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lives of American history, and to play them out through his own artistic persona. Who, after all, is Bob Dylan? He is a mask worn by Robert Zimmerman. Thus, Robert Zimmerman can be Bob Dylan, and Bob Dylan can be a left-wing folksinger, a born again Christian, a motorcycle punk, a country crooner, a wizened riverboat gambler, a relaxed family man, a hooded recluse in dark glasses... In effect, anyone; just as his albums so often shift in tone and musical style, and the various voices he inhabits nonetheless sound authentically like himself. Dylan approaches these masks, these disguises, not as a burden but as an opportunity for a new personification, both of himself and of his country. When I read his autobiography, and found that he had spent months in the New York Public Library reading old newspapers from the Civil War, I was not surprised, but I was struck by how perfectly it fit. What else would Robert Zimmerman be doing during the process of becoming an other? What is remarkable in the case of Dylan, is that he has become so many others, and yet has remained so resolutely himself.
Paul Cella: There are few errors easier to fall into than making too much of the Bob Dylan mystique. We blunder badly when we make of him more than he is. A considerable portion of the literature on this man commences either in that cringe-worthy portentousness of the hip English professor (think Donald Sutherland in Animal House), or in the affected detachment of postmodern ennui. All the warmth and playfulness and humor in Dylan’s songwriting vanishes under the pressure of these pedants. It was against this tedious business that Andrew Ferguson’s recent anti-Dylan polemic in the Weekly Standard proved, to my mind, most effective. As I see it, the core of Bob Dylan’s greatness consists in his distinctly American innovations in the English language. It is usually through this that his other qualities flow. If you examine each phase of his career, you will find at back of it a signature song, an exemplar, which conveys its particular significance through the medium of something distinctively American. From the debauched humor of “I Shall be Free” (“Well, ask me why I’m drunk all the time / It levels my head and eases my mind”) to all the bluesy masterpieces of the mid-1960s, to the evangelical enthusiasm for the Book of Revelation, especially its grimmest portions (“Can they imagine the darkness 31