March 14, 2025

I finally managed to see James Mangold’s film about Bob Dylan, A Complete Unknown, and I’m glad I did. It is well worth seeing, partly for the brilliant performance of Timothée Chalomet, who not only captures Dylan’s voice, manner, and singing in an almost uncanny way but plays something like 40 of Dylan’s songs in acoustic fingerstyle—and plays them accurately. I know, because I play many of them myself, and I watched his hands the whole time. I am filled with admiration for this alone.

What is worth writing a newsletter about is the film’s theme, captured in its title. The phrase comes from the song “Like a Rolling Stone,” but applies to Dylan himself rather than to the woman the song is addressed to. As a biopic, A Complete Unknown takes a number of liberties, even though it is based on the book When Dylan Went Electric (1915) by Elijah Wald, a wonderful historian of popular music whose books are meticulously researched (I’ve read half a dozen of them, including this one). Rolling Stone magazine lists about 27 departures from factual accuracy in the course of the story, but they are of a kind about which most viewers will neither know nor care. What should intrigue any viewer, on the other hand, is the way that Dylan insists, sometimes aggressively, on remaining unknown. He refuses to reveal his identity, even as everyone around him—lovers, business associates, fans, fellow artists—try, with equal aggression, to pin him down. We might add some of the film’s critics, who faulted it for failing to answer the Sphinx’s-riddle of popular music: who is this man?

When Dylan arrived in New York City in 1961, he had already repudiated the identity he grew up with: he was not Bobbie Zimmerman from Minnesota. When Joan Baez complains to him at one point that she doesn’t know him at all, even though they are lovers, he responds with contemptuous exasperation. Everyone makes up their identity and their past, he fumes impatiently—they remember what they want to remember. The film’s title links with the title of a Woody Guthrie song heard more than once in the film, “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You,” but the connection is ironic. By the end, we know that Dylan’s main method of keeping himself unknown to people is to leave them, from his lovers to his original fans. One of the things that drew Dylan to Woody Guthrie was that Guthrie was a restless wanderer throughout the country. He had “no direction home,” another Dylan phrase that became the title of Robert Shelton’s 1986 biography and Martin Scorsese’s 2005 documentary about him. Dylan merely updated the method of travel: Guthrie hopped freight trains while we see Dylan repeatedly speeding off on his motorcycle. The restless refusal to settle down was for him a way of keeping himself free.

The interesting larger question is whether Dylan doesn’t want people to know his identity, or, more radically but more interestingly, whether he doesn’t want to have an identity, and therefore destroys one the minute he has built it up. The former is common enough: in some traditional cultures, people keep their true name a secret, imparting it only to those they absolutely trust, lest their enemies seize upon it and use it to do them magical harm. But I find the refusal to have a fixed identity a more fascinating possibility. And, if this is the case, is it Dylan’s neurosis—or a gift, a way of repeatedly dying and being reborn as a new self that is one of the secrets of his astonishing creativity? And, if the latter, what implications does this have for the rest of us? Every film about Dylan’s identity seems to circle around this issue, a fact suggested by their titles alone. The most radical of them, I’m Not Here, splits Dylan into 6 different people played by 6 different actors. One is African-American and one is Cate Blanchett. None of the personae have more than a tangential relationship with what we might call the empirical Dylan. If Dylan himself had reported such fantasies about himself to a psychiatrist, he would be diagnosed with schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder, but the film suggests that this is rather a condition of radical creativity. A stable ego identity is not creative. Even Dylan’s own film, Masked and Anonymous (2003) has a title suggesting the elusiveness of identity (and is clearly a play off the old line from The Lone Ranger: “Who was that masked man?”). The film was a dismal failure, but since it is set in a future America that has devolved into what various reviews describe as “anarchy,” “civil war,” and “authoritarianism” all at the same time, perhaps we should entertain the possibility that creative schizophrenia can be prophetic.

