[published in Popular Music and Society, Fall 2001]

DOUBLE DYLAN

by Robert H. Bell

"You're gonna make me give myself a good talkin' to" 
--Bob Dylan, "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go"

     Yeats suggests that to create art, writers split and debate themselves: "Of the quarrel with others, we make rhetoric; with ourselves, poetry." Bob Dylan began his career with some quarrelsome rhetoric, forceful but single-minded utterances. Dylan's early lyrics are marked by fervor, righteous indignation, and a rigid dichotomy between them and us, villains and victims, haves and have-nots, treacherous women and betrayed men. To excoriate the wicked "Masters of War" (1962) and to affirm his own rectitude, Dylan presumptuously speaks for Christ: "Like Judas of old / You lie and deceive . . . Even Jesus would never / Forgive what you do." Tentatively, the young Dylan began to explore more complex dualities and--I will argue--dramatize more compelling quarrels with himself.

     Dylan's development indicates a more seriously comic and self-ironic interrogation. In "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" (1963), his apocalyptic vision includes the cameo appearance of a clown: "Heard the sound of a poet who died in the gutter, / Heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley . . ." In this jejune jeremiad Dylan notices the crying clown without seriously regarding him as anything more than a fringe figure. Gradually, in other songs, Dylan gives more license to clowns and fools, gargoyles and grotesques. Unleashing his humor strengthened his prophetic songs. Envisioning the last day, "When the Ship Comes In" (1963) blends salty yarn, scriptural idiom, and comic gusto: Dylan was learning how to make disparate, even contradictory, elements cooperate and cross-pollinate. This time, when "the time will come up," the mood is not dreadful but cheerful; the rhythm is jaunty, anticipating change with excited energy. The effect of "When the Ship Comes In" is less like Dylan's "Hard Rain" or "Masters of War" than Frost's "Once By the Pacific," counterpointing the dire prophecy with an ebullient playfulness. When the seas split, something cosmic is surely imminent, but it's the morning that "will be breaking," not all the world and its sinners. Nature participates, rejoices in the cataclysm: "Oh the fishes will laugh / As they swim out of the path / And the seagulls they'll be smiling." If there's a touch of Frost's wry self-irony, there's also a dollop of fairy tale wonder, of domesticated miracle: Dylan sings not as Jeremiah but as Mr. Tambourine Man, enjoying and celebrating this mysterious voyage. Liberation busts the chains of the sea, brings the ship to port, illuminates every face. It's still an apocalyptic encounter under the aegis of eternity: "And like Pharaoh's tribe / They'll be drownded in the tide, / And like Goliath, they'll be conquered." But now Dylan's Seer is enabled by irony, humor, and a sense that he hears himself playing a role: an all-too-human prophet, amused by the fine line between cosmic and comic--a single sibilant, as Nabokov delighted to remind us.

   As fervently as Dylan delivered prophecies, he joyously played games, questioning his role as messiah: that crying clown glimpsed in the gutter eventually becomes a much more significant and ubiquitous figure, the fool within. Dylan's doubleness, his "jocoserious" debate between competing tendencies in himself, is robustly staged in "Changing of the Guards," written in 1978:

Sixteen years,
Sixteen banners united over the field
Where the good shepherd grieves.
Desperate men, desperate women divided,
Spreading their wings 'neath the falling leaves.

   Sixteen years earlier, at the time of "Hard Rain" and "Don't Think Twice," truth appeared easier to perceive. As of yore, the "good shepherd" suggests Christ grieving for his flock, people torn between good and evil, separated from grace but trying to recover. But in "Changing of the Guards," Dylan represents his intervention much more mysteriously and complexly than he does in his early songs:

Fortune calls.
I stepped forth from the shadows, to the marketplace,
Merchants and thieves, hungry for power, my last deal gone down.
She's smelling sweet like the meadows where she was born,
On midsummer's eve, near the tower.

Appearing from the shadows, the narrator of "Changing of the Guards" is a murky, ambiguous figure. Is he the good shepherd or a worldly individual, involved in business? Similarly, it's hard to tell whether the lady to whom he is drawn is friend or foe, captive or rebel, the sweet lady of stanza 2 and/or the ebony maid of stanza 3:

They shaved her head.
She was torn between Jupiter and Apollo.
A messenger arrived with a black nightingale.
I seen her on the stairs and I couldn't help but follow,
Follow her down past the fountain where they lifted her veil.

