IMPLACABLE, or, whatever…

from the GRAND POOBAH OF THE DISMISSIVE FOOTNOTE, I give you Luc Sante on Dylan:


“Chronicles works so well in part because in writing it Dylan apparently found a formal model to adhere to or violate at will, and if he did not have in mind any specific nineteenth-century account of callowness and ambition, maybe he conjured up a cumulative memory of dusty volumes found on friends’ bookshelves in Greenwich Village or in the basement of the bookshop in Dinkytown he worked in as a student. He also found an outlet for his inclination to counter his audience’s expectations. Readers, guessing on the basis of interviews and movies as well as the hydra-headed mythic image that has grown around Dylan over the decades, might have expected his memoir to be variously inscrutable, gnomic, bilious, confused, preening, recriminatory, impersonal, defensive, perfunctory, smug, or even ghost-written. Instead Dylan had to outflank them by exercising candor, warmth, diligence, humor, and vulnerability. If there is ever a second volume, he may have to contradict himself yet again.”


My own theory about CHRONICLES: after rejecting the overgrown ms., an ambitious editor figured out how to salvage the project by stitching together various episodes that worked out of sequence, both as a way of giving the narrative some herky-jerky form and to emphasize the associative way Dylan’s memories and hunches fit together. Wish I could prove this. You gotta love the way Dylan SKIPS THE SIXTIES, there’s a red herring for you…