Why Dylan Matters. Richard Thomas F.

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СКАЧАТЬ others want to deepen their appreciation of Dylan’s art or their own skills as songwriters. In the application, students are asked to say why they want to be in the seminar, and the responses show that Dylan’s appeal is as varied as the dimensions of his art:

      “I want to take this seminar because I want to be a better writer. I want to analyze his lyrics and internalize the reason people empathize with his sentiment. Maybe I can’t, maybe it’s innate.”

      “I’m both a singer and composer I am interested in the way Dylan marries lyrics and music.”

      “I knew all the words to ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ by the time I was four years old. My dad had played Dylan to me practically from birth.”

      “My favorite English teacher from high school loves Dylan.”

      “While Dylan may not possess the crazy guitar chops of guys like Slash or Jimi Hendrix, his lyrical genius makes his music just as, if not more, powerful.”

      “I want to gain an understanding of how music can interact with history and philosophy.”

      After twelve years of teaching the course, I have experienced firsthand the intergenerational power of Dylan. His art transcends time, and the power of his songs appeals to young adults whose parents were not yet born when Dylan started putting his words and music together. Dylan is here to stay. He has become a classic, each new album shifting the boundaries of the art he took up all these years ago. And with his 2016 award of the Nobel Prize in Literature, the world has recognized his literary merit—vindication for those who have long recognized the fact. My seminar happened to meet on October 13, 2016, the day the Nobel Prize was announced, and it was one of the high points of my teaching career to experience the utter joy of my first-year students on that day, since they knew the judgment of the committee was righteous.

      This book will end with the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm, but for now let’s visit a more recent stop there on Dylan’s long path. On April 1, 2017, Bob Dylan, still on the road at the age of seventy-five, started a twenty-eight-concert European tour with the first of two performances at the Stockholm waterfront. Earlier in the day, he had met privately with twelve of the eighteen members of the Swedish Academy to receive his diploma and gold medal for the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, which had first been announced five months before, “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” Sara Danius, academy member and its permanent secretary, reported the essentials of the private medal ceremony on her blog:

      Spirits were high. Champagne was had. Quite a bit of time was spent looking closely at the gold medal, in particular the beautifully crafted back, an image of a young man sitting under a laurel tree who listens to the Muse. Taken from Virgil’s Aeneid, the inscription reads: Inventas vitam iuvat excoluisse per artes, loosely translated as “And they who bettered life on earth by their newly found mastery.”

      Danius’s evasive “quite a bit of time was spent looking closely at the gold medal” fools nobody: everyone else in that room had seen the medal many times before. Dylan was clearly the one who must have been studying it most carefully. An artist who notices everything in the world around him, and one with a connection to Virgil’s work, as we’ll learn more about later in this book, Dylan would have been fascinated by the image on the reverse side of the medal, designed by Swedish engraver Erik Lindberg in 1902.

      The man we see here is not just any young man. He would seem to represent the poet Virgil, one of the shepherd-singers of his poem Eclogue 1, “meditating the woodland Muse” as he sings in the shade of a tree. The singer on the medal is likewise looking up at the Muse as she plays the seven-stringed lyre, or cithara as the Greeks and Romans called it—the word that gives us guitar. Beside him is depicted an ancient box (capsa) with three papyrus rolls, the young man’s supply of writing materials. Dylan knew just what he was looking at, having integrated Homeric singing and lyre playing from the Odyssey into his 2012 song “Early Roman Kings”—“Take down my fiddle, tune up my strings”—which he would perform the next day in Stockholm. Like the image, the words engraved around the medal’s rim are also Virgil’s: Inventas vitam iuvat excoluisse per artes. In its larger context the line comes from a description of the privileged place that singers have deserved in Virgil’s version of paradise in Book 6 of his epic the Aeneid:

      And Orpheus himself, the Thracian priest with his long robes,

      keeps their rhythm strong with his lyre’s seven ringing strings,

      plucking now with his fingers, now with his ivory plectrum.

      And faithful poets whose songs were fit for Apollo

      those who enriched our lives with the newfound arts they forged

      and those we remember well for the good they did mankind.

      —Virgil, Aeneid 6, tr. Fagles

      In 1945, T. S. Eliot wrote an essay titled “What Is a Classic?” devoted to Virgil, and to why the Aeneid became a classic over time. In 1948, when Eliot received his Nobel Prize in Literature, he must have been pleased to see Virgil’s line of poetry, and the image, on the medal. What Eliot wrote of Virgil as classic in his essay could apply equally to his own work The Waste Land, the classic of modernist poetry, or to the work of Bob Dylan:

      [Virgil] was, if any poet ever was, acutely aware of what he was trying to do; the one thing he couldn’t aim at, or know that he was doing, was to compose a classic: for it is only by hindsight, and in historical perspective, that a classic can be known as such.

      This is a book about Bob Dylan, the genius of my lifetime in his artistic use of the English language, and of its song traditions—just as surely as Eliot was the poetic genius of the first half of the twentieth century. It is mildly ironic that Dylan has acquired this status. After all, the mention of Eliot in his 1965 song “Desolation Row”—a song he also sang on the Stockholm waterfront on the evening of the medal award—had an iconoclastic ring to it:

      And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot

      Fighting in the captain’s tower

      While calypso singers laugh at them

      And fishermen hold flowers

      In that song, Dylan may seem to be on the side of the calypso singers and fishermen, situated like them

      Between the windows of the sea

      Where lovely mermaids flow

      And nobody has to think too much

      About Desolation Row

      As readers have noted, not only does Dylan name Eliot and Pound; in Eliot-like fashion his verse allusively builds on the ending of Eliot’s first great poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (124–31):

      I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

      I do not think that they will sing to me.

      I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

      Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

      When the wind blows the water white and black.

      We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

      By sea-girls wreathed СКАЧАТЬ