Dylan's Visions of Sin (60 page)

Question
. What is your name?

Answer. N.
or
M.

Question
. Who gave you this name?

What is your name? Robert or Bob. Dylan or Zimmerman. “You may call me Bobby, or you may call me Zimmy” (
Gotta Serve Somebody
).

What Was It You Wanted?
is a catechism. One with a difference anyway. “Who are you anyway?” Now, I ask you (“exclamatory phr. indicating disgust or
asseveration”).
⁴³⁹
The questions, though, are designed, not to establish the foundations for faith, but to dig into whether the lover’s
faith really has any foundation. (Is it groundless?) The song scrutinizes the love or lovelessness of woman (and of man), not the love of God.

Question
. What meanest thou by this word Sacrament?

Answer
. I mean an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.

What Was It You Wanted?
inquires not into the meaning of sacrament but into sacrilege, the demeaning of love:

We are to listen for the outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual disgrace. A frightening crevasse – a cold pause, musical and vocal, of a nature to give you
pause – opens between “Is it something important?” and “Maybe not”. Far from being a casual fluency, “Maybe” comes out there as rigidly frigid. “Is
it something important?” The philosopher J. L. Austin famously remarked, “I am not sure importance is important: truth is.”
⁴⁴⁰

This song about truth, a song that catechizes and castigates, is a string of questions, coolly plaited into a noose. It takes you back to the good old days when “to go to heaven in a
string” was to be hanged.

It is no merry boys’ song,
What Was It You Wanted?
But it does fulfil the educational obligation of a catechism: to be instruction. In faith and in the faith. And in good
faith, for it is dedicated to teaching someone a lesson. Two people actually, the woman who is being quizzed and the man who is quizzing her in a tone too monomaniacal to be quizzical. And maybe a
third, too, the other man, with whom she may have been faithless. “Someone there in the shadows / Someone that I might have missed”. Do I miss you, my darling? Did I miss him, your
darling, fail to spot him, or fail to hit him? “Was there a slip of the lip?” A slip of the lip may betray something, may be evidence of betrayal, of unfaith. The sacred world of
I
Believe in You
may have been desecrated in the world of earthly love. “Who are you anyway?”

The song launches itself immediately into questioning, with just this one provocative proviso: there is to be no answering, understood?

Good of him to give you a minute to collect yourself, is it not? – but you had better not suppose that in a minute’s time, when you
have
got it together, you will
get the chance to speak, an opportunity to answer him. Do you have to answer to him? His words are edged. She will not get a word in edge-ways or edge-wise.

The question that glowers darkly through the song is
Get it?
Men just don’t get it. Or is she going to be the no-getter? From “You can get it together by then” in the first
verse, through “Get it back on the track” in the next verse, arriving in the closing verses, first, at

– and then at the final question, the one to which you would be well advised not to answer
Yes
: “Am I getting it wrong?” The right answer to that one is not
far to seek. How prudent of Latin to build into the language a word of advice as to just where power lies when it comes to these questions:
num
, “introducing a direct question, usually
expecting a negative answer”. Now there’s negative capability for you. Hey
nonne
no. Or rather yes:
nonne
, “in a direct question,
no
? (expecting an affirmative answer)”.

Dylan’s song
Sen˜or
has its subtitle, or rather, side-title: (
Tales of Yankee Power
). (Those parentheses, those lunulae, or little moons, forecast the eclipse of power.)
Sen˜or
is a song of religious politics, a judgement hymn.
What Was It You Wanted?
is a song of sexual politics, a judgement on him and on her (Sen˜or and Sen˜orita), and its side-title might
be “Tales of Man Power”. Or should that be “Tales of Woman Power”? For a silent interlocutor (she never does get to reply) is not necessarily the less powerful one. She may,
on the contrary, be in the position of strength, holding her fire and letting him question himself out. Buttoned lips, like compressored lips, can emit great force and authority. Men are menacing,
but perhaps
here the man and the woman, though no love-match, are evenly matched. This, despite his having the first word, the last word, and every word along the way. And
perhaps not
despite
but
exactly because he has
. . . He may have the word-power (“It pays to increase your word-power” is how the advertisement words it), but there is such a thing as
wordless power, power that is audible in the very wordlessness of the person who is, let us say, among those who are interviewing you. Faced by his or her formidable silence, you want to exclaim,
I’ve had just about enough of your buttoned lip.

The song proliferates its prosecutory questions, and yet it plays this against the disconcerting fact that, as so often in life, it may be not entirely clear whether something really is a
question.

Is this opening of the song a single-line question, followed by a three-line imperative? You can’t tell from the run of the words whether “know” is a
transitive or intransitive verb, and you can’t tell from Dylan’s voicing, either, for it doesn’t let on. Perhaps it should go like this:

But hang on a moment, it might be better to suspend the sense:

And what would be the point of leaving it dubious, equivocal as to just what is being intimated? To bring out the fact that there is a borderline – between what is a
question and what is not – that needs to be policed.
Who do you think you are?
Is that a question? Yes and no. It takes on itself the form or uniform of a question, but it has the function of
an arresting accusation.
Dylan’s “Who are you anyway?” has this same quasi-question potentiality, potential danger, actual power.

