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