‘Continual Becoming'

In Scorsese’s No Direction Home, Bob Dylan gives voice to the belief that the artist should remain in a ‘continual state of becoming’. As everyone knows, the idea of self-transformation is familiar and indispensable in all kinds of respects in discussing Dylan’s work and career. However, I think it is important to distinguish it from another, superficially similar, idea that recurrently attaches to it. This is the notion that self-change for Dylan has to do with him being a ‘protean’ or ‘chameleon’ figure. On this view, it is as if the dynamic or drama of selfhood involved were a matter of successively assuming identities, like taking off and putting on (or hiding behind) one mask after another. Speaking of the Hibbing days, Richard Williams writes that ‘[i]t was at this time that he began to try on other identities’, ¹ while Greil Marcus puts it memorably: ‘few performers have made their way onto the stage of the twentieth century with a greater collection of masks’ (Marcus, The Old Weird America, xviii). ² Stephen Scobie’s book places the idea at its centre: ‘What Dylan has always presented to us is a succession of “shifting masks”’ … Identity for Dylan is always hidden … mask or disguise’ (Scobie, 35). Michael J. Gilmour writes that ‘Bob Dylan has spent nearly fifty years as a pubic figure hiding behind masks’. ³ Mark Polizzotti suggests that Highway 61 Revisited is an exception to the general rule that Dylan’s is an art of self-dissimulation:

Dylan has always presented a persona, which is to say (following the etymology of the word) that he has always worn masks – whether the clean-cheeked innocence of his folksinger days, the jawline scrub of his country period, or the more overt whiteface of the Rolling Thunder Revue. Highway 61 is perhaps the only moment where he shows us, and himself, what it looks and sounds like to be Bob Zimmerman, the rock n’ roll kid with the dark imagination and truckloads of attitude, not to mention crateloads of insecurity; the only time he challenged us to know just how it feels. (Polizzotti, 21)