Evidently she is being sacrificed, if not simply victimized, as if she were an acolyte of the old order being overthrown. Signs are vague, messages delivered but undivulged. The singer remains in the shadows, elusive and obscure, observing and apparently free to move: he sees and rides past the destruction. He is also marked with an emblem of ardor--a heart-shaped tattoo, vivid but cryptic. We still don't know what his role is. More broadly, who has won and lost in this drama? If the priests and witches are traitors to the old, dying order and agents of the new dispensation, is that good, bad, or indifferent? The singer is suddenly addressing "you," not the sweet lady or the ebony maid. He is somehow more closely associated with the characters he's describing.

It's characteristic of Dylan, early and late, to depict his envisioned worlds as fantastic, biblical, or mythic realms, "where her memory is protected, / Where the angels' voices whisper to the souls of previous times." The lady, whoever she is, wakes up some man (the captain? the singer? the good shepherd?) and we fast-forward to two days later. Though the situation remains ominous, their fates undetermined, the images of waking and dawn and the anthem-like rhythm suggest the worst is past. She's not being hurt but is clutching onto him, as if being rescued. But who is this savior?

Gentlemen, he said,

I don't need your organization, I've shined your shoes,

I've moved your mountains and marked your cards

But Eden is burning, either get ready for elimination

Or else your hearts must have the courage for the changing of the guards.

Though this speaker sounds like the Good Shepherd, or the singer in his bardic robes, he specifies an odd assortment of tasks. If this is a Savior, he's an eminently human figure, shining shoes and marking cards. Dylan deliberately blurs the distinction between mage and gopher, prophet and trickster, hero and scoundrel. Maybe that is another way in which, like the desperate men and women of the opening stanza, he is "divided." The vision of Eden burning and of course the title indicate that apocalypse is nigh; "Changing of the Guards" concludes with another of Dylan's "millennial visions" (Herdman 108):

Peace will come

With tranquility and splendor on the wheels of fire

But will offer no reward when her false idols fall

And cruel death surrenders with its pale ghost retreating

Between the King and the Queen of Swords.

The final stanza of "Changing of the Guards," proclaiming peace, tranquility, and splendor, implies more than political transition; it's a vision of upheaval, devastating but necessary and good. The corrupt old order succumbs to the power and glory of the new dispensation, which brings peace and a sword. "Changing of the Guards" has an exceptionally rigorous rhyme scheme: four stanzas, five lines, with a short first line: a/b/c/b/c (sometimes the third line has the rhyme word c in mid-line). This expressive pattern suggests inevitability or rightness beyond individual vacillation or uncertainty. No joke, "Changing of the Guards" is providential design, or divine comedy.

In elaborating an unusually formal structure and in bestowing mysterious prominence upon the fool, "Jokerman," on Dylan's 1983 album Infidels, resembles "Changing of the Guards." The first line of each stanza of "Jokerman" ends with a word echoed by a rhyme in the middle of the second line but not rhymed with any words at ends of lines. Similarly, the third line of every stanza ends with a rhyme word which is reinforced by an internal rhyme in the middle of the fourth line. In addition, the rhyme word at the end of the second line is a two-syllable rhyme with the word which ends line 4. Lines 1 and 2 and lines 3 and 4 of every stanza are sentences. There are six stanzas of six lines. The last stanza is the only one that addresses Jokerman directly by name. The three-line chorus is repeated six times. This separation into stanzas is reinforced by differing dominant sounds. While there is a preponderance of S sounds, sustained in every stanza, stanza 3 also stresses M sounds, stanza 4 L sounds, and the last stanza P sounds.

Yet in "Jokerman" as in "Changing of the Guards," such stringent, meticulous patterning belies a weird narrative shiftiness. Projecting and contemplating personal identity, Dylan is notoriously elusive; as he wrote on the album notes to Highway 61 Revisited, "there is no I--there is only a series of mouths." In "Jokerman" Dylan's "negative capability," to borrow the Keatsian term, oscillates between prophet and fool. "Jokerman" has many metamorphoses: an outcast, outlaw, or impostor, even a demon, with intimations of immortality, poetic-prophetic powers, a shaman/magician, or false savior. Jokerman is inveterately double, split every which way between innocence and malice, an avatar of confusion, a paradox incarnate. But Jokerman, like Mr. Tambourine Man, is persistently, reliably regarded as "a figure of the imaginative self, a creative soul of the poet-speaker" (Day 19). It's tempting to add that whatever, whoever the subject, Dylan is nearly always talking about himself.

