“JUST LIKE TOM THUMB'S BLUES”

When you're lost in the rain in Juarez,
And it's Easter time too,
And your gravity fails
And negativity won't pull you through,
Don't put on any airs when you're down on Rue Morgue Avenue,
They've got some hungry women there,
And they'll really make a mess out of you.
Now, if you see St. Annie,
Please tell her “Thanks a lot,”
I cannot move, my fingers are all in a knot.
I don't have the strength to get up
And take another shot,
And my best friend my doctor
Won't even say what it is I got.
Sweet Melinda,
The peasants call her the Goddess of Gloom,
She speaks good English and she invites you up into her room.
And you're so kind and careful not to go to her too soon.
And she takes your voice and leaves you howling at the moon.
Up on housing project hill,
It's either fortune or fame,
You must pick one or the other,
Though neither of them are to be what they claim.
If you're looking to get saved,
You'd better go back to from where you came,
Because the cops don't need you
And man they expect the same.
Now all the authorities,
They just stand around and boast,
How they blackmailed the sergeant-at-arms,
Into leaving his post,
And picking up angel who just arrived here from the coast,
Who looked so fine at first,
But left looking just like a ghost.
I started out on burgundy
But soon hit the harder stuff.
Everybody said they'd stand behind me,
When the game got rough,
But the joke was on me,
There was no-one there even to bluff.
I'm going back to New York City,
I do believe I've had enough.

In recent years literature teachers in search of relevance have flirted uncomfortably with popular literary forms. This flirtation has been so unsatisfactory because the works of Tom Wolfe, the Beatles and so on do not respond readily to the application of the kind of standards we adopt in dealing with more conventional literature. It is not the intention of this paper to resolve the problem of what a teacher is to do with popular culture, but rather to try to demonstrate that in at least one case, that of Bob Dylan, there is no problem. Despite his close affinities with popular culture Bob Dylan has produced songs which belong in the mainstream of Twentieth-Century literature, both thematically and technically. Dylan's work is greatly varied in quality and I will not attempt to produce on anthology of “respectable” Dylan. Instead, I will encourage others to engage in such a selective process by subjecting one song, “Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues,” to a detailed analysis. I have chosen this song because, in that the world view it expresses and the methods by which it is composed seem to owe so much to T. S. Eliot, it fits very readily into the central tradition of modern poetry.

Bob Dylan usually fights shy of any literary associations, but he has admitted an awareness of the existence of T. S. Eliot,¹ and it is likely that “Tom Thumb's Blues” draws directly on both “The Wasteland” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” For example, Dylan not only chooses to filter his narration through the consciousness of a persona, as Eliot does in “Prufrock,” but he also creates in Tom Thumb a character who is remarkably similar to Prufrock, Eliot's near-definitive version of modern alienated man. Thus, the spiritual diminishment from which each protagonist suffers is reflected in his physical frailty. Dylan's persona is “Just Like Tom Thumb”² and Prufrock's “arms and legs are thin.”³ Both find that their spiritual deficiencies lead to a general sense of anxiety and uncertainty which manifests itself most obviously in an inability to cope socially. Tom Thumb proves to be as inadequate in his dealings with St. Annie, Melinda, the doctor and the police as Prufrock is with the refined women who talk of Michelangelo. In neither case does an attempt to retreat behind the protective shield of polite behaviour prove successful. While Tom Thumb is left “howling at the moon” by Melinda despite being “so kind and careful not to go to her too soon,” Prufrock discovers that even within the confines of the genteel tea party he must inevitably end up “pinned and wriggling on the wall” (15). This inability to act decisively leads in each case to a sense of paralysis. Tom Thumb is literally paralysed by St. Annie and Prufrock projects his feelings into his description of the evening as “a patient etherised upon a table” (13).

