Jokerman

    JOKERMAN

    Dylan in 1983 seemed less concerned with evangelism, and Infidels, released in November, apparently bore out rumours that he was investigating his Jewish heritage once more. Fans and critics speculated whether the born-again phase had really ended, and though the new album did contain a heavy quota of Biblical references, the majority of them seemed to have their source in the Old Testament. There was no overt preaching, and signs of a conscious effort to sound contemporary. Because of this, Americans in particular embraced Infidels as a return to form.

The album eventually became infamous, however, for the amount of great songs written for it but rejected, apparently against the advice of producer Mark Knopfler. This is not quite true - a glance at the recording sessions lists reveals that there is not nearly so much of substance as during the Shot Of Love sessions, which produced three major unreleased songs (“The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar,” “Caribbean Wind” and “Angelina”). But Infidels did suffer from the absence of one major song, perhaps the greatest of Dylan’s mature songwriting, “Blind Willie McTell”, which will be discussed shortly. Even so, the album does manage to offer a handful of interesting minor songs and two major ones. The foremost of the major songs is “Jokerman,” which Dylan chose to open the album.

The central, enigmatic figure of the Jokerman has prompted theories that fix him as either Christ, the Jungian trickster-hero, the Tarot fool, and many others besides. The song is addressed to him, and seems to be full of reproach, for he sets himself up as a superhuman figure, a god in his own mind. In the opening image he is standing Christ-like upon the water, casting bread in the manner of the Passover ritual, while, elsewhere, an idol made of metal stands with burning eyes, the pagan graven image of a deity. He is associated, then, with a human image of god, a false idol, and indeed this is his role throughout the song. The presence of the idol evokes some sort of ancient cult, and it seems that man is engaged in carving out images of a god or playing the role of god. Michael Gray has taken the image of being “born with a snake in both of your fists while a hurricane was blowing” to be a reference to Hercules or Heracles, who, as an infant, wrestled a snake in his cradle.[i] It is an image of the superhuman, of the human as god; Hercules, half-immortal, was the son of a god but not the son of God. More generally, this image suggests mastery over natural forces (and perhaps over evil, as the snake is traditionally a symbol of Satan). To be born while a hurricane is blowing would be superhuman enough, but to be born holding two snakes is something else - a miraculous birth indeed, certainly suggestive of eastern cults. Yet it is the very opposite of the humble birth of Christ, the son of God. Indeed, the Jokerman does not embody truth at all; as a representative of mankind he has freedom within his grasp but truth itself is far off; the position, I suspect, Dylan thinks we are in the modern age - the sole ideal has become freedom, not truth. Ironic to think, then, that Dylan’s reputation partly rests on his championing of freedom in the ‘60s. References to the superhuman abound: Michelangelo is the prime example of an artist who dedicated himself to sculpting God-filled men, superheroes of the Old Testament, and there is a clear parallel with the makers of the pagan idols and the maker of Christian ones, because both seek to render the saintly or immortal in pigment or stone. There is also the scarlet prince, superhuman because he controls the world, both secular and religious, a representation of the antichrist.

There is a sense that the Jokerman is Dylan himself. At times the subject appears to be man in his loftiest state, or the artist in general, but at the same time Dylan appears to be looking within, looking back on his semi-mythic past, and exploring the potential of the artist to be a Christ-like impostor. With this in mind, the opening image may recall the poet-prophet of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” who announced his intention to “stand on the ocean until I start sinking”. The speaker may indeed be referring to the artist’s messianic function, and to his own appropriation of the role of messiah (Dylan, the messianic rock star, certainly did cast breadcrumbs of wisdom to his disciples in the ‘60s; what has changed in the present, apart from the dwindling of those disciples, is his awareness of the iniquities of the modern world, the Babylonish cities with their idols of iron and steel). Dylan looks back on his youthful ideals, and his generation’s lofty ambitions, when he refers to the “distant ship sailing off in the mist”; this is a reversal of the positive image of “When the Ship Comes In,” with its Goliath-conquering ideals, and an admission of his generation’s failure to change things. The Herculean birth is an aptly chosen image that plays up to the mythologizing of the rock star, but Dylan undercuts it by presenting a comically excessive portrait: to be born with a snake in both fists stretches credulity, but to be born in the midst of a hurricane topples things over. The time when the hurricane began was, if we remember, also the time when the ship came in, the hurricane image referring to swift, apocalyptic change anticipated by the socially conscious young. The younger Dylan had sung about freedom, in “Chimes of Freedom” especially, as if it was the most important goal of all: in the ‘60s it became the watchword and the cause to end all causes. The Dylan of “Jokerman” is mature enough to recognise that freedom is not enough without truth, so this is an example of the older, supposedly wiser Dylan looking back on his younger self with reproach. The artist recognises that he has sold a false dream, that he has played Christ. The truth is that life is brief, and you better try to discover what truth really is because the sun is setting. In the end, we really do “rise up and say goodbye to no one”.

