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He that is without sin — cast a rolling stone
By Jessica Ullian
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In 1965, Bob Dylan posed a question that has been asked thousands of times since and will be asked thousands of times more:
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?
After years studying Dylan’s words as intently as he has studied the words of T. S. Eliot, John Milton, and Alfred Lord Tennyson, Christopher Ricks has an answer: not even Dylan knows for sure.
“The song has very mixed feelings about the question how does it feel,” said Ricks, BU’s William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities, before a standing-room-only crowd at Barnes and Noble at BU on September 28. He was there to discuss his latest book, Dylan’s Visions of Sin (Ecco, 2004). “And how does it feel to be on your own is in some ways terrible and in other ways not terrible at all. Dylan has always loved questions to which the answer is yes and no.”
The notion that Ricks, widely considered among the most important English language poetry critics, should regard Dylan’s songs as belonging in the canon of great 20th-century poetry has been met with some skepticism. At the discussion, however, Ricks presented a compelling case for why the songwriter is a worthy subject, mingling his own enthusiasm for the music with detailed deconstructions of Dylan’s lyrics, inspirations, and performances.
Ricks, who earlier this year was elected Oxford’s new Professor of Poetry, and last year won the Distinguished Achievement Award of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is of course an unabashed Dylan fan. He called the singer “a genius” and opened the discussion by playing Dylan’s cover of “Red Cadillac and a Black Moustache” to remind the audience “why we are so grateful that he exists, and that we exist at the same time Dylan does.” He sat at the front of the room, eyes closed, blissfully tapping his hands and feet as the music played.
The reasons for his zeal were elucidated when he delved into the songs. Using the book’s framework of classifying Dylan’s songs according to the seven deadly sins, the four cardinal virtues, and the three heavenly graces, Ricks pointed out that Dylan meticulously uses the poet’s tools of cadence and syntax to suggest what is to be felt or understood. The book focuses on sin, he said, as a critical device that allows him to “take hold of the bundle” that is Dylan’s work. And as he told the audience, looking at the work in terms of sin reveals one of the songwriter’s great strengths: “The songs do not fall into the sins that they castigate.”
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| Christopher Ricks says in his new book, Dylan’s Visions of Sin, that Bob Dylan’s songs are also great poetic works. Photo by Vernon Doucette | |
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In “Like a Rolling Stone,” for example, the lyrics rebuke the subject for a display of pride. “You know there’s going to be a fall before you reach the word ‘proud’ of that song,” Ricks said. “One of the great things about it is that in a strange way, the song itself is not proud.” The lack of pride, he continued, stems from Dylan’s ambiguity — communicated through both lyrics and vocal delivery — about the question how does it feel, and that lack of pride is what makes the song an effective warning against the deadly sin itself.
He elaborated on the theme in discussing “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” which Ricks called “a perfect song.” Inspired by a newspaper article Dylan had read, the song is about the murder of a hotel maid and the light penalty that her privileged killer received. In Dylan’s Visions of Sin, it is catalogued under the cardinal virtue of justice. At the bookstore, Ricks said that the sin committed by the murderer is anger, and Dylan again refrains from committing the sin himself by studiously keeping his own anger out of the song.
Ricks focused on one line to demonstrate how Dylan carefully uses tempo and structure to convey the song’s principal themes of difference and inequality. “The judge ‘handed out strongly for penalty and repentance William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence,’” he said. “Syntactically, it won’t work. There’s an immense number of things wrong with it. If you believe that he’s uneducated and unimaginative, you will think something just goes wrong with his syntax and he should report to the writing program. If you think, as I do, that he’s extraordinarily innovative, then the terrible turmoil in those lines is to the point.”
Dylan has arranged each lyric to finish with an unstressed dying fall, Ricks explained, and every line has a feminine ending, in which the last syllable is not accentuated, except for the refrain.
“That’s the cadence which, in the newspaper item, caught Dylan’s ear and caught his conscience,” he said. “It’s masculine endings against feminine endings, as it’s a man against a woman, black against white, young against old, rich against poor.”
Ricks declined to play the song at the bookstore, however, saying, “This room is incompatible with being moved to tears, and there would be something wrong with you if you were never moved to tears by a song that says repeatedly, ‘Now ain’t the time for your tears.’”
Dylan incorporates the tools of poetry into his songs, Ricks said, because he grew up reading John Donne instead of Stephen King; as a result, his songs are full of references to his literary heroes. Even in an apparently simple song, such as “If Not for You,” Ricks said, the rhyme is a creative expression of a standard form: the abba structure, used in most sonnets, is altered slightly in each verse until the last, when the end rhymes of several verses are brought together in what Ricks called “a beautiful love knot” that signifies the end of the song.
“Some people think I’m making all this up, because he’s just an obscene howling hobo,” Ricks said. “(a) He is not an obscene howling hobo, and (b) he has much, much more imagination than I have. And that is really saying something, ladies and gentlemen!”
Ricks’ opinion that Dylan is neither obscene nor howling was challenged during the question-and-answer period. One audience member wanted to know if Ricks doubted Dylan’s versions of his own history, given that “he seems to be a master of creating fiction in his own life.”
Ricks replied that he is not interested “in the reduction of works of art to gossip about their creator,” and that there is always a difference and a conflict between an artist and his or her work.
Others wanted to know what his favorite Dylan album was — either Blonde on Blonde or the English version of Essential Bob Dylan — and his reaction to Dylan’s appearance in a commercial for Victoria’s Secret last year.
“Dylan likes, with comedy and a certain amount of courage, doing things that you are not altogether expecting from him,” Ricks said. “I think he likes the idea of annoying a certain type of person.”
Finally, someone asked what almost everyone must have been wondering: if Dylan had ever shared any of his ideas with Ricks, in person.
Ricks paused for a moment before answering the question about his brush with musical greatness — a meeting that took place when Dylan played at the University in November 2000, and that Ricks said left him “very touched.”
“I have met him once,” he said. “I try not to talk about it.”
8
October 2004
Boston University
Office of University Relations