Thoughts on a Nobel Laureate

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Bob Dylan. He’s turning 81 in May, and though I’ve been a fan for well over a decade, I’ve started looking at his work through a more poetic eye as that’s a legacy we’ll be wrestling with long after his records seem dated.

To that end, I’ve been reading Christopher Ricks’ Dylan’s Visions of Sin, and while I appreciate Ricks deep dive into the lyrics I find myself wanting him to take a more rhetorical approach. That is, contextualize the lyrics with when the songs were recorded and what we know about what was happening in Dylan’s personal life as well. But Ricks is a literature professor and is doing what literature professors do.

Yes, Dylan has always been a private, puzzling artist, who resisted the moniker of “spokesperson for a generation” by having the temerity to grow. Of course, his growth and progression during the ’60s mimicked the radical changes that were taking place during the ’60s too, so he really couldn’t avoid being a product of the decade and, by extension, since he was producing art, being the spokesperson whether he wanted to or not.

But I had an interesting observation while thinking about Todd Haynes’ wonderful I’m Not There. If you haven’t seen the movie it’s not exactly a linear telling of Dylan’s life but rather a sort of catalog of his many personas and each one is represented by a different actor. Of course, Kate Blanchett’s silhouette graces the movie poster and her portrayal of Blonde on Blonde era Dylan is awesome, but Christian Bale (a fine…