Bob Dylan Revisited

By Jared W. Zelski | Monday, May 5, 2008

“Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?”
—Ballad of a Thin Man

On Tuesday, April 29, Professor Louis Renza delivered his newest project—a paper entitled “Bob Dylan’s 116th Dream: Reflections on the Lyrics”—to a crowded auditorium in the Leslie Humanities Center. Friends, colleagues, students, and Dylan admirers all eagerly greeted the former English Department chair, who is nearing the end of his career as one of Dartmouth’s most eccentric and loved English professors.

Prof. Renza, whose interests include Edgar Allen Poe and Wallace Stevens, chose a particularly ambitious and personal subject this time—the elusive meanings behind Dylan’s enigmatic lyrics. Renza, in his study of Dylan, seems to approach Dylan with a complex combination of emotion, fervent intellectualism, and personal history, almost imitating Dylan’s own songwriting. In approaching the subject, Renza cautiously plays with certain interpretations of the two songs he focuses on—“Went to See the Gypsy” and “Series of Dreams”—although the overarching theme is that Dylan’s lyrics are at once meaningful and elusive, always in between extremes.

— Dylan —

First, he cites Dylan’s “Went to See the Gypsy” as a self-reflective metaphor for his artistic crise d’esprit. In this recollection, a dancer in a hotel urges the persona to pursue a gypsy, who is staying at the hotel; after contemplation, the person goes to the gypsy’s room only to find that she has fled:

The gypsy’s door was open wide
But the gypsy was gone,
And that pretty dancing girl,
She could not be found.
So I watched that sun come rising
From that little Minnesota town.

In trying to make sense of the song, Renza rejects Dylan scholar Michael Gray’s mere biographical reading of it as an encounter with a musical icon like Elvis Presley. Rather, Renza delves deeper into the lyrics and favors a more lyrical reading. He reads the “pretty dancing girl” as Dylan’s artistic conscience, his own magnetic attraction to the “gypsy,” who embodies Dylan’s wavering desire to continue as a performer. Crowds fill the gypsy’s hotel room, yet at the same time it feels almost palpably vacant. This type of tension results from what Renza sees as Dylan’s lyrical sophistication and ambiguity. Dylan walks the thin line between here and there, surreptitiously invoking two extremes within the same song and often with the same words. It is this lack of explicitness that Renza calls the “complexity of the real.” In watching the sunrise, does Dylan find a “new morning… or a new mourning?”

As a second archetype of Dylan’s sensibilities, Renza refers to “Series of Dreams,” an unreleased song in which the persona claims that his dreams are neither “of anything specific” nor “too very scientific.” The second and last verses paint them well:

…Wasn’t making any great connection
Wasn’t falling for any intricate scheme
Nothing that would pass inspection
Just thinking of a series of dreams

…Wasn’t looking for any special assistance
Not going to any great extremes
I’d already gone the distance
Just thinking of a series of dreams

Here, the persona consciously refuses to subject his dreams—just dreams—to any type of futile examination. Renza sees this as a warning, on behalf of Dylan, to avoid interpreting his own songs. Yet, as Renza points out, the persona insists “they lack meaning, when they actually have too much meaning for him.” In a way, there is no way for Dylan to escape his dreams. Renza offers one interpretation that the dreams are actually past Dylan lyrics, although he notes that no one interpretation is ever correct with Dylan. This indecision—dreams as dreams, lyrics, experiences, or religious views—results in the ethereality that permeates his songs.

This inability to pin-point Dylan’s lyrics and intended meanings typify his entire collection of works. With Dylan, there always exists something unseen; his poetic genius is often at odds with our biographically superficial interpretations of his songs. Furthermore, the act of listening to a Dylan composition puts the listener at odds with his or herself. The songs, as Renza points out, have immediate emotional and visual effects that few poets can elicit; yet, a Dylan lyric simultaneously prompts the listener to further reflect in order to find satisfaction.

Renza goes so far as to say that everything about Dylan appears enigmatic. Perhaps there is more to the title of the newly released Dylan film, I’m Not There, than meets the eye. After all, Renza contends that Dylan’s lyrics are “significant for their lost significance.” So Dylan, a musician who turned his temperamental feelings into poetic visions, wrote perhaps the most popular—and elusive—verses of our generation. Renza suggests that this “intractable ambiguity” highlights Dylan’s artistic prowess.

To resonate with this sentiment, Renza selected the following lines from “I and I” to end his presentation:

“Noontime, and I’m still pushin’ myself along the
road, the darkest part,
Into the narrow lanes, I can’t stumble or stay put.
Someone else is speakin’ with my mouth, but I’m
listening only to my heart.
I’ve made shoes for everyone, even you, while I still
go barefoot.”

Bob Dylan Revisited

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