More Dylan Thefts
Henry Timrod made some news a couple of weeks ago by getting some of his lines quoted, or re-used, by Bob Dylan in his new album Modern Times. Timrod was a Confederate poet whose works are now in the public domain. Apparently Bob consciously or unconsciously snipped a few florid Victorian phrases and dropped them into some of the old-timey songs on his record. I don't think there's anything really wrong with that; it's not like he took whole passages and used them wholesale.
And yet Dylan, in his memoir Chronicles, comes pretty close to doing exactly that with other authors. Look carefully at this short passage:
Walking back to the main house, I caught a glimpse of the sea through the leafy boughs of the pines. I wasn't near it, but could feel the power beneath its colors. (Chronicles, p. 162)
Compare that to this longer passage from Marcel Proust's Within a Budding Grove, especially the passages in italics:
But when, Mme. de Ville-parisis’s carriage having reached high ground, I caught a glimpse of the sea through the leafy boughs of trees, then no doubt at such a distance those temporal details which had set the sea, as it were, apart from nature and history disappeared ... But on the other hand I was no longer near enough to the sea which seemed to me not a living thing now, but fixed; I no longer felt any power beneath its colours, spread like those of a picture among the leaves, through which it appeared as inconsistent as the sky and only of an intenser blue.
I don't think there can be any doubt that Bob had to have consciously taken these sentences and, with some revision, passed them off as his own.
Another example is from a book that I imagine Dylan knows well, Huckleberry Finn:
Every night we passed towns, some of them away up on black hillsides, nothing but just a shiny bed of lights; not a house could you see. ... There warn't a sound there; everybody was asleep.And now look at Chronicles, p. 165:
One night when everyone was asleep and I was sitting at the kitchen table, nothing on the hillside but a shiny bed of lights ...My last exhibit (a less exact quote) comes from a book called Really the Blues (1946) by Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe, in which a hipster introduces "his chick" to Mezzrow:
Baby this that powerful man with that good grass that'll make you tip through the highways and byways like a Maltese kitten. Mezz, this is my new dinner and she's a solid viper.And now, part of Dylan's description of his friend Ray's girl, Chloe Kiel:
She was cool as pie, hip from head to toe, a Maltese kitten, a solid viper — always hit the nail on the head. I don't know how much weed she smoked, but a lot. (Chronicles, p. 102)And later in Really the Blues, a black man was "sitting there actually talking to a white woman cool as pie."
Now what are we to think of these "borrowings"? I know that borrowing and revising tunes and song lyrics is standard practice in folk and blues music, and Dylan has done plenty of that, quite openly, as have others. That doesn't bother me. But in a sustained piece of prose that is not meant to be sung or played, but taken as the author's own composition, it is not standard practice. In the instances given above, I think Bob comes pretty close to real plagiarism, and for all I know there are more instances in Chronicles yet to be identified. Frankly, as a Dylan fan from way back, I'm a little disappointed. Say it ain't so, Bob.
UPDATE: A couple more.
Jack London, Children of the Frost:
"Rum meeting place, though," he added, casting an embracing glance over the primordial landscape ...Chronicles, p. 167: I cast an embracing glance over the primordial landscape ...
Jack London, Tales of the Klondyke:
Another tremendous section of the glacier rumbled earthward. The wind whipped in at the open doorway ...Chronicles, p. 217: Wind whipped in the open doorway and another kicking storm was rumbling earthward.
UPDATE II: Yet more:
Sax Rohmer, Dope (1919), A tiny spaniel lay beside the fire, his beady black eyes following the nervous movements of the master of the house.
Chronicles, p. 167: A tiny spaniel lay at the guy's feet, the dog's beady black eyes following the nervous movements of his master.
London, Children of the Frost: And then they are amazingly simple. No complexity about them, no thousand and one subtle ramifications to every single emotion they experience. They love, fear, hate, are angered, or made happy, in common, ordinary, and unmistakable terms.
Chronicles, p. 169: Yet to me, it's amazingly simple, no complications, everything pans out. As long as the things you see don't go by in a blur of light and shade, you're okay. Love, fear, hate, happiness all in unmistakable terms, a thousand and one subtle ramifications.
UPDATE III (Oct. 2): Jack London, Tales of the Klondyke: Through this the afternoon sun broke feebly, throwing a vague radiance to earth, and unreal shadows.
Chronicles, p. 112: The afternoon sun was breaking, throwing a vague radiance to the earth.
