Ricks on Dylan

I've been reading Christopher Ricks's book on Bob Dylan's lyrics, and I wonder how Dylan aficionados feel about it and especially about the discrepancy between style of critic and style of songwriter.

Ricks is probably the most talented practitioner of old-fashioned "close reading" that we have. His books on Milton, Keats, Eliot offer brilliant line-by-line analysis of great poems. "Dylan's Visions of Sin" shares much with his previous books: passionate advocacy of the writer, clever puns and allusions in every sentence, a controlling concept to organize and unify the book (T. S. Eliot and "prejudice," Dylan and "sin"). Thus, for example, "Positively 4th Street" becomes a condemnation of a former friend guilty of the sin of envy. It is exciting that Ricks has the same ardor for Dylan as for Eliot and Samuel Beckett.

The style of analysis and expression is so characteristic of Ricks -- logical, linear despite pirouettes, "English" -- and so seemingly antithetical to Dylan's non-analytical, non-linear, "American" manner that you can't help noting the incongruity.

Opinions, anyone?

-- DL

Comments

applying this kind of analysis to dylan's work doesn't hold much appeal for me. but what do i know? "i should have been a pair of ragged claws" etc.

[Lawrence J. Epstein]

Many who admire Dylan were disappointed in Ricks's book. As you noted--with characteristic insight--Ricks's linguistic universe is very distant from Dylan's. This is crucial because he ends up imposing a language that doesn't fit and that ends up imposing an entire critical apparatus on Dylan's work that, to me at least, doesn't completely work. It is, of course, always a pleasure to see Ricks's erudition and passion. Personally, I find his close readings of poets far more convincing.

A cautionary note: I do provide a quite different interpretation of Dylan's lyrics in the book I'm writing, and therefore it's possible my mind wasn't generous or flexible enough to accept Ricks's.