ABSTRACT

For many listeners Blonde on Blonde is the apex of Dylan’s meteoric trajectory in the 1960s, the culmination of his achievement and influence. However, an important paradox is that this album of untrammelled verve and invention is dominated by scenarios of the self as captive, exploited, rejected, confused, betrayed, or lost. The blurred album cover photo is perfect for the urban, nocturnal, or amorous world within: a world of self-opacity, perplexity, desire, paralysis, and abandonment, even incarceration. But all the time the songs also release alluring resources of youth, invention, and escape encoded in music and singing that often seem the sound of desire and longing: ravishing, driven, languorous, clamorous, unappeased, abandoned …. As Michael Gray put it: ‘Blonde on Blonde offers a person awash inside the chaos and speaking to others who are acceptedly in the same boat and on the same ocean … [and yet] the feel and the music are on a grand scale, truly oceanic’ (Gray, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, 59). At the heart of this chapter is this obscure generative ratio between the passive, oppressed self who the songs figure, and the provisional, exuberant self who is released through them. The first is lifeless, targeted, and caught within his nocturnal, subtractive world, and the circuits of his pain, mystification, reproach, or desire, whereas the second is secreted through enactment and performance to find new, aversive resources of movement, force, elation, élan, and beauty.