Love Minus Zero: The Dialectic of Existentialism and Religious Faith in Bob Dylan's Lyrics

By Peter J Brown

This thesis outlines the influence of Judeo-Christian Religious Faith and American literature of the lyrics of American songwriter Bob Dylan, who rose to prominence in the culture of 1960s America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter John Brown
• Release date: Aug 8, 2017
• ISBN: 9780648140917

Book preview

INTRODUCTION: EXISTENTIALISM AND RELIGIOUS FAITH IN DYLAN’S LYRICS

I have concentrated in this thesis on the philosophical or thematic aspects of Dylan’s work because Dylan cannot be properly understood unless one takes into account the extent to which he influenced the attitudes of his generation. Existentialism is to Dylan as Calvinism is to Melville. Dylan is a person of his time, conversant with the prevailing trends in philosophy, yet still deeply rooted in the traditional religious culture of his ancestors. During the period 1964-67 he appears to have attempted to heave off his traditional culture, but it seems that he had only a limited capacity for this sort of aufhebung, and by late 1968 he had returned even more strongly to his Jewish roots. Later in his career he espoused born-again Christianity. When I refer to religious faith in this thesis I mean the Biblical faiths of Judaism and Christianity.

Existentialism was a philosophy popular in the post-WWII period. It influenced the Beats, by whom in turn Dylan was influenced. I define existentialism as a philosophical movement characterised principally by the belief that existence precedes essence, and that to be is to perceive. Existentialism concentrates on the necessity for human freedom to act in such a way as to avoid mauvais foi, that state of interiorisation and anguish in which one feels uncomfortable in one’s own shoes, feeling as if one is not quite authentically oneself. For the existentialists, life is a continuous process of self-creation, one thought nihilating another, one individual validating another’s existence, one act redeeming another, until we come to the last minim of our existence and discover that death is the absolute nihilation. Clearly this belief is contrary to traditional Judeo-Christian belief, yet a dialectic between the two beliefs is clearly discernible in Dylan.

Dylan has certainly read and assimilated Martin Buber, who sought in the Existentialism of Sartre and Heidegger a verdict as to whether and under what conditions the character of a living human reality can be ascribed to religion (Buber, 1952, 65). Buber is critical of Sartre’s willingness to accept Nietzsche’s dictum that God is dead (Buber, 1952, 66). Buber found Sartre’s atheism to be basically different from any materialistic one (Buber, 1952, 66). Buber asks that we understand God as self-revealing and self-concealing. He chastises Sartre for viewing the silence of the transcendent as well as the perseverance of the religious need as being the great problem which besets modern man (Buber, 1952, 66-67).

Dylan was the voice of a generation which grew up after the agony of WWII, under the constant fear of the Cold War, the tragedy of Vietnam, and the evils of racism. This generation produced many individuals who sought to change these and other obvious evils. Many people of this generation took their destinies in their own hands rather than submitting to man or God or law, or indeed any destiny which was not of their own making. Therefore I think that the philosophical impulse behind this movement is worth exploring, and the attempt to relate Dylan’s work to his own existential and religious concerns will be of benefit to future researchers.

Criticism of Dylan has fallen into four broad areas, dealing with:

(a) The death theme; religious conversion; doom-ridden symbolism; imposition of the will on the World, the Flesh and the Devil; journey into the subconscious.

Michael Roos (Fixin’ to die: the death theme in the music of Bob Dylan) argues that Dylan is obsessed with death and the agents of death, which include the military-industrial complex, social prejudice and women. James W. Earl (Beyond desire: the conversion of Bob Dylan) treats Dylan’s religious conversion, arguing that Dylan’s Jokerman is Christ. Aidan Day claims of Mr. Tambourine Man that to be drawn by the tambourine music is to be drawn by the energies of the unconscious (Day, in Gray and Bauldie, 48). Reading argues in Tears of Rage: A History, Theory, and Criticism of Rock Song and Social Conflict Rhetoric 1965-1970 that the doom-ridden symbolism of ‘Hard Rain’ extends into the more complex work of 1964-66 (Reading, 106). In Reading’s view, Dylan’s confrontation with death shifted his concerns from the social to the spiritual (Reading, 115). For Snow (86), the attempt in Who Killed Davey Moore to shift the blame for Davey Moore’s death onto destiny or God’s will is a feeble excuse on the part of interested parties. Mellers (1981, 144) argues that Dylan’s monodic incantations attempt to impose the human will on the World, the Flesh, and the Devil".

