- 1 “Through me many long dumb voices”, “Through me forbidden voices”. Whitman, 2006 (1855), p. 61.
- 2 Dylan, 2004, p. 288.
1In an allusion to Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”, some four years after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, Bob Dylan entitled the opening track of his latest album Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020) “I Contain Multitudes”. In doing so, he attempted much more than to consolidate his place within the American literary canon. Much like the bard of Leaves of Grass, though using different instruments and singing in times in which the quarrels and controversies of the day bestowed an equally important but distinct meaning upon these words, Dylan was asserting his right to contradiction, indeed to non-coincidence with oneself (“Very well then, I contradict myself,” admits Whitman in the same poem). Furthermore, Dylan claims not only the right, but the vocation of the artist to harbor within his own singing voice those voices issuing from the colorful and overflowing crowds of our modern world1. This intertextual nod continued the discreet work carried out by the singer over the decades to explain his persona and his poetic positioning, not through flashy media appearances but in the mode of the treasure hunt. This Whitmanian echo was a logical follow-up to the revelation of Rimbaud’s “I is another” traced fifteen years earlier in Chronicles, Volume One2. Beyond the double literary filiation, Dylan reaffirmed his creative freedom and responded to those of his detractors who, over the years, had reproached him for intertwining his songs, and his voice, with those of other artists less legitimate than himself.
- 3 On the dialectics of the individual and the collective in speech, see Meschonnic, 1982, p. 94-98.
2This issue of Cahiers de littérature orale continues an exploration of Dylan’s work in light of this question of the plurality of voices, understood both in an empirical sense and in a more abstract way, on a cultural, social, and historical level. Bob Dylan occupies a rather unique position in recent history because of his growing integration within the literary field, which shifts and blurs the boundaries between so-called “popular” culture, that of songs and orality, and the “legitimate” sphere. He did not win the Nobel Prize for Literature by publishing collections of poetry in addition to his work as a singer, but rather received this honor in and through orality, by making his voice, his voices, resound over the years. The contributors to this issue, for the most part in the wake of ethnopoetics, problematize the Dylanian voice by probing into how it contextualizes an event. This question is not only aesthetic; it invites an approach combining elements of technicality and keen sensitivity to historical, cultural, and even political questions, which play out in the integration of a multitude of voices in the emergence of the voice of our artist. This approach is grounded in a multiplicity of listenings to, and in the construction of hermeneutic relationships with the voice that becomes a plural in such an emergence. The study of the fluctuations of the voice within the same song, or across the performances of the same song, must be informed by a broader reflection on the social and cultural issues of the voice event, which is by definition the site of a subtle dialectic between the plural and the singular3.
3More concretely, in the present foregrounding of the plurality of Dylanian voices, we wish to highlight the inexhaustible quantity of voices, in the enunciative sense of the term, which express ideas and emotions, describe recent or past images and events, and depict their social context by narrative configuration as well as by rhetorical design. These varied forms of human expression, which together make up the complex network of social portraits present in Dylan’s songs, are so deeply intertwined that the voices which can be identified within them remain essentially polymorphic, often elusive. But the plurality of Dylanian voices is not only an enunciative phenomenon, it also incorporates the realities of sound and music. The virtuosity of the singer stems not only from his talent as a writer; it plays out at the junction of vocalization as perceived manifestation of a subjectivity, merging the musical material and the verbal form with all of their intricate potentialities. Vocal technique (intonation, nasalization, vocal fry, etc.) is not just a layer of beautiful wrapping with which the verbal message is delivered. It is part and parcel of the verbal means and the discursive motives deployed by the singer-songwriter. This interpenetration of the physical voice with the functionality of vocal and verbal expressivity must be accounted for if one wishes to grasp the multiplicity of aesthetic traits that emerge in performance as rich indexes of tradition and innovation. Mirroring in the layers of oral performance the dialogism once theorized in literature by Mikhail Bakhtin4, this approach will reveal vocal constructions which constitute points of articulation of language in context, narrators in performance, composers in lyrical landscapes, or even lyricists in their narratives. All the voices or types of voices inscribed in the song contain their own potentials and constraints, and merge with others through a dialogical process in which all the major corpora of the speech arts participate, whether an establishment recognizes them as “literary” or not. The rich layering of voices that strikes Dylan’s listener brings together timbres, intonations, registers, genres, and narrative strategies in the performance, at the junction of vocal technique and verbal composition.
