…To name an object is to suppress three-quarters of the delight of the poem, which consists in the pleasure of guessing little by little; to suggest is, that is the dream. It is the perfect use of this mystery that constitutes the symbol: to evoke an object, gradually in order to reveal a state of the soul or, inversely, to choose an object and from it identify a state of the soul, by a series of deciphering operations… There must always be enigma in poetry…
Stephane Mallarme, 1891
…The poet’s like the monarch of the clouds
Who haunts the tempest, scorns the bows and slings,
Exiled on earth amid the shouting crowds,
He cannot walk, for he has giant’s wings…
Charles Baudelaire, 1859
Visions of Johanna is generally regarded as one of Bob Dylan’s greatest achievements. It is built upon a haunting melody and is crammed with unforgettable images and highly distinctive wordplay. As one of the standout tracks from perhaps his most acclaimed album, 1966’s Blonde on Blonde, it epitomises the mysterious musical alchemy that he once described so memorably as …that thin wild mercury sound… The highly suggestive and atmospheric lyrics have been compared with those of Keats and Eliot and it is frequently held up as proof of Dylan’s status as a great poet. Yet critics and commentators have argued for decades over its meaning, not to mention the supposed identity of the characters that drift in and out of its splendidly fractured narrative.
Dylan worked through many versions of the song during the recording of the album. Initially, in sessions recorded in New York with members of The Band, it was a faster paced rock number. Only when he relocated to Nashville, the home of what was then still usually referred to as country and western music, did he find the elusive sound he had been looking for. This had been a difficult journey, as the song lacks a conventional chorus or bridge, as well as much variation in the length of its lines. It is now taken at a more leisurely pace, with an especially prominent role for the bass guitar played by Joe South. Robbie Robertson and frequent Dylan sideman Al Kooper supply tasteful and restrained snatches of lead guitar and organ respectively. Dylan has returned to the song many times throughout his performing career, with no significant changes to the lyrics but with many melodic variations in performances that have often been the highlights of his shows. An exquisitely powerful solo acoustic version became one of the highlights of the opening sections of his historic controversial and iconoclastic 1966 tour set, as Dylan twists the song’s many ironies and contrasts around. Despite its many acidic or sarcastic lines, the song in all its forms displays an ineffable beauty in its languorous evocation of spiritual longing.
Visions of Johanna prominently displays the influence of both symbolist poetry and various forms of modern art. The French symbolists of the late nineteenth century (such as Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Stephane Mallarme and Arthur Rimbaud) emphasised the idea that poetry should express the state of the writer’s soul through the use of symbols which could, at their most effective, have multiple meanings. Such poetry also emphasises the striking and unexpected juxtapositioning of particular combinations of words. The deliberate use of ambiguity allows readers to construct images and connections in their own minds. Symbolist painters such as Paul Gaugain, James Whistler and Edvard Munch attempted to create similar effects in their art works. Twentieth century art movements such as Dada and surrealism, under the influence of Freudian psychology, emphasised the importance of dream states in which apparently random images (often shown in disproportionate relationships to each other) revealed hidden truths about human perceptions. In Visions of Johanna Dylan presents us with a series of dreamlike scenarios in which various objects, places and characters appear to symbolise the state of the soul of its narrator in a highly ambiguous manner. The narrator himself appears to be detached from the actions being described; almost as if he is not actually present in the scenario. One might even see all the characters as facets of his own unconscious mind. But the triumph of the song is that it goes beyond individual psychology to comment on the functions of artistic expression itself. In its most outstanding lines Dylan produces poetic expressions that which resonate very powerfully on an unconscious level.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
In the first of the five verses Dylan sets up a highly ambiguous scenario. He begins by posing a rhetorical question: …Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet… As with many Dylan songs from this especially fertile period, he uses a form of colloquial expression which often creates a comic effect by setting contemporary ‘hip speak’ against poetic symbolism. The idea of ‘the night’ – which here is both a literal and symbolic place – is central to the song. It is immediately suggested that the narrator is either dreaming or drifting in a liminal (and possibly drug-induced) state between consciousness and dreams.
EDVARD MUNCH Anxiety
The song itself ‘plays tricks’ with its continually ambiguous use of pronouns. Here the narrator may be addressing the listener or himself. The next line …We sit here stranded, though we’re all doing our best to deny it… is similarly open to interpretation, as is the ‘you’ in …Louise holds a handful of rain, tempting you to defy it… Already we get a strong sense that the narrator is examining his own conscience. ‘A handful of rain’ may be a purely surreal dream image or perhaps Louise is tempting the narrator with amphetamines, certainly a substance that would keep him awake overnight. The image also strongly suggests something which is unfixed or (quite literally) fluid. It is inevitable that such a liquid will be spilt, evaporate or run through Louise’s fingers. Already we appear to be in a world of transient experience.
