By David Polanski
Not traditionally understood as a gothic artist, the writings of Bob Dylan nonetheless embody what David McNally identifies as the genre’s most radical functions: to offer unsettling imagery and subversive narratives as a means to “disturb the naturalisation of capitalism” (a system wherein “individual survival requires selling our life-energies to people on the market”), and to counter Liberalism’s denial of such “quotidian horrors” by insisting instead “that something strange, indeed life-threatening, is at work in our world” – that “something is happening” and we need to know exactly what it is. From the depraved American landscape of 1965’s “Tombstone Blues” (wherein Jack the Ripper “sits at the head of the chamber of commerce,” and government officials seek to ritualistically resurrect Paul Revere’s horse), to the apocalyptic Eden of 2006’s “Ain’t Talkin” (whose Milton-esque protagonist wanders the world seeking vengeance against greedy speculators and the god-like elites who’ll “crush you with wealth and power”), Dylan has spent more than sixty years wielding the very same “armoury of de-familiarising techniques” that McNally attributes to Shelley, Marx and other gothic artists in an effort to undermine “the structures of denial that dominate conscious life in modernity,” and to remind his fans that life under capitalism will never be anything less than “bizarre, shocking, monstrous.”
As capitalism now lumbers through its most zombified phase, it is perhaps no coincidence that Dylan’s most recent engagement with the genre is also his most overt: 2020’s “My Own Version of You,” an unconcealed retelling of Frankenstein that mirrors Shelley’s allegorical use of the creation of physical life to represent the political construction of Liberal humanism (and its crude distinction between the “species of man” and the “race of devils” that must be annihilated if the bourgeoisie are to sleep well at night). Like Shelley’s “Victor,” Dylan’s narrator believes he has struck the ideal balance between dispassionate methodology and “decency and common sense” (that his naked self-interest is “for the benefit of all mankind”), and like Victor, Dylan’s narrator views human history as an arc that bends directly towards him, one whose greatest tragedies (which he and Victor both identify as slavery in the ancient world and the colonization of the Americas) could have been prevented had the leaders of such times felt “the way that I feel.” Most damningly, both characters freely confess their intent to create not merely a new human, but a new conception of what it means to be human – in Victor’s case, “a new species” possessed by a childlike devotion to him as their father; for Dylan’s narrator, someone akin to a “robot commando,” someone who’ll play the piano for him, make him laugh, then deliver the heads of his enemies on a silver tray.
Yet, whereas Shelley’s then-Modern Prometheus fixated on the corruption and politicization of the physiological sciences, Dylan’s target is more technocratic in nature, his narrator an embodiment of those today (such as Steven Pinker, Cass Sunstein, and the cast at Vox.com) who practice a reanimated form of 19th Century scientism. Scientism, as Jackson Lears explains, represents a grotesque “redefinition of science” from “an experimental way of knowing” to “a source of certainty,” one that that “ruthlessly pares down complex events to a single mechanistic causal explanation,” and whose disciples not only reject “the traditional tools of humanistic inquiry” (e.g. “archival research, close reading, attention to variety”) but also “any attempt to understand the mind through introspection.” These qualities are on abundant display in Dylan’s narrator, who believes his master plan to be free of “insignificant details,” who considers himself immune to the vulgar passions of the lowly masses, yet who cannot help but confess to the imperious urges that linger beneath the surface of his calculations and his spreadsheets (“I pick a number between one and two/and I ask myself what would Julius Caesar do”). Later, Dylan’s narrator indulges in a sadistic fantasy wherein Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx – two figures whose concepts clash violently with the scientistic approach – are being tortured in hell, whipped with a “raw-hide lash” until the skin is torn “from their backs.”
