Bob Dylan, the Nobel, and the Watchtower
An American singer and songwriter won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Like many people around me, my first reaction was a small shock and disbelief, followed by a strange ambivalance. Bob Dylan is quite surely my favorite musician of all time, but I had never quite imagined him right next to the likes of Calvino, Saramago, Canetti, Hemingway, Marquez, Neruda… you get the idea. So, it was as if a joke was being played on me by the academy. It sometimes even felt like a kind of theft, an illegitimate appropriation of the song into literature. But then, it could also point to the porosity of the lines seperating various ways of artistic expression, and declare that great literature could come in any form. Dylan’s own indifference towards the award did not help, either. The man doesn’t even return his calls.
Evan Puschak made a brilliant video that explores the literary character of Dylan’s work, mostly focusing on the song All Along the Watchtower (here) (seriously, you have to watch this, it is really brilliant). In the video he gives background information for the song and the album John Wesley Harding, talks about the brilliance of the song by alluding to the structure of the narrative, and mentions some of the interpretatations that have been suggested (and much more). “There are entire trilogies,” he says, “that have less content that Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower.” However, he does not really get too deep into this content himself. He does feel a sensation of an impending doom in the song, and a futility that is present due to the beautifully arranged circular structure, with the story always wrapping around and starting again.
Here, I will make an attempt to get a bit further into the content of the song. What is this coming thing that Evan feels to be an impending doom? What is the narrative telling us? Again, noone can claim an absolute position in any understanding and interpretation of an artwork, so I will merely give my own reading of the narrative. I believe that it is a good one, one that does not leave holes, that is, one taking into account all of the stanzas.
I tend to listen to the song as a perfect parable for our social reality. Maybe I should say social reality at the time of Dylan, but then, things have not changed much as far as the general contours of our ‘social reality’ is concerned, either.
At this stage, I ask you to please find the original album version of All Along the Watchtower by Bob Dylan and listen to it (actually, there is one here). Here is a link to the lyrics as well. What the hell, if you like, throw in the Hendrix version before coming back. If you have a grasp of the song and the lyrics, you can of course just read on.
The song opens with an announcement by a character called the joker: “There must be a way out of here,” he declares, implying that there is something wrong with the reality that is surrounding him (her?), and that he cannot make complete sense of it. His conundrum will be explained to us further into the song. The song begins here, but the story need not. So, let us now leave this joker where he is and pay attention to the visual highlight of the environment, the first thing we would have seen if we had looked at the setting from afar: the watchtower.
There are rulers, princes*, and they are watching from the top of a tower. There are women around, as well as barefoot servants. The princes are not just sitting there enjoying a beautiful view or a cup of tea; they are watching from the top of a watchtower, a tower that must have been built there to watch. They are not watching for an approaching army, either, as we are told that they are keeping the view of two approaching riders. Here, the connection between the watchtower and the panopticon is an obvious one. The tower is for the surveillance of the kingdom and the subjects therein. We understand that the princes have power over their subjects, and in order for them to keep their position of power, they must watch. This is so much a necessity that a watchtower had to be made. The princes, in this setting, represent the ruling power, the privilaged position of the few, who need to exert effort (watch!) in order to keep their positions of power.
They are keeping the view, and two riders are approaching to the tower. One of them is the joker, and the other is the thief. Now, this connection between the joker and the thief, and the approaching riders are often suggested, but I am going to take this connection as an obvious one. Introducing a very interesting conversation between two characters with curious names, and then two approaching riders from the perspective of princes, in my opinion, do not leave much room for interpretation. Assuming that the two riders are completely different and unknown characters just sends the story away from us, puts it out of reach, something I do not believe Dylan would intend: “There’s no hole in any of the stanzas. There’s no blank filler. Each line has something”.
These are characters who do not seem to have much in common at first. What unifies them, what brings them together, is that they represent two different and distinct types of rebels; the joker likely having a direct allusion to Dylan himself, who, in his life and art, found it difficult to accept our social reality as it is, and rebelled through his art and his humor (watch the opening of Puschak’s video for a glimpse of this). He gets the first line and expresses this very difficulty: “There must be a way out of here.” He cannot get any relief. This is too confusing, too unreal. So much so that absorbing reality into logic is not just difficult, it is simply impossible. Businessmen drink his wine and plowmen dig his earth, but neither of them know what they are actually doing to him, because neither of them know the true worth of anything. This is unjust for the joker, and he experiences this as a theft of his wine and his earth from him. However, being the businessmen and the plowmen, their positions in the social order allow them to do this without objection or sanction. The joker is infuriated by this contradiction, and refuses to accept this as part of his reality, desiring a way out.
In just four lines, we get a sense of two of the most fundamental contradictions in our social reality, as well as their interrelation: Its economic contradictions in the form of exploitation (businessmen drink my wine!) and the illegitimate appropriation of commons (plowmen dig my earth), as well as its political contradictions that invalidate its internal logic of justice, rendering social reality incomprehensible and illegitimate for the joker.
The other rider, who kindly tries to calm the joker down, is the thief. Unlike the businessmen and the plowmen, who are described by the joker as thieves, he is an outlaw in the existing social order. He also has already rebelled against this reality by violating one of its rules: he stole and became a thief, perhaps and likely, rather than become a barefoot servant himself. He complains about people who see life as a mere joke, and feels proud that he is not one of them. He also lets us know (among other things) that the hour is getting late, as if some big or critical event is about to happen. We are not told what or when.
Here, I have always found something of great beauty in the togetherness of the joker and the thief. Each of them mirrors the main problematic of the other (and to the other) in a very powerful way. They represent for one another their own fundamental contradictions with reality. To the joker, what is being done to him is theft. The thief takes issue with the fact that life seems like a joke. Yet, the thief rides with the joker, and the joker with the thief. The two require eachother for making sense of the reality around them. Hence, they must also ride to the tower together, and neither can do this without the other.
The two are the rebels. They are approaching the tower. Princes are keeping the view. A wild cat growls out in the distance, and wind begins to howl.
Something is about to happen. We do not know exactly what, but we get the idea that the women and the barefoot servants, who are now with the princes, will also play vital roles.
The circularity of the narrative, in the words of Evan Puschak, points to the futility of the initial cry of the joker. I agree with this, and so does the thief. There is no way out. Yet, the joker and the thief do not just do nothing. The bare fact is that there never is a way out, and never has been, but this only means that looking for a way out is just silly. We know this because we have been through that before, so we know that this is not our fate. So, let us not speak falsely. There is no way out, but there is always a way forward. Life is not a joke, and even if everything is predetermined in a brutal cyclicality, even if Nietzcshe is completely right in his absolute pessimism, riding together towards the tower is not futile. No case for determinism (not even a correct one, if any), nor the most rightful nihilism, can kill human agency.
The Watchtower is a narrative, one that is only of twelfe lines, that can initiate conversations with theology through the Bible (see Puschak’s video), with political economy through Marx, with philosophy through Hegel, with psychiatry through Freud and Lacan, and who knows with what and who else. I am also very grateful that it is available to us with two really amazing soundtracks.
Well done and much respect to you, master Dylan, you strange, brilliant, and beautiful man.
(*) Princes, and not a princess, as reminded to me by a friend (thanks Rodolfo). Hendrix version uses the word ‘princess,’ but not Dylan’s original. I preferred to stick to the original version of the song throughout.