"Jokerman," like "Changing of the Guards," situates us at once both in biblical Palestine and in contemporary Desolation Row. Dylan invokes a Christ "Standing on the waters casting your bread," yet we can't say whether this is a savior or a showman. "Jokerman" dramatizes that fundamental Dylanesque duality, the simultaneity of contrary possibilities. (Christianity, of course, is inherently paradoxical.) This Jokerman is always shifting shapes, "Shedding off one more layer of skin, / Keeping one step ahead of the persecutor within." He seems both divinely endowed, "a man of the mountains [who] can walk on the clouds," and a performer, a pop phenom peddling snake oil: "Manipulator of crowds, you're a dream twister." His godlike attributes could be inflated self-image, or ironic exaggeration: "Michelangelo indeed could've carved out your features."

As Dylanesque identities blend, merge, disappear, and reappear, the relationship between Jokerman and the narrator vacillates unstably. Is Jokerman the same as "Preacherman" in the fifth stanza? As we glide from the Book of Leviticus and Deuteronomy (impishly rhymed with "are you only") to tear gas and Molotov cocktails, allegiances and identities, like the time and place, appear intangible: "It's a shadowy world, skies are slippery gray." Jokerman rarely clarifies or illuminates. On the contrary, the singer values his cryptic, enigmatic inscrutability. "Oh, Jokerman, you know what he wants, / Oh, Jokerman, you don't show any response." We are left to wonder whether Jokerman is anything more essential than a series of roles or masks, endlessly proliferating propensities.

Dylan's Jokerman is perhaps best understood as a Holy Fool. An inextricably protean, divided figure, his powers seem enormous: a man of the mountains who can walk on the clouds, he empathizes with martyrs, pariahs, the sick and the lame, and lashes the rich and powerful. Rooted in scripture and associated with nature, Jokerman has a Godlike beauty, serenity, and proximity to the heavens. He inhabits a world simultaneously literal and symbolic at once here and now yet ancient and mythic. The final stanza of "Jokerman" blends specificity and mystery: in a world shadowy, slippery gray, we can't confidently recognize that new-born prince, nor clearly comprehend the effect of putting the "priest in his pocket" and "the blade to the heat." But at the end of "Jokerman," the fate of the children and the link to the harlot sound promising--as does the melody, the urgent, high-spirited rush of the whole song, and the joyous refrain of the chorus. If this arrival remains an ultimate mystery, it surely sounds like Good News, and time for jubilation. "Affirming the resilience necessary to leaving things in play, the lyric bears witness to the exhilarating necessity of holding things in play, to the fundamentally unavoidable dynamic of 'not stopping' " (Day 143).

Dylan's ability to make poetry out of the quarrel with himself, to fashion lyric debates from ballads and romantic monologues, is nowhere more striking than on his 1974 album Blood On The Tracks. Many critics consider Blood On the Tracks Dylan's finest album, and it is the one I find particularly rich for literary analysis. A major source of its power is many-mindedness, its blend of voices, sometimes juxtaposing inflections incongruously, to suggest that single, fixed attitudes are inadequate, that any formulation of feeling competes with strikingly different attitudes. The dichotomy we've seen between prophet and fool is restaged as another kind of dramatic debate: to be double is simultaneously disabling and enabling, and is rendered as a more intimate experience for the singer. Blood On the Tracks is energized by pervasive uncertainty, enhanced by prismatic perspective, and complicated by multi-layered suggestivity. The voices are introspective and reflective, wary of the world's illusions yet aware of the self's delusions. Doubleness is the central quality of Dylan's best songs, and the competing roles of omniscient narrator and poor fool are most productively at work and play throughout Blood on the Tracks.

