problem. Sorry about your dissatisfaction with your position and your place (your standing), but it’s not my problem, “Don’t you understand”. You don’t understand (and that’s your problem).
The song is sharply shaped when it comes to questions. The first two quatrains don’t have any questions in them and the last two don’t have any either. But the middle of the song is a quartet of questions, most of them such as are not really questions at all, any more than is “Who do you think you are” or “Can I help you”. Dylan doesn’t print them with question-marks or sing them very interrogatively:
Why then don’t you show it
Do you take me for such a fool
Why don’t you just come out once And scream it
Don’t you understand
The only question in the song that is manifestly sung (and printed in Lyrics 1962–1985) with a question-mark is the one that is treacherously considerate, the inquiry in the street from the friend: “How are you?” Not “You ask, ‘How are you?’”, but “You say, ‘How are you?’”
It may seem a bit late for this commentary to raise the question of whether the friend is a man or a woman. Not to be raised as a biographical or historical matter – it’s clear that the friend could be a compound ghost, and many candidates have been proposed over the years, with Joan Baez appearing in the company of half a dozen men in David Hajdu’s annals Positively 4th Street (2001). Who, except an uncouth sleuth-hound, cares? But much of the song’s power may lurk in its decision not to decide this for us. In a Dylan song it is usually clear whether a man or a woman is being addressed. This time, not so. “Just talking to somebody that ain’t there.” What matters is that a friend has let you down. Badly. Because of envy and rivalry and . . . And is still capable of unctuating (“Good luck”) unconvincingly.
A question at a press conference in 1965:
In a lot of your songs you are hard on people – in Like a Rolling Stone you’re hard on the girls and in Positively 4th Street you’re hard on a friend. Do you do this because you want to change their lives, or do you want to point out to them the error of their ways?
Answer: “I want to needle them.”88
It was a needle that injected the songs back then; now it is more likely to be a laser beam.
For my part, I have always taken the no-friend-of-his to be a man. Friends of mine, it seems, have taken a woman. At one point, the force of the lines would have to be taken differently if the irritant were not a he but a she.
I know the reason
That you talk behind my back
I used to be among the crowd
You’re in with
Do you take me for such a fool
To think I’d make contact
With the one who tries to hide
What he don’t know to begin with
I envisage the friend himself as despised here, to his face, as “the one who tries to hide / What he don’t know to begin with”. And I take this to be the formally aggressive mock-incredulity or distancing (“one who . . .”) that says “he” even while speaking to “you”: “Now he tells me!” This, with “know” as yet another of the occurrences of a word angrily bandied between the two of them throughout the song. I get more from this than from the other interpretation, the one that travels out, via the third-person pronoun, to a third party who forms part of an obscure narrative that ripples into further rivalries. For I have always thrilled to the immitigably binary set-up for the song. You and I, not You and I and He.
Oh, there is a crowd you’re in with, but for the duration of the song the crowd is outside the ring, and inside the ring there are just the two of us, with no referee to boot. So I’d like to continue to hear “one who tries to hide / What he don’t know to begin with” as contemptuously third person – especially if “third” be pronounced in the Irish fashion. But I can understand the feeling (and I value the reminder) that a woman could well have proved to be just such a friend.89 And I’d grant that the word “heartbreaks” (“the heartbreaks you embrace”) might consort better, albeit prejudicially, with a woman. Not that heartbreak need be sexual or amatory – there is no end to the things that break hearts. (In Among School Children, Yeats saw how different are the images that nuns, as against mothers, worship: “And yet they too break hearts”.) Heartbreak, like so much else in the song, could have a root in envy. Bursting with envy. Jealousy is not the same, but bear in mind the words set down in 1586: “Shun jealousy, that heartbreak love”. It may be a valuably unsettling thing about the song that the sex or gender of the friend is not settled. In an interview in Spin, Dylan said:
Outside of a song like Positively 4th Street, which is extremely one-dimensional, which I like, I don’t usually purge myself by writing anything about any type of quote, so-called, relationships. I don’t have the kinds of relationships that are built on any kind of false pretense, not to say that I haven’t.90
Two-dimensional, not one-dimensional, this 4th Street, and although one-sided, it is two-edged, a two-handed engine that stands ready to smite more than once and smite some more. As to sex or gender: the canting word “relationships” (“quote, so-called”), though these days it does suggest lovees and lovers more than friends, can’t be denied its applicability to friendship, or to ex-friendship. Catharsis, the ancient critical metaphor in Dylan’s phrase “purge myself”, would be one way of getting rid of the catharsole and of the waste matter that is pretence.91 The metaphor in “purge myself ” is critical, but Dylan’s target isn’t formally a critic. “Some would later think the vitriolic lyrics were addressed to the critics of his new style. Dylan denies it. ‘I couldn’t write a song about something like that,’ he said, ‘I don’t write songs to critics.’”92
I don’t envy the imagined or imaginary “friend” in this song. One other candidate as the sin of the song would be anger. But the power and the threat are felt in the very restraint: there is no yielding of any kind in the song, and that includes yielding to anger (as against understanding what anger might yield). Anger is a sin resisted or at least curbed by the song. But if I ask what sin might have tempted the artist himself here, the answer isn’t going to be envy. When it comes to sin, the song is all the more ample in that its position and its place are not circumscribed by envy. The song looks searchingly into those who, having opted for emptinesses, now want to co-opt someone back into their misvalued ethos and pathos. Pity for the infected, as Pound said, but preserve antisepsis.
They tell me to be discreet for all intended purposes
They tell me revenge is sweet and from where they stand, I’m sure it is
(Dark Eyes)
What sin, come to think of it, might envy incite? Why, pride. My position and my place. Pride in being envied, even sometimes (and this is the very bad bit) if it is being envied by creeps. And then pride’s further pleasure: contempt for the envious flatterers. But Dylan does not flatter himself – again, not a biographical point but an artistic accomplishment. He can be proud of the song, not least because he is not proud in it.
Blind Willie McTell
Gratitude to a fellow-singer, no less than in Song to Woody