Jack London, White Fang: He carried himself with pride, as though, forsooth, he had achieved a deed praiseworthy and meritorious.
Chronicles, p. 63: He didn't need to say much—you knew he had been through a lot, achieved some great deed, praiseworthy and meritorious, yet unspoken about it.
R. L. Stevenson, Providence and the Guitar: As Leon looked at her, in her low-bodied maroon dress, with her arms bare to the shoulder, and a red flower set provocatively in her corset, he repeated to himself for the many hundredth time that she was one of the loveliest creatures in the world of women.
Chronicles, p. 127: I bought a red flower for my wife, one of the loveliest creatures in the world of women.
posted by EMC @ 7:57 PM
39 comments
39 Comments:
I'd say any amount of allusive fancy, from someone Dylan's stature, is normal in real literature. It's lazy hackwork we criticize for "plagiarism." ("Bad poets borrow, good poets steal.") Your first two examples seem a normal literary way of allusively heightening the significance of what Dylan has to say. The third example is tougher... but all Dylan is doing is imitating a jazzy way of talking together with the "Maltese kitten." Anyone would read the Chronicles passage and think, "Dylan is going for some first-half-of-the-20th-c. jazzy jivy way of talking." Your tracking of the source just shows how deliberately and carefully Dylan created that effect.
I think deliberate is the key word.
It's a shame that one of the greatest living lyricists has to resort to such a low level to express himself. Good work.
Dylan is such an an accomplished lyricist and wordsmith that we can safely assume that a) he probably reads a lot and b) has an eye or an ear for a well turned phrase. So it is harly surprising to find him using, consciously or unconsciously, a felicitous expression or image lodged away in the the back of the mind.
If you think about it, Dylan's version of the Proust quote makes no sense. "The leafy boughs of pines." Ever see a pine tree with a leafy bough? Me neither. This is not the writing of someone closely observing a scene.
I think anyone familiar with literature will note the frequent re-use/recycling of passages; not as a whole, but by phrasing and words. How many authors, for example, have used the Hemingway-coined phrase " A clean, well lighted place?" I don't think Dylan ever rips whole passages in Chronicles. Identifying phrases as allusions to older writings is a key part of literary analysis. Subject any modern work to the same critical eye that is turned on Dylan's stuff and you are likely to expose many "frauds."
What you are describing is a standard practice of well-read writers called literary allusion. It's a technique that has been used by every great writer in the canon including Shakespeare and Joyce. No one has ever considered it plagiarism and the examples you cite do not come anywhere near the legal definition of that term.
Henry Fnord
Very interesting literary detective work. I once read an excellent study of Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov that pinpointed dozens of similiar "liftings" of phrases and images from other works scattered throughout the novel, chiefly Pushkin, Dickens and Schiller, but also popular songs, religious tracts, etc -- all uncredited, none of them in quotes. Some were lines that any educated Russian reader might be expected to know; others weren't.
There seems to be something similar going on here. Dylan's "plagarism" here and in his lyrics seems of a very peculiar sort, confined mostly to phrases which are then worked into his texts in ways that often have no relation to the original source's use o the phrase -- and sometimes is the opposite of the original usage. For example, in the first example here, Proust writes that he can no longer feel the power of the sea; Dylan says he could still feel the power of the sea. Likewise, with the Timrod snippets dropped into Modern Times, Dylan's use is at odds with Timrod's.
It's hard to say exactly what Dylan is doing with this practice. He obviously doesn't NEED to do it; i.e., it's not like he doesn't know how to handle words or turn a phrase. It may be that when he runs across a phrase that particularly strikes him, he salts it away, either in his memory or even in a box. (He once said that "Jokerman" was "written by the Box," a collection of notes and scraps; and his co-writer on Masked and Anonymous said that was how the script for the movie began: Dylan came in and dumped a collection of scribbled notes on the table -- quotes, ideas, images, etc.)
I come back again to the Dostoevsky study. Again, he seems to be doing the same thing Dylan is doing, turning to account anything he finds useful in putting across the apprehension of reality he wishes to convey. As with Dylan, some of the borrowings are so obivous that anyone would know they are borrowed (as in Dylan's frequent recycling of old blues and folk lines); others in Dostoevsky are more obscure, as with Dylan's use of Timrod and the Yakuza book. You can also find much the same thing in Shakespeare, who adopts whole speeches from other works, adopts lines, ideas and images -- or, with Hamlet, rewrites what appears to have been a quite similar play written by a contemporary.