Dylan's lyrics are frequently self-reflexive, commenting on the process of singing and writing: "I can change, I swear" in "You're A Big Girl Now" expresses the lover's vow and indicates the musician's change of key. Everybody, everything, seems poeticized; even the crickets are "talkin' back and forth in rhyme." Literary references, such as an allusion to Verlaine and Rimbaud in the opening lines of "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go," seem entirely appropriate to the poetic consciousness and verbal resources of this narrator. A remarkable versifier, Dylan exploits the possibilities of poetic form more vitally and vigorously than ever. "Tangled Up In Blue" has stanzas in strict ABCBDEFEGHIHJJ rhyme scheme, forming irregular near-sonnets. The formal organization of songs on Blood On The Tracks is persistently varied and demanding. Paradoxically, Dylan renders confusing, incompatible, or bizarre states in deftly patterned forms, as if heightened formal demands permit or encourage more complicated self-dramatization and self-analysis. Within and through exacting verbal constructions, Dylan pursues his most vexing inquiries into selfhood, relationship, and unity; personal identity itself becomes a prime problem, imperfectly understood yet thoughtfully investigated. The wandering troubadour, that child of Woody Guthrie ramblin’ down those dusty roads, was always socially marginal; now Dylan's singer is frankly liminal, on perilous borders: "Well, I'm livin' in a foreign country but I'm bound to cross the line / Beauty walks a razor's edge, someday I'll make it mine" ("Shelter from the Storm").

One line the lyrics repeatedly cross is chronological sequence. Dylan's "break up of time" begins in the opening stanza of the first song, "Tangled Up In Blue." No sooner are we located "early one morning" than time is discombobulated, linearity abandoned. The narrator is in bed remembering the past, before he met his lover. Without warning, the scene shifts to the distant past where the narrator is standing beside the road and heading for the East Coast. The stanza beginning "She was married when we first met / Soon to be divorced" may or may not recount the lovers' meeting, for "she" might be another woman, someone he met driving East or at some other time and place. In either case, she is no longer with him, another fission in this song of mournful departures: "Split up on a dark sad night." It's telling that the action takes place entirely in the narrator's head; there is no present tense, no action transpiring except in his memory. Dylan's narrators are commonly recollectors rather than interlocutors, solitary men who remember conversations and now listen to themselves recounting and reflecting. Talk, so important at the time of utterance, remains significant only as recreated discourse rather than "actual" conversation, with the singer addressing a lamentably absent beloved.

Then and now, here and there are inextricably tangled and twisted. The narrator--if it is a single speaker--is all over the map, from the great north woods to New Orleans. Usually he is alone. Moments of recognition, meeting, or reunion are murky, strange.

She was standing there in back of my chair

Said to me, "Don't I know your name?"

I muttered somethin' underneath my breath,

She studied the lines on my face.

I must admit I felt a little uneasy

When she bent down to tie the laces of my shoe

Tangled up in blue.

Dylan's discontinuous time is cinematic, a version of montage, juxtaposing discrete moments. It makes a kind of sense that the woman, who may or may not be his long-lost love, greets him with what could be vague unfamiliarity or cool irony, "Don't I know your name?" and proceeds to gesture intimately, disconcertingly, like a mother lacing her child’s shoes. The woman is either a stock figure employing cliché or a sophisticated ironist teasing the narrator for being the strong and silent western hero. "Then she opened up a book of poems and handed it to me / Written by an Italian poet from the thirteenth century. / And every one of them words rang true / and glowed like burnin' coal / Pourin' off of every page like it was written in my soul from me to you, / Tangled up in blue." Here Dylan makes a startling move from John Wayne to Dante, from western potboilers to Vita Nova and Inferno. The harmonics pick up and become more varied, and the narrator sounds moved by the power of poetry and the possibility of communication.

While time continually dissolves, or loops back, some things unfortunately remain the same: the bottom keeps falling out and the narrator becomes "withdrawn." Yet he survives to fly birdlike, and presumably sing, which is the perdurable destiny of many a Dylan narrator. The last stanza provides self-conscious but dubious closure. Stanzas 4, 5, and 6 vary the ABCBDEFEGHIHJJ pattern just slightly and deliberately to prepare us for the final stanza, which returns to the original rhyme scheme, and appropriately begins, "So now I'm goin' back again. . . " Hence the speaker is "goin' back again" to "how it all got started" as both the character in a narrative and the composer of the song. This return reinforces the likelihood that he is speaking of the original woman, the redhead he awoke thinking about, but moments of clarification are regularly muddied by the pervasive sense of irreality. Fragmented linearity, that characteristically modernist quality, produces something like postmodern indeterminacy; "Tangled Up In Blue" prods us to construct identity, relationships, and narratives--but denies us reliable means of verifying our suppositions or situating ourselves comfortably anywhere.

