Writing: The Blues, The Great American Novel, and Feeling Like A Complete Unknown

Am I really coming out of left-field with these ideas from James Livingston's Sinners in the Hands of a Complete Unknown (Liberties)?

 But stories explain without argument. And so the point is that, whether you are watching or reading, and whether you are absorbing fiction or non-fiction, the mere presence of a narrative form, on the screen or on the page, is enough to convince you that you are not there, on the scene as it unfolds according to the narrator, but are rather in the place and time you know as the present.

Wald constantly reaffirms this “stereophonic” principle. He writes from what he perceives (and makes us feel) as a great temporal distance from the quasi-political skirmishes he describes, as if he’s a military historian who specializes in the wars of antiquity. He also turns himself into a Seeger-like figure, becoming a sounding board that compiles but won’t assess the contemporaneous yet incommensurable narratives of the various transitions he meticulously records — from the folk movement to the moment of rock ‘n roll, from the latter to “rock,” a more serious and non-harmonic music, from sound check to Dylan’s set at Newport in 1965, from Newport to Woodstock, etc. — all the while measuring the loss of blood and treasure to the commercial mainstream where the siphons and spigots of pop music are permanent fixtures. Every moment in the book is a before or an after, an either/or.

Marcus violates this principle, as Dylan has consistently tried to, making us experience his music as a “space” that exceeds or ignores any articulation of time, becoming a topological map of American history in its entirety — or, as I would prefer to put it, a geographical eschatology that turns Huck Finn’s territory, the fabled frontier, inside out, importing all the social questions that the uncivilized margin of civilization was supposed to export, once upon a time. “The unmapped country prophesied in ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ is still there,” Marcus concludes, “hanging in the air as a territory of danger and flight, abandonment and discovery, truth and lie,” but in 2005 it seemed to him to be coming from another country, because he sensed that “no one has been there in years.” He hears the song as an epic fairy tale that was then and is now in search of lost time, “the thing itself, the past.” [pp. 19, 201, 91]

I like the idea of a story explaining, not arguing. Seduction instead of a bludgeoning?

The ideas of the last paragraphs are not being easily digested at this time. I have more of a sense that there is something that can be used. The border turning back on itself? Time becoming space. The events being seen as an either/or? Could it be that one transitions into the other?

These paragraphs make think that here is how to take a tradition and turn it into new uses. 

In this narrative key, we’re always already catching up to Dylan not because his music is timeless but because that six-minute recording of “Like a Rolling Stone,” which hit the charts the day before his electric set at Newport, both recollected the past and predicted the future, and this we know — we can hear and feel it in our bones — because subsequent generations of listeners and performers keep responding to it, transforming it by repetition, rearrangement, or re-composition, according to their own needs and dialects. The extant “translations” of the song observe no linguistic, generic, or geographical limits. They range from reggae (Bob Marley) to Italian hip-hop (the Mystery Tramps). “A Complete Unknown,” the movie, is the latest and most elaborate of the responses to Dylan’s epic fairytale, which lingers or languishes according to the state of the nation it calls to attention.

So the question is not whether but how the music continues to transport us in this way. “A Complete Unknown” offers that the fateful night in Newport was a turning point — an ending and a beginning, a new direction but along an old and beaten path — because Dylan deliberately grounded his music in the blues idiom, a gesture made explicit by the presence of Mike Bloomfield, the guitarist from the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Plugging in was more incidental than important. 

What does fiction have that compares with the blues?  The canon? There is syntax and diction and plots and characters foisted on us by language. There is one other thing: imagination. 

First came the acoustic blues, and then Muddy Waters invented electricity.

 

But here is another question raised:

 But can the blues set you free? That is the question both movies ask. The prior question, the one Delta Slim forces on us by using the first person — “us” and “our” — is, who owns the blues? Can white people claim it as theirs, and if so, how so? By the physical violence of the vampires and the Klansmen in the Delta, by the linguistic chicanery of the lawyers in the tall buildings of the urban plantations — or, as Elvis and then Bob Dylan would have it, by “owning” but not possessing the music, by treating it as a common place, where the simultaneity of different times and the similitude of different peoples become audible?

What is the common place for fiction? I will put it where I think white and black share the blues: in the experience of living as human beings in a world that does not fit us.

The essay gives us a call to action:

If so, if that is what we can hear in “Like a Rolling Stone” and see in these movies, it’s an undiscovered country, a complete unknown that is still hanging in the air, still waiting to be explored, because we haven’t been willing to reckon with the tragedy of American history long enough to hear the blues as the comedic musical form that keeps time running backward and forward, toward the nation conceived in slavery but dedicated nonetheless to the self-evident truth of the proposition that, someday, all men and women will know each other as equals. Instead we — if there is a “we, the people” left in us fractious Americans — have stubbornly indulged the temptation to silence the voices of the strangers in our midst, to close the borders between the disintegrating past and the impending future, to forget that there’s a difference between who we are and what we might become. We aren’t ready to share a dance floor with the Others of our own making. 

Perhaps that is what is lacking in our Great American Novels - a reckoning with our history. 

 

Okay, maybe I over did it, and maybe I didn't. Listening to all of them, they are all different and all alike. Except, Dylan's is the only acidic performance.

I think Mr. Livingston point is correct.

sch 8/29