However, to focus solely upon Dylan’s forays into gothic terrain, or even upon his more overt critiques of our technocratic overlords (from the number-crunching imperialists marked for death in “Masters of War,” to the “Chicago-school” economists – also marked for death – in “Workingman’s Blues #2”) is to miss the haunted forest for the gnarled trees. As I demonstrate in a forthcoming article in Peace, Land, and Bread, the near-entirety of Dylan’s body of work has been infused with an artistic and a political consciousness that is diametrically opposed to the counter-revolutionary reformism at the heart of the Liberal tradition. Whereas the historical origins of Liberalism are “aristocratic” in nature (developed in response to the French Revolution and the events of 1848 as a means to discourage the “dangerous classes” at home and abroad from “interfering with the process of capital accumulation”), Dylan has spent his sixty-two year career casting his lot not with “ye gifted kings and queens,” but with “The Wretched of the Earth, My brothers of the flood,” composing songs that call upon the dispossessed masses to reject the political ideologies designed to defend the predominate order, to boldly and perpetually reinvent our personal and political perceptions of the world, and to accept the reality that violent resistance is required to liberate ourselves from a world that is (by design) “ruled by violence.” Although it is unlikely that Dylan embraces a revolutionary ethos as part of his personal identity (he’s become quite the corporate lackey in recent years, and his 1983 defense of the colonization of Palestine represents an ethical lapse impossible to ignore), he has nonetheless fulfilled his duty as an artist by exploring fields of perception and emotion that exist beyond his own intellectual and spiritual boundaries. As such, we can identify innumerable parallels between the anti-systemic, anti-authoritarian, and relentlessly unsettling spirit of Dylan’s six-decade body of work, and the “revolutionary consciousness” that voices such as Marx, Mariátegui, and George Jackson (to whom Dylan composed a loving ode in 1971) have all deemed a prerequisite to the invention of more communal forms of political relations.
That being said, a gothic approach to the topic of “Bob Dylan” allows us not merely to identify Dylan as a slayer of Liberal demons (a snake in the garden of the capitalist world order), but to cast a tormenting light upon the uniquely vampiric realm of Bob Dylan critical studies, a realm long haunted by un-dead practices and presumptions, and long teeming with bourgeois scholars who have spent decades draining the revolutionary spirit from Dylan’s body of work. Whereas, for example, my recent paper for Affirmations: of the Modern positions Dylan’s intertextual engagement with biblical and so-called “Classical” literature as a systematic critique of the autocratic beliefs that pervade such texts, tenured fuddy-duddies such as Raphael Falco, Richard Thomas, and Christopher Ricks depict Dylan’s relationship to ancient literature as fundamentally reverent (as Dylan honoring, rather than interrogating, the Western world’s imagined cultural heritage). Quite similarly, whereas my forthcoming paper for Peace, Land, and Bread identifies within Dylan’s writings a fundamental rejection of the American political project (demonstrating how Dylan frames American history as a “Godot-like nightmare,” and America itself as “exceptional only in its propensity for sadism”), Dylan Review founder Lisa O’Neill-Sanders depicts Dylan’s writings as concerned not with America’s systemic and foundational rot, but with mere acts of “injustice,” while Graley Herren imagines Dylan as waging a “battle” on behalf of something Herren terms the American “freedom movement” (an arch of history, Herren claims, propelled not by revolutionaries such as Dylan muse Jackson, but by reformist icons like “Lincoln, the Kennedys, and King”). Most damningly, whereas I identify “My Own Version of You” as a gothic critique of corrupt scientific inquiry and Liberal hubris, a who’s who of prominent “Bobcats” (Michael Gray, Paul Haney, Laura Tenschert, and Dr. Thomas yet again) have reduced it to a winking communiqué from Dylan to his fans as to the nature of his creative process (“a literary Frankenstein,” “Dylan’s ars poetica,” a “personal” reflection of “the obsessive pursuit” to “put the parts together and create something new,” as well as an opportunity for Dylan to vent his sadistic “grudges” against Freud and Marx).
