Dylan's Visions of Sin (9 page)

Impact impinges. Repeatedly. The song exercises its sway while swaying (like a boxer), for it has an extraordinary sense of powerfully moving while threateningly not moving.
⁷⁶
“You just stood there grinning”: the song just stands there, not grinning, but grinding. Might it even be said to just stomp there? No, because it bobs a
bout. So when we suddenly find (it is a surprise) “surprised” precipitating “paralyzed” –

– it is that the song has realized its power, tonic and toxic, to paralyze its opponent.

“You say, ‘How are you?’ ‘Good luck’”. Disarming? No, and Dylan declines to lower his guard. For luck invites envy, as is understood in
Idiot Wind
:

You can’t be blamed for being lucky – but you can be disliked for it, and you are likely to be envied for it. All you can do is shrug and propitiate (“I
can’t help it if I’m lucky”). It was good of Dylan to wish us well at the end of an interview in 1965:

Is there anything in addition to your songs that you want to say to people?

“Good luck!”

You don’t say that in your songs
.

“Oh, yes I do; every song tails off with, ‘Good Luck – I hope you make it.’”
⁷⁷

It is a nice thought that every Dylan song tails off with “Good Luck” to those of us who are listening to it, but what about those whom the song addresses as
you
?
⁷⁸
Positively 4th Street
does not tail off, it heads off, and in any case it does not tail off with “Good Luck” to its
interluckitor. Dylan’s farewell in the interview has a cadence that is illuminatingly close to the wording of the cited farewell in this song from the very same year.

The feeling of paralysis (the root notion of
fascination
⁷⁹
) is a consequence
of the counterpointing – or
counterpunching – of the units musical and verbal. Musically, the unit is of four lines, but verbally (as lyrics) the unit has a rhyme scheme that extends over eight lines. Positively 4th and
8th. The effect is of a sequence that both is and is not intensely repetitive. So while musically the song is in twelve verses, rhymingly it is in six. The armour-plated template in each set is
simply the rhyming of lines two and six, and of lines four and eight. But Dylan, as so often, loves not only to attend but to bend his attention, and so to intensify, and what we hear within those
first eight lines is the not-letting-go of any of the first four lines: “nerve” is repeated in the fifth line, the whole line back again as though in a lethal litany; “lend”
takes up “friend”; “on” off-rhymes with “down”; and “winning” is in a clinch with “grinning”. (All the more a clinch in that the final
rhyme, here as throughout, is a disyllabic rhyme, all the way from this
grinning / winning
to the final
be you / see you
.) As though on probation, not one line of the first four is
let off its obligation to report back during the ensuing four.

Whereupon the next set can afford to relax, as though the template should be enough for now (
that / at
, and
show it / know it
), yet not quite enough, since Dylan threateningly
dandles a rhyme-line from the first verse, whose “When I was down” immediately gets re-charged here:

The accuser is the one who had faith to lose. The music and the voice combine to create a chilling thrilling pause after that word “lose”, so that “And you
know it”, pouncing, brooks no resistance.

Such an evocation of faith negated is a positive achievement, because
it makes sense only as founded upon faith in the possibility of something better. For every
Positively 4th Street
about faith misplaced in friendship, there is a
Bob Dylan’s Dream
about friendship’s solid solidarity for all its pains and losses. And in any case
the vibrant anger in
Positively 4th Street
does itself directly convey what friendship ought to be and can be. For how could there be a true indictment of false friends that didn’t
call upon and call up true friends?

But now it settles into third, fourth, and fifth sets of verses, all in the sedate template. First,
my back / contact
, and
in with / begin with
:

Then,
embrace / place
, and
rob them / problem
:

“Understand” is irresistible (“Don’t you understand”), an unobtrusive triumph, mindful both of “You just stood there” at the beginning
and of the undeviating repetition of “You could stand inside my shoes” at the end.

But the
problem / rob them
rhyme is something of a problem. The rhyme is a touch far-fetched, and is it worth the carriage? Perhaps, but that would have to be the point, for the other
rhymes are living near at hand, and are simply telling:
friend / lend
,
grinning / winning
. . . The rhyme
problem / rob them
precipitates a different
world or mood, suggesting the uneasy bravura of
half sick / traffic
in
Absolutely Sweet Marie
(absolutely sweet there). Nothing wrong with one pair of rhymes asking a different kind
of attention (not more attention, really) than do the other rhyme-pairs in a song, and this would be congruent with the perplexity of the syntax in this verse. For whereas elsewhere in
Positively 4th Street
the syntax is positively forthright, advancing straight forward, here it is circuitous, and it pauses for a moment upon “Perhaps”:

