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LOOK
INSIDE YOUR MIRROR' - Review of:
Nicola Menicacci: BOB DYLAN, L'ULTIMO CAVALIERE
('BOB DYLAN, THE LAST CHEVALIER')
2005,
Riola (Bologna, Italy): Hermatena Edizioni, ISBN 88-88437-22-3,
soft covers, 232 pp, EUR 19.00
Preface by Alberto Cesare Ambesi
www.bobdylanlultimocavaliere.it,
www.hermatena.it
Author
of review: Christopher Rollason - September 2005
Bob
Dylan's work can be imagined as a hall of mirrors. Time and again
the poet invites us into 'a room full of covered-up mirrors', and
challenges us to take off the covers, gaze into the smiling mirror that
is each song, and discover within it arcana, mysteries to be plumbed.
Does Bob Dylan see his own songs as clearly as the listener who looks
inside their mirror and has had their author on his mind? Such is the
point of view favoured by a certain group among Dylan's more loyal
admirers, those who believe the songs are there to be endlessly
interpreted - that they belong less to Dylan himself than to the
listeners for whom they have become an indissociable part of their
lives. Nicola Menicacci's remarkable new study certainly comes from a
Dylan fan of this stamp, and is a book addressed to the members of that
special group of companions in interpretation.
Nicola
Menicacci is already known in Dylan circles for his often daring
and always absorbing readings of Dylan songs that have been published
over the years on the Bob Dylan Critical Corner site. This volume (so
far available only in Italian, though the author promises an English
version), takes a particular period in Dylan's songwriting - 1974-1989,
from the Blood on the Tracks to the Oh Mercy songs - and reads the
lyrics of those years in the light of a philosophical postulate. The
postulate is that during that period - and essentially only that
period, with a handful of exceptions before and after - Dylan's
songwriting is consistently coded in two layers of meaning - one on the
surface, immediately accessible; the other, hidden and symbolic. As the
author puts it in his introduction, this group of Dylan songs would
then have the status of 'messaggi cifrati' ('messages in cypher' - 9).
Nicola Menicacci argues that the symbolism which he deciphers (or
de-cyphers) in these songs should be related to an esoteric
belief-system to which, he contends, Bob Dylan secretly subscribed over
those years. This system could approximately be described as pertaining
to the alternative or counter-historical spiritual tradition,
running
against the grain of established Christianity of whatever stamp, that
has manifested itself over the centuries in such movements or currents
as Gnosticism, the Cathars, the Templars, the Grail cult, the
Rosicrucians and Freemasonry, and in such sacred places as Jerusalem,
Glastonbury in England and Rennes-le-Château in France.
Certainly,
there is no lack of songs from the period concerned whose
texts can well lend themselves to such a reading: among those that
spring to mind are 'Shelter from the Storm', 'Isis', 'Golden Loom',
'Changing of the Guards', 'Angelina', 'Caribbean Wind', 'Ring Them
Bells' and 'Dignity' (all of which, indeed, are discussed in this
book). Where Nicola Menicacci's thesis gets really challenging is in
his discussion of the Christian period: in the albums of those years,
he maintains, the songs' evangelical surface is in fact a manifest
content masking a latent content deriving from an underlying esoteric
world-view that is in no sense orthodoxly Christian. If we are to see
Dylan as 'the last chevalier', some kind of latter-day Templar, then
the songs discussed become a cascading series of dreams - dreams
replete with symbols that call out for interpretation. At this point,
as Alberto Cesare Ambesi suggests in his preface, we might
see Nicola
Menicacci's argument broadening out from Dylan's work into wider areas
of cultural symbolism - illuminating, in Ambesi's words, 'il vasto
horizzonte della simbolistica' ('the broad horizon of the study of the
symbolic' - 8). The book does, nonetheless, remain very much a study of
Bob Dylan, theoretically and conceptually audacious yet grounded at all
moments in the detailed analysis of the song texts proper: it is, to
quote the author himself, 'un'analisi di Dylan adottando tale cammino'
('an analysis of Dylan that follows such a path' - 9).
In
illustration of his thesis, the author deploys a very considerable
number of symbols and concepts betokening his wide reading in his
chosen field. Thus, if we look at the discussion of Blood on the Tracks
that constitutes the book's first major analysis, we find 'Tangled Up
In Blue' explicated in relation to Mary Magdalene ('she bent down to
tie the laces of my shoe': 'Questa posizione ricorda da molto vicino la
Maddalena che lava i piedi di Gesù' ('this position closely recalls
the Magdalene washing Jesus' feet' - 22); beyond this, the whole album
is placed in a broader context of esoteric symbolism taking in the
Templars, the Grail, Joseph of Arimathea and more. 'Lily, Rosemary and
the Jack of Hearts' is read through the prism of the Tarot and the Song
of Songs; 'Shelter From the Storm' is illuminated via Masonic
symbology. The stage is set, and effectively the same method
- textual
interpretation plus background exposition - is pursued across the
volume. We are, then, dealing with a series of close readings of Dylan
song texts, shored up consistently by a specific interpretive and
contextual methodology. In this sense one might wish to file Nicola
Menicacci's book on the same shelf as the studies of Michael Gray,
Stephen Scobie and Aidan Day - with, nonetheless, the important
difference that here the methodology, unlike the approaches employed by
those critics, is neither literary-critical nor based in musical
history, but, rather, relates Dylan's work to a set of broader
historical and cultural traditions. For further enrichment, analogies
with the world of fine art appear throughout: Dylan's verbal symbolism
is likened to the visual symbolism to be found 'inside the museums'
through contemplation of the canvases of such masters as Leonardo da
Vinci, Sandro Botticelli or Nicolas Poussin (here we may note in
corroboration that Chronicles Volume One, whose pages could not be
fully taken into account in this study, has amply confirmed Dylan's
interest in the painterly heritage). Such is the method employed that
it may be no exaggeration to suggest that this volume breaks new ground
in Dylan studies.
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Estratto della recensione
di Chris
Rollason apparsa su rec.music.dylan il 27 Settembre 2005 (la
traduzione italiana sarà disponibile tra breve, clicca
qui per essere informato) |
