Tangled up in Pynchon
Carvill John
johncarvill at hotmail.com
Tue Aug 2 09:38:58 CDT 2011
> It is important to remember that Dylan is first and foremost a
> songwriter with great technique. By 1974, he had had a lot of time to
> work on that technique. It's no surprise that he got better at it,
> whereas lesser rock 'n' roll singer/songwriters fell off after their
> twenties because of their reliance on personal experience that
> naturally becomes less dramatic and angst-ridden with age. Dylan's
> well didn't run dry not because his personal experience was somehow
> superior, but because his technique was.
Absolutely goddamn right.
>
> I like to point something out to people who analyze lyrics but don't
> write them. When Arnold Schwarzenegger shoots somebody in a movie,
> nobody actually dies. Don't assume autobiographical content just
> because the word "I" appears in a narrative song. Songwriters are
> writers. It may be a parable or allegory, or it may just be an
> entertaining story, but sometimes they just make shit up.
Indeed.
Although........ One of the many fascinating things that Dylan does, particularly (but far from exclusively) on 'Blood on the Tracks', is to mix aspects of narrative which are clearly autobiographical (come on, Bob, you *know* they are) with more elusive and amorphous elements. And it's not the fact that he mixes them, it's the *way* that he mixes, or blends them, so you cannot say or even guess where one ends and the other begins. So the song, and the album, absolutely is about Bob's relationship with Sara, while simultaneously having nothing to do with them at all. The words themselves reflect this mixture of specific and general. Throughout much of Dylan's work, you get this powerfully dreamlike sense that you know *exactly* what he is saying, without your being quite able to elucidate, to anyone else, what it is. You get that feeling from Pynchon too. The similarities don't end there, but keep on keeping on......
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