Bowden (289) quotes Paul Nelson on John Wesley Harding: It is as if Jean-Paul Sartre were playing the five-string banjo and confining himself to stating all his theories in words of under four letters. Bowden (334) argues that the themes of guilt and freedom in Dylan are akin to the same themes in Hawthorne, Melville and Twain.

(b) Rhetorical content.

Gonzalez and Makay argue that Dylan’s work has a strong rhetorical content, and that Dylan borrows from himself and external sources in order to achieve intrinsic and extrinsic redundancy (Gonzalez and Makay, 5), as for example in In the Garden, where the story has strong connotations for anyone familiar with the Biblical references to the Garden of Gethsemane. They compare All Along the Watchtower with Isaiah 5: 20-21. Medcalf argues that Dylan used rhetoric as a force for social change, proceeding from the leftist tradition in America, but that Dylan lacked the political ideology of Guthrie or Seeger(Medcalf, 85).

(c) Security and freedom; dialectic of freedom and non-freedom.

Carolyn Sumner defines Dylan’s concerns as including the conflict between security and freedom. She understands personal freedom on Dylan’s part as appearing in dialogue and relationship (Sumner, 42), drawing from Scaduto (291) the revelation that he understood his writings about others to refer to no one but me. Day argues (in Gray and Bauldie, 50) that Subterranean Homesick Blues voices a characteristic American dread that in the home of the free individual freedom has been misplaced. Roos and O’Meara discover in Dylan a dialogue between freedom and non-freedom (Thomson and Gutman, 50).

(d) Cultural progenitors: Surrealism, Brecht, Eliot, Tennyson; Sartre in simple form; Surrealism and the Beats; Folk and Beat tradition.

Michael Gray seeks to establish Dylan’s work in relation to the nature of culture and the dissociation of sensibility (Gray, 19), as performative utterance and as a participant in the English literary tradition (Gray, 17-18). Gray cites various allusions to and borrowings from T. S. Eliot in Dylan (Gray, 10 et ff).

Aidan Day’s Jokerman fixes Dylan in the surrealist tradition of Andre Breton. For Day, the song I and I illustrates a theme running throughout Dylan of man in conflict with himself and with God. Day treats Desolation Row as a modernist experiment deriving from T. S. Eliot and compares the stepping stones of Baby Blue with Tennyson’s I held it truth that men may rise on stepping stones of their dead selves (Day, 80).

John Herdman draws parallels between Dylan and Brecht (Herdman, 10, 89) and notes Dylan’s capacity for what Keats called negative capability (Herdman, 20). Hersch treats Dylan as a progressive artist in the liberating tradition of the Beats. He draws parallels between Dylan and Ginsberg, as well as with Whitman (Hersch, 53). He establishes Dylan’s connection with Surrealism (Hersch, 205-210). Snow argues that Dylan proceeds from the folk and Beat traditions in America, and that he drew heavily from the Bible.

In the view of this thesis, Bob Dylan is a poet whose early work is characterised by evocations of a mood of dread, despair and the inability to compromise in relations with others. Dylan expresses a sense of being uncomfortable with his own social role which reflects Sartre’s idea of mauvais foi (Sartre, 1964a, 48) - not so much bad faith, but rather interiorisation and a sense of not belonging in one’s own shoes (Sartre, 1964a, 55-56). Also, a sense of the strangeness of Being when one confronts it with one’s senses stripped, as in Mr Tambourine Man (270).Dylan brings to his work an alienation which is existentialist in character, though alienation from the environment, oneself and society has been a common theme in American literature. Hawthorne, Poe and Melville frequently express such a mood in their work, whereas Emerson and Whitman joyously transcend it. Imre Salusinsky (43) argues that the real tradition to which Dylan belongs is the tradition of American Romanticism, of Whitman and Hawthorne and Dickinson and Thoreau – and above all of Emerson. From first to last, the one religion to which Dylan has remained true in his poems has been the Emersonian gospel of Self Reliance. William Burroughs represents alienation and morbidity at their worst, whereas Jack Kerouac represents the Emersonian tendency to wholeness. Ginsberg, Corso, and Ferlinghetti express existentialist leanings in their work. Dylan may thus be said to participate in the American Symbolist and Beat traditions.

