Reaching for Himself: Bob Dylan and Bill Richardson, S.J.
At the climax of the Oscar-nominated Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown,” Dylan returns to the Newport Folk Festival, where he was seen as a hero, and does a set using electrified instruments. While the crowd is shocked and infuriated by his choice to abandon the folk music sound, for Dylan the moment is very clearly one of liberation and authenticity. His restless heart refuses to be caged by anything or anyone.
But in an unexpected twist, director James Mangold doesn’t present that moment as a happy for one for Dylan. In the aftermath of the set, Dylan (played by Timothée Chalamet) seems to take little pleasure in the freedom he has gained. Rather than some promised land that is somehow finally arrived at, the true self, the true voice that Dylan wants to express is always on the move. The quest for authenticity is less a quest than an inescapable demand. And it costs.
Over the course of his more than 60 years as a music legend, Bob Dylan and his work have been brought into the conversation on an almost limitless number of topics and in forums that do not seem very Dylan-esque. In 2011, Fordham Urban Law Journal convened an entire symposium on Dylan’s critiques of society and law. Earlier this month St. Louis University theology professor Grant Kaplan wrote in America Magazine about the communion of the saints by way of Dylan and Woody Guthrie. And last Fordham month philosophy professor Babette Babich did a talk online about the concept of the end of time as expressed by rock stars Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Meatloaf, and French Catholic composer Olivier Messiaen.
One of the more daunting-sounding takes on Dylan comes from a former Fordham and Boston College professor, Father William J. Richardson, S.J., who in 2010 published a lecture he had given in 1966, “Toward an ontology of Bob Dylan,” in the journal Philosophy and Social Criticism. When he died in 2016, Richardson had been working as an academic for almost exactly the same period of time that Dylan had been performing. His area was the highly esoteric work of German philosopher Martin Heidegger and French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. “He was a serious person,” says Babich, who studied with him at Boston College, and became his friend.
He was also beloved. In his eulogy for Richardson, Father Leo O’Donovan, S.J. described his lectures as “events of revelation….Light shone from him as from a diamond.”
And he loved Dylan. “He was a fan, top to bottom, head to toe,” Babich shared with me in a phone interview. Later in life, Richardson described his entrance into the world of teaching in part in terms of Dylan. “I was asked to teach [Jesuit] seminarians,” he said in a taped interview published as part of a series of reflections in 2017 memorializing him after his death in 2016. “This was in 1963 when the seminarians and students all over the United States were caught up in the sweep leading up to 1968 and that exploded in America in ‘68, in Berkeley. But 1963 was the year that [John F.] Kennedy was shot, shortly after that [in 1968] Martin Luther King was killed. The Beatles came to America then [in 1964] and Bob Dylan began to sing. This was the world in which I was asked to teach.”
After a year at the seminary he moved to Fordham, where he began giving lectures about Dylan and Heidegger. ‘It was extraordinary,” wrote one of his students, journalist Gene Palumbo, in the 2017 book. His students gave him a mug: on one side, it read “To William Richardson: a truly honest man.” On the other, was a line from “Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man”: “To dance beneath the diamond sky, with one hand waving free.” Palumbo noted that he still had that mug at the very end of his life.
In his article on Heidegger and Dylan, Richardson writes that he was interested in “the Dylan behind Bob Dylan, the self into whom Bob Dylan withdraws.” And he wondered if Heidegger’s vision of the human person could help make sense of Dylan’s life. For Heidegger, what distinguishes the self is its capacity and instinct for transcendence. “Of its very nature,” Richardson writes of Heidegger, the human self “passes beyond beings to their Being,” some greater fullness and essence. The self is therefore “a process” never fully realized, “always to-be-achieved.”
Babich notes a dark side to this. Other than “once in a blue moon,” Babich says, our existence is “a lifetime of being inauthentic” for Heidegger, of never feeling that sense of being truly true to who we are. “Even in the moments when we suddenly come to ourselves, there are elements of that that are fake, there are elements of that somebody else can point to, that we ourselves can point to and say, Yeah, what’s my real motivation for that?” We never fully arrive.
That sometime-unhappy restlessness is what Mangold brings out near the end of the film. As Babich puts it, “Authenticity is a tough thing.”
But in talking about Heidegger and Dylan, Richardson instead focuses on the more empowering side of transcendence. The process of transcendence begins with “a choosing of the self by the self.” And that choosing to go beyond who you are, says Richardson, to reach for the fuller or truer you that lies beyond, at least in part in mystery, is itself for Heidegger the fundamental act of authenticity. “For the self to choose to be to the self is to be authentic; to fail to choose to be the self that it is meant for it [is] to be inauthentic.”
“The choice,” Richardson writes, “is everything.” And that’s what he thinks Dylan most understood: “It seems clear that Dylan has a profound awareness of his own self as a self,” Richardson writes. “’The most important thing I know,’ he says, ‘I learned from Woody Guthrie. I’m my own person…Everything I do and sing and write comes out of me.’”
“There is a ‘me’—a self still to be achieved,” Richardson summarizes Dylan. “The task is an endless one, for he’ll ‘never finish saying everything [he] feels.’” Which also means he’ll always be casting off other people’s expectations, just as he is forced to cast off his own. “He will have no part of the In-Crowd who take him as their spokesman,” Richardson notes. “He is trying to find his own groping way toward a truth in himself that sloughs off the solecisms of everybody else.”
“People keep asking him how to ‘change things’,” Richardson wrote in 1966, observing the treatment of Dylan at the time, and he noted Dylan’s response: “’’I can’t tell them how to change things, because there’s only one way to change things, and that’s to cut yourself off from all the chains’—chains that constrain you from being who you are in truth.” In a sense, fans’ attempt to get Dylan to tell them what to do represented their own avoidance of the quest they needed to undertake. “For Dylan, as well as for Heidegger,” Richardson writes, “the achieving of the truth of one’s self is what makes a human being authentically free.”
Mangold doesn’t actually end “A Complete Unknown” on an unhappy note. Dylan leaves the folk festival on his own, but only after stopping to watch his mentor Pete Seeger—who never rejects him—doing clean-up of the grounds. And then he travels back to New Jersey and visits Woody Guthrie one last time and plays for him on the harmonica that he gave him. Transcendence may mean change, but it doesn’t have to mean the end of everything you had, and the friendships and lessons you treasure.
In his remembrances of Richardson, Palumbo tells the great story that supposedly after the aged Richardson had moved to a Jesuit retirement community outside Boston in his 90s, the staff grew panicked one night when they could not find him. It turned out he had gone to a Dylan concert. Like his hero, Bill Richardson always embraced the call of his own journey, and rambled on to wherever it took him.
