Joyce Carol Oates on Bob Dylan

JCO dedicated her story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” to Bob Dylan. She said the following in a letter to the editor of Esquire in 1972:

I believe these things are true about Dylan, as they are true about any genius: 1. He is unstoppable. 2. “He” is both an individual and a medium, a process by which certain energies are released, and the “he”–the man, Bob Dylan–arranges and invents and occasionally exploits the forms in which these energies are released. 3. As fast as people imagine they are following his “career,” he is always ahead of them and therefore no longer interested in their opinions; not out of modesty, but because he has work to do. 4. If there had been no era of protest, no civil-rights involvement, no Vietnam War–still, there would be a Bob Dylan, because the energy he represents would have been channeled into another area.

In 2004, she said this:

Dylan has continued in his long, ambitious, ever-evolving public career, through permutations of the self that have left many of his original admirers behind, or unaffected. (Evangelical Christianity? Bob Dylan? Count me out.) My Princeton University students, including musicians, born in the 1980s, very much admire Dylan as a classic, extolling his work of the 1960s and 1970s. In a pop culture of rapid, vertiginous change, when audiences are more fickle and ephemeral than any in history, Bob Dylan yet retains his stature and something of his original mystery. He’s the exemplary Dionysus figure: “Hey Mr. Tambourine Man, sing a song for me / I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to.�

In 1975’s Blood on the Tracks, my all-time favorite Dylan album, the song “If You See Her, Say Hello” contains the lyric:

I always have respected her for busting out and gettin’ free

I think that’s why I’ve always respected Dylan, even when he disappoints me. He’s stayed free.

Possibly related posts:

Bob Dylan on why the South is different

You can’t go back to Constantinople

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