Questions of such a kind that it is in question whether they really are questions: these create a threat that can be felt throughout the song. Coercive, they can pretend to be concessive. (I was
only asking.) “Could you say it again?”: well, you know that I
could
, but are you genuinely asking me (
please
?)to say it again? “Would you remind me again” (remind me again,
not just put me in mind of it again): not a question exactly, a pretence of a courtesy – and the more so because of the pressure (iron hand in velvet glove)
⁴⁴²
of the rhyming, with its silky lining:

There “my mind” is only too pleased to cooperate with (or is it collude with? or even conspire with?) “remind” – a dry-tongued witticism, since
“remind” is “mind” again, with “again” at once following: “remind me again”. And so (with these three rhymes working together like three merry boys,
hand in glove with one another) on to “so kind”, taking the line that can murmur, with a villain’s courtesy that could almost be a curtsy, “If you’d be so
kind”.

The questions have the repetitiveness of yet another turn of the screw, yet another twist of the knife. The title is the opening line, “What was it you wanted?”; this figures twice
in both the first verse and the second. Given a break for the next verse (torturers get tired), it comes back (remember “I’m back”?) in the third and fourth verses, though only
once each. Back to its full double strength in the fifth verse (with two verses left to go), it is then not allowed to become boring – it is as a drill that it must bore, not as a dullard
– so Dylan gives its repetition a new twist at the end of the next verse, the one but last verse: not

What was it you wanted

returning identically six lines later:

What was it you wanted

– but

What was it you wanted

wrested to

Why do you want it

For the man in the song is well aware that repetition is the great penetrator. (You can say that again.) Things come back. “I’ll be back in a minute”
comes back as “I’m back”, and then as “Get it back on the track”, and finally as an arsy-versy question in the last verse, “Is the whole thing going
backwards?” Ain’t no going backwards from the last verse, which completes the execution of the song, the execution that is the song:

With every question something or someone is laid low. For this first time that will be the very last time, every singling-out one of the eight lines can be heard – no,
must be heard – as a question. For the first time and last time, a verse doesn’t start with something related to the two opening words,
What was
:

– and then, from inner space,

Don’t know about the scenery, but certainly the opening words of the scene are changing. The same goes for other things within this inexorable ending, for instance the
rhyme
wrong / song
. It is the only unassisted or unsupported line-ending in the last stanza. For the other rhyme (
free / me
), the one that closes everything, picks itself up from
be / me
in the
previous verse.
⁴⁴³
And “changing” is participial (as so much is, within this song that means to go on pounding and needling and
nagging);
⁴⁴⁴
“backwards” picks up the earlier “back”; “started” the earlier “start”; and
“wanted” the recurrent ending. So the pairing of “Am I getting it wrong?” with “Are they playing our song?” achieves a unique ache. It is not only the grim
thought: “Are they playing our song?” – are you really asking that? For there is the sardonic acuteness of “our”. This screed, careful not to be a screech, has been a
you and your / I and me and my affair
. True, it had averred, early on,

But he is only saying that, and what in the end he comes to is this only other invoking of the two of them, seen in a harsh true light: “Are they playing our song?”
This, in a song that “we” are hearing, has a moment of De Palma-type bemusement or comic horror. He is playing his song. They are playing his song. They are playing what, thanks to
Dylan’s creativity, is our song, too. Exit, with the question that can be heard as not a question exactly (or rather, exactly not a question), although it would be perfectly civil if you
could bring yourself to take it as sincerely and good-naturedly put: “Are you talking to me?” The question is laced. Is it ever
me
, really, you’re
talking to? Is it ever
talking
, really, as against verbal tics? Is it ever talking
to
me, really, as against at me?

What Was It You Wanted?
is a study of the question as weapon, understanding such aggro (“Abbrev. of aggr (
AVATION
or
AGGR
(
ESSION
+ o”), understanding it and even perhaps forgiving it but aware of the malign form that can be taken by the question that does not ask for or even permit of an answer.
Fortunately, there is such a thing as a good form of the self-answering question.

True, often enough, and truthful. The most famous question ever asked about truth, “What is truth?”, came from Pontius Pilate, who notoriously did not stay for an
answer. But his question has been recognized for centuries as miraculously containing within itself its answer. For
quid est veritas?
is an anagram of
est vir qui adest
: “It is the man who is
here”. Christ, one of the three persons of the Trinity, can speak of himself in the third person, creator of the miracle by which a meaning may lurk as a marvel for those who have eyes to see
or who have ears to hear. Such, at least, is faith in the divine. Faith in the human is a smaller-minded business. The
catechism
that is
What Was It You Wanted?
has its bitter root in the ancient
world: “to instruct orally, originally to resound, sound amiss, ‘din one’s ears’”. Yet how insinuating such a din in one’s ears can be, and how right on target,
so direct, such sounding amiss. “Someone that I might have missed”.