again from where it seemed to fail,
Stormed in orbs of song, a growing gale.
There are seven deadly sins, but only four cardinal virtues (Justice, Prudence, Temperance, and Fortitude). Seven to four? But do not despair, for here come the three heavenly graces: Faith, Hope, and Charity. Seven-a-side, then. But there is imbalance still. The antonym of guilt is innocence, the antonym of a virtue is a vice – but what, pray, is the antonym of a sin?
Furthermore, isn’t it rather bewildering that the sins, as they mount their masque, enjoy masquerading as one another? For lust can be seen as one form that may be taken by greed or gluttony, as can covetousness or avarice. “One sin very naturally leans on another”: there is something appropriately creepy about this seventeenth-century description (by Thomas Wilson) of the pleasure that sins take in their leanings, in their overlapping.
A sin will have to be set, first and foremost, in opposition to the goodness that opposes it. Gratitude will have no truck with envy. Thomas Wilson again:
Every virtue consists in denying some corrupt inclination of our depraved nature; in opposing and resisting all temptations to the contrary vice; charity, in opposing continually self-love and envy; humility, in resisting all temptations to pride, etc.
But some of the discriminations that need to be made are more elusive. How confident can we be, for instance, in distinguishing a sin from the goodness to which it is immediately adjacent? Envy, bad: emulation of an honourable kind, good. Sloth, bad: relaxedness, good. Pride, bad: pride, good.
And then there are sins of omission. “Forgive me, baby, for what I didn’t do” (Maybe Someday). In the Summertime, before it came to shake its head sorrowingly (“Fools they made a mock of sin”), had asked:
Did you respect me for what I did
Or for what I didn’t do, or for keeping it hid?
Waltzing with Sin is not a Dylan song, but it danced along on The Basement Tapes. Dylan likes setting to music our besetting sins. He likes company in doing so, and he likes the comedy that company encourages. Which is one reason why 7 Deadly Sins was issued by a joint stock company, the Traveling Wilburys.
7 deadly sins
That’s how the world begins
Watch out when you step in
For 7 deadly sins
That’s when the fun begins
7 deadly sins
Sin number one was when you left me
Sin number two you said goodbye
Sin number three was when you told me a little white lie
7 deadly sins
Once it starts it never ends
Watch out around the bend
For 7 deadly sins
Sin number four was when you looked my way
Sin number five was when you smiled
Sin number six was when you let me stay
Sin number seven was when you touched me and drove me wild
7 deadly sins
So many rules to bend
Time and time again
7 deadly sins
One of the endearing things about the song, tucked up in all innocence, is that there don’t actually seem to be seven sins on the go at all. Just one good old one. Touching, really.
The claim in this book isn’t that most of Dylan’s songs, or even most of the best ones, are bent on sin. Simply that (for the present venture in criticism) handling sin may be the right way to take hold of the bundle. Dylan himself may make a mock of the idea that songs are about things, but he did speak of the “things I have to say about such things as ghetto bosses, salvation and sin”. And even in his travesty of owlishness (the notes accompanying World Gone Wrong), he heads these comments of his on other men’s songs with the words:
ABOUT THE SONGS
(what they’re about)
Of Broke Down Engine, Dylan remarks (in a way that may freewheel, but is not out of control) that “it’s about Ambiguity, the fortunes of the privileged elite, flood control – watching the red dawn not bothering to dress”. So I shall take Ambiguity as an excuse for returning to the author of Seven Types of Ambiguity, William Empson.8
Empson explained why he came to do the explaining in which he took delight. His method, verbal analysis, started simply from the pleasure of his response to a poem.
I felt sure that the example was beautiful and that I had, broadly speaking, reacted to it correctly. But I did not at all know what had happened in this “reaction”; I did not know why the example was beautiful. And it seemed to me that I was able in some cases partly to explain my feelings to myself by teasing out the meanings of the text.9
Empson’s example is crucial to me, not only in its happiness, but in his not being dead set upon convincing anybody else that a particular poem is good. The idea was not so much to show someone that a poem is good, as to go some way towards showing how it comes to be good, so very good.
You think that the poem is worth the trouble before you choose to go into it carefully, and you know more about what it is worth when you have done so.10
In the same spirit, I think of what I am doing as prizing songs, not as prising-open minds. (Most people who are likely to read this book will already know what they feel about Dylan, though they may not always know quite why they feel it or what they think.)
I think that nowadays we can explain why Milton was right, but the explanations usually seem long and fanciful; they would only convince men who believed already that the line was beautiful, and wanted to know why.11
Literary criticism – unlike, say, music criticism or art criticism – enjoys the advantage of existing in the same medium (language) as the art that it explores and esteems. This can give to literary criticism a delicacy and an inwardness that are harder to achieve elsewhere. But, at the same time, this may be why literary critics are given to competitive envy: What I’d like to know, given that he and I are working in the same medium, in the same line of work, really, is why I am attending to Tennyson, instead of his attending to me . . .
And then there is the age-old difficulty and problem of intention. Briefly: I believe that an artist is someone more than usually blessed with a cooperative unconscious or subconscious, more than usually able to effect things with the help of instincts and intuitions of which he or she is not necessarily conscious. Like the great athlete, the great artist is at once highly trained and deeply instinctual. So if I am asked whether I believe that Dylan is conscious of all the subtle effects of wording and timing that I suggest, I am perfectly happy to say that he probably isn’t. And if I am right, then in this he is not less the artist but more. There are such things as unconscious intentions (think of the
