A Face like a Mask and a Voice that Croaks: An Integrated Poetics of Bob Dylan's Voice, Personae, and Lyrics

This paper seeks to more closely examine the specific literary pleasures experienced by listeners of Bob Dylan's songs. In doing so, this analysis posits that such pleasure is a response to the concurrence of three literary activities: Dylan's poetic texts are first written and then performed; Dylan's poetry is rhythmically re-written by the voice; and Dylan uses the songs to write himself—in other words, to construct a series of numerous and competing personae. This essay argues that close reading of the lyrics must therefore be supplemented by a "poetics of the voice" and a detailed analysis of the theatricality of what might be called Dylan's "games of masks." While a stylistic approach to Dylan's lyrics reveals a thrust towards writerly openness and new poetical idioms that fuse oral traditions with "high" poetry, the aesthetic and semantic uses Dylan makes of his voice are equally sophisticated. In this analysis, Dylan's voice will be approached from several angles: as an object of pleasure; as an instrument of writing that allows Dylan to create a form of oral free verse; and as a complex sign that the artist uses for pathos, self-parody, and/or to enhance his fatalistic and stoic vision of a fallen world in which "everything is broken."

The study of Dylan's "masks" will show that the musician uses archetypal poetic identities (prophet, trickster, man of sorrow, and so forth) as fictional figurations of himself that he then offers to the audience. These lyrical personae can be approached as texts that may become objects of analysis in their own right. A persona is indeed an enclosed structure with an internal coherence, an artifact composed of signs, codes, and discourses. In Dylan's case, the personae emerge from the lyrics and interact with his public image, constantly ratifying or parodying it, thus enabling the artist to ceaselessly construct and deconstruct a fictional "Bob Dylan." The songs thus eventually come to fictionalize his biography in a theater of identities that brings into play a participatory game: the audience is made to interrogate Dylan's postures and impostures and to construct apocryphal versions of his life/lives, thus further enriching in fiction the many literary pleasures derived from the songs.

Today, the critical recognition of Bob Dylan stands at an all-time high. Yet his primary artistic medium, songwriting, is still largely spurned by mainstream literary studies. For many, it remains hard to conceive that an oral form that is hybrid by definition—and, in this case, popular—might turn out to be as artistically challenging and rewarding for the audience and the critic—in terms of intellectual and aesthetic pleasure—as the open forms advocated by the poetical avant-garde of the twentieth century. In the past fifty years in mainstream academia—especially in Europe—all dominant critical discourses have held the written word in higher regard than the oral; experimentation has been favored over tradition and the "impersonal" mode thought more worthy than the "lyrical" mode. More generally, academic opinion-makers have been partial to so-called "difficult" texts: the literary merits of a given literary work have been thought proportional to its resistance to reading, and the violence with which it attacked linguistic and artistic structure has been thought to be the ultimate test of poetical strength.

Within this ideology of the arts—an inheritance of modernism, no doubt—the song as an artistic form was obviously deemed of less than secondary importance. The three well-known faults of that musical medium for literary critics can be summarized as follows: first, the fact that the historical affinity with the lyrical mode makes songs the ideal vehicle for complacent, second-rate romantic poetry; second, that songs are not meant for the page and therefore, their literary potential is restrained by the corset of a traditional poetical system (stanza-rhyme-meter) that can be easily put to music; and finally, that as a performer, the songwriter establishes no clear barrier between "entertainment" and "art"—his potential...