Genre, Narrative and Judgment:
Legal and Protest Song Stories in
Two Criminal Cases

A narrative is a story about an event delivered to an audience by a narrator. Audience plays an important role in this process because narrators characteristically tell stories that respond to their audience’s expectations and desires. The understandings shared by a narrator and his audience are what define a genre – or class of stories sharing certain norms and tendencies. The power of a genre resides in its imposition upon narrators of a set of rules and conventions that govern storytelling practice. Lawyers and protest singers are inescapably influenced by their respective storytelling traditions, for ‘[g]enre retains its wonderful power to say what it, rather than the individual talent would like to say.’

Dylan and the defense lawyers in the cases below each relied on a storytelling tradition which informed their perception of the empirical world and delimited the range of stories they could tell about that world. Their stories are visions of reality glimpsed through thick lenses of meaning. Neither can be understood as a version of ‘what happened’ in isolation from the context in which it was produced.

Narrative studies have recently become a prominent feature of the legal academic landscape, where writers with diverse emphases have explored the many relationships between storytelling and law. One troubling perspective of this nascent movement in ‘legal storytelling’ is a belief in the impossibility of judging between stories. Following the postmodern5 insight that perception is subjective and absolute truth unattainable in an indeterminate world, many narrative scholars conclude that differences among competing stories about a given event are ‘inadjudicable.’ Determining whether one story is better than another is not possible, it is argued, because there is no objective way to measure their correspondence to ‘what really happened.’

The relativism expressed in this view is a valuable insight, without which one cannot fully comprehend narrative theory. And yet, in the context of the stores told by Dylan and the defense, it is a profoundly unsatisfying conclusion. Comparing their stories makes clear that we must not abandon the ability think critically when it comes to historical representation. While it is important to appreciate the postmodern dictum that every story is merely a contingent version of an event, examination of the narratives that follow renders more urgent our obligation as moral persons to judge the stories we encounter, whatever their genre.


Letter From America

Some of the handwritten stuff, though, is very interesting. No, more than that, fascinating. There is the first page of a Hibbing High School essay on John Steinbeck. It shows young Bob as an earnest student, very correct and systematic, and with (unlike later!) very neat and legible handwriting. The teacher criticized the format of his footnoting (‘Love and Theft’?) and gave him a B.

Years later, there is a handwritten page which seems like a first draft of something that is interesting but going nowhere – several variations on ‘choose between the forest and the sea’ – until the last lines latch onto the phrase ‘How does it feel?’ – which clearly went somewhere else. This page (almost completely incoherent and unfinished) was, for me, one of the major highlights of the exhibition.

One wall of the exhibit is occupied by one hundred, multi-language, covers of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’ One wall of the exhibit is totally covered in samples of red iron ore mined in Hibbing.

There is an abundance of historical material relating to the political context: articles on Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger; reminiscences of Civil Rights in the Deep South; maps of the plan for the March on Washington; concert advertisements and programs; business contracts for Dylan/Baez shows; pages from Izzy Young’s diary; a photograph of Davey Moore taken one hour before he died. You could write a whole history of early 60s America out of the pages on show in this exhibit.

Then there’s this really weird letter, typewritten, supposedly from Joan Baez to her mother, dated November (1964??), describing a drag-down all-out fight with ‘you know who,’ and really laying into ‘you know who’ without restraint. I now know (having looked it up in various sources, from Baez herself to Hadju) that the letter was actually concocted by Bob himself. I suspected so at the time, on purely stylistic grounds. But, as this is only acknowledged in tiny print as having been written by Dylan, most viewers will presume it is an actual letter from Joan.

There is also an astonishing page of MS/typescript. It's a typed page, with lots of handwritten corrections, which sketches out the lines for ‘Ballad in Plain D.’ Then on the same page (Bob was being frugal with paper) lines probably intended for ‘I Shall Be Free #10.’ This is genuine first draft material, as close to the raw creative process as we are likely to get.


Claude-Angèle Boni:
She’s An Artist, She Don’t Look Back 

This interview has two underlying themes I would like to call to the reader’s attention: the first one concerns Dylan’s attitude in respect of his fans and the second one deals with the relation between Dylan’s art and other arts.Why does Dylan allow, from time to time, complete unknowns to approach him either on stage or elsewhere in private? Could it be that he’s looking for distractions from his routine? Or is it adventure he prizes above everything? It is a matter of public record that on occasion, Dylan has permitted fans to obtain more than a casual glimpse of his person; for obvious reasons, women rather than men (please refer to Tracy Johnson’s excellent Encounters with Bob Dylan about this). One can only wonder what can have been on his mind when he allowed Swiss fan Liz Sioussi to climb on stage in Eindhoven in 1993, and duet with him on ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’, or when he invited a German girl to play guitar on ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ in Cologne in 2000. On another hand, Dylan is known to be quite cold, even rude, to his fans if they try to get close to him: consider the story about an encounter somewhere in an escalator, when a fan who had just recognised him said, ‘Oh, I know you but you don’t know me’, and Dylan curtly answered, ‘Yes, let’s keep it like this’ and walked away.

As to the second large issue raised by this interview: it is an indisputable fact that there are many Dylan fans who, inspired by his personality or by his songs, have started writing, drawing or making music. Even a genius such as Jimi Hendrix only started to sing after he first heard Dylan singing; until then he was convinced he could only play guitar! There are so many songs and poems, paintings and books dedicated to Bob Dylan, even if only few are of any real merit, that we must perforce come to the conclusion that one of Dylan’s decisive characteristics is that he inspires people to tap their own creative resources, if any. If we limit ourselves exclusively to the field of painting, if you only care to take a look at the URL: expectingrain.com/dok/bdx, you will find a considerable and yet by no means exhaustive list of artists inspired by Dylan.