzle solving champions’ and then ‘keyed in on how code-breakers look for patterns and anomalies, try to find a way in, and then build on their successes’. Warmuth had studied ‘sideshow talkers and pitchmen’, books on poker strategy and cheating at cards. He had looked at the interlinked worlds of magic, carnivals, medicine shows, minstrel troupes and con men. Whether he had enjoyed listening to Bob Dylan albums while all this was going on was not mentioned. To begin with, as Warmuth admits in the essay, he did not know how any of his researches could be applied to the study of the artist’s work. Chronicles was, it appears, a gift.
Warmuth and Cook would come up with a dozen pages covering the Jack London connection alone. In his essay, the disc jockey would attempt to deal with the issue of whether plagiarism matters by conceding that London’s own wholesale thefts had done his reputation no lasting harm. Once the idea of codes and hidden meanings was established, at least to the writer’s satisfaction, the next question had become obvious: what was being concealed? Warmuth would end his article by concluding that an ‘initially invisible second book’ existed within the covers of Chronicles amid the ‘amalgam’ of voices that constituted Dylan’s singular American voice. On the way to reaching that judgement, the essay observes:
In reading Chronicles: Volume One, it may be worth ignoring the perception of motion and looking instead at individual frames as puzzles in their own right. While creating what is read as a narrative, Dylan, with all his samplings and borrowings, may have been seeking to freeze-frame his image and suggest shadows of his possible self.
Warmuth’s work continues. On the Goon Talk blog and elsewhere he continues to add to the stock of alleged Dylan borrowings. Others have joined him in the hunt. The search engine hits just keep on coming and the research effort is impressive, the results undeniably intriguing. Warmuth believes they add up to a kind of ‘treasure map’. You could as easily call them a schematic diagram of the inner Dylan. Sometimes the books cited are obvious enough, sometimes oddly discrepant. So here stand the shades of Juvenal, Hemingway, Ovid, Conrad, Baudelaire, Orwell, H.G. Wells, Homer, Carl Sandburg, Henry Miller, Willa Cather, Strindberg, Pynchon, Tennessee Williams and others besides. Here are Civil War histories, here an encyclopedia of desks. Here, as though to show that Dylan knows his pre-Beat stuff, is Kenneth Patchen’s The Journal of Albion Moonlight (1941).21 One incidental service performed by Warmuth and Cook might be to have brought to a halt finally the game of speculative allusion hunting where Dylan is concerned. What point remains when a bibliography has been supplied? At the time of writing, Warmuth and like-minded souls are already hard at work unpicking Tempest, the artist’s 2012 album. On 12 August of that year, the blogger wrote:
Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One is a vast palimpsest, with the words of many other writers coming through the text, hundreds and hundreds of times. When you are aware of what the original source material is you find that the subtext often subverts the surface text or adds another meaning to it that you could not be aware of initially.
If that is what the artist is doing, another small question remains to be answered: why he is doing it? Not, surely, for all the grief he has received. In April 2010, Joni Mitchell, veteran of the Rolling Thunder Revue, set Dylan watchers abuzz across the internet by telling an interviewer, ‘Bob is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception.’22 For the record, Mitchell’s given name was not Mitchell, nor did her parents know her as Joni, but she doesn’t answer to Roberta Joan Anderson. Still: ‘a deception’.
So again you wonder: to what purpose? Just to keep the money coming in? Or because the deceit, if that’s what it is, has gone on for so long Dylan has passed the point of no return? So where stand the songs against which no allegations have been laid? Plagiarism and deception, funnily enough, are not always as they seem. If Warmuth is right about Chronicles functioning as a palimpsest, you can as well argue that in all of his twenty-first-century creations the artist is simply doing what he has always done. He is turning the invented figure of Bob Dylan into an artwork. If that’s the case, and if borrowing is part of the method, why on earth would he list his sources?
In his own blog, Ralph the Sacred River, Edward Cook has tried to deal with the entire issue of plagiarism, sorting through definitions of allusion, ‘uncredited use’, the borrower’s intention or consciousness of the borrowing, passing off – presenting the work as the borrower’s own – and the ‘presumption of originality’. Cook accepts that the last of these is ‘weak’ within a folk process that depends, or once depended, on continual reuse and adaptation. He believes, however, that originality is presumed and expected in written work. Dylan is therefore ‘arguably guilty of plagiarism’ in Chronicles. Cook, a fan, believes furthermore that in ‘the last ten years or so [Dylan] has compensated for the waning of his creative powers by over-indulging in this borrowing habit, which reaches a high point in his own autobiography’.23 The conclusion is that he should therefore own up to the habit. You can only wonder what would then remain of the work created, shorn of the illusions that are supposed to be at the heart of the great conjuring trick.
As previously observed, neither Dylan nor his publishers calls Chronicles an autobiography. It ‘explores critical junctures in his life and career’, it is described as ‘an intimate and personal recollection of extraordinary times’, but it is nowhere identified as autobiographical. An interested reader might be entitled to ask what on earth the book is, in that case, but it remains safe to call it a work of literary art. Dylan tells a good story. He incorporates essential elements of the American experience. He functions as an artist. The point made by Warmuth and Dylan himself about the Timrod borrowings i
s another statement worth adapting. You could hand the keys to the artist’s apparently extensive library to thousands of people and each of them would fail to produce Chronicles. That might be the most important fact of all.
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Chronicles: Volume One will tell you a lot about Dylan. It won’t tell you what it appears to tell you. Even the deceits are not what they seem. You don’t need to go to the extravagant lengths of Warmuth and Cook – the former would call it ‘thoroughness’ – to grasp the degree of artifice in the book. Then again, anyone who finds Dylan a slippery memoirist should cast an eye over Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975). This so-called postmodern autobiography mocks the idea of the story of a life truly told and offers up instead a seeming jumble of (possibly) connected fragments. French literature has been awash since the 1970s, in any case, with autofiction, the fictionalised autobiography, the autobiographical fiction. America has had its parallel ‘faction’ genre since Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) with Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer and others following along behind. Some people glory in the ensuing complications. They better represent reality, it is argued, than anyone’s ‘true story’. In that context, Dylan’s book is a wholly modern exercise. And surely he knows it.
There is nothing new about seemingly autobiographical writing founded on the belief that all autobiography is a kind of fiction. The joke has been around at least since Laurence Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759–67) (a book also misunderstood because of plagiarism charges). There is nothing new, either, about the conviction that all modern celebrity memoirs are hogwash, self-serving, mere inventions of the public-relations industry. Dylan has taken that dismal truth and turned it into something valuable. His peculiar dilemma, after all, is that he has spent half a century confronting people who demand ‘the truth’ about him when no such truth is available and when, as often as not, they begin from the conviction that he is forever playing games. Warmuth and Cook maintain that Chronicles: Volume One is the most elaborate game of all. They fancy that it can be played and won.