What does appear to be certain that we are in the presence of bohemians engaged in an unconventional lifestyle. We hear that …lights flicker from the opposite loft…suggesting that the participants are sitting together in an urban attic. They are clearly not in an expensive hotel as …in this room the heat pipes just cough… The location has often been suggested as New York’s famously rundown Chelsea Hotel (the renowned haunt of rock stars and other bohemians in the 1960s) although there is no direct evidence of this in the song. The lassitude of the participants, which has already been hinted at by the notion of them being ‘stranded’ is emphasised by the brilliantly deadpan …The country music station plays soft/ But there’s nothing, really nothing, to turn off… Here the participants appear to be too unmotivated – or too stoned – to get up and switch off the bland music they are only half-listening to. The double emphasis on ‘nothing’ may indicate that we are hearing the narrator’s inner thoughts, as he tries to justify his own inability to ‘switch off’ while he is ‘turned on’.
In the lines that lead to the refrain it seems that there are only two people in their loft: …just Louise and her lover so entwined… But it is not clear if the narrator is Louise’s lover and that they are lying in bed together (perhaps in post-coital bliss) or if he is merely a third person in the room. Perhaps Louise and her lover are ‘entwined’ on one of the attic’s sofas. Or it could be that the narrator is not in the room at all. He may be a ghost-like presence hovering over the scene. The refrain …And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind… tends to suggest that the entire scenario is the narrator’s dream or memory. We do not yet know who ‘Johanna’ is but the expectation is that we will find out, at least by the end of the song. The literal meaning of the name in Hebrew etymology is ‘God’s grace’. Thus its use suggests that the narrator is seeking spiritual meaning, even though he is presently ‘stranded’.
RENE MAGRITTE THE LOVERS
We then move out of the bohemian attic into the ‘night’ of the city, either literally or (as is more likely) in the narrator’s altered state. We are now …in the empty lot where the ladies play blind man’s bluff with the key chain/ While the all night girls, they whisper of escapades out on the D-Train… Blind man’s bluff (or ‘buff’) is a game in which one person is blindfolded until they can touch one of the other participants. Here the ‘ladies’ are engaged in this rather pointless pastime while the ‘girls’ seem to be giggling, presumably about sexual hook ups they have been involved in. Meanwhile, a ‘night watchman’ questions whether it is he or them who is ‘insane’. It is unlikely that this is a ‘real’ scene. Perhaps it is a figment of the narrator’s stoned reverie. We then hear from Louise again, who we are told is …delicate/ She seems like the mirror… This is a rather surreal image which suggests that ‘Louise’ is actually an imaginary figure, another product of the narrator’s imagination – even an emanation of himself. This impression is amplified in the verse’s astonishing final lines: …The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face/ Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place….
The incredibly resonant image in the first of these two lines may suggest that the narrator himself is the ‘ghost’ whose consciousness is merging with the characters in the song. It also gives us a picture of a figure who is deeply haunted by their experiences. The image can be interpreted in many ways. Perhaps Louise is a haggard drug addict, or someone who has had an extremely hard life. Or perhaps, as the phrase ‘taken my place’ suggests, she is merely an aspect of the narrator’s psyche. Maybe Louise really is the narrator’s lover but when he looks into her face all he sees is the ‘God like’ but essentially invisible Johanna. All of these meanings, and many more, can be read into this stunning and transcendent couplet, which often draws a crowd’s cheers in performance.
In the third verse, we switch perspectives again as we are introduced to the…little boy lost… who Dylan, rather sneeringly, tells us …takes himself so seriously… We also hear that he …brags of his misery/ He likes to live dangerously… A ‘little boy lost’ appears in Blake’s short poem of the same name, symbolising those who are spiritually or materially forsaken. But Dylan, while trading on this archetype, is being particularly playful here. We do not know whether the ‘little boy’ is a new character or whether the narrator is actually mocking himself and his own pretensions. The sarcastic use of ironic overemphasised rhymes ….He sure gotta lotta gall/ To be so useless and all/ muttering small talk at the wall/ While I’m in the hall… presents the ‘little boy’ as a spoilt, precocious ‘man child’ – a comic version, perhaps, of the stereotypical ‘tortured romantic poet’. Although the ‘little boy’ appears to be a separate character, he can also be seen as a ‘shadow version’ of the narrator himself. Perhaps, Dylan may be suggesting, all this shifting symbolism is mere ‘small talk’ being delivered to an unresponsive ‘wall’. In the creation of this ‘cartoon character’ he may thus be anticipating the public response to the delivery of symbolist poetry in the apparently contradictory format of a ‘pop song’.
