I referred a couple of days ago to Scott Warmuth’s discovery of some specific phrases from a certain edition of TIME magazine showing up in Bob Dylan’s Chronicles. Later in the same forum thread where he posted those observations, he also referred to some discoveries made by Edward Cook in 2006, in posts at his blog Ralph the Sacred River. Cook identified lines and phrases in Chronicles that came from such sources as Huckleberry Finn, and a book called Really the Blues by Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe. Scott follows and expands on Cook’s discoveries.

I wrote a reaction to Cook’s discoveries at the time, in a post at this link. I don’t really have anything to add to it. I would say this (similar to a comment I just made to Scott in an e-mail): It seems to me overall that Chronicles is telling it straight when other known and real people are involved (e.g. Daniel Lanois, Bob Johnston) and the events are more or less on the record. (No one that I know of has accused Dylan of lying about such episodes.) But then there are other passages which might be fantastical or fictionalized to one extent or another, and maybe these tend to be the passages where Dylan indulged in this kind of mixing-in of things he’d read. But clearly enough this is a developing story.

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Addendum 08/05/2009: Richard e-mails:

Dylan’s always been an unreliable narrator (and a thief – and a joker, talking to himself) the only thing that’s different is the internet, making him easier to find out. I have moved him out of Nobel consideration, though.

I wonder if the internet has made others easier to find out too, but people are not necessarily applying their energies to investigating other writers this way. It’s an interesting question, which I’m not qualified to answer: To what extent have other writers — and let’s limit it to very highly regarded writers — done this kind of snipping of phrases, whether you call it allusion or larceny or whatever? I’ve seen it asserted that Shakespeare and Dostoevsky did things like this. I do know that Shakespeare’s art was derivative in many ways; but can what he did be compared to what Dylan’s apparently doing? How many other writers have done something like it?

To me, it’s strange. I can’t even imagine trying to write something of my own while filching around for phrases in other people’s books and trying to fit them in. It would make the whole process twenty-times harder, for me at least. You can’t help unconsciously using someone else’s words occasionally, but what Dylan has been found to be doing in Chronicles surely cannot be unconscious. Why do it? Does it somehow make the process more fun for him?

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