MARK SPITZER
"BOB DYLAN'S TARANTULA: AN ARTIC RESERVE OF UNTAPPED GLIMMERANCE DISMISSED IN A RATLAND OF CLICHÉS"
"Dylan? He's the best living
American poet there is, man!"
—Andrei Codrescu.
For the most part, critics
and reviewers have always stigmatized Bob Dylan as a lousy poet, advising the
public to buy his music instead. When his book Tarantula was published
by Macmillan in 1971, the reaction was predictable, and has been ever
since—keeping in league with what is expected from that failed-artist class
bent on bashing the bards they secretly aspire to be, but can't, for lack of
imagination.
That common thought restated
for the millionth time, I'll take another unpopular stance: I have never felt a
connection with Dylan's music, nor have I felt the urge to worship him like so
many fanatics from so many different generations all over the world. Still,
there is something about him that I feel is worth appreciating.
Growing up in
Meanwhile, Dylan's popular
songs were being played daily (as they are today) on KQ92, and were just as
overplayed as the Beatles—because
But back to those whose job
it is to maintain the standard standards of a mass market thriving on lyrical
lard: their jargonistic journalism seeks not literary
genius, but rather simple rhythms to secretly pledge allegiance to, since we
all go la la la in
our heads when we walk down the street denying the silence of our minds.
Reviewers rarely being poets, though, and hardly ever scholars, it's no
surprise they're out of touch with the history of cutting-edge verse.
Robert Christgau
was the worst. He reamed Dylan in a New York Times interview when Tarantula
first came out, stating that the book "is not a literary event because
Dylan is not a literary figure."1 But the thing is, Dylan would be more of
a literary figure if Christgau hadn't set the stage
for the book's critical reception—which a herd of poetically illiterate
reviewers repeated the sentiments of for over thirty years, essentially echoing
Christgau's final damning words: "it is a
throwback. Buy his records."2
Plus, the publisher's
dismissive introduction (in which the editor refuses to identify himself)
didn't help Tarantula become recognized as an avant-garde work of
postmodern poetics. By explaining that the editors "weren't quite sure
what to make of the book—except money," then employing the disclaimer
"This is Bob Dylan's first book... the way he wrote it,"3 it's no
wonder readers had trouble understanding Dylan's innovation.
Blundering reviewers like
Steve Collins then came along and confused Dylan's readership even more by
poorly explaining the literary tradition the poetry sprang from:
Tarantula came about after poet Allen Ginsberg urged Dylan to read Maldoror by the Comte de Lautreamont (pseudonym of Isodore Lucien Ducasse) and A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud, both of them nineteenth-century French surrealist poets and writers. Surrealism is a modern movement in art and literature in which an attempt is made to portray or interpret the workings of the artist's or writer's subconscious mind as manifested in dreams. It is characterized by an irrational, non-contextual arrangement of material. Some describe it as automatic writing, that is when a writer quickly puts his random thoughts on paper without organizing them, allowing interpretation on the basis of the writer's total creative output, whether for a day or a lifetime of effort. Others call it art that is anti-art.4
Thus, we now have tons of
misinformation informing readers about what Dylan was trying to accomplish. For
one thing, Rimbaud and Lautreamont were never
"nineteenth-century surrealists," because they predated that movement
by half a century (Hey Collins, look up André Breton, 1928, and see if there's
a manifesto; Rimbaud and Lautreamont inspired the
Symbolists, who in turn inspired the Surrealists, but they never belonged to
anyone's club). Also, Surrealism may have been a Modernist movement, but it
hasn't been a "modern movement" for sixty years. One can only
conclude that Collins' malarkey about "irrational... arrangement of
material" must've come from the same place he got that baloney about a
"writer's total creative output" allowing for interpretation.
I am embarrassed for the
reviewers of Dylan, who note his poetic influences but don't have the foresight
to look into these connections. Sloppy research, though, is better than no
research at all when it comes to reporters trying to understand the purpose of
Dylan's poetics. After all, to fully perceive the fine web of music and meter
strung throughout Tarantula, it takes a "seer"—a term Rimbaud
used in defining the voyant: someone
who approaches the ideal of the impossible through a systematic derangement
of the senses—which Tarantula does in conscious dreamlike
windings.5
Such perspectives on seeing
are alien to most people who have never studied the poetics of Rimbaud, but
such lyrical language techniques were definitely visible to the visionary
Dylan. He practiced these techniques with a skill and ambition that rivaled
Rimbaud's. In fact, no other poet in the Am Po scene has demonstrated such
mastery in this department since Walt Whitman.