It is clear, however, that the ‘little boy’ is still being drawn towards the central mystery of the song: Who is Johanna? We are told that …When bringing her name up/ He speaks of a farewell kiss to me… This may indicate that Johanna is an ex-lover, or perhaps a stage performer who ends her shows by blowing a kiss at the audience. The narrator may be chatting to the ‘little boy’ here or (as is equally likely) talking to himself. At the end of the verse he seems to be becoming tired of trying to unravel the mystery …How can I explain… he asks himself …It’s so hard to get on/ But these visions of Johanna, they kept me up past the dawn…. We get the sense here that Dylan is reaching out towards some ineffable kind of expression which he knows he will never really be able to achieve. All he can do is ‘paint’ the scene’ from a number of different angles. But perhaps it is the quest to solve the mystery of Johanna (of ‘God’s grace’) rather than any mundane ‘explanation’ of who ‘she’ is that is most important.
In the fourth verse this search for spiritual and aesthetic meaning is further developed as we are taken inside ‘the art world’ itself. Dylan now invites us into a kind of ‘art gallery of the mind’. In a 1965 interview with Robert Shelton he once claimed that …museums are cemeteries… and that art should be taken out of these spaces into a much wider public arena. Here he attempts to do this in a symbolic way, with some hilarious comic and tragic-comic twists of phrase …Inside the museums… he begins tantalisingly …infinity goes up on trial/ Voices echo “This is what salvation should be like after a while”… By employing these extraordinary juxtapositions, he teases us by posing questions that can never be answered – because they can have ‘infinite’ numbers of answers. The ‘voices’ may be those of the ‘chattering classes’ who endlessly try to interpret art works by tying them down to a specific, one-dimensional meaning (as so many had done with Dylan’s own songs). Thrown into this ‘infinite’ space of symbolic interpretation, they revert to the religious concept of salvation (which can only occur in the infinite space of eternity) but present it in an uncertain, almost half-assed way by adding the speculative, uncertain coda …after a while…
Dylan here appears to be mocking art critics (and quite possibly his own critics) who attempt to reduce the potentially ‘infinite’ meanings of deeply expressive art works (including, of course, this song itself) to pat explanations. This is quite brilliantly summarised in another one of his sharpest and funniest lines …But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues/ You can tell by the way she smiles… Here Dylan shows us the most famous painting of all. He defies time and space by identifying her famous enigmatic smile with the symbolic search for freedom which is featured in so many blues songs. The Mona Lisa’s smile is the ultimate expression of ‘infinite’ artistic ambiguity. Da Vinci’s painting presents us with an enigma that can never truly be solved. Here Dylan may be taunting his own critics, pretending to have solved the riddle of her famous smile. But it is surely obvious that he is doing this with a similarly enigmatic expression on his own face.
LEONARDO DA VINCI THE MONA LISA
The following lines are perhaps a little anti-climactic after this tour de force of poetic irony, as Dylan presents us with cartoonish images of visitors to the museum: …See the primitive wallflower freeze/ When the jelly-faced women all sneeze/ Hear the one with the mustache say, “Jeez, I can’t find my knees”… He again uses slightly over-emphasised rhymes to mock these spectators. We may picture them as a group of obese middle class women who have no real understanding of art. Or they may actually be figures in some of the other paintings. Perhaps they are the distorted women often featured in Picasso’s works. Dylan may even be referring to the famous painting by Marcel Duchamp in which a moustache and a beard is added to the Mona Lisa as a comical commentary on the supposed sanctity of ‘great art’.
MARCEL DUCHAMP
MONA LISA WITH
MOUSTACHE AND BEARD
PABLO PICASSO WEEPING WOMAN
Or perhaps Mona Lisa herself is lamenting the fact that she is painted only from the waist up and thus ‘can’t find her knees’. In this surreal landscape, which itself is like a modern art painting, dream and reality are merged. We then get another highly dream-like image …Jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule… Perhaps this is another painting in Dylan’s imaginary gallery. The entire verse can be seen as a kind of treatise in which, with his tongue very firmly in his cheek, he mocks not only those who attempt to place limited interpretations on great art works but also his own pretensions to be a great artist. The final, and highly ambiguous, line …But these visions of Johanna, they make it all seem so cruel… invites us to pity the ‘little boy’ who is lost in the infinitely unsolvable mysteries that transcendent art, music and poetry are devoted to celebrating. But the edge of irony in Dylan’s voice here expresses the fact that he is not really to be pitied.