Far more troubling, however, are the attempts by influential ideologues such as Greil Marcus, Cass Sunstein, and Sean Wilentz to redirect (in a most Orwellian manner) Dylan’s anti-systemic, anti-authoritarian gaze away from the Liberal/capitalist order that has reigned predominate for the entirety of Dylan’s life and career, and subsequently towards those of us who have embraced the oft-criminalized perspectives of the anti-colonial and anti-capitalist Left. Wilentz, for example, begins his Bob Dylan in America with a tortured parallel between Dylan’s evolution as a songwriter and the personal journey of composer Aaron Copland (with whom Dylan has no substantial relationship) from youthful Communist flirt to “staunch political Liberal,” then spends the next three-hundred pages depicting Dylan as a kind of counter-revolutionary troll (as warning fans of the danger posed by “high-toned intellectualism,” as whitesplaining the true nature of inequality to the experienced activists at the “March on Washington,” and as hoisting an American flag in Paris in ‘66 so as to teach the future participants of May ‘68 a lesson about the real America). As for Sunstein, his recent keynote address at the 2023 World of Bob Dylan conference offered a strategically reductive portrayal of the revolutionary organizations active across the globe throughout the 1960s (one that erased their respective histories, methods, and goals), then positioned these now-indistinct “political movements” (many of whom were directly influenced by Dylan’s artistry) as the monochromatic antithesis to Dylan’s freewheelin’ spirit. Last, but never least, Marcus injected his influential The Old, Weird America with sentiments as jingoistic as anything uttered by the Trumpian Right, depicting the America of the 1960s as haunted by the spectre of nihilistic radicals hell-bent on rejecting democracy, rock n’ roll, apple pie, and the “covenant with God” established at Plymouth Rock, then portraying Dylan (in defiance of such devilry) as delving into the archives of the American folk tradition so as to resurrect a long-buried “national experience” without which (Marcus breathlessly warns) “all bonds” will be “dissolved,” and “people will begin to kill each other, even their own children.”
Like Edmund Burke before them, who co-opted gothic tropes in his Reflections on the Revolution in France so as to slander the radicals with “charges of cannibalism, sorcery, grave-robbing and alchemy,” Marcus, Sunstein, and Wilentz appropriate Dylan’s revolutionary spirit for counter-revolutionary ends – and like Burke, their arguments are a bluff, premised on the presumption that no one will call them out for their rhetorical distortions or dearth of historical or textual evidence. Unfortunately for Burke, that’s exactly what Thomas Paine did in his Rights of Man, offering what David McNally describes as a “deliberate provocation” wherein aristocratic landowners were portrayed as “cannibal-monsters,” and the revolutionary forces presented as “slayers” of such spoiled, snooty beasts. Fortunately for Marcus, Sunstein, and Wilentz, the realm of Dylan studies has long represented a safe haven for those harboring reactionary or otherwise counter-revolutionary sentiment (with nary a Jacobin, nor even a Girondin in sight).
It was not until recently, for example, that the decades of “racism, misogyny, [and] homophobia” espoused by influential biographer Clinton Heylin was met with a substantial public rebuke (by Laura Tenschert, in fact), and my forthcoming paper for Peace, Land, and Bread represents the first systematic rebuttal of the crude manner in which Gray, Heylin, Marcus, Wilentz, Peter Doggett, Will Kaufman, and others have for years sought to dismiss Dylan’s ode to George Jackson (and to delegitimize Jackson himself). More to the point, there exists within Dylan studies a creeping anti-intellectualism, as evidenced, in large part, by the growing antipathy among Dylan scholars towards the practice of critique. Critique, as Robert Tally notes, represents the rigorous, yet thoroughly joyous (and unabashedly political) practice of “careful reading, considered meditation, and creative speculation” through which we “affirm our collective and individual freedom,” and “imagine alternatives to our intolerable circumstances” (and without which we allow the “crassly utilitarian” opponents of the humanities “to set the terms of the debate”). Amid the political violence, existential risk, and “boundless mystifications” that mark these modern times, Tally rightly declares that the denizens of our scholarly institutions should be loudly and proudly calling for “more critique, more theory, and indeed more critical theory.” Within the un-dead dominion of Dylan studies, however, a parade of prominent figures have adopted postcritical postures centered around “surface reading,” “thin description,” and reader-response criticism, and all for the supposed