Bob Dylan also uses imagery very similar to that employed by Eliot at the beginning of “The Wasteland” to establish the essentially dead and sterile nature of his world. Just as Eliot's April showers fail to bring new spiritual life, so Tom Thumb's existence is characterised by “negativity” rather than nativity even though it is raining and “Easter time.” The narrator of “The Wasteland” is consequently left in a lifeless environment where “The dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief / and the dry stone no sound of water” (63) and Tom Thumb finds himself on “Rue Morgue Avenue.” The sense of death conveyed by the name of the street is intensified by the obvious reference to Poe's “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Moreover, while Bob Dylan does not describe Juarez, the very use of the Mexican place-name evokes a desert-like picture very similar to that conveyed by Eliot's depiction of the wasteland.

Although there are no more specific parallels between “Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues” and “The Wasteland” because Bob Dylan limits his subject matter to the town of Juarez while Eliot ranges over the whole of Western and occasionally Eastern history and literature, both continue to employ their symbolism towards similar ends. The main point of Eliot's references to The Tempest, the grail myth, Tiresias, etc., is to demonstrate the various ways in which the present is inferior to the past. Similarly, Dylan utilises religious imagery to show how the faults of the modern world have served to debase traditional spiritual values. Thus, the first part of his song is based on the fact that in all religions female objects of worship have been defined in sexual terms—either as earth mothers like Demeter and Isis or virgins like Mary, the mother of Christ. The Saints and Goddesses of Dylan's world retain this sexuality, but it has been perverted into prostitution and has thus lost its sacred life-producing function. Since female sexuality is now directed towards purely economic ends, the male is inevitably also prevented from playing his part in the act of procreation. Instead of enabling Tom Thumb to fulfill himself, St. Annie, named ironically after the mother of the Virgin Mary, almost paralyses him: “Now if you see St. Annie / Please tell her ‘Thanks a lot’, / I cannot move, my fingers are all in a knot. / I don't even have the strength to get up / And take another shot.” Literally, of course, she has given him venereal disease for which he is undergoing a course of penicillin injections. However, symbolically, she has deprived him of his spiritual wholeness. Tom Thumb's paralysis is thus, as mentioned before, akin to that from which Prufrock suffers. It is because of the spiritual nature of Tom Thumb's malaise that the doctor, whom one might expect to be capable of diagnosing venereal disease, is unable to explain what is wrong with him.⁵ The goddess Melinda, whose name is also ironic since it means “gentle,”⁶ similarly corrupts the sexual act by utilising it as a means of making a profit. This time Tom Thumb is completely deprived of his humanity and is reduced to the level of a dog “howling at the moon.”

Having concluded his examination of the effects of the profit ethic on sexual relationships, Dylan turns in the fourth verse to the subject of governmental corruption. Again, he asserts that modern society has been tainted by a basic selfishness and lack of concern for others that is destructive of spiritual values. Thus, Tom Thumb is painfully aware that he cannot look towards the self-seeking police for salvation: “If you're looking to get saved / You'd better go back to from where you came / Because the cops don't need you / And man they expect the same.” Similarly the blackmailing authorities are responsible for destroying the angel who “looked so fine at first / But left looking just like a ghost.”

Such a society offers little hope of salvation and the modern Calvary is, appropriately enough, “housing project hill” where, rather than being poised between heaven and hell, the individual is offered only a choice between the worldly goals of fortune and fame “neither of which are to be what they claim.” Consequently, when Tom Thumb says “If you're looking to get saved / You'd better go back to from where you came,” he is not suggesting that salvation can be achieved simply by leaving Juarez and returning to New York City.⁷ Rather, he is calling on modern man to turn away from this world entirely and to seek the spiritual values that are to be found by looking into the past. Although Bob Dylan has gradually come to believe in the existence of a benevolent God,⁸ at this stage in his development he was incapable of suggesting how this necessary temporal movement might be made. Thus, having been forced by the pressure of life to exchange his “burgundy,” which is clearly emblematic of the sacramental wine, for “the harder stuff,” Tom Thumb is finally left in a condition of total disorientation: “Everyone said they'd stand behind me / When the game got rough, / But the joke was on me / There was no-one there even to bluff.” The only choice left open to him is to return to New York City, which is at least a familiar hell.

The seriousness of Bob Dylan's concern with the spiritual crisis of this century and the skill with