In the final verses, several new characters make fleeting appearances. We first meet a ‘peddler’ and a ‘countess’ – apparently representing a poor person and a rich person. We could also picture them, like the other characters in the song, as being contemporary figures in the bohemian world that the narrator inhabits – in this case, perhaps a rich heiress who is ‘slumming it’ with the bohemian crowd in Greenwich Village. The ‘peddler’ may be a chancer who is taking advantage of this rich woman, although the countess (probably a social dilettante) is said to be merely ‘pretending’ to care for him. But the peddler is scathing in his justification of his dependence on her: …Name me someone who’s not a parasite… he sneers confidently …And I’ll go out and say a prayer for him… Some commentators have linked the figures in this final verse to the scruffy young Dylan and his former consort, the rather ‘queenly’ Joan Baez, who did much to advance Dylan’s early career. This may be reinforced by the reference to the mysterious and absent figure of …Madonna… who is clearly a stage performer. We are told that …She still has not showed… and we are presented instead with an image of a rusty ‘empty cage’ …where her cape of the stage once had flowed… Like Johanna, Madonna (whose name, of course means ‘Mother of God’) is absent from the scene. The line has achieved a strange resonance in subsequent years with the emergence of a ‘real’ Madonna as perhaps the best known female performer of late twentieth and early twentieth century popular music. It now seems that Louise, making her own ‘final bow’ in the song, is about to become involved with the peddler as she delivers the caustic aside in ‘street jive’: …You can’t look at much can ya man?… Louise again appears to be a down to earth or ‘grounded’ character, who is determined to get what she can from her immediate material circumstances rather than wait for the spectral appearance of distant female goddess-like figures.
In the final lines, we meet another ‘random character’, ‘the fiddler’, who writes the highly ambiguous message …Everything’s been returned which was owed… on the back of a departing ‘fish truck’. The presence of such a mundane vehicle amid all the ethereal symbolism is another example of how the song juxtaposes the sacred and the profane in comical or sardonic ways. It seems that the ‘fiddler’ (whose name implies that he may be some kind of trickster) is dumping all the poetic detritus of the song onto this dirty, smelly old truck… suggesting that in the end, it has all been meaningless ‘garbage’. In an earlier draft this line consisted of the intriguing ….He examines the nightingale’s code… an apparent allusion to Keats’ similarly drug induced reverie Ode to a Nightingale. The ‘replacement line’, however, makes a little more sense in the context of the song, as the singer shrugs off his responsibilities along with the preconceptions that may have held him back artistically. Now he cries defiantly, in the wondrous…as my conscience explodes… Like the fiddler, or his ‘alter ego’ Louise, he now refuses to be burdened by redundant feelings of guilt that might limit his creative imagination. In later stage performances, this line is accompanied by a musical crescendo that leads into the final, highly resonant image of …The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain/ And these visions of Johanna are all that remain…
As with many of the other lines in the song, this final denouement is marvellously and unreservedly ambiguous. Are the harmonicas ‘playing themselves’ as if they are independent beings? Is ‘The Skeleton Keys and the Rain’ some kind of weird folk song? Or are the ‘keys’ to the meaning of the song merely dangling in front of us, obscured by the ‘handfuls of rain’ we were introduced to at the beginning of the song? Of course, there can be no definite answer to these questions. Dylan is engaging with the pure delight of what can be done with the English language to suggest the kind of aesthetic transcendence that the song represents. In the end, after all the mysterious characters have dissolved in the narrator’s mind, only the visions remain. The ‘visions’ themselves are the dream like images that we have been presented within the song – such as the ‘ghost of electricity’. Ultimately the song is a triumphant celebration of poetic symbolism itself, with its ability to create imaginary worlds. It also suggests that artistic creation is itself a spiritual process. ‘Johanna’ is thus the ultimate artistic muse and embodiment of the ideals of romanticism. She is the personification of the mystical state that the artist can reach through creating forms of art that cannot be tied down to mundane explanations or biographical interpretations, but which can speak to us through the centuries as a form of truth that is ultimately beyond words.
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