Dylan’s musings on relational uncertainty and the horror of mortality are not philosophy, but they do belong in the existential tradition, as literature. The existential tradition is a human tradition in which Dylan participates by virtue of his humanity, and by merely existing. Anguish and dread, that is, are not the sole province of theologians, to whom they are a consequence of sinfulness and separation from God. The term Bad faith which Sartre (1956, 55-56) uses to define something of the uncanniness of being, may be taken as duplicity in a relationship, but this may be taken as a metaphor for failure to connect with God – as unbelief, that is. Duplicity in a relationship is often the product of youth and naivety, which emerges in Dylan as something to be sympathised with, or pitied. Dylan’s early poetic personality refuses to reach out and accommodate others. Dylan and Kierkegaard have in common a mood of anxiety, causeless fear and nameless guilt which Davis Dunbar McElroy (2-3) traced back to the Christian myth of the Fall. Wilfred Mellers observes that this mood in Dylan reflects Nathaniel Hawthorne’s in The New Adam and Eve, where human purpose is viewed in terms of attaining to a profounder happiness than that which Adam and Eve lost by sinning (Mellers, 1984, 23). The religious impulse has been building up in Dylan’s work since as early as 1962, in Long Ago, Far Away (Shelton, 485).

We find echoes of this sense of separation from God, and thus of a nascent existentialism, in Dylan’s rendition of old folk tunes like See That My Grave Is Kept Clean, where he expresses a mood of concern that the monument to his human existence be looked after. We find this also in Dylan’s rendition of Man of Constant Sorrow, which Mellers (1984, 122) observes to be unambiguously sorrowful, where Dylan gives voice to the Puritan notion that life is a vale of tears.

The literature on Dylan cannot be complete without a serious study of his relationship to the Existential tradition. At its best, Dylan’s work makes profound statements about: the self, as it is determined by existence and essence; the human obligation to act in an engaged fashion; the nature of reflective self-consciousness; the character of human freedom in relation to Divine purpose; the intervention of destiny in human affairs. It is essential to an understanding of Dylan, therefore, to view him in terms of his religious and philosophical impulses. His unique greatness lies in a synthesis of these.

Dylan’s search for meaning is innate and existential. It has an a priori nature which is not characteristic of constructs, if we take constructs to be linguistic machines which create reality rather than expressing a priori realities [1].Dylan’s concerns are with life and death, perception as a quality of living and nihilation of perception in death, and ultimately with a metaphysic which incorporates a dialectic of religious belief as opposed to existential atheism. His early work does not proceed from a well-schooled or comprehensive understanding of philosophy or philosophical schools of thought, but rather from concerns which have their basis in that insightful questioning which is a characteristic of giftedness.

For Dylan, the question of whether God exists is not a logical question to be subjected to analysis. It is rather a question of faith appended to a perception of mortality and human violence, to which faith in God is a cure, or at least a therapy. Dylan’s faith is not subject to any notion of constructed linguistic reality. The existence of God is for him not a philosophic proposition, but rather an inherited tradition which he has questioned of his own volition throughout his career.

Linguistic interpretation of Parmenides, for example, like Furley’s Notes on Parmenides (in Lee, Mourelatos, Rorty) (2] gives rise to the suspicion that questions of Being in Greek and subsequent Western philosophy have their basis in linguistic constructs [3]. I would assert that the question is a purely theoretic one, the province of philosophers rather than poets such as Dylan. The exegesis itself obscures the nature of the poem as poetry--a direct human response to a situation inspiring powerful emotion, in the case of Parmenides the constant alteration of darkness and light, and thus the fleeting nature of time. Also, the perception is a human perception, with the potential to be shared by any human being--a direct perception which may be defined by a school of philosophy, but is not the exclusive province of that school. I maintain in this thesis that Dylan’s lyrics are characterised by tension between religious faith and existential belief--not that they participate in the theoretical dialogue of philosophy other than as an artefact. Dylan appears to seek truth rather than seek to modify the nature of truth philosophically. Dylan is not concerned with definitions of the verb to be, but rather with characteristics of being as it is perceived, innately, by a living individual.

This thesis is concerned with Dylan’s writing as text. Musical or performative dimensions are not considered, because they have been done elsewhere (by Mellers, Williams and Bowden, particularly), whereas there is actually a need to research the philosophical basis for Dylan’s work, particularly as he was a major force in articulating the need for an end to the Cold War, which for a time seemed likely to result in the end of life of this planet. He also articulated a mood of resistance to injustices of race and class. Dylan’s concerns are the concerns of his time, and there is some need to fix them in a philosophical perspective.

Bob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941 in Little Hibbing, Minnesota of a family of orthodox Jews who believed in tradition and hard work. B.H., Dylan’s great¬ grandfather, questioned his existence fiercely, but always seemed to find an answer in God. This, of course, is what Dylan exhibited throughout his professional career (Sp, 13).The Zimmermans were among forty-three separate ethnic groups who lived on the Mesabi Range, each interested in maintaining their own separate identity (Sp, 11).The Rangers were often narrow-minded and repressed personalities committed to religious dogma (Sp, 11), and