USA TODAY International Edition
Something’s missing in ‘Why Dylan Matters’
The field of scholarship loosely known as “Dylanology” gathered steam in 2016, when Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The great laurel affirmed for many of us (though not all) that the legendary singer/songwriter was on a par with the immortal bards; the cultural stickiness of Dylan’s classic songs and phrases had told us so for decades.
Now, Harvard University classics professor Richard F. Thomas offers a nimble gloss on Dylan’s lyric genius with Why Bob Dylan Matters (Dey St., 323 pp., ★★g☆). Thomas, who teaches a popular freshman seminar on Dylan, doesn’t explore the breadth of Dylan’s poetry, musical influence and recorded catalog, wisely choosing not to compete with the likes of Michael Gray, whose thousand-page Song and Dance Man is the definitive treatise on Dylan’s artistry.
Instead, Thomas sticks to the lyrics and makes his case for Dylan as a poet bred from the classical tradition. To Thomas, Dylan is a kind of postmodern alchemist, a master of poetic pastiche whose informal education — in the lyricism of bards from Homer, Virgil and Ovid to Robert Burns, T.S. Eliot and even the obscure 19th-century Confederate American poet Henry Timrod — charges his songwriting with allusive depth.
To those who might argue that Dylan’s outright borrowings lessen his art, Thomas reminds us, repeatedly, of Eliot’s critical dictum that “immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.” For Thomas, Dylan’s technique is not a matter of plagiarism but of intertextuality, “a term that is most convenient in its neutrality for describing the process by which poets, songwriters, painters, composers, or artists of any genre produce new meaning though the creative reuse of existing texts, images, or sound.”
As Thomas illustrates, such recent songs as Ain’t Talkin’ and Workingman’s Blues #2, from Dylan’s 2006 album Modern Times, appropriate several lines from Ovid, transforming ancient Roman poetics into rustic Americana.
Thomas cites a number of Dylan interviews with Mikal Gilmore in Rolling Stone, most notably one in which Gilmore presses Dylan on “the controversy over your quotations … from the works of other writers.” Dylan responds that “in folk and jazz, quotation is a rich and enriching tradition. … It has to do with melody and rhythm, and then after that, anything goes. You make everything yours. We all do it.”
Dylan’s melodies and rhythms go largely undiscussed in Thomas’ book, unfortunately, since the power of Dylan’s artistry has as much to do with his music, his phrasing, his stylistic shifts. Thomas is unabashedly a fan, recalling how he packed Dylan’s album Blonde on Blonde in his trunk when he left his native New Zealand for America in 1974.
But he spends a bit too much time sifting for significance while recounting his tourist jaunt to Dylan’s hometown of Hibbing, Minn., citing the bard’s high school interest in Latin (and Little Richard). It all adds up, convincingly enough.
And yet by the concluding chapters, as Thomas describes the Nobel Prize ceremony that Dylan did not attend — though Patti Smith did, delivering a memorable version of A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall — the book rests more on Bob’s laurels than on Dylanological revelation.