Book Review: Political English: Language and the Decay of Politics

Abstract

beat poets, Dante and Petrarch, and the Confessions of St Augustine. All this of course establishes Dylan as a major artist. In contrast to these three dominant approaches to Dylan’s work, then, Hampton’s approach consists in exploring how ‘songs are made and how specific literary and musical techniques work to generate particular manifestations of style in song’ (p. 13). This emphasis on ‘style’ is of course from a stylistic viewpoint extremely promising. However, Hampton has a literary-critical rather than a stylistic understanding of ‘style’, seeing it in terms of how ‘artists manipulate different levels or historically defined registers of representation’ (p. 13), and of ‘the conventions that dominate a particular moment’ (p. 16). Despite his emphasis on ‘close analysis’ (p. 9), however, Hampton has disappointingly little to say about how Dylan’s songs really work–as complex linguistic phenomena. Hampton’s focus is primarily on how Dylan relates to other artists, and the trajectory of his analyses is always towards the thematic or meaningful level of the songs. As a consequence, he does not deal in any great depth with how Dylan creates meaningful effects by manipulating the sonic and syntactic levels of language. One important feature of Dylan’s work to which Hampton pays little or no attention, for example, is the way that Dylan manipulates his singing voice in order to create sonic ambiguity: it is very often simply impossible to be sure of what he is singing. For instance, the song ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ (the song to which Hampton devotes the most attention) contains a number of sonically ambiguous lines: does Dylan sing, ‘They never did like mama’s homemade dress, papa’s banquet wasn’t big enough’ (as I always thought) or ‘They never did like mama’s home address, papa’s bank book wasn’t big enough’ (as the official lyrics attest)? My point is that an approach rooted in stylistics rather than the close-analysis tradition of literary criticism would be able to say much more about how Dylan’s songs really work. Hampton’s book, then, is a timely reminder of why Dylan’s work matters, and his approach manages to avoid the usual pitfalls of Dylan criticism. It made me appreciate once more the depth and complexity of Dylan’s oeuvre (which has been the soundtrack to most of my life), and provided me with new insights into many of the songs. It certainly differs from, and is better than, most other work on Dylan. But there is still a book on Dylan to be written from the more fruitful perspective of stylistics.