benefits of the “ordinary” fan. Sean Latham, for example, has suggested there may be no “way of understanding” Dylan’s songs other than “within the moment and context of performance itself,” Anne-Marie Mai has offered a Felski-inspired call for scholars to produce “emotionally engaged,” chatroom-esque depictions of our relationship to Dylan’s music, Douglas Brinkley has decried (without offering a single example for us to scrutinize) “a new wave of over-intellectualized critical writing” that he believes has “mummified” Dylan’s artistry, and Raphael Falco has positioned his Dylan Review (the only peer-reviewed journal focused on Dylan studies) as an Edenic utopia devoted to the promotion of “coeval” perspectives as opposed to critical “quibbles” (with Falco going as far as to warn fellow scholars of the intrusion of devilish figures bearing “glozing promises” that we may yet obtain what Falco claims is “too much knowledge”). Even Heylin-slayer Tenschert has accompanied her otherwise laudable efforts to expand Dylan’s fanbase with vague denouncements of unnamed elites who have supposedly “over-intellectualized” Dylan’s music and rendered him inaccessible to younger fans (claims which echo the faux-populism of the postcritical crowd, along with the tendency of Felski and company to conjure elitist, tweed-suited strawmen with which to do battle).
So what is to be done?
In no uncertain terms, to consider the realm of Dylan studies by way of a gothic perspective is to cast aside any and all delusions of reform, and approach the matter instead as one would approach the nosferatu itself: with a sharp stake (“hardened by charring it in the fire”), a heavy iron hammer, and murderous intent. As such, my scholarly project aims not merely for the resurrection of Dylan’s long-buried revolutionary attributes (from his gothic inclinations, to his relationship to George Jackson, to his intertextual repurposing of ancient colonial and imperialistic texts for decolonial and decapitalist ends), but for the ruthless critique of the practices and practitioners most responsible for this act of critical and political vivisepulture. My recent article for Affirmations: of the Modern (one which analyzed Dylan’s six-decade engagement with the Garden of Eden motif in relation to the revolutionary theories of Franco Berardi) represented an initial volley, and my forthcoming paper on the intimate and multifaceted relationship between the respective writings of Dylan and George Jackson will pour copious amounts of fuel on this purifying fire. A monograph on such subjects will follow in due time, along with battles fought on other fronts (reviews, conferences, and online debates when appropriate), with the goal being nothing less than the utter decimation of Bob Dylan critical studies as we know it today.
To identify the spiritual and intellectual predecessor to this approach is to look no further than Huey Newton’s gothic-tinged depiction of “Ballad of a Thin Man” as a scathing deconstruction of the voyeuristic impulses of the white bourgeoisie toward Black America (as well as a celebration of the terror experienced by such oglers when they realize that those they gawk at view them as the real freaks), along with his portrayal of Dylan’s “Mr. Jones” as representative of the politicians, cops, and businessmen who “cause the conditions which make it necessary for people to go to these lengths to survive,” then “pay to see the performance the people put on.” Just as Newton rightly identified decolonial and decapitalist attributes that exist in Dylan’s writings regardless of Dylan’s awareness or intent (then thanked Dylan for all his music meant “to the Black Panther Party, and to [he and Bobby Seale] personally”), I seek to map the uncharted radicalism of Dylan’s artistry in a manner unbeholden to Dylan’s personal beliefs or approval, and I express my solemn debt to Newton for the still-smoldering critical trail he blazed. Along the same lines, the ideal modern model for this project is undoubtably Andrew Culp’s remorseless reclamation of the legacy of French theorist Gilles Deleuze from claws of reactionary factions such as the Israeli army, Silicon Valley shills, and Slavoj Žižek. Just as I aim to wrest Dylan’s artistry away from those who have recast him as a prophet of positivity, a guru of Liberal universalism, an apolitical humanist, and a bearer of the torch of Western civilization itself, Culp boldly confronts those who have reduced Deleuze to “a naively affirmative thinker of connectivity” (“the lava lamp saint of ‘California Buddhism’”) with the tormenting vision of “a different Deleuze, a darker one,” a Deleuze discovered only “when we escape the chapel choir of joy for the dark seclusion of the crypt” (a wild-eyed voice in the wilderness advocating a “revolutionary negativity” through which we wish “a happy death” upon the “calcified political forms” that sustain the capitalist world-system).
