Pulling rabbits out of hats, on the other hand, provided that he provides the hats: this may on occasion be something else.
As a student at Cambridge long ago (1928?), the young William Empson impressed his teacher, the not much older I. A. Richards, by his spirited dealings with a Shakespeare sonnet. “Taking the sonnet as a conjurer takes his hat, he produced an endless swarm of rabbits from it and ended by ‘You could do that with any poetry, couldn’t you?’” But only if the poetry truly teems, and only if the critic only seems to be a conjurer. What, then, is the critic’s enterprise? To give grounds for the faith that is in him, in us, in those of us who are grateful. It is a privilege.
Dylan is not the first artist to clarify his responsibilities as he does: “I’m the first person who’ll put it to you and the last person who’ll explain it to you.”2 William Empson himself had a comically modest turn of phrase for the thing he needed first of all: the right handle to take hold of the bundle. Dylan handles sin. Manhandles it, sometimes, as burly burlesque.
Jeremiah preached repentance
To those who would turn from hell
But the critics gave him bad reviews
Even threw him to the bottom of the well
(Yonder Comes Sin)
Jeremiah’s in the well. “And they let down Jeremiah with cords. And in the dungeon there was no water, but mire: so Jeremiah sunk in the mire” (Jeremiah 38:6).
She opened up a book of poems and handed it to me, written by an English poet from the fourteenth century: Handling Sin.3 Handling sin is for me the right handle to take hold of the bundle. My left hand waving free.
“Fools they made a mock of sin.”4 Dylan’s is an art in which sins are laid bare (and resisted), virtues are valued (and manifested), and the graces brought home. The seven deadly sins, the four cardinal virtues (harder to remember?), and the three heavenly graces: these make up everybody’s world – but Dylan’s in particular. Or rather, his worlds, since human dealings of every kind are his for the artistic seizing. Pride is anatomized in Like a Rolling Stone, Envy in Positively 4th Street, Anger in Only a Pawn in Their Game . . . But Dylan creates Songs of Redemption (Allen Ginsberg’s phrase), and so – hearteningly – Justice can reclaim Hattie Carroll, Fortitude Blowin’ in the Wind, Faith Precious Angel, Hope Forever Young, and Charity Watered-Down Love.
What, in Dylan’s eyes, are the words of his to which people have mostly turned a deaf ear? “The things I have to say about such things as ghetto bosses, salvation and sin, lust, murderers going free, and children without hope –”5
“The glamour and the bright lights and the politics of sin”: this wide-sweeping fiercely lit line was held aloft by an interviewer. The line is from Dead Man, Dead Man. Interviews can be a form of living death, and Samuel Beckett once declined to be interviewed, saying to his friend: Not even for you, and in any case I have no views to inter. The politics of sin?
It just came to me when I was writing that’s the way it is . . . the diplomacy of sin. The way they take sin, and put it in front of people . . . the way sin is taken and split up and categorised and put on different levels so that it becomes more of a structure of sin, or “These Sins are big ones, these are little ones, these can hurt this person, these can hurt you, this is bad for this reason and that is bad for another reason.” The politics of sin; that’s what I think of it.6
But it is in Dylan’s music, not in his musings, that what he most deeply thinks of sin can be heard and felt. The word “sin” haunts the songs, with a range of insinuations such as should make us think.
People tell me it’s a sin
Because he sinned I got no choice, it run in my vein
And there are no sins inside the Gates of Eden
That hollow place where martyrs weep and angels play with sin
Where charity is supposed to cover up a multitude of sins
To the sin of love’s false security
I didn’t commit no ugly sin
I’m gonna baptize you in fire so you can sin no more
They like to take all this money from sin, build big universities to study in
Well, if you can’t quit your sinnin’ . . .7
And if Dylan can’t quit your sinnin’?
Desolation Row is a masque of the sins, worthy (in its pageant of unworthiness) of the Seven Deadly Sins who cavort in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus – Doctor Faustus, otherwise known as Doctor Filth, aided and abetted by his nurse:
She’s in charge of the cyanide hole
And she also keeps the cards that read
“Have Mercy on His Soul”
Her sin is her life-threatening officiousness. She has been preceded in the parade by Ophelia: “Her sin is her lifelessness.”
Desolation Row sees and shows a Vision of Sin. Tennyson saw and showed The Vision of Sin:
I had a vision when the night was late:
A youth came riding toward a palace-gate.
The hour is getting late. One rider was approaching. The wind began to howl:
Then the music touched the gates and died;
Rose again from where it seemed to fail,
Stormed in orbs of song, a growing gale.
There are seven deadly sins, but only four cardinal virtues (Justice, Prudence, Temperance, and Fortitude). Seven to four? But do not despair, for here come the three heavenly graces: Faith, Hope, and Charity. Seven-a-side, then. But there is imbalance still. The antonym of guilt is innocence, the antonym of a virtue is a vice – but what, pray, is the antonym of a sin?
Furthermore, isn’t it rather bewildering that the sins, as they mount their masque, enjoy masquerading as one another? For lust can be seen as one form that may be taken by greed or gluttony, as can covetousness or avarice. “One sin very naturally leans on another”: there is something appropriately creepy about this seventeenth-century description (by Thomas Wilson) of the pleasure that sins take in their leanings, in their overlapping.
A sin will have to be set, first and foremost, in opposition to the goodness that opposes it. Gratitude will have no truck with envy. Thomas Wilson again:
Every virtue consists in denying some corrupt inclination of our depraved nature; in opposing and resisting all temptations to the contrary vice; charity, in opposing continually self-love and envy; humility, in resisting all temptations to pride, etc.
But some of the discriminations that need to be made are more elusive. How confident can we be, for instance, in distinguishing a sin from the goodness to which it is immediately adjacent? Envy, bad: emulation of an honourable kind, good. Sloth, bad: relaxedness, good. Pride, bad: pride, good.
And then there are sins of omission. “Forgive me, baby, for what I didn’t do” (Maybe Someday). In the Summertime, before it came to shake its head sorrowingly (“Fools they made a mock of sin”), had asked:
Did you respect me for what I did
Or for what I didn’t do, or for keeping it hid?
Waltzing with Sin is not a Dylan song, but it danced along on The Basement Tapes. Dylan likes setting to music our besetting sins. He likes company in doing so, and he likes the comedy that company encourages. Which is one reason why 7 Deadly Sins was issued by a joint stock company, the Traveling