What’s Wrong with Bob Dylan’s Biographers?

There’s also the matter of Dylan’s personal archives—a massive data dump of notebooks, contracts, manuscripts, films, tapes, and correspondence—being sold off to the University of Tulsa in 2017. Heylin’s new research draws heavily from this collection. More than a conventional, or conventionally readable, biography, A Restless, Hungry Feeling feels more like a hefty appendix to extant Dylan bios, or an advanced research seminar in Dylanology. Heylin lays out his own project a little ghoulishly, declaring it “a new kind of biography written in the same milieu as its subject but with the kind of access to the working process usually possible only after an artist’s death.” In his music and presentation of himself, Dylan has always been mercurial, recalcitrant, unknowable: a wiggly mess of creative impulses that Heylin hopes to pin down, playing the Dylanologist as lepidopterist.

At the risk of dismissing the whole venture out of hand, I can’t help but wonder how useful this is. First of all, there’s a simple matter of credibility. Heylin, like anyone who cares even a little bit about Bob Dylan, takes for granted that his subject is a master fabulist, if not a compulsive liar. From his made-up name to his imagined backstory, to his preternatural ability to mimic folk and blues forms that Heylin describes as “uncanny,” the “real” Dylan has always seemed like a bit of a phantasm. This idea, of Dylan telling truths from behind a mask, is productively mined in his 2019 collaboration with director Martin Scorsese, The Rolling Thunder Revue—an entertaining conflagration of tour doc and playful fabrication that Heylin waves away as mere “mockumentary.” If this penchant for fabulism is so deeply baked into Dylan’s DNA, then why should anyone reasonably expect that his private manuscripts or personal letters would adhere any more to the capital-t Truth?

Dispelling Dylan’s various myths, self-styled and otherwise, also has a diminishing effect. It’s like explaining a magic trick. Throughout his career, Dylan’s identity mutated—from warbling folkie to motor-mouthed rock poet to country troubadour, Christian evangelist, and beyond—as he followed his muse, or his whims, or whatever. He defies expectation and seems creatively beholden to not much beyond his own shifting fancies. I imagine this is why most people like Bob Dylan. Because this is why I like him. And if other people like him for other reasons? Well, then that only certifies his status as the man of manifold possibilities, a Bob for all seasons. Rifling through old letters and contracts for clues to the “real” Dylan can feel a little beside the point, like fact-checking The Iliad against archaeological excavations from ancient Greece. Does Heylin expect to find some smoking gun, a scrawl in an old journal reading, “I am going to make a point of performing my identity, to vex and frustrate the public, and particular critics and biographers?” Such a po-faced confessional seems unlikely, and Heylin knows it. Even the titular “double life” conceit of these new biographies seems insufficient for an artist who recently boasted of containing multitudes.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/3yCVGfJ