The Naked Truth: The Mystery Of God, The Holocaust And Bob Dylan
Consider this an apology. And a lesson learned.
There are too many lessons to learn, especially the ones learned from experience, the mistakes you can’t fix, the ones you just have to apologize for. I hate those. This is one.
It has to do with when and whether it’s right to get in people’s faces with awful truths you believe in—but which you know (or should know) are going to hurt their feelings. Or rob them of their consolatory protective mechanisms. We all need consolatory protective measures. But who’s to decide how important it is to strip them away from other people for the sake of forcing them to face the purported truth? Even in academe, is truth the only value?
It’s taken me a while to realize where I went wrong. The inciting incident took place at the end of last year, when I gave a guest lecture at Stanford. The occasion was an angry outburst during the question period. Not so much a question but an anguished, enraged protest.
For the record, I’m not an academic (I’m a Yale-lit grad-school dropout); the lecture invitation grew out of a book I’m writing on Bob Dylan for Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series. The title I gave my lecture was “Bob Dylan’s God Problem—and Ours.”
I had a theory about Dylan and God, Dylan and the Holocaust—and the impact their conjuncture had on American culture. I’d argued that Dylan and his impact had been misconstrued by most Dylanologists; that he should not be situated with rustic pastorals or popular-front folkies, but with the urban, mostly Jewish, mostly literary “black humor” movement of the 60s, which ranged across genres, from Lenny Bruce to Bruce Jay Friedman, Joseph Heller to Stanley Kubrick. A movement whose absurdist nihilism—which reaches a viciously eloquent peak in Yossarian’s denunciation of God in Catch-22—was a response to two holocausts: Hitler’s, still only 15 years past, and the nuclear holocaust that seemed—especially after the 1962 Cuban missile crisis—just a shot away.
Dylan and Hitler? Was I forcing a conjunction? Some time before the lecture, I made what I thought was an important discovery in a pizza parlor. Well, it was while reading in a pizza parlor that I came across a line Dylan had written about Hitler that hardly anyone seemed to have noticed before. Yes he’d referred at least once in his lyrics to the Holocaust (in “With God on Our Side”), but I had no recall of an explicit mention of Hitler in the songs, and never in such a compressed and deeply expressive way.