What is it (the phrase is cryptic) to embrace heartbreaks? To enjoy one’s own sufferings? To be sicklily solicitous of other people’s suffering, creepily
commiserating away? And do these tangents amount to one of those mysterious triumphs of phrasing that exquisitely elude paraphrase (like “One too many mornings / And a thousand miles
behind”), or is this one of those occasions when something eludes not us but the artist? Dylan is a master of living derangements of syntax
⁸¹
but
even he must sometimes let things slip. Dr Johnson ventured to characterize as an imperfectionist that Dylanesque writer William Shakespeare:
⁸²

It is incident to him to be now and then entangled with an unwieldy sentiment, which he cannot well express, and will not reject; he struggles with it
a while, and if it continues stubborn, comprises it in words such as occur, and leaves it to be disentangled and evolved by those who have more leisure to bestow upon it.
⁸³

It must be granted that if these lines induce queasiness, they do make a point of saying “No, I do not feel that good”. So an unsettling rhyme such as
problem /
rob them
might rightly be hard to stomach, especially given the tilting “Perhaps”. And given what a
problem
is: not just “adifficult or puzzling question proposed for
solution; a riddle; an enigmatic statement” (the song takes care to couch these “problem”-lines enigmatically, riddlingly), but a forcible projectile, “lit. a thing thrown
or put forward”. The song throws out and puts forward its weaponry.

But again, “Perhaps I’d rob them”: what does this enigmatic phrase mean? “I’d steal them” (these heartbreaks)? Then what would you do with them? And
wouldn’t that have to be “I’d rob
you of
them”? Rid you of them? Not rob them, the heartbreaks, presumably – except that
rob
is sometimes used to mean
“to carry off as plunder; to steal” (
The Oxford English Dictionary
, 5, “Now rare”), as in “rob his treasure from him”, or “Passion robs my peace no
more”,
⁸⁴
so Dylan wouldn’t have to be taking or stealing much of a liberty. Especially as there may be a suggestion of heart-breaking and
heart-entering (or exiting). And yet the lines, like nothing else in the song, continue to rob my peace. Not that the song offers itself as a peace-maker. A truce at most.

On and on and on and on the song weaves, and yet with a left and a right or a shifting of weight all the time pugnaciously, combatively. But we can sense that the round must be drawing to an
end, or may be nearing a knock-out, when the pattern of the opening re-emerges. There, the line “You got a lotta nerve” had opened two successive quatrains, and now the reminder that
even this vituperation must come to an end is brought home
to us when we hear, as we have not heard along the way, such a repetition again at the head of two successive
quatrains: “I wish that for just one time” / “Yes, I wish that for just one time”. (Relentless, this pressing home twice the words “just one time”.) But then
there is a further compounding of the shape in which the tireless tirade had been launched, for back then it had been only a matter of repeating the first line, whereas now that there is to be a
complete dismissal of the ex-friend, it is not one but two lines that will be repeated to begin the excommunication:

Usually the idiom about wishing that someone could stand inside your shoes is a movement inviting sympathy (see it my way, please); here it swings round into antipathy. And
Dylan gives voices to these feelings so that at the end of each verse – and consummately at this very end – the few syllables are held, stretched on a rack all the more frighteningly
for there being nothing of a scream at this end.

Until this unpalliated ending you feel that Dylan could have gone on pounding for ever (
Eternal Circle
of hell), so that the challenge was to arrive at a conclusion that could bring proof
and reproof to an end. And then, for the only time in the song (truly “for just one time”), there is a shrewd little tilting of the stress within the disyllabic rhyme, with “be
you” not having exactly the same measured pressure as “see you”, the first asking slightly more emphasis upon “you” than does the second:

There is a famous poignancy in Hardy’s poem
The Voice
:

F. R. Leavis brought out how Hardy’s rhythms escape the “crude popular lilt” that might endanger the poem: “you that I
hear
” is set in
contrast with the hope “Let me
view
you then”, asking that there be some emphasis on “view”, whereas in the line that rhymes with this, the antithesis is of
“now” as against “then”, so that there has to be a touch tilting it away from a lilt. As Leavis saw and heard, “The shift of stress (‘víew you
then’, ‘knew you thén’) has banished the jingle from it.”
⁸⁵

Positively 4th Street
was never going to succumb to a jingle, or even to a jingle jangle, but it is the deadly precision of the emphasis that consummates the act of banishment, giving the
unanswerable last word to this song that is not
I and I
but You and I.

It has the hammering away at words, and with words, that characterizes a quarrel, and one word above all others:
know
. About this friend or “friend” we know nothing except
what the song declares through and through. If I now quote something that Dylan himself said, it is not in order to invoke whatever biographical facts might exist outside the song, or to adduce
Dylan’s own character – it is the character of his songs that matters to me. But
Positively 4th Street
is an act of retaliation, and it gives some warrant for stressing
know
in the song that Dylan makes much of the word in this context. “I’m known to retaliate you know; you should know I’m known to
retaliate
.”
⁸⁶
You know; you should know I’m known . . .