Tangled Up in Bob (Page 2)

If Greil Marcus indulges in some of the giddy associations of the lapsed graduate student, though, in Dylan's Visions of Sin, Christopher Ricks displays the Olympian but not always illuminating erudition of the eminent academic. It's quite a leap across the pond from Muddy Waters to the Oxford Professor of Poetry, and Ricks is aware that his own Anglophilic reading list is not the same as that of his venerated subject. "I certainly don't make many claims for allusion," Ricks told the Boston Globe. "I don't think that 'Lay, Lady, Lay' is an allusion to 'Come, Madam, come.' I think that there are an extraordinary number of affinities between the Donne poem ["To His Mistress Going to Bed"] and the Dylan song, and the affinities...are very illuminating." For more than 500 pages, Ricks dotes over Dylan lyrics and tries to tease out affinities between selected Dylan songs and the seven deadly sins, the four heavenly graces and his own Miltonic, Keatsian, Tennysonian and Eliotic predilections, along with puns, chummy asides and learned ruminations. Dylan is indeed a reader, who not only went through a well-known religious phase as a born-again Christian but also scattered Old Testament prophecy throughout his earlier work, particularly on the 1967 John Wesley Harding. And there's no argument with Ricks that Dylan has a way with words. But there is no evidence that Dylan ever conceived of the grand schema the professor lays out for him in Dylan's Visions of Sin. "We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us," wrote Keats, a shared favorite of Ricks and Dylan. The design of Ricks's book is palpable.

Dylan's songs, of course, are intended for the ear and not the eye. Betsy Bowden, a medieval literature scholar by training who published the first scholarly book on Dylan back in 1982, said it all in her title: Performed Literature. Dylan's lyrics, Bowden states, "are not poems. They are songs: words and music combined for oral performance." Dylan has mentioned Keats as an influence in interviews, and famously imagined Eliot and Pound "fighting in the captain's tower" in "Desolation Row," but wresting the words from the performances, and their cultural context--at least the way Ricks does it--ends up saying much about the learned author of Dylan's Visions of Sin but surprisingly little about its purported subject. Even when looking at the words themselves, Ricks's donnish sleight of hand can shockingly miss the meaning of the lyrics.

The section on Dylan's 1983 song "Blind Willie McTell" is as revealing an example as any of how Ricks can get lost in the minutiae of dictionaries and literary and biblical concordances while losing track of what the song is actually about. He discusses William Tell's arrow (since the first line of the song contains the word "arrow"), makes many references to the Psalms (not a bad hunch, since Dylan was still on the tail end of his fire and brimstone mode) and many asides to let you know that the Warren Professor of Humanities at Boston University and this year's choice for Oxford Professor of Poetry is aware of Homer's and Milton's blindness. "William Tell's arrow hit the apple on the head of the apple of his eye, his son. Since Mc means 'son of,' the son of William Tell may be living in another country under another name: William, or Willie, McTell."

Over twenty pages of precious wordplay and meta-Dylan references (to "Gotta Serve Somebody"), Ricks does not even mention that Dylan was not merely summoning up William Tell or adding the "Mc" for any fancy reason, but that McTell was an actual blues musician and the song's true subject. Blind Willie McTell was not blind because of Milton but because he was blind from birth. And the McTell of the song was so named not because of William Tell but, according to legend, because a teacher at a school for the blind had mistakenly changed it from "McTear." Music and history don't exist for Ricks's own metaphorical convenience.

"Them charcoal gypsy maidens/Can strut their feathers well/But nobody can sing the blues/Like Blind Willie McTell." Dylan's use of "charcoal" suggests that he is not only singing about black women wearing ruffled feathers but perhaps also about minstrel singers with charcoal-smeared faces, imitating and appropriating the blues, which, Dylan plainly says, McTell sings better than anyone else. Minstrelsy has long been an obsession for Dylan: He named his 2001 album Love and Theft after Eric Lott's landmark study of blackface minstrelsy of the same title, and even had Ed Harris in blackface as a minstrel fury in his 2003 film Masked & Anonymous. But for Ricks, it's all about phrase placement, dictionaries, Milton's "L'Allegro," anything and everything on Ricks's shelf but the song and its themes, racial guilt and Dylan's anxiety of influence as a white bluesman. Dylan's Visions of Sin is a cautionary tale about the kinds of elaborate misfires that can occur when his words are stripped from their musical and cultural contexts. Dylan's been with this professor, and he likes his looks, but there's something happening there, and Ricks doesn't know what it is. Still, Dylan's Visions of Sin also shows that Dylan can appeal to the passions of an extremely learned and accomplished scholar, and it's worth noting that Dylan himself invited Ricks and his wife backstage after he played a gig at BU, Ricks's turf. The conversation has been kept a secret. One hopes, at the very least, that Dylan saw his name bandied alongside canonical selections from the Norton Anthology of Poetry and felt gratified to be placed in such visionary company.

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