Throughout Blood On The Tracks resolution is problematic, closure provisional--repeatedly attempted and systematically evaded. The ends of many songs remain resolutely double or defiantly open-ended, aware of the responsibility to resolve yet refusing to do so: "Oh, Mama, can this really be the end?" Like the Jack Nicholson character in Five Easy Pieces, Dylan apparently prefers "auspicious beginnings" to entangling alliances. "Tangled Up In Blues" leaves the narrator back on the road again--ramblin' ruefully, perhaps marginally enlightened and modestly fortified. Has he learned or changed? He affirms an enduring connection with his lost love, and, perhaps more hopefully, acknowledges the legitimacy of a "different point of view." Yet while proclaiming that he's going back again, he signals that the quest is probably futile. He acknowledges loss but sings with gusto and optimistic force. The tone of the music, especially its powerful rhythm, supplements, even contradicts the doleful lyrics. Throughout Blood on the Tracks contending possibilities are conveyed by a discrepancy between the lyrics and the music: the story of "Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts" saddens, but the brisk, jaunty rhythm gladdens. Knowing this is the end, he goes on, moving and singing, to "keep on keepin' on."

Another paradox charging Blood on the Tracks is the effort to organize elusive, baffling experience in insistent patterns. The emphatic formal structure of "Tangled Up In Blue" is paralleled by "Simple Twist of Fate." Its intricate rhyme scheme has six stanzas of seven lines each in a sequence of AAABBCC:

They sat together in the park {A}

As the evening sky grew dark, {A}

She looked at him and he felt a spark {A}

Tingle to his bones. {B}

'Twas then he felt alone {B}

And wished that he'd gone straight {C}

And watched out for a simple twist of fate. {C}

Conventional ballad material quickly becomes spooky. (Dylanized: to become strange.) That spark isn't what we expect or recognize, for it prompts a withdrawal from intimacy and a retreat to enigmatic introspection. Confusion and illumination are incongruously associated, as are darkness and light. What burns bright is not a revelation but the "heat of night," mysterious and ominous. Perhaps no "twist of fate" can ever be "simple." The situation isn't clarified by the appearance of a speaker, the I who remembers well: throughout Blood On The Tracks, the first-person singular is fuzzy, wavering, inclining toward and away from the third-person, such as the he "who felt alone and wished that he'd gone straight" in this song. As in his comic/apocalyptic songs, Dylan bifurcates "himself" and moves fluidly between first and third person. As Dylan remarks with uncharacteristic cogency on his notes to Biograph, "You're never quite sure if the third person is talking or the first person is talking. . . Its [sic] like Rimbaud said. I is another."

For all the obscurity of who's who, where, and when, there is much vividly rendered particularity in "A Simple Twist of Fate": music, instrument specified, details like the beat-up shade indicating a shabby honky-tonk hotel. Dylan delineates a place that seems here-and-now, down-and-out, but somehow never-never and up-and-away, situated simultaneously in the grittily contemporary and vaguely mythic. Like the narrator of "Tangled Up In Blue," this speaker awakes to confront his loneliness: he "felt an emptiness inside to which he just could not relate," a wonderful image of disconnection from his own alienation. In his desperate solitude the narrator grimly recognizes the fundamental cleavage not only from his beloved but from himself:

People tell me it's a sin

To know and feel too much within.

I still believe she was my twin, but I lost the ring.

She was born in spring, but I was born too late

Blame it on a simple twist of fate.

We noticed how often Dylan envisions doubles or twins to represent reflections of himself and to dramatize a fundamental conflict within himself. In "A Simple Twist of Fate," there is a nice mirroring or contrast between that "emptiness inside" and "too much within." The rhyme scheme also reinforces this sense of proliferating doubles, with two middle lines twice as long and twice as rhymed as the first, second, and fifth lines. The conclusion longs for a mystical connection between soul-mates, linked but separated by lost rings, pertinent birth dates, and fatal destinies.

