Whoever he is, Bob Dylan doesn’t role-play so much as play around with the very idea of roles. When Mr. Cott himself talked to Mr. Dylan about directing his first feature, Renaldo and Clara, he clarified its confused cast list thus: “There’s Renaldo … there’s a guy in whiteface singing on the stage, and then there’s Ronnie Hawkins playing Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan is listed in the credits as playing Renaldo, yet Ronnie Hawkins is listed as playing Bob Dylan.” But Bob Dylan made the film, insisted Mr. Cott. “Bob Dylan didn’t make it,” replied Mr. Dylan in what one fervently hopes was the tone of mock exasperation he perfected for Mr. Pennebaker’s picture. “I made it.” Not for nothing was Mr. Dylan’s last movie called Masked and Anonymous.

 

Because for all his modernity, for all his cubist narratives and symbolist imagery, Mr. Dylan has never had any time for the 20th century’s cult of the id. Whatever else he may be doing as an artist, he’s adamant that he isn’t expressing himself. “The songs are the star of the show,” the Los Angeles Times’ Robert Hilburn quotes him as saying, “not me.” Yes, but he wrote them didn’t he? Not necessarily. “It’s like a ghost is writing a song,” he said of what is probably still his most iconic work, “Like a Rolling Stone.” “It gives you the song and it goes away. You don’t know what it means.” Only at the level of craftsmanship is he willing to discuss writing: “I’m not thinking about what I want to say,” he told Mr. Hilburn. “I’m just thinking ‘Is this OK for the meter?’“ Little wonder Mr. Dylan admits to loving “Don’t Fence Me In” and what he calls Cole Porter’s “fearless” rhyming.

 

 

 

NOT SO MICHAEL GRAY, WHOSE LOATHING of such “supposedly sophisticated songs” is as profound as his love of Bob Dylan. The author of a 918-page study of Mr. Dylan’s art, Song and Dance Man, Mr. Gray has now written the 736-page Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, a book of such critical mass it comes complete with a searchable CD-ROM transcript. Type in the word “Hoagy” and you will be taken to this: “Carmichael is one of the many improbable people whose work and persona Dylan admires, possibly just to be perverse.” Type in the word “Sinatra” and you will learn that “your parents listen[ed] to [his] awful, syrupy music on their radiogram” and that his “musical world was the one rock ’n’ roll was born to abolish.” Well, maybe, though should Mr. Gray have turned on his own radiogram these past few weeks he might have heard a new D.J. on XM Radio discoursing worshipfully on the likes of Sinatra, Judy Garland, Glenn Miller, even Dean Martin. The D.J. in question is none other than Bob Dylan.

 

A critic needn’t like everything, of course, but if he’s to cut deep he must range wide. Mr. Gray knows his blues and his rock ’n’ roll—but that’s about all. Just as you wouldn’t trust a writer on classical music who told you the only guy that counted was Beethoven, so it’s hard to trust Mr. Gray even at those times when he seems level-headed. When he’s off his head, caterwauling at another writer on Dylan he deems to have got things wrong, he sounds like the worst sort of bitchy academic. Mr. Gray, who studied English under F.R. Leavis (from whom he’s inherited his teleologizing tantrums and canonizing curmudgeonliness), knows everything there is to know about Bob Dylan apart from the answer to the question: What know they of Dylan who only Dylan know? “Too much of nothing,” as Bob Dylan once sang—and that “just makes a fella mean.”