Everyone searches for their true identity. Or so it is often assumed. It is the quest narrative of modern times, an updating of the traditional myth of the hero. A standard plot of the novel throughout its history has been that of the Bildungsroman, the growth of the protagonist from childhood to maturity. A related form is the Künstlerroman, the development of the artist, such as Wordsworth’s Prelude and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, typically ending when the character has an epiphany of his artistic vocation. Such narratives chronicle the first half of life. But in the second half of life, we may find ourselves with a new task, that of looking back and trying to figure out, “Who was I?” “What was all that about?” These too may culminate in some epiphany or recognition scene, maybe taking the form of a kind of personal Last Judgment. We may come to understand that we we are in fact not the person we thought we were. We may come to admit that we did wrong to some people in the past, or made wrong decisions. Possibly worse, we may come to regret aspects of life unlived, things we never managed to do, or were afraid to do. I suppose this is the reason for people’s obsession with bucket lists. But even if we have no regrets, we may be determined to try to understand the final shape of our lives, which can only be clear retrospectively, once all the evidence is in. How can someone like Dylan repudiate this attempt to follow the advice of the Delphic oracle to “Know thyself”?

But we are not just ourselves. Part of our identity consists in the relationships we have had with other people. Indeed, the self can only know itself only in relationship to an other, a not-self. We are fond of the notion of self-fashioning: I think this is part of the appeal of existentialism, which says there is no innate self. We construct a self out of the choices we make in life. We are what we choose to be. The value of this form of existentialism, which is roughly that of Sartre, is that it insists on personal responsibility. Sartre was wrestling with the questions of wartime collaboration with the Nazis in France, and his answer was that of radical freedom. No good trying to blame my family or my social environment. They may have pressured me, but it was my choice to give in to the pressure or to resist it. I am free, no matter what. There is never a moment in which I could say, “I had no choice, and therefore no responsibility.” This is in a way an attractive, heroic stance. Its appeal is that of the Victorian poem “Invictus,” which asserts, “I am the master of my fate, / I am the captain of my soul.”

But in less exalted moods, one less intoxicated by a philosophy of the self-creating will, we may feel that we are caught up in something larger than ourselves, that we are playing out some larger pattern or myth. Sometimes we feel that the events of our lives have been fated or destined. We feel this most strongly, perhaps, about the people who have come into our lives, and sometimes have gone out again. We may think, “If I had not happened to meet that person, my whole life would have been different.” Our emotional response to this is complex. Rationally, it is just random chance that we meet any particular person. But some meetings are so momentous that they feel somehow inevitable, fated. And those are the meetings that change our whole lives. In Buffalo, in the 1980’s, a woman walked through the door of the shared adjunct office of the Buffalo State College Department of English, and there went 8 years of my life. If “by chance” she had been assigned to a different office, none of it would have happened, none of the beauty, none of the tragedy and ultimate ugliness. Once such people enter our lives, it is often impossible to get rid of them, even when they are long gone, as Joan Baez says in the opening lines of her stunning song “Diamonds and Rust” about Dylan:

Well, I’ll be damned
Here comes your ghost again
But that’s not unusual
It’s just that the moon is full
And you happened to call

She does not fail to note her former lover’s ghostly elusiveness:

You were so good with words
And with keeping things vague

The sense of fatedness is what the Prologue to Romeo and Juliet means by calling the lovers “star cross’d.” In La Vita Nuova, Dante looks back after the death of Beatrice to the first two times they met, at the ages of 9 and 18 respectively. The symbolism makes their meeting appear the working of a power far greater than chance. That power reveals itself in a dream after the second meeting and says, “Ego dominus tuus,” I am your master, the god of Love. When he first saw her, Beatrice was dressed in crimson; at their second meeting, she was dressed in white. Red and white are the colors of Eros. “La vita nuova” means “the new life,” and usually refers to the rebirth to a new life after a religious conversion. Dante’s book is a meditation not so much on Beatrice as on his own identity. As he says at the end, it is a kind of Künstlerroman, for it is her death that inspires Dante to write what will become the Divine Comedy, which will take him to a final vision of a greater love “that moves the sun and other stars.”