I realize there are fine lines here, and it could be that Dylan is stepping over them at times. But I don't think any of this vitiates his art, or lessens the impact of the vision of reality -- the emotional weather of being -- that he manages to put across in his work.
Whatever. As Bob said in Brownsville Girl, "Oh if there's an original thought out there, I could use it right now."
Ha ha, this was funny. Good stuff. It's takes balls to rip off Proust, huh?
I don't think you're coming from a "we should be outraged" by this stance, right? I hope not.
I think it was Wilde who said bores borrow, and genuis' steal. Not sure what camp Dylan is in, but it does make a point.
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I don't want to defend too quickly, but I'm reminding myself of this, by way of a premise: Chronicles is not the story of Bob Dylan the man. If it were, we'd have lots more on his relationship with his wife and his kids (he might even mention their names!) and plenty of other intimate personal recollections that are not offered. Chronicles is Dylan's way of telling his public story -- to his public. It's the memoir of Dylan the artist. What he's providing is a seemingly very honest and startlingly clear portrait of how he went from being the kid from Hibbing full of dreams to the accomplished songwriter and performer who caused such a ruckus -- in addition to how he arrived at later stages of artistic development. He goes to great lengths to tell us exactly what books he read, what authors he liked and why, what music he loved, what performers fascinated him and what moments of catharsis kicked him towards writing the kinds of songs he came to write. That's what the book is about. In the course of contemplating all those matters and in particular revisiting the literary works that stuck in his mind through the years, perhaps he found it both amusing and appropriate to put some of those writers' phrases into his own memoir -- adapting them to tell his own story.
It's worth remembering that no witnesses have accused him of making up the stories in Chronicles. From the survivors of the early Village days (admittedly there aren't very many of them around) to later characters like Daniel Lanois -- no one has said, "Hey, Bob's imagining that -- it never happened." For that and other reasons we can be reasonably sure that he didn't plagiarize the story that he is telling -- it is what he claims it to be. If, in the course of it -- as is now apparent -- he planted and adapted phrases from some his favorite books, then that's something else.
The ethics of it are debatable, of-course, and they will be debated. All I can say right now is: If Simon & Schuster does a complete recall on the book, I'm pretty sure I'll be holding on to my copy.
Kudos on spotting these things, however. It is something that deserves serious consideration.
It just occurred to me -- despite the "Confessions of a Yakuza" brouhaha over "L & T," when Dylan did his latest round of interviews for Rolling Stone and USA Today, he wasn't asked about it. (Or if he was, they never printed the exchange.) He should not be allowed to get away from his next interview without doing a little accounting for all of this stuff.
You got a lotta nerve.
Maybe Dylan should sue himself, or give Hootie back his cash...
Bob knows well the scrutiny to which his writings – prose, lyrics and otherwise -- are subjected, and he ain’t no pig without a wig. These and the many other as of yet uncovered morsels of petty rhetorical love and theft that likely exist throughout his writings comprise nothing more than a cheeky game of literary hide-and-seek. He knows you are going to play, with or without him, so he plays along. Be grateful. Have fun. “Okay, you Junior Scholastics – how many things can you find in this scene that don’t belong.”
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So when are we going to talk about all the Scripture Dylan lifts puts in his lyrics? He alludes all the time to Scripture - including the current album. He takes phrases right out of that book and never sites where it came from (perhaps many folks don't know that book as well - but he practically swims in it, even now). Why don't we get all upset about his lifting those words? Why - because Dylan writes prose (and makes films) just as he writes songs. That is one of the main reason he's so much fun to listen to (ask TS Eliot, who did the same thing by the way). He alludes to everything, twists it, and puts it out. Poets have been doing this for a very very long time - that's what poets do, just as Robert Burns. And then there's the man himself - Shakespeare - who was a master at it. Many - if not most (if not all) of his plays are based on other people's works (just ask Marlowe) - he just took them and made it better. And that is what Dylan does.
And didn't he tell us this himself - he's the joker and the thief. ;)
bb
...and the next thing you know, he will be borrowing from Doonesbury...
How much should Led Zepplin pay to the estate of Howlin' Wolf?
What I want to know is how you have tracked all this down! It is easy for an author to lift from various sources that HE knows, but far harder to find them! Kudos!
The allusions game is a lot of fun...
