Amerindian Roots of Bob Dylan's Poetry

Bob Dylan is a recognized author whose sources of inspiration have already given rise to several studies, the most monumental surely being Dylan's Visions of Sin by Christopher Ricks (2003). According to Ricks, Dylan's sources can de found in the Bible and in the Anglo-American literary corpus, in writers ranging from Shakespeare to T. S. Eliot and including Milton and Yeats. Such cultural self-centeredness could seem surprising to a French reader to whom other names immediately spring to mind, such as Baudelaire (Dylan is a skillful inventor of oxymorons, a prominent element in Les Fleurs du Mal), Verlaine, and Lautréamont, especially in his early period. Moreover, Bob Dylan's inspiration is by no means restricted to the tradition referred to by Ricks, even if it is enlarged to take in the broad spectrum of Western literatures in their entirety. Robert Zimmerman, a Northerner, is indeed fascinated by the Old South. And this very fact quite naturally explains the important place assigned in his work—and one that he readily acknowledges—to the Afro-American heritage. It is our intention here to bring to light another source of inspiration, the cultural tradition of Amerindians.

Such an approach may seem far-fetched in that, at first sight, Indians are strikingly absent from Dylan's corpus. Only on rare occasions are they mentioned explicitly: in the title of the instrumental "Wigwam,"¹ for example, or in the expression "broken treaties"² that is so hackneyed in the United States that it has become almost inoffensive. Another reference can be found in a line from the traditional "Shenandoah"³ (itself an Indian word) that Dylan arranged and recorded early on. This song speaks of the Mississippi River and contains the line "Indians camp along her border." But intuition leads one to think that the first inhabitants of the New World are not really absent from Dylan's work, which here and there resounds with echoes of a latent Indian-ness.

Geography will help us to track down these buried references. Dylan frequently expresses his attachment to the northern regions of his origins. In a song entitled "California,"⁴ he admits that he misses the climate of the North where, if nothing else, four seasons prevail. Indeed, the theme of distinctly separate seasons is omnipresent in his work. These lines make seasonal changes explicitly meaningful:

If not for you / Winter would have no Spring //

("If Not For You," New Morning)

Similarly, Dylan writes of winter landscapes, of frozen lakes and blizzards⁵ and, of course, we find summer in at least two of his songs, "Summer Days"⁶ and "In the Summertime."⁷

These examples of Dylan's attachment to his native region may well be connected with Indian-ness as expressed through an ideal feminine figure of Indian origin. The long hair of the girl in the song "Girl of the North Country,"⁸ a penultimate tribute to Dylan's homeland, endows this mythical beauty with an undoubtedly Indian character. This is brought to bear all the more so as the description of her powerful beauty is limited to just this one detail. Such an attribution of Indian-ness to long hair, common in American folklore most generally, is made explicit by the singer-songwriter in "Summer Days,"⁹ a song written four decades later and in which Dylan sings "Got a long-haired woman, she got royal Indian blood." In this song, the poet's personal voice comes to the fore in his play on ambiguity, "royal" and "Indian" being incompatible. In addition to the widespread vision of long-haired Native American women as regal, the figure of the Indian mistress, if not wife, to the white man belongs to the folklore of Dylan's native region after having long been a reality (White 1991).

Such indications encourage us to explore the Dylan corpus further in search of themes and images used by the writer and which, in the light of my extensive studies of Indian myths, cultural systems, and structural relations, may very well have their...