The address to his younger self continues: what more appropriate allusion could there be to Dylan’s ability to reinvent himself than “Shedding off one more layer of skin”?  The earlier version of “Jokerman” offers some elaboration on the prophetic, Christ-like abilities the artist possesses: “No crystal ball do you need on your shelf.” There is no need for fortune telling, presumably because the artist, in the words of Blake, “prophetic sees” the past, present and future to begin with, or has the audacity to believe so.

The self-reflection is severely critical of the tendency to play Christ to the masses: “You’re a man of the mountains, you can walk on the clouds / Manipulator of crowds, you’re a dream twister.” What greater analytical deconstruction of his own myth can we expect? As we have seen, Dylan, in the mid ‘70s, drew parallels between his own experience and that of Christ; “Jokerman” punctures the self-inflation. How much larger than life this figure seems, a man as tall as the mountains, floating on his own myth. His values are as changeable as his image: “Friend to the martyr, a friend to the woman of shame” (the context in which these remarks appear make the Christ parallel obvious). Likewise, his learning has come from the Old Testament books that concern themselves with law and ritual (Leviticus and Deuteronomy) and from the law of the jungle. It would be difficult to come up with more conflicting sets of values than this coupling of the Darwinian idea of the survival of the fittest with the canon of Biblical law, yet to say that they are one’s “only teachers” suggests adherence to a consistent set of imparted principles. Dylan’s awareness of his own photogenic image, his sculpted look, as Michael Gray has noted, lurks behind the reference that “Michelangelo indeed could’ve carved out your features”.[ii] No doubt, this worse self which Dylan is deconstructing would readily like to see himself placed next to Biblical figures like David (a man of the mountains, the statue being twice human height) in the Michelangelo canon. And what better way to mount the statue of a hero than on a horse to give him that extra bit of lift? There is again a Christ-echo in “resting in the fields, far from the turbulent space,” a hint of his refuge of Gethsemane, far from the turbulent space of Calvary and the obligations of history. In this marvellous image there is at least something of Dylan’s own retreat from the rock circus to which he had nearly fallen victim, and a sense that his own history is being mapped out.

As ever with his post-Christian output, there is reference to the degeneration of the modern world; now we are whisked away from these images of the artist and deposited in the apocalyptic present, the present of “nightsticks and water cannons, tear gas, padlocks,” the ruthless world Dylan now finds himself surviving in. The image of “False-hearted judges dying in the webs that they spin” is a memorable comparison between judicial corruption and, in the words of W.B. Yeats, “a spider smothered by its own web,” conveying the idea of a web of deceit that ultimately proves the spinner’s undoing. Just as he insists that the sun swiftly sets, Dylan stresses that night will shortly come “steppin’ in,” personified like a theatrical villain. And sure enough, the final verse unmasks the villain of the song, the prototype of the singer’s own worse self in his capacity to twist dreams and manipulate the masses, his tendency to play the messiah: the arrival of night marks the entrance of the scarlet prince, approximating the antichrist of Revelations, who will “put the priest in his pocket” (control the church, in other words), “put the blade to the heat” (the ghastly image of a red-hot knife returns us to theatrical, especially Jacobean territory) and “Take the motherless children off the streets / And place them at the feet of a harlot” - a corruption of Christ’s acts, an image reminiscent of the Biblical whore of Babylon.

The time, again, is the end times, and what better time to finally listen to that “persecutor within” whom the Jokerman is constantly fleeing, the conscience, and to submit to God. One of the extraordinary things about the depiction of the hostile modern world in the penultimate verse is the intimation that even the clergy have succumbed to the general duplicity: it is not just the rifleman who is stalking the sick and the lame but the preacher also. Indeed, as another Infidels song claims, not even the Vatican is safe from the general corruption. The world is a world of masks, appearances concealing deadly realities (behind every curtain there are nightsticks and water cannons and so on; the judges who spin webs are really corrupt individuals hiding behind the mask of their authority - the metaphor is appropriate, the spider’s web, apparently a thing of beauty, being essentially a trap). Truth is far off, and in such a world, it will be easy for the arch-Jokerman, the devil or antichrist, to rise to power. For that is the link between the song’s depiction of the messianic complex and the final unmasking of the antichrist: when we play at being Christ we do not, in fact, imitate Christ, the most humble of men; rather we are types of the antichrist, seduced by power and driven to corruption.