Some of the best writing on Dylan I’ve read - and I’ve read a lot!

Particularly valuable is the writing on Dylan's approach to language. Scobie highlights two major throughlines: the "elaborate style" that relied on "a proliferation of images" and a "loose, nonlinear structure,” and a more plain, (relatively) austere "reliance on colloquial and proverbial speech" that frequently places intertextual material in new contexts.

It all ties back to Dylan's focus on "stopping time" in his work, and Greil Marcus' idea that a great deal of the music Dylan drew from, that is folk and “traditional” music, frequently comes across to the listener as "an allusion to a body of knowledge [that] can never be recovered.” Dylan, a “great poet of absence” in Scobie’s terms, picked up on this quality and incorporated it in his own songwriting.

For instance - with John Wesley Harding, "narrative gestures" are used as "selective invocations of the semiotic codes of outlaw ballads." Elsewhere (as with Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts), the writing is "so elliptical that nothing in the text excludes" a wide array of possible interpretations. Later, in the "born-again" era, Dylan will use this same elliptical writing and abstraction to explore a kind of self-negation or self-division. Eventually, with “Love and Theft” and Time Out of Mind, the approach develops to become a broader intertextual collage of tremendous depth that is necessarily inscrutable in any traditional sense.

Also valuable is Scobie's analysis of specific albums. The Basement Tapes (my personal favorite!) is a series of "fundamental dislocations of the very conditions of utterance." The key to those recordings is in "the absence of conventional systems of signification, as the language of the songs retreats into fragmentation and incoherence: the absence, in post-structuralist terms, of any transcendental signified."

Self-Portrait, in its reliance on material known to the listener, is either "a series of masks," an earnest attempt at outlining influences, or a "radical and definitive denial of the self." Dylan "disavows" writing and "erases altogether the privileged signifier of the [physical or authorial] voice.” In doing so, it creates a compelling portrait of the self, Dylan's or anyone's, as a fluid or unstable amalgamation of influences and personae mediated by the expectations of the audience.

With Time Out of Mind, Dylan "inserts into his own writing the disjunction of 'immemorial' tradition" in the frequent incorporation of "lines [whose] origin has been occluded." Authoritative interpretation and explicit sources are lost in a haze of intentional uncertainty.

Despite thematic similarities, the writing style (and performance) differs wildly from album to album. Scobie charts these changes in a broader overview of Dylan’s simultaneous trickster/messenger inclinations. The guy is complicated!

Anyway, I might not be doing the ideas here justice - if any of this is interesting even at a glance, I’d highly recommend this book.