People long gone may suddenly come back into our lives. In “Diamonds and Rust,” Dylan has called her literally out of nowhere: “Where are you calling from? / A booth in the Midwest.” Why? Who knows why Dylan does anything? But sometimes there is a reason, a sense of a connection that still remains, even when people have not heard from each other for years, for decades. This has been happening to me to such a degree that it has become a bit uncanny. Five people within a month have contacted me after decades of absence. Four of them are former students: it is not just love relationships that create bonds that are part of our identity. These four are people in mid-life who have been thinking about what went on way back when they were my students. In some cases, they have thanked me for the role I played in making them who they are, and I am honored to have been useful. I should thank them as well, for the influence is not one way: your students change you as you change them. And, as with lovers, there is the paradoxical feeling that it was a needle-in-a-haystack chance that a student happened to show up in my classes or as my advisee and yet at the same time our meeting seemed inevitable. I know this from the other side. It was incredible luck that I should have gone to Baldwin-Wallace College, an almost random choice because it was fairly close to home, and ended up as the student of Ted Harakas, who handed me Northrop Frye’s book on Blake, Fearful Symmetry.

Sometimes the people we meet are the authors of books that we possess so deeply and intensely that they become part of our identity. That was true of Fearful Symmetry, which I read and thought about and assimilated so thoroughly that I cannot imagine who I would be if I had never encountered it It is the imaginative counterpart of metabolism. What I eat literally becomes part of my body, and the same is true of some books, some authors, Frye and Jung particularly, which have become part of my own identity even while remaining themselves. I am not talking about cultism. Cultism is when someone passively allows a charismatic guru or ideology to take them over, so that their identity is replaced by that of the guru or ideology. That is as unhealthy in mentor relationships as it is in love relationships. Those who think only in terms of the will to power see all relationships only in Lewis Carroll terms: it is a question of who is to be the master. The literary critic Harold Bloom was as influenced by Frye as I was, and in the 1960’s wrote a series of books from Frye’s Romantic-visionary point of view. But in mid-life he decided he needed to deprogram himself and not only repudiated Frye but formulated a theory of the “anxiety of influence” in which all writers formulate their identity by an Oedipal power struggle against a Precursor and have to symbolically kill the father to become themselves.

I am grateful that I never felt such anxiety, which has enabled me to become known as a “Frye scholar” without becoming some kind of disciple. Frye never wanted disciples, and I have never wanted to be one. All this may seem remote from most people’s situation, but I am not so sure. I know any number of friends and former students who have been inspired by certain books or authors, often when they were young. Literary critics do not normally inspire people. In fact, they may have a prejudice against it, dismissing any writing intended to engage a wider audience as “popularizing.” Frye was an exception, and it is no accident that his books emerged directly from his teaching. Entire generations of people in all walks of life have regarded Frye’s influence as a valuable part of their identity. If we had had more such critics, instead of a wave of critics who saw their role as adversarial rather than inspiring, adversarial not just against the academic establishment but against Western culture itself, we might still have students willing to risk majoring in the humanities.

But depth psychology tells us that intense, entangled relationships with other people are “projection.” The other draws us by a kind of numinous aura: we are enchanted, enspelled. We are told that is illusion: the numinous energy does not belong to the other but is projected from one’s own psyche. The person that the other seems to be is really an “imago” or archetype. Sometimes we know this after the spell is broken and we realize we never knew the real person at all, only the archetypal role they played. A lot of Jung’s terminology gives names to the common roles: the anima and animus, the shadow, the Wise Old Man and Wise Old Woman. In Freud’s more personalizing psychology, we are formed by the influence of the parental imagos. When we grow older and finally detach from their illusion, we may realize that we have never known our parents as people at all.

