Bob Dylan Ain’t Talking: One Man’s Vast Comic Adventure in American Music, Dramaturgy, and Mysticism | Peter Murphy

Summary: Music, Culture and Society: Peter Murphy <strong>Bob Dylan Ain’t Talking: One Man’s Vast Comic Adventure in American Music, Dramaturgy, and Mysticism</strong> Peter Murphy Bob Dylan is the Augie March of American music, a Bellovian character who is engaged in an endless relentless picaresque journey through the vast landscape of American music, adopting and readopting one musical character type after another, a wanted man pursued by his original fans, the egregious sixties protest generation, whose idolatry he reviles—a musical chameleon, evasive, shape-shifting, identity changing, metamorphosing, impugner of romantic authenticity. The talk explores Dylan’s mystic propensity not to talk, his preference for dramaturgical masks and theatrical collaborators, the disappearance of his original self (Zimmerman) and its replacement with an enigmatic persona—an astonishingly original impersonator-mimic whose unending touring is an emblem of a life that is a comic masterpiece where the aw-shucks sly humor of Huck Finn meets the allusive mercurial word play of Shakespearean drama meets a kind of Quixote-like misidentification of self, misunderstanding by audiences and a mysterious transcendentalist metaphysics that is a peculiarly American mix of Calvinist necessity, bohemian experimentalism and mystical disdain for messages. Please allow me to introduce you to the Augustinian Jew, the philosophical entertainer, the jokerman born out of time. He is one hell of a bunch of interesting guys.