Even by Dylan's demanding standards, the formal structure of "Idiot Wind" is unusually intricate, forming a lyric debate between dual elements. There are twelve stanzas of five lines each. Stanzas 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, and 11 maintain an a/a/b/b/c rhyme scheme, while stanzas 3, 6, 9, 12 vary, d/d/e/f/e. There is thus a symmetrical pattern or geometrical mirroring both within and among stanzas:

1, 2 4, 5 7, 8 10, 11

3 6 9 12

"Idiot Wind" begins with a burst of furious resentment, complaining about planted stories and bad press, and reminding us that Dylan is poet laureate of paranoia, a "venomous voice" (Bowden 149) fueled by fury. The speaker initially seems to blend Bob Dylan the celebrity and a John Wayne type. But this cowboy has poetry in his soul, an inner life, an emotional history, and a need to connect with his "Sweet lady." John Wayne in The Searchers would never have acknowledged these feelings, if he ever had them. Torn between Old West codes and New Age tendencies, Dylan not only locates and defines his pain, but instinctively deploys it, puts it to use, as if The Searchers glanced toward King Lear or Paul's Epistles.

I ran into the fortune-teller, who said beware of lightning that might strike

I haven't known peace and quiet for so long I can't remember what it's like.

There's a lone soldier on the cross, smoke pourin' out of a boxcar door,

You didn't know it, you didn't think it could be done, in the final end he won the wars

After losin' every battle.

The narrator of "Idiot Wind" has visionary capacity beyond the ken of any ole cow-poke: visions "shoot through my head and are makin' me see stars." He has a capacious range of vision, from the stars above to "the ditch" below. He perceives details, the smoke, the flies, the cypress trees, part of the world he's evoking, suggesting yet not revealing larger meanings or possibilities. A figure of intriguing, complex consciousness, he sees feelingly.

Still, he doesn't perceive adequately, much less ideally. "Idiot Wind" dramatizes another clash of competing forces, a battle between aspects of the singer's soul. Bob Dylan is a Gemini--words I never thought I would write with a straight face--who often represents himself as dual selves or figurative doubles. Here the split or "twinning" is particularly arresting because the narrator indicates different "truths." There's the truth of the heart or ego, which he knows intimately: "You hurt the ones that I love best and cover up the truth with lies." But he's aware of other factors and broader forces at work: "It was gravity which pulled us down and destiny which broke us apart." Instead of the egocentric "truth-attacks" of earlier songs, like "It Ain't Me Babe" or (least successfully) "Ballad in Plain D," there's a mind moving, trying to comprehend, not merely exonerating himself or blaming her: "Now everything's a little upside down, as a matter of fact the wheels have stopped, / What's good is bad, what's bad is good . . ." Anyone might be confused by these ongoing perplexities.

Confusion is a condition and a theme throughout Blood On The Tracks. Memories merge, time shifts, intimates metamorphose: "I can't remember your face anymore, your mouth has changed, your eyes don't look into mine." We're given precise delineations of strange, unaccountable behavior: "The priest wore black on the seventh day and sat stone-faced while the building burned." If memory and chronology are faltering, so is history. Dylan's album (1975) suggests both bicentennial nostalgia and revisionism: "Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skull, / From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol." Dylan's national scope recalls Woody Guthrie's exuberant anthem, "This Land Is Your Land," when government built dams and helped people; here "capitol" rhymes, wickedly, brilliantly, with "skull." But this singer isn't finger-pointing, for now he realizes his plight is partly his own making. Neither a Woody Guthrie at home with the folks in Anywhere USA, nor a noble innocent scorned by a corrupt society, this singer is a stranger in a strange land. More mature, self-questioning, the singer of "Idiot Wind" knows that some of the evil he dreads is inside him, blowing within his skull.

Perhaps this pained realization fuels his self-loathing: "Every time I crawl past your door, I been wishin' I was somebody else instead." The singer's mortal infirmity and all-too-human weakness suggest the possibility of penitence and redemption, in language delicately touched with spiritual connotations, as in "the road to ecstasy," "your ragin' glory," and "your holiness or your kind of love." Strikingly, the singer's tortured self-recognitions, though unable to save him, enable him to transcend his egocentric pride and to recognize her separate struggle. The last stanza of "Idiot Wind" both recapitulates and advances beyond his experience so far. He lapses momentarily, reiterating his privileged pain, but now marvelously (miraculously?) corrects himself, or at least supplements his imbalanced, partial perspective. At which point he can actually apologize: "And it makes me feel so sorry." The stanza sustains his doubleness in several ways:

I been double-crossed now for the very last time and now I'm finally free,

I kissed good-bye the howling beast on the borderline which separated you from me.

You'll never know the hurt I suffered nor the pain I rise above,

And I'll never know the same about you, your holiness or your kind of love,

And it makes me feel so sorry.