- 5 Dylan, 2022.
- 6 Harvey, 2001, p. xx.
4The recent publication of The Philosophy of Modern Song reveals the fine ear with which Dylan listens to the voices of other artists5. From his formative years soaking up Folkways Records6 to his recent homage to Jimmy Reed on Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan is never so much a literary genius as when he channels other voices. Anytime he is called upon to speak about himself, he prefers to seize upon the occasion to evoke the voices that have shaped his own. In this way, the vocal polyphony specific to so many of his songs constitutes an apprenticeship in listening as well as a stroll through the pages of the history of American popular music. Through his musings and his probings into the qualities of other singers and their works, as well as in the vocal polyphony that holds the passionate attention of the authors of this volume, we meet a song apprentice with a fine-tuned ear and deep respect for his masters, who has become a teacher of sorts, guiding his students through the vinyl grooves of the history of American popular music. Listening itself emerges as vocality, an oral transmission of earlier voices that resonate through the imagination, the heartbeat, and the vocal cords of a man whose life’s work may be summed up as the express and resolute attentiveness to the voices of others. These voices become fully embedded in the enunciative, rhetorical, narrative, and vocal designs of Dylan’s own songs as well as in his covers, forming a choir within a singular voice. The poetic patterning giving way to a Dylan song is identifiable by listeners, though the choir of voices conjured from the artist’s most intimate listenings will not cease to escape us.
- 7 Hymes, 1981, p. 79-141.
- 8 Lecercle, 2019.
5A Dylan song performance invites us to question, far beyond the scholarly archeology of references, the way in which we decide, individually and collectively, what is relevant within a performance, what makes an event (even if we are talking about the event of an influence, of a reminiscence), of what constitutes the moment when a voice emerges, when an inflection shifts it and singles it out. Words, voices that “take place”, such is the object par excellence of ethnopoetics since Dell Hymes’s “Breakthrough into Performance”7, and in this, the Dylanian corpus, although vastly studied and interpreted by experts, still has much to teach us. The role of the listener, immersed in a verbal and musical bath of Americana in which countless more or less situatable speakers pierce through, between archetypes, singers of the past and literary creations, is called upon to participate in an apprenticeship through listening which allows, on the basis of pre-existing cultural knowledge, to detect and interpret a multitude of minute vocal nuances which bring out singularity out of multiplicity, and vice versa. The same process of singularization of the plural and pluralization of the singular is at work in the relationship between the many scholarly allusions and the mobilized popular culture: the vocal and verbal art “calls out” (interpelle in the sense of Lecercle8) Dylan as author from the crowd of forgotten voices of the old blues and folk repertoire as much as it thwarts the individual vocality of the author by endorsing these voices.
- 9 Thomas, 2017.
- 10 Mai, 2018.
- 11 Hampton, 2019.
- 12 Nainby & Radosta, 2019.
- 13 Starr, 2021.
- 14 Otiono & Toth (ed.), 2019.
6The present publication takes its place in the polyphonic concert of post-Nobel publications on Dylan’s work. It does so by embracing a general movement towards the establishment of the song corpus within the academic field, particularly in literary circles, while asserting the specificity of a viewpoint greatly colored by the heritage of ethnopoetics. Among the works published after 2016, several polarities can be observed, even though the publications that lean towards one or the other of these polarities complement more than they contradict each other. A clear trend, widely deployed in reaction to the controversial dimension of many responses to the 2016 Swedish surprise, has been to delve into the depths of the literary complexity, particularly the formal and intertextual aspects, of the Dylanian corpus. This is notably the case with Richard F. Thomas’s book, Why Bob Dylan Matters9 (2017), as well as Anne-Marie Mai’s Bob Dylan the Poet, published the following year10. Another trend has been to emphasize the poetic specificities of Dylan’s songwriting, combining lyrics and music, akin to Timothy Hampton’s Bob Dylan’s Poetics: How the Songs Work11 (2019), or even developing an approach centered around the concept of performance, as done by Keith Nainby and John M. Radosta in Bob Dylan in Performance. Song, Stage, and Screen12 (2019), and also Larry Starr in Listening to Bob Dylan13 (2021). Within this choral ensemble, one particular publication lays solid and fruitful foundations for the study of polyphony in Dylan’s work. Published in 2019, the collective work directed by Nduka Otiono and Josh Toth under the title Polyphonic Bob Dylan: Music, Performance, Literature14, delves into the question of vocal plurality from a literary standpoint, while also paying careful attention to the performance and musical dynamics of the songs. The editors and their authors propose elaborate frameworks for the study of Dylan’s polyphony as an elaborate construct of his literary art, not despite his performance and sound dynamics, nor as an exception to the quiet configuration of words on a page. This collection of studies fully characterizes the singer-songwriter as a literary agent, both challenging and building on a vast body of literature that includes, consciously and seamlessly, distinct qualities of oral and written forms. The editors of the collection Polyphonic Bob Dylan respond in their introduction to the great debate that challenges the legitimacy of a singer-songwriter being awarded a Nobel for literature, informing their readers:
In large part, the purpose of this collection is to interrogate the ways in which Dylan’s work engages or provokes this odd anxiety about the nature, or finite boundaries, of the literary–an anxiety that became ever more apparent in the hours and days and weeks that followed Danius’ announcement. While various journalists and bloggers and fellow musicians and writers published or posted or tweeted congratulatory “defenses” of Dylan, just as many (if not more) lamented or mocked the Swedish Academy’s “surprising” decision. Either way, Dylan’s status as Nobel laureate was approached as a notable exception–something that challenged (for good or ill) the very definition of “literature.” It’s hard not to hear in these various defenses and condemnations an echo of the anxiety surrounding the novel’s growing popularity in the late eighteenth century.15
7Otiono and Toth’s collection of studies provides not only a wide-reaching exploration of the polyphonic contours and avenues in Bob Dylan’s art. The editorial introduction prepares us for the way in which Dylan studies (especially as they have become institutionalized by the Nobel win) participate in the polyphonic dynamics of literature and literary scrutiny, giving way to the outburst of voices that seek to conserve or revitalize literary forms and expectations, responding to these voices and thereby becoming a part of the dialogical processes at work in Dylan’s œuvre. For all these voices, as pointed out by the authors, emerge in response to the “odd anxiety” caused by Dylan’s prize, and to which he later responded, as discussed earlier, by singularizing his essential polyphony: “I Contain Multitudes”.
- 16 On meta-pragmatics, see Catharine Mason’s paper, “Voice and Voicing: Genre, Poetics, and Metapragma (...)
8While the major focus of Otiono and Toth’s collection is the polyphonic elements and operations, formal structures and dynamics as well as theoretical problematics that arise in specific studies, the present volume seeks to highlight the actual voices and voicings that push and pull their way through the singular voice of the controversial artist that is Bob Dylan. Our authors engage in analyses of both historical and performative contextualizations as they are indexed in the voices of the singer’s musical masters, other literary artists, fictional characters, and archetypes, as well as those of the singer and listeners as identified in metapragmatic schemes16. This approach makes it possible to envision a synthesis between the performative (and empirical) dimension present in some recent publications, enriched by musicology and pragmatics, and the attention to the historicity of discourses inherited from literary studies. The question of the plurality of voices is thus strategic in that it invites one to position oneself at the intersection of these two levels of analysis: the description of the singular voice that resonates, that takes place in the present of the performance and connects the artist and listeners; and the historicity of the voice, this complex cultural and ideological sediment that comes into play in the projection of subjectivity, and by virtue of which the individual voice is never truly isolated, as it is traversed through and through by a multitude of other voices. The studies presented here offer various ways to approach and methodologically position oneself in the face of this plurivocality.
9Cyril Vettorato delves into the complex references —musical, literary, historical, social, ideological— and their intersections behind the construction of Dylan’s voice as an authentic and even authoritative hybrid of the voices of master blues singers in his breakthrough into performance as both polyphonic and singular. Focusing on Dylan’s first album, Bob Dylan, the author of this article takes us back to the context of its recording in the response by journalists and other listeners to this youthful voice in its formative years to show us that Dylan’s unique voice is a result of both socio-cultural dynamics and his own deliberate expressivity. Two primary questions guide Vettorato’s exploration into four blues covers on Bob Dylan: how did a youthful white singer emerging from a distinctly different background from that of the blues singers he admired cultivate a voice that was perceived as so authentically inhabited by those old masters? And to what extent did the context of an emerging form of popular music contribute to the construction of the voice we know today as Bob Dylan?