I would also like to know how you found the textual allusions in 'Chronicles' - is it some kind of software that compares the entire text of 'Chronicles' to the entire text of everything ever printed? Crazy! Sax Rohmer, Jack London and Proust - gotta love Dylan even more just for putting those names together, surely?
I might suggest the same sort of attention should be paid to TS Eliot's "The Waste Land" which is filled with allusions to other to the works of other poets, writers, philosophers, and scripture. This is what great poets do - the allude to other works, then either juxtapose or twist the original into something different. Chronicles was a successful illustration of what Dylan does not only in his songs, but in the films as well (though the films are very hard to figure out, but they do the same "cut and paste" as Dylan. In fact, in the beat period (and the art period of that time) "cutouts" was quite the rage. Dylan is still a beat poet - even after all these years. But he also is an "everyman's" Eliot as well. He applies the same principles - he is, at the heart of it all, a poet.
bb
A "six degrees of Dylan" contest... maybe you can get some mileage from your post!
Is ones life to be replete with footnotes?
Writers have always quoted or borrowed from other writers.However, plagiarism is not just simply borrowing from others, it is using the words or ideas of others and claiming them as your own.Dr Dylan has not acknowledged his various borrowings. This is his "crime." It is becoming apparent that he is a serial plagiarist.A few borrowings are OK, but where do you draw the line?We now have dozens of examples of Dr Dylan's "borrowings." We admire artists for their originality. You can't just go on and on borrowing and claim to be original.I guess we can only excuse Dr Dylan because of his age--his creative juices must be drying up.
Herman Melville tells the writer how books are made in REDBURN. HIS FIRST VOYAGE:
At sea, the sailors are continually engaged in "parcelling," "serving," and in a thousand ways ornamenting and repairing the numberless shrouds and stays; mending sails, or turning one side of the deck into a rope-walk, where they manufacture a clumsy sort of twine, called spun-yarn. This is spun with a winch; and many an hour the Lancashire boy had to play the part of an engine, and contribute the motive power. For material, they use odds and ends of old rigging called "junk," the yarns of which are picked to pieces, and then twisted into new combinations, SOMETHING AS MOST BOOKS ARE MANUFACTURED. This "junk" is bought at the junk shops along the wharves; outlandish looking dens, generally subterranean, full of old iron, old shrouds, spars, rusty blocks, and superannuated tackles; and kept by villainous looking old men, in tarred trowsers, and with yellow beards like oakum. They look like wreckers; and the scattered goods they expose for sale, involuntarily remind one of the sea-beach, covered with keels and cordage, swept ashore in a gale.
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/8118
The word "junk" has several meanings in Melville's writing, but the making of new rope from old rope is it's most remarkable context; e.g., THE PIAZZA TALES-- BENITO CERENO --:
They each had bits of unstranded old junk in their hands, and, with a sort of stoical self-content, were picking the junk into oakum, a small heap of which lay by their sides. They accompanied the task with a continuous, low, monotonous, chant; droning [pg 119] and drilling away like so many gray-headed bag-pipers playing a funeral march.
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/15859
Apparently Dylan is a junk-dealer, who accompanied the task with a continuous, low, monotonous, chant; droning ...
Another relevant author in this discussion is St. Augustine (whom, you remember, Bob once dreamed of). The impression I have from Henry Chadwick's translation of Confessions is that every other phrase is a quoted from somewhere--various books of the bible mostly, of course. At bottom of some people's worries, I think, is a misunderstanding of the nature of creativity and orginality. Wittgenstein talks somewhere about eating sausages and potatoes and how when they become part of your own body it no longer matters which molecules come from where. I suppose it's what you do with them that counts.
Well, did you actually read the book or did you just scan it line by line with magnifying glass and reference library handy?
I don't know Dylan, but he seems to be a poet with a reference library in his head. His lyrics, and the autobiography, appears to me to be shifting tones all the time - lots of lines piled up on each other, all saying the same thing, each one sounds like it comes from a different poet's mouth. Gives the effect of a certain time, a certain feeling, a certain situation... and where does he claim he came up with every sentence he wrote?
Maybe you're just trying to show off.
"I know where that word came from. And that. And that."
Just try to enjoy what you're reading next time...
The inescapable problem with Yakuza and the Timrod songs is that the liner notes essentailly say everything was written by Bob Dylan when that is clearly untrue. On this point his genius is irrelevant.
All he had to do was give credit to a dead poet and an obscure author and you have no issue. That he didn't is the heart of the problem and raises the issue to the level of plagiarism.