The evidence for this,
however, isn't in the fact that I say so; it's in the assonance and
alliteration which Dylan saw Rimbaud applying to his already super-imagistic
verse, making it more musically dimensional than anything that came before—thus,
putting an end to centuries of rhyming in France by slaughtering sonnets,
killing quatrains, and foreshadowing the future of free verse.
Dylan, though, didn't just
imitate Rimbaud's syllabic acrobatics; he observed how Rimbaud placed similar sounds
together to create melodic waves, then did it himself
in a way that is hauntingly reminiscent of Rimbaud's poetic prose. Note the
repetition of "u" and "a" sounds in the Rimbaud excerpt
below, followed by the same sounds in the Dylan excerpt following that. Also
note the "c" and "g" combinations in Rimbaud, as compared
to the "l" and "d" combinations in Dylan:
From Rimbaud's
"Bottom"
Je fus, au pied du baldaquin supportant ses bijoux adores et ses chefs-d'œvre physiques, un gros ours aux gencives violettes et au poil chenu de chagrin, les yeux aux cristaux et aux argents des consoles.6
From Dylan's "Black Nite Crash"
aretha in the blues dunes—Pluto with the high crack laugh & rambling aretha—a menace to president as he was jokingly called—go—yea! & the seniority complex disowning you . . . Lear looking in the window dangerous & dragging a mountain.7
Language aside, this Dylan
passage hardly represents an "irrational... arrangement of material;"
it is part of a high-art symphony of allegoric metaphor, fertile with
commentary on Civil Rights and twentieth-century politics through the ghosts of
Kerouac and Shakespeare via Greek mythology. And any reviewer who can't see
this is either ignorant or lazy, like those who fail to notice the same
(but less pretentious) intention in Dylan that is automatically glorified in
the canonized antics of James Joyce, a "crooner born with sweet wail of
evoker, healing music, ay, and heart in hand of Shamrogueshire...
googoos of the suckabolly
in the rockabeddy... copiosity
of wiseableness of the friarlayman
in the pulpitbarrel... wideheaded
boy!"8
"Inaccessibility"
is expected from Joyce, but not Dylan, who chose his name for a reason that his
sophomoric followers—who view rhyming clichés as poetry—refuse to acknowledge.
The Tarantula's web is therefore labeled "jibberish,"
as demonstrated by a recent listing of the "Top Five Unintelligible
Sentences From Books Written by Rock Stars" in Spin
Magazine. Dylan made the top of the list with "Now's not the time
to get silly, so wear your big boots and jump on the garbage clowns."9
It's ironic, of course, that those who claim Dylan is unintelligible assume
that his words have no meaning, but it's pathetic that they fail to notice who
the "garbage clowns" are. If such bumbling media-mongers juggling
rubbish took a moment to consider that the poet might actually be a poet and
have some insight into human nature, they might decode the metaphor.
Meanwhile, there's an
undiscovered continent of sense to be made from the seemingly nonsensical pages
of Tarantula. Because reviewers of music are not authorities on poetry,
there's a whole poetic "novel" by Dylan here waiting to be praised
for cryptic brilliance. So get past the music, Garbage Clowns, and read the
book—but slowly, and out loud, pausing with reflection.
End Notes
1. Christgau,
Robert. "Tarantula," Bob Dylan: A Retrospective, Craig
McGregor, ed. William Morrow & Co.,
2. Ibid., p. 394.
3. The Publisher. "Here Lies Tarantula," Tarantula,
Bantam,
4. Collins, Steve. "Tarantula:
Poems," Book Reviews, http://poeticvoices.com/0006BDylan.htm
(accessed 2/19/2003), 2000.
5. For more on Rimbaud's visionary aesthetics and the
impossible, see "Introduction," The Collected Poems of Georges
Bataille, Dufour
Editions, 1998 (2nd ed), pp. xii,xiii;
or Bataille, Georges. "The Malady/Greatness of
Rimbaud," translated by Emmanuelle Pourroy,
Exquisite Corpse 7, http://www.corpse.org/issue_7/ critical_urgencies/batail.htm
(accessed 2/21/2003), 2000.
6. Rimbaud, Arthur. "Bottom"
(from Illuminations), Œuvres de
Arthur Rimbaud, Mercure de France,
7. Dylan, Bob. "Black Nite Crash," Tarantula, Bantam,
8. Joyce, James. Finnegan's Wake, Penguin,
9. Compiled by Dave Itzkoff et al.
"Top Five Unintelligible Sentences From [sic] Books Written by Rock
Stars," Spin, vol. 19, no. 4, April 2003, p. 86.
[Originally published inJACK Magazine. 2/3. 2003. http://www.jackmagazine.com/issue7/essaysmspitzer.html. Reprinted by permission of the author and publisher.]