What does this imply about maturity? That we are mature when we are at last completely disillusioned. If this is true, then romantic love, for example, is just nature’s trap, a way of getting people involved enough to marry and reproduce, and then the honeymoon’s over. This is not cheap cynicism: Shakespeare appears to be wondering about it in such seemingly lighthearted plays as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Much Ado about Nothing. People are madly in love with one person—until they are suddenly in love with another person who may be their opposite. Real people do this all the time without the aid of magical “love juice,” although alcohol sometimes helps. Likewise, in the latter play, people are “merry” or “melancholy,” and at any moment may suffer a mood swing faster than you can say “bipolar.” In Much Ado, one metaphor for this notion of identity as a temporary role rather than an essential self is the mask: early in the play there is a masked ball with, of course, confusion of identities. Shakespeare was a man of the theatre, and himself a minor actor. When he said that all the world’s a stage, and that life consists of playing roles, did he mean that there is no essential self, no real person beneath the masks? Are we all like H.G. Wells’s invisible man in the film version, who unwraps his bandages, only to reveal that there is nothing beneath them?

Every serious relationship is a dramatic tangle. We are playing a role, and we are casting the other into a role through projection or “transference,” and the other is doing the same in the reverse direction. This results in the kind of miscommunication common in relationships. Shakespeare sees that as well. The word “nothing” in the title Much Ado about Nothing would have been pronounced “noting” in Elizabethan English, and Shakespeare plays upon the double meaning. People are commonly “noting”—eavesdropping, overhearing, and gossiping—throughout the play, and much of the communication is really miscommunication. Social media have only given a digital platform to an age-old social dynamic. It’s complicated.

Still, I wonder whether all projections and transferences are illusory and destructive, even if many are, perhaps most. I cannot help but wonder about the possibility of what might be called “creative transference.” I hasten to add that I have no professional training in depth psychology, so this is the possibly-naïve speculation of a layperson. But I am wondering about what Frye himself called the use of illusion. One place Frye talked about this was in the chapter of his second Bible book, Words with Power, called, significantly, “Identity and Metaphor.” What does metaphor have to do with identity? Metaphor is a statement of identity that is in fact paradoxical because it says that two different things are one: A is B. Hence we normally take metaphor only “figuratively,” meaning not literally. But, as Frye says, there are three types of people who take metaphor literally, namely, those named by Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: the lunatic (or religious visionary), the lover, and the poet. Dylan was all three: poet and lover, and arguably a visionary. Theseus is a no-nonsense rationalist, and to him these three types are neurotics who believe in their own projections. The lover “Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt” (5.1.1841), Helen of Troy where there is really a Dark Lady. That lunatic Don Quixote constructs a lover named Dulcinea from the component parts of Courtly Love imagery:

“…her rank must be at least that of a princess, since she is my queen and lady, and her beauty superhuman, since all the impossible and fanciful attributes of beauty which the poets apply to their ladies are verified in her; for her hairs are gold, her forehead Elysian fields, her eyebrows rainbows, her eyes suns, her cheeks roses, her lips coral, her teeth pearls, her neck alabaster, her bosom marble, her hands ivory, her fairness snow, and what modesty conceals from sight such, I think and imagine, as rational reflection can only extol, not compare" (Part I, Chapter 13, Ormsby translation)

Such images, which have dwindled to clichés, originally suggested the numinous, compelling quality of what Jung called an anima figure, the archetype of the feminine in the unconscious of a heterosexual male. Don Quixote projects this anima onto a peasant girl who does not, needless to say, resemble Dulcinea in the slightest. But is his projection different in kind from that of Dante, who elevates his girlfriend to a position only slightly below that of the Virgin Mary in the seating chart of heaven?