This in turn makes the things in Chronicles more disturbing. It's not a financial or legal issue -it's an ethical issue. We teach, or at least we try to teach, students not to do what Dylan did here.
Many of the examples cited to justify what Dylan did don't wash. Artists sample and take snippets ,not verbatim passages - if they do, then it's wrong. Allusions are not always cited, either because they are well-known as in Biblical passages or because the author is using them in passing, not as the thrust of the work. Maybe Dylan is doing that in some of the Chronicles stuff, altho it would still be nice to cite the original, but that is clearly not the case in Yakuza or Timrod.
You can whitewash it, you can excuse it because he is a trickster, you can pretend it doesn't matter because he is a genius. But at least some of it is plagiarism, i.e the unauthorized use of another's words without attribution along with the claim they are your own. And if some of it is, the other stuff becomes more suspicious.
Any intellectually honest observer must acknowledge it is certainly does no credit to Bob Dylan. 1esuos
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Bob Dylan is a phony and has always been so. His contemporaries like John Lennon (a veritable genius) treated him like a clueless brat. This entire discussion above places him on a footing with the likes of Dostoyevski, Shakespeare, Joyce, and Eliot which does as much disservice to these timeless bards (i don't know about Joyce myself, his later works become too impressionist for my tastes) as this honest blogger is purported to have done to H.E. Dylan. It's like comparing Hyperion to a satyr (my words:).
The dirt of gossip blows into my face and the dust of rumor covers me, but if the arrow is straight and the point is slick it will pierce through dust no matter how thick.
I think Mr. Dylan has more than earned to right to develop his art as he sees fit, and not be distracted by a bunch of wantabees, whining and carping about something they couldn't possibly comprehend.
I would say three things:
1. He's basically a composer and composers sample music from all over the place and always have, it makes sense that he would do the same when writing prose.
2. I doubt whether he does it consciously, as someone who has said he can't even read music he has probably developed a prodiguous talent for storing things up and retrieving them he needs them.
3. His own body of original is still vast, as people on here have already quoted him. As far as we're aware songs like Visions of Johanna ("jewels and binoculours hang from the head of the mule" etc.) are his own work and in his prime he was about 10 years ahead of any other songwriter.
(1) Dylan's limitless ear has absorbed countless phrases and passages that will drift through the windmills of mind . . . in an out of the turbines and onto the page.
(2) Pick up Gifford's _Ulyssess Annotated_. Note every time Joyce riffs, borrows, links, alludes, pastiches, mosaics, and steals from other authors.
(3) Consider the foolishness and horror of the Goll/Celan plagiarism case and so forth.
(4) Consider the Dylan writes masterful tunes known the world over, while you're playing search-engine Nancy Drew on a blog. Don't you feel like creating something yourself? Nick a line from _Chronicles_ to start yourself off.
Fnord.
Judging from the resentful and narrow-minded reaction of Dylan-worshippers the world over, it appears as though I've really struck a nerve. Apparently whatever their hero does is fine with them. Fair enough; but why can't one appreciate the positive contributions of Dylan and, at the same time, lament the occasional lack of inspiration that causes him to sometimes steal the words of others?
Hey, anonymous (brave of you to conceal your identity), I've written 3 books and about 25 articles. I never had to steal a line from anybody to get started.
we can say what we want, but man, he sure has been a great musician!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReIEDHMu0Zw
Of course it's deliberate. Think about it for a few more minutes. Ancient techniques. Pure genius as per the usual, and over many heads undiscerning.
He's been doing this for a while, and it seems to be effective. The list of those who have is long and impressive, and the mysterious workings doubly so.
Dylan is a true artist, and as such is multifaceted.
There is no ownership of any of the things being argued here. Not a one.
Anyone remotely concerned with and familiarized with evolutionary creation knows this, and the subject is laughable. It is in fact quite narrow-minded to think one owns something outright, especially something borne of ideas/creativity. NO ONE can explain or define what occurs, no matter if the act is ballet, football, or folk music. Ownership of these energies is absurd.
That's why he affixes his name, to give rise to this point (not to mention the immensely profound symbols/links/references embedded in his work, from day one).
Bob, is that you? Stop posting as "anonymous"!
I've never put much stock in Bob Dylan's lyrics or his music. Never struck me as great, except for maybe "Queen Jane Approximately" and "Like a Rolling Stone."
If you want a good lyricist go listen to Lou Reed.
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