More to the point, the spiritual and intellectual antithesis to my project is undoubtably the postcritical utopia that is the Dylan Review. In addition to his pastoral vision for this particular publication, Raphael Falco actually had the nerve to ask fellow scholars (in the journal’s inaugural issue, no less) to consider whether the act of “systematic study” might hasten the “death” of Dylan’s influence as an artist, or would otherwise stifle the capacity of Dylan’s music to produce “spontaneous experiences of shared intimacy” between himself and his listeners. With such a reactionary foundation, it should surprise no one that the Dylan Review has come to embody a kind of intellectual “safe space” wherein amiable but critically mundane ruminations on Dylan’s artistry mingle with regressive efforts to immortalize the un-dead practices and presumptions that have long-haunted this critical realm (especially as they relate to Dylan’s intertextual practices and his relationship to political topics). It likewise came as no surprise to me (but I needed to be able to say that I tried) that when I submitted to the Dylan Review in 2020 an early draft of my forthcoming paper for Peace, Land, and Bread (an unapologetically “systematic study” of Dylan’s relationship to George Jackson, one which most assuredly met the journal’s stated expectations for rigor, structure, and originality, and which spoke directly to their call for papers regarding "the special topic of political authority and race in Dylan’s work"), I was informed by one of its editors that the draft had not merely been rejected, but had been deemed unworthy of even being sent out to reviewers. Far more telling than the rejection itself was the journal’s refusal to justify their decision, with the editor in question responding to my query with an assertion of the journal’s right to reject submissions (as if I was contesting such an obvious point), as well as a declaration of its desire for confidentiality. Evasions of this nature, of course, are reflective of the trepidation universal among those who construct such arcadian states, whose borders are invariably porous. To put it another way (to put it in terms that Falco might understand), such a fair foundation he has laid whereon to build their ruin.
Accordingly, I stand on the lookout for lost souls laboring within this fragile Xanadu whose minds might be excited by the prospect of the decimation of Dylan studies as we know it – and as always, I will continue to find allies among those on the front lines of the global struggle against climate change, fascism, and all the other horrid by-products of capitalist development. Although there is much to admire, for example, in the efforts of Tenschert, Harrison Hewitt, and Rebecca Slaman to use social media to cultivate a more youthful and diverse cohort of “Bobcats,” the (almost entirely) depoliticized manner in which they approach Dylan’s artistry flies rather brazenly in the face of the political awakening and radicalization that has transpired in recent years among this planet’s youngest generations (developments which have, unsurprisingly, caused ruling class elites such as Sunstein so much consternation, and which inspired no less than three Dylan scholars – Marcus, Wilentz, and Gregory Pardlo – to attach their names to the deeply reactionary 2020 “Harper’s Letter”). The youngest and most open-minded among us are increasingly recognizing that our species no longer has the luxury of mere political reform, and as such, are increasingly embracing (as the most direct and practical path towards a more humane, sustainable future) the kinds of “love-inspired,” thoroughly egalitarian, and unapologetically confrontational approaches associated with the decolonial and decapitalist traditions. Bluntly put, a radical Dylan is a relevant Dylan to the next generation of scholars and fans, and thoughtful, well-meaning folks like Tenschert, Hewitt, and Slaman would be wise to realize that no amount of social mixers, amiable podcasts, or Dylan-themed karaoke nights (however lovely such things may be) can compare to the comforts of revolutionary comradeship and the pleasure of knowing we will leave this world far better than we found it.
So, comrades (and future comrades), let us get on with it. Let us sharpen our stakes, and polish our pitchforks, and whatever other pointed metaphors may apply, and do the work that must be done (and do it together). Or as Dylan once so darkly declared, “this is how I spend my days – I came to bury, not to praise.”