And yet Frye’s discussion ends in an unexpected conclusion:

Behind the lover the administrative mind of Theseus sees nothing but lunatics. But, as noted earlier, there are infinite varieties of madness, some of them traditional attributes of poetry, or activities closely related to poetry. There are the Asian shamans, the sibyls and prophets of the ancient Western world, the cults of divine possession like those of Dionysus that have given us the word “enthusiasm”; there are the mystics and the visionaries. There are also identifications with the natural environment, with society or a social group, or with a predecessor in the literary tradition. In all this there is one factor of the greatest importance. In every such form of identification there is a renunciation of egocentric or subjective identity. (81-82)

That “factor of the greatest importance” brings us back to Dylan—yet without departing from Shakespeare:

Carrying on with Plato’s figure of a ladder, it seems as though with the imagination there is a journey upward into a world where subject and object are one. This takes place, apparently, in literature, through an interchange of illusion and reality. Illusion, something created by the human imagination, is what becomes real; reality, most of which in our experience is a fossilized former human creation from the past, becomes illusory. For me the supreme example of this interchange in literature is Shakespeare’s Tempest. (85)

In The Tempest, Prospero acts as an analyst who uses his magic to put most of the other characters through a kind of enforced analysis, summoning projections that push most of the other characters to confront the false ego-identities that have led them drastically astray. He also puts his daughter Miranda and prince Ferdinand, who are smitten with each other, through a trial: their anima and animus projections may be the illusions of two young and naïve people—but by living up to them, they make them become true. If romantic love is anything more than a cruel hoax, the illusions of mutual transference must be capable of being realized. It must be possible to see another person simultaneously as their ordinary self and yet as the incarnation of a mystery, of something beyond the negotiation of two egos. Immediately the Theseus-voice of skepticism wishes to shout this down: “Oh, all that means is, ‘I want to find my Prince Charming or my Princess Bride, marry them in real life, and live happily ever after.’” Lots of luck. Prospective candidates are recommended to watch Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods, which follows the fairy tale to the disillusionment that occurs after the happy ending. The ego, a product of the subject-object split, is not capable of literal metaphor’s both-and. It is trapped in a dualized world of either-or.

The same is true in the religious context suggested by the word “incarnation.” Catholic doctrine proclaimed that Christ was fully God and yet fully human. But there have always been dissenting voices. A dissenting point of view was that Christ was a spirit who only took on the appearance of being human. The opposite dissenting view is that Jesus was a remarkable human being elevated to divinity by his superstitious followers and thus made the object of a cult. Both views are reductive. So is the view that the paradoxical union of divine and human is unique to Christ: saying otherwise is condemned as a blasphemous heresy, the manifestation of a merely human pride. But every human being is an incarnation of spirit, and therefore an Incarnation of Christ. This is what Paul means when he says, “I, yet not I, but Christ in me.” Just as every sacrifice of the Mass does not just commemorate but actually repeats the Crucifixion, every birth is the Nativity happening again. Dylan Thomas’s poem “Vision and Prayer” is about the birth of his own child, and it begins, “Who / Are you/ Who is born / In the next room / So loud to my own.” Eventually, though, he flees in terror, realizing it is “the kingdom come / Of the dazzler of heaven / And the splashed mothering maiden / Who bore him with a bonfire in / His mouth and rocked him like a storm.” Forget peace on earth: this is the Second Coming, in which Christ will judge the living and the dead, and it is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God. But his flight is to no avail. In the last stanza, “I / Am found.” Yet it is a paradoxical moment, for the final lines are, “Now I am lost in the blinding / One. The sun roars at the prayer’s end,” with a pun on Son. To be found means to lose one’s ego identity, and that is terrifying.