10Fabio Fantuzzi brings our attention to the influences, effects, and interstices of two sources that Dylan pulls from in the unique polyphonic interplay of his literary art: the teachings of Norman Raeben in Dylan’s own practice of the visual arts; and the unique dialogical structure of the Talmud. The author reflects on the words of Dylan himself in various interviews with regard to the influences of his creative process. Through this autobiographical as well as biographical, but especially dialogical lens that highlights voices and perceptions of voices in Dylan’s oeuvre, Fantuzzi insists on the intertextuality that is always at play in a Dylan song. Fantuzzi exposes the ways in which the artist challenges the normative spatial and temporal constraints of text as akin to the commentary that surrounds a biblical text on a Talmudic page. And he compares the voices that emerge in Dylan’s songs to the semi-abstract sketch of a human figure in the Raeben painting that is found in illustration to his study. Zooming in on the characters and the environment of “Tangled Up in Blue”, the author of this study describes Dylan’s characters as “ineffable presences that emerge in the song as voices in a continuously evolving text.”
11John Leavitt’s article offers a meticulous micro-study of the song “Changing of the Guards” (1978), approached as a modern form of epic or even myth, but one that adopts a radically fragmented logic. Far from displaying the reassuring traits of the traditional epic speaker singing about “heroes and weapons,” the voice at the center of this song projects a kaleidoscopic multitude of cultural and literary reminiscences towards its audience, blurring the tracks to better create a “baroque” aesthetic experience that leans towards a form of playful “hermeticism.” Unlike other commentators who have argued these characteristics to invalidate the song, the author engages with its poetic logic to grasp its uniqueness and richness. Leavitt’s reading meticulously unfolds the universes suggested by Dylan’s poetic art in “Changing of the Guards”, summoning a multitude of voices from the past, including Gérard de Nerval, Robert Graves, T.S. Eliot, Shakespeare, James Joyce, not to mention the bible and many other references, notably in the realm of songwriting. Leavitt also addresses the question of authorship and plagiarism in the field of music, connecting recent debates around ‘stolen’ songs to those that may have affected Bob Dylan himself. Between pre-Raphaelite-inspired medievalism, occultism, and the aesthetics of collage, “Changing of the Guards” demonstrates all that the singer’s voice, under the deceptive obviousness of its sonic resonance, carries in terms of cultural history and hermeneutical labyrinths presented to the listener.
12Finally, Catharine Mason’s article develops a meta-pragmatic analysis of the plural voice in Dylan, making the song “Tangled Up in Blue,” previously mentioned, a particular focus for her reflection. For Mason, the numerous voices that surface in Dylan’s song are means of establishing and strengthening the relationship between the performer and the audience, based on a shared and living cultural memory. Far from derealizing the performance and loosening the ties to the audience, these plural voices concretely function as factors of pragmatic and poetic effectiveness. Drawing on the theoretical tools developed by Kenneth Burke, Dell Hymes, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, and Michael Silverstein, Catharine Mason strives to decipher the multiple layers of literary and auditory expectations at play in the song, whether they relate to poetic (narrative poetry, lyric poetry) or musical genres (ballad, blues), literary movements (modernism), or types of characters. She cautions against a simplistic equation between “the voice of the song” and the biographical person of the singer, urging us to analyze the enunciative processes at work while valuing the hermeneutic activity of the listeners. In “Tangled Up in Blue,” the pragmatics of enunciation and vocal work converge to establish a fruitful parallel between the romantic relationship of the song’s speaker and the real relationship formed between the artist and the audience. Multiple verbal and paraverbal elements present in the song function at a meta-pragmatic level, meaning that they serve as signals addressed to the listeners concerning the very frameworks that govern the performance of the song. Thus, the plurality of Dylan’s voices, not content with covering phenomena of ventriloquism, intertextuality, authority, and poetic suggestion, ultimately refers to the participation of all performers, even seemingly passive ones, in the operations of delimiting and characterizing the voices. Throughout, the Dylanian voice is entirely imbued with alterity.
13Drawing on the verbal and sonic materiality of the songs, the cultural and intertextual polyphony that constitutes them, and the pragmatic frameworks that underlie them, these studies incorporate new elements into conversation sparked by Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize, as well as research on orality and the verbal arts more generally, with the hope that the blurring and even transcending of the boundaries between “legitimate” and “popular” poetry that is being initiated may have a positive impact on the entire field of vocal arts and orality, beyond the sole figure of Bob Dylan.
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