What began as another defense has become something much deeper, an apology and confession--not because the song might "actually" be autobiographical but because it conveys and suggests so much doubleness, the felt life, range of passion, and depth of consciousness of an extraordinary character, "a narrator attempting not to manipulate the world of the lyrics but to understand how and why its language works the way it does" (Bowden 144). The final chorus elides from "you're an idiot" to "we're idiots, babe." We've been prepared for this development: "Idiot Wind" ends with a realization rarely achieved or sustained by the young lover of the early songs that there are different perspectives, not merely bogus or spurious, but legitimate and necessary points of view. The contrasts in tone, the opposed selves, compete yet blend; out of this quarrel with himself, Double Dylan makes poetry.

"Blood on the Tracks" imagines and develops a remarkably complex, multi-layered figure, tormented by rage and despair but grasping some measure of equanimity and magnanimity, and achieving frequent flashes of humor and self-irony. This is a mind in motion, a narrator listening to himself speak. No sooner does he draw a grand comparison than he retracts or qualifies it. Introspection enables him to react, change, develop. This character has the ability to surprise us, and maybe himself, by perceiving and teasing himself. The singer manages to generalize, puncture his grandeur, evoke literary history, reinforce his authority, mock his pretensions, state a feeling directly, and conclude with a witty joke on the drama of selfhood: "Yer gonna make me give myself a good talkin' to." (No one is in danger of reading too much irony into lyrics by a writer, capable at age twenty-three, of singing, "Ah, but I was so much older then / I'm younger than that now.") No perspective on Blood On The Tracks is unqualified or single, all become provisional postures or temporary stances. Rueful self-recognition vies with protective self-evasion, including witty verbal formulation. This "Dylan" is most intriguing not for the nature of his relationships nor the unity of his personality but for the interiority and multiplicity of his experience. In "Shelter From The Storm," the singer is, again, lonely, wild, without identity ("I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form"), yet he's uncompromising and heroic. The lady providing shelter is elusive, double, mysterious: her comforting Madonna-like powers seem supernatural, or metaphorically empowered, somehow less or more or other than what she seems. As so often in Dylan's narratives, the protagonist is a mere fool, yet also a canny trickster; imperiled by some belle dame sans merci, he's learned a few tricks, including the humor of exaggeration and the efficacy of self-irony. This speaker won't be restricted to self-aggrandizing solemnity. The singer of "Shelter From the Storm" doesn't blame her treachery or incapacity, nor does he take refuge in proverbial wisdom. What lifts this questing pilgrim above the cowboy's stoic heroism is his keen receptivity and aspiring imagination. He perceives marks of weakness, marks of woe, in himself as in others. He is capable of much more than a temporary respite or one-night-stand; he seems to have experienced and reflected deeply.

As he reiterates her litany of welcome, she sounds more like the mystical lover or maternal redeemer any wandering pilgrim needs and seeks. Though "Shelter from the Storm" speaks of being stranded without love in this world, local and temporal, its Christian iconography and idiom are unmistakable: "gambled for my clothes . . . bargained for salvation." While the allegorical possibilities are marked, they are also comically exaggerated, jocoserious hyperbole--like that "crown of thorns" he graciously accepts. Raising the hope of salvation, the singer finds only temporary sanctuary. "Grace" is neither the joke it was in some early Dylan songs, nor the terrible impossibility of the 60s songs like "Desolation Row" or "Gates of Eden," nor the illusory plateau of the country phase.

Dylan's many-minded voices on Blood on the Tracks are recognizably modern and reassuringly traditional, essentially solitary, perpetually wandering, profoundly lost, "livin' in a foreign country." But he's more than your marginal, alienated antihero. He's bound "to cross the line" which seems a danger, an opportunity, a vow, and a threat all at once. Our poet-hero has learned the perilous appeal of glory, the opportunity and the cost of his quest: "Beauty walks a razor's edge, someday I'll make it mine." He breaks off, inspired yet haunted by visions of grace, never more than provisional or ephemeral, and always in danger of being exposed as poetic constructions or wily words. Though with verbal resources as rich as this, charged, rhythmic, and intricate, he is in little danger of being forgotten, thanks to "the language that he used" ("Like a Rolling Stone"), recognizing his tendency toward melodrama and suggesting the misleading quality of his similes even as he stages them.