Bob Dylan (Robert Allen Zimmerman, b.1941–) is an American singer, songwriter, and visual artist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature for ‘having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition’. In his songs and compositions, he seems to represent himself a pacifist and gives vivid descriptions of the horrors and brutalities of wars in his early songs (‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and ‘John Brown’, for example). He experimented with the techniques of singing songs and accompanying musical instruments. He writes his own songs, composes the lyrics, sets the music and sings himself. The age in which he became popular as a songwriter was one which rejected to set itself into any definition and turned things upside down to dismantle all logical assumptions and constructions, that is postmodern. He emerged as a folk singer and has secured a stronghold and permanent place in the American Popular culture. He can be called the man who brought popular literature from streets to highways.
Published in the collection of his songs, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, the song became popular among many Americans and spread among the listeners like a wildfire. In the original version of the song, Dylan sang it with a composite-musical instrument (guitar and harmonica simultaneously) and later it was adopted in different versions and recorded with many other musical instruments and into different music patterns all over the world. In matters of form, the poem uses three eight-line stanzas that pose three rhetorical questions (questions that make the issues and arguments deeper and let the readers think about the complexities, pain and trauma of the real life — the questions whose answers the author does not expect to be given by the reader) in the six lines and end with a couplet repeating the catchwords (the title) of the seventh line into the eighth one in each stanza. In fact, the eight-line stanza (octave) uses a sestet and a couplet rhyming abcbdbee. It uses repetition as a literary device at the end of every stanza.
In its background, the song speaks about the conflicts of Vietnam War with the United States of America and the discrimination against the African Americans in America. This song tries to universalize the ideas of wars and their devastating effects on humanity, human values, culture, human mind and environment. It tries to sensitize the readers against the horrors, brutalities, and destruction of war through the rhetorical questions posed in all the three stanzas.
The singer has shown a special sympathy with the American Americans in America (a free country) where they were not given many civil and legal rights recognized by the American government. The American judicial systems at that time were discriminatory and biased and many ‘salves’ (the African American slaves who were freed from slavery but did not have the rights to live their lives with dignity) had very restricted settlement and movement in a ‘free country’ like America.
The song questions the universality of reason, the values of enlightenment, the authority of humanism and the rationality of government systems. It seems to blur the vision that human reason (marked in singular) can create and shows that the human mind is not capable enough to comprehend and resolve all problems through rational means. The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century had failed and disappointed humanity. It shows the threatening repercussions of high humanism (that puts humans in the centre of all activities) as unconceivable, unavoidable and unforgivable and problematizes the authoritative governments because of their extreme nationalism, frenzied patriotism and inhuman attitudes towards the mankind.
It tries to show that the purpose of humans is now at play and they have either lost the capacity to feel or comprehend or they have developed the ability to ignore. The ending couplets of all the three stanzas seem to be indicating the death of semantics (meaning) and the chaotic dispersal of only rhetorical designs into endless signifiers without any signified. It indicates that man (all humans) is neither interested in nor capable of finding the answers to the question related to the problems of our daily life, perhaps, because he has started living this chaos, irrationality, anarchy, silence and the irony of life. He deliberately delays (defers or postpones) to come to the answers that are ‘blowin’ in the wind’ in order to hide his lack of strength (both physical and mental), incapability of facing the truth that even does not exist and the reality that is more painful than the fragmentary world of pretention and ignorance. He believes that ignorance is bliss and awareness is a trauma.
© Copyright (Dr. Sanjeev Vishwakarma)
Literary Latitude 