Tarantula

by Bob Dylan

(1971)

   Drafted in late 1964 and early 1965, bootlegged from early promo copies in 1966, commercially released by Macmillan in 1971, bob dylan’s Tarantula is a confounding text that, like much of the best work of Dylan, defies expectations and facile explication. Debate in regard to what genre it inhabits has roiled from the time of its clandestine release. It has been variously deemed a novel (Shelton 1986/1997), poems (St Martin’s 1994 reissue), and “a book of words” (Heylin 1991). Joan Baez at one time suggested an alternative title for the collection: “Fuck You.” Dylan himself seems to have taken up the composition of Tarantula as an open-ended commercial and artistic opportunity. His contract for the book appears to have been signed prior to settling on a fully conceived notion of how its content might be manifested—in May 1964 he described the book as “pictures and words” that focus on Hollywood. Dylan’s writing, and especially his writing in the mid-1960s, was clearly influenced by the Beats, never more transparently so than in Tarantula. Ann Charters excerpted a part of it in her The Portable Beat Reader (1992). Dylan’s first serious discussion in regard to publishing his work was with lawrence ferlinghetti and City Lights in 1963. Liner notes that support his album releases, beginning with The Times They Are a-Changin’ in 1963, exhibited Dylan’s propensity for free-form verse and the exercise of jack kerouac’s spontaneous prose method. Dylan’s composing process in Tarantula was clearly indebted to William S. Burroughs’s cutup techniques. Speaking in early 1965 about Tarantula (then tentatively titled “Bob Dylan Off the Record”), Dylan asks interviewer Paul Jay Robbins of the LA Free Press whether he “dig[s] something like cutups” and describes his writing as “[s]omething that had no rhyme, all cut up, no nothing except something happening which is words.” Dylan’s propensity for exaggerated American plain-speak and his carnivalesque description of “atomic fag bars being looted and Bishops disguised as chocolate prisoners” is deeply redolent of naked luncH–era Burroughs. Dylan’s exposure in 1960 to Kerouac’s mexico city Blues appears also to have had a bearing on both its free-form verse and the Spanish language and bordertown episodes of Tarantula’s fractured narrative.

   Perhaps the clearest line between the Beats and the Dylan of this period might be drawn between Tarantula and gregory corso’s The Happy BirtHday of deatH (1960), opening as it does: “Lady of the legless world I have refused to go beyond selfdisappearance.” Tarantula, which road-tests hundreds of personas and masks, behind any of which might lurk (or not) “Bob Dylan,” is as much a book about self-abrogation as revelation. It is one of Dylan’s earliest exercises in “self-disappearance.” Corso makes a cameo appearance late in Tarantula: “I could tell at a glance that he had no need for Sonny Rollins but I asked him anyway ‘whatever happened to gregory corso?’ ” Much of the language, syntax, and headlong velocity of Tarantula seems to be channeling Corso’s “bomb,” with its “tomahawk Cochise flintlock Kidd dagger Rathbone,” its suggestion that “To die by cobra is not to die by bad pork,” and its clear nod to Rimbaud and French symbolist poetry.

 Bibliography

■ Corso, Gregory. Mindfield: New & Selected Poems. New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1989.

■ Hajdu, David. Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña. New York: North Point, 2001.

■ Heylin, Clinton. Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades. New York: Summit, 1991.

■ Shelton, Robert. No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan. New York: Da Capo, 1997.

   Tracy Santa