The interest which the academy has shown in Bob Dylan over the years has been considerable, if unreciprocated. Do You, Mr Jones?, a collection of essays on Dylan edited by Neil Corcoran, takes its title from “Ballad of a Thin Man”, with its taunting refrain “something is happening here / and you don’t know what it is / do you Mr Jones?” This is evidently a red rag to a bull: all the Dylan-loving scholars (and their lineage goes back not just to Christopher Ricks, but to Stephen Spender and Frank Kermode, inter alia) queue up to show that they do know, and that (in Corcoran’s words) Dylan’s lyrics “often do merit and repay patient expository and interpretative attention, just as complexly organized poems do”.
Only a handful of Dylan’s songs come close to falling into that category, in fact, and that handful are treated several times over in the course of these essays, because they offer ingredients on which the academy can cheerfully feed: the surreal ballads, with personae from history, myth or Dylan’s splendidly cartoonish imagination; rhyming which, at times, is as witty as that of Gershwin or Lehrer; a dependence on archetypal images in spare lyrics which allow a range of themes to be extracted or imported—religious, political, gender-based. Some of the songs even retain their propulsive or braking rhythms on the page. Most, however, are only successful as songs (and of all the contributors to Do You, Mr Jones?, only Lavinia Greenlaw makes much of the extraordinary way that Dylan sings against the natural rhythms of both the lyrics and the music, and the emotional texture this adds). Corcoran, in his introduction, duly admits the difficulty of separating the lyrics from the music. Yet, having conceded that an analysis able to treat Dylan in both musicological and literary terms at once is ideal (and instances of the achievement are cited), he confesses that the contributors he has chosen do not have the requisite expertise—and presses on regardless.
Instead, Dylan’s work is treated as poetry by special pleading: and the lyrics are analysed with contemporary tools. Reading the sometimes tenuous and sometimes banal interpretations that fill the book, one is reminded that any lyric, by its spareness, suggests larger and unwritten contextures (J. H. Prynne’s recent book-length commentary on a single Shakespeare sonnet establishes the point with brio). So Dylan becomes a peg on which we see hung the conventional garments of contemporary literary criticism: the identifying of allusions, the tracing of thematic developments or diversions, the discerning of political dissent, the worrying over gender relations, and racial, theological and geographical aspects. Christopher Butler’s piece “Dylan and the Academics” is honest enough to confront the problem. Noting that “there is scope for all sorts of scholarly activity here”, he is nonetheless sceptical of the value of that activity, and ties himself into knots rescuing himself from his conclusions. His scepticism extends to Dylan’s “allusions”, which for many other essayists are de facto signs of Dylan’s excellence:
Michael Gray thinks that “‘Go’way from my window / leave at your own chosen speed’ has a certain Donnean immediacy at the beginning of a song.” It is easy to go too far along this road. Beginning a love lyric with an imperative may not be enough. The window from “The Sunne Rising” may simply be a distraction here. And this looks suspiciously like what Philip Larkin called dipping into the myth kitty.
Butler is right (although his Larkin reference enacts the very problem he diagnoses). Other essayists, however, are unabashed: Corcoran sees the use of the vocative in one of Dylan’s songs as “a kind of Baudelairean gesture, as [in] ‘Au lecteur’, the poem which opens Les Fleurs du Mal—to which Dylan alludes in ‘Every Grain of Sand’.” Corcoran seems to mean “Oh the flowers of indulgence and the weeds of yesteryear”, which I am far from convinced constitutes an allusion. Bryan Cheyette, having introduced us to the other writers who use trains as metaphors for religious journeys, says: “That Dylan’s ‘slow train’ ushering in a new Christian age spans Kierkegaard, Guthrie and the gospel tradition gives a strong sense of its multiple resonances”, though Cheyette does confess, of another of his fancies, that “this is clearly a flagrant over-reading of this brief spoof”.
Several contributors admire Dylan’s apparent inconsistencies, with the same gusto with which they admire his thematic consistencies: he can be seen as the shamanic trickster figure also currently beloved of academic criticism, the joker, the thief; essay after essay discusses his “masks” and slippery name changes, carefully differentiating his academy-approved self-reinventions from those of “commercial” musicians—it is taken for granted that Dylan has more integrity than other singers, though nowhere is it explained quite why. But categorizing Dylan as uncategorizable, while easy enough, doesn’t leave the academic with much else to do except “celebrate”, and some essayists nonetheless pick a theme and suggest how it is elaborated throughout the oeuvre. In one essay we do, inevitably, encounter the “Bakhtinian carnival” and “Michel Foucault’s idea of a ‘heterotopia’”, along with Debord, Baudrillard and Derrida. (Of these, only Bakhtin fails to appear in an index more ornamental than useful.) It isn’t that these theorists are used to illuminate Dylan, more that Dylan is being given a pat on the back for seeming to enact those theorists’ more famous propositions.
If the professors are predictable, the poets offer more variety. Mark Ford, in unusually low gear, but stylish as always, picks up on similarities between Dylan and Emerson, mostly giving us introductory notes on the latter but concluding, winningly, that Emerson “proleptically” replies to Dylan. Simon Armitage, who seems to like neither Bob Dylan nor literary criticism, offers a grumpy piece of autobiography and inadvertently gives the impression that he has misalphabetized his record collection. Greenlaw’s piece is an interesting response to Dylan’s erotic employment of delay in “Lay Lady Lay”, Susan Wheeler’s a wholly engaging account of Dylan’s humour: these two chapters come closest to giving a sense of why Dylan is such an attractive artist.