All this may seem very complicated, but in the moment that a relationship begins it becomes an interaction, a drama that anyone can find familiar. There is an encounter, and someone sees something in me, perhaps something that completes or fulfills them. Perhaps they feel that no one else could complete or fulfill them in the same way. And perhaps I feel the same way in return. Or—someone sees something in me that damages and destroys them. Both Dylan’s lovers, the light and the dark, came to feel that way about him. There is a dark anima, a femme fatale, and a dark animus, the irresistible but destructive male. From them may come the caustic anger and terrible accusations of that avenging Fury known as the “ex.” Of course, not every potentially romantic interaction begins at this full intensity—but in the beginning there is always a sense of anticipation, a feeling of something hanging in the balance, which could go either way. We have to decide on the spot what to say, how to act, and we all know these are crucial choices. It only takes one wrong move and the whole thing is off. Yet simultaneously with the feeling of crucial choice, we may feel swept up, our decisive will taken over by something greater than ourselves, for better or worse, or possibly for both at the same time. Yet we still have the choice of whether or not to give in to the powerful pressure of our destiny. We are not just puppets: we can resist. The Christian Middle Ages accepted astrology, the influence of the stars, the overarching pattern that can be charted and interpreted—with the all-important provision that our horoscope cannot overrule our will. It maps our predispositions, but they do not predestine us.

A certain choice may activate a fateful pattern that previously seemed merely latent, a potential. And we may choose deliberately to set the zodiac’s machinery in motion. The character of Richard Thompson’s “The Poor Ditching Boy” admits, “I was looking for trouble to tangle my line / But trouble came looking for me.” The character of another Richard Thompson song, “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight,” says, “A couple of drunken nights rolling on the floor / Is just the kind of mess I'm looking for.” The anima throws a man into the storm of life, said Jung, out the door into the rain flung in sheets by the wind and the lightning falling all around. Left to himself, he would prefer to sit comfortably and avoid the trouble. The anima throws a match into the tinder of the ego self, and up it goes. In some cases, the man seeks not just passion but illumination in the light of that fire. He seeks to know his identity reflected in the other. But in “Mirrorball,” Taylor Swift warns him, “I’m a mirrorball / I’ll show you every version of yourself tonight.” She spins and the lights fly everywhere.

I’m sure JD Vance would be highly shocked. This is the kind of unhinged cat-lady behavior he wants to crack down on, the bad result of too much female freedom. In his endlessly suggestive essay “The Stages of Life,” Jung speaks of the tremendous pressure on young adults to settle—to settle down, but to settle down means settling for a limited self and refusing to try for more than is “realistic” and “practical,” which usually means what is useful to a capitalist and patriarchal society. As a teacher, my job is to push back against the social pressure on students to become what historian Christopher Lasch called the “minimal self.” I have always loved Maslow’s idea of the “Jonah complex.” If you run away from your vocation, run away from your highest self, run away from the attempt to realize your dreams, he warned his own students, you will be bitterly unhappy. I usually push back not by making speeches but by reflecting back the potential ideal self I see in them. The best students often lack confidence and are held back by their own reductiveness. No sales talk: I just try to show them what I see in them. Lovers may do this too. They may play a less ironic role than mirrorball. What Othello saw of himself as reflected to him by Desdemona was not the idealistic illusion of a naïve teenage girl. It was the real Othello, his true self, and a noble one. The tragedy is that he had no faith in it, leaving his identity to be defined instead by the fear and hate of Iago. Reading or watching King Lear, we may be baffled when Cordelia and Kent clearly see more in Lear than we do. All we see is a cruel and utterly exasperating narcissist. But they see more, and in doing so help Lear to see himself, even though by then it is too late.

We are never a singular identity, what Sartre called the en soi, the “in-itself.” Where there is one, there is always already two, as we saw in the newsletter on mirrors. We only have an identity through a relationship with the other. That relationship may vary. The other may complete us, be our complement. In fact, Jung says many people marry their opposite, introverts marrying extraverts, in an unconscious attempt to make up for what they lack. He warns that this can be a dangerous dependency, but it also at its best make the couple function as a team. Or the other may challenge us. We may need to be pushed, and sometimes we even like to be pushed. In Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, one of her ladies says that a woman should try to please a man in every way. “The way to lose him,” Cleopatra snaps dryly. And we have seen what she means. She drives Mark Antony repeatedly crazy with her impulsive, unpredictable, irrational behavior. She is the ultimate cat-lady in a land where cats were embodiments of the Goddess. Some of the women students always hate her, but Mark Antony prefers her to his good Roman wife, who is as compliant and passive a doormat as JD Vance might desire.

Having said all this, we are back to the question of Dylan’s refusal of identity, which we have not yet answered. Dylan was identified as a “folk singer,” but we need the kind of historical context provided by scholars like Elijah Wald to see the ambiguities of that label. A folk singer was at first one who tried to preserve the songs of the original, anonymous “folk” by continuing to perform them in an “authentic” manner. Pete Seeger was a folk singer in this manner, although he did occasionally write his own songs. Dylan’s first album, when he was only 20, has only one original song. Believe me, this was no mistaken identity: he performs old songs like “Fixin’ to Die” and “House of the Rising Sun” with about twice the usual intensity. But Dylan came to New York City on a pilgrimage to see his role model, Woody Guthrie, who was declining in a hospital. Woody was a member of the previous generation, which had invented the new identity of “singer-songwriter,” who created new songs instead of or in addition to performing old ones. What impelled the creation of new songs, both in England and America, was social upheaval. The most prominent genre of the new singer-songwriters was the protest song. In the 1940’s, both Seeger and Guthrie were members of the Almanac Singers, who sang pro-union songs as well as songs protesting in the name of social justice. Dylan first became a superstar by writing protest songs whose power and literary quality were far beyond anything anybody else had written: “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” “Masters of War,” “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall,” and so on.

But then he faced the usual star’s dilemma. He could make a lifetime career out of singing “Blowing in the Wind,” or he could change his identity. There was pressure on him not to change. Pete Seeger was not just upset about Dylan going electric. He saw that Dylan was giving up on the protest movement just at the moment Seeger thought that social change might happen, and the thought of losing Dylan’s influence was anguishing to him. The business people were of course upset that he was walking away from a money-making formula. Then there was sAlan Lomax, the obnoxious guy who ends up in a fistfight with Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman at the Newport Folk Festival. Oh, the ironies. We owe a huge debt to Alan Lomax, who, with his father John Lomax, went around the country recording traditional folk songs before the oral tradition died out. But we now know that they shamelessly exploited one of their biggest discoveries, Leadbelly, making him a kind of flunky, forcing him to perform in convict garb after they got him out of prison. The anger of Lomax at Newport was about “authenticity”—electric instruments were not authentic. This is nonsense. First of all, acoustic guitars themselves were not traditional folk instruments. Second, the “folk revival” was really the “folk-blues revival,” and the blues had already gone electric back in the 1950’s. Lomax was not only being a purist but an irrational one. (This is all as the film plays it—the real-life situation was more complicted). Finally, there were the outraged fans, who were a kind of coffeehouse clique writ large, people who felt they belonged to an elite in-group—an in-group that would be swept into oblivion in a couple of years by rock music.

It is entirely understandable that Dylan walked away from all these attempts to imprison him in an identity. But there is an artistic as well as a social reason that Dylan left his old identity behind him. People focus too much on the new electric style. But the content of the songs also changed. Dylan’s new songs articulated an alienation deeper than any social reform or revolution could touch. His first song, the “Song to Woody,” spoke of a world that was dying but had never been born. That is the world he sang about now in songs like “Desolation Row,” “Visions of Johanna,” “Positively 4^th Street,” “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” and, yes, “Like a Rolling Stone,” a bleak world like that of Eliot’s Waste Land. From there he turned to songs that were visionary but riddling, like “All Along the Watchtower” and “I Shall Be Released.” There have been other phases and other identities, including even born-again Christian, and he is still creatively active in his 80’s.

The question remains: is Dylan’s refusal to have a fixed identity unique to him, as people often seem to assume? Is it a healthy thing, or a kind of desperate defense mechanism? Well, Dylan is far from being the only artist who develops through successive identities marked by radical stylistic transformations. We think of Beethoven in music, Picasso in painting, Yeats in poetry. This kind of metamorphic rhythm is revolutionary rather than conservative, and is perhaps characteristic of eras in which society itself is in the throes of change. A sour remark is dropped in the film about folk music not being Shakespeare. But in fact it is Shakespeare whom Dylan most resembles, if not in quality at least in terms of a rhythm of continuous re-invention. Stylistically, I can think of no parallel to Shakespeare’s restless experimentation. Every play is in a new style, sometimes in a new genre. Personally, Shakespeare is more of “a complete unknown” than any major writer. Biographers have been so obsessed with pinning down his identity that some of them are willing to invent conspiracy theories to account for his elusiveness, including the theory that Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare but another writer using the name. Given that Shakespeare is the greatest example in literary history of sustained, continually inventive creativity, one is strongly tempted to connect it with his self-effacing quality.

We cannot do without an identity. But perhaps, like scientific theory, our sense of identity should be tentative, never final, always subject to revision in the face of new evidence, and thus able to endure even the most radical paradigm shifts. Literary theory some decades ago taught us that there is no way to declare a final, definitive meaning of any text whatsoever. Philosophers are still writing new interpretations of Plato, critics of King Lear, political philosophers of the Constitution. We do have to interpret, and interpretation is choosing. We commit ourselves to what interpretation seems best to us. But that may change, and new interpretations are not always refutations but ways of seeing new aspects of a text that we have never noticed before. The first model of a metamorphic sense of identity in literature is Odysseus in the Odyssey, who is described in its opening lines as polytropos, of many turnings. The chameleonlike ability to change his identity is for Odysseus a survival skill. He disguises himself and assumes false identities, lying through his teeth about who he is. He doesn’t even tell the same cover story twice, but always alters its details. When the Cyclops asks his name, he says “Nobody.” His one mistake is when, out of pride, he stops lying and gives the Cyclops his real name—which the Cyclops uses to curse him. Like Woody Guthrie, like Dylan, he is a wanderer with “no direction home.” Like Dylan, he dallies with women who themselves have multiple identities, with dark Circe and domestic Penelope.

In the last paragraph of the last book of a extraordinarily creative career, Northrop Frye, looking back in old age at the transformations of a long life, said this:

The omnipresence of time gives some strange distortions to our double vision. We are born on a certain date, live a continuous identity until death on another date; then we move into an “after”-life or “next” world where something like an ego survives indefinitely in something like a time and place. But we are not continuous identities; we have had many identities as babies, as boys and girls, and so on through life, and when we pass through or “outgrow” these identities they return to their source. Assuming, that is, some law of conservation in the spiritual as well as the physical world exists. (The Double Vision, 235)

Paul Tillich spoke of the God beyond God. Jung spoke of the Self, an identity larger than the ego, beyond time and space, and the source to which all our identities return like rivers to the sea. Frye suggested that the God beyond God and the Self beyond selves are one, metaphorically identified, A is B. But we never get more than intimations of this boundary-concept. Mostly we are stuck in the here and now, moving through successive identities, “One man through his sundered hulks,” as Dylan Thomas put it in a late poem. I have just passed through, at the age of 74, a complete transformation of my entire life involving literal deaths of some, both animal and human, who have returned to their source, which I hope is our source, and also deaths of old roles and identities. I am not ready for that final nostos or return yet. If nothing else, I have more to write. The one constant image in A Complete Unknown is Dylan writing. He never stops, ever. When his lovers are abed, he is at the table, putting down words. His identity is not an essence but a process. That is what he is, what we all are, whether our process uses words or not, and you can no more pin it down than you can pin down water.

References

Frye, Northrop. The Double Vision. In Northrop Frye on Religion, edited by Alvin A. Lee and Jean O’Grady. Volume 4 in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2000. 35-82.

Frye, Northrop. Words with Power: Being a Second Study of ‘The Bible and Literature.’ Edited by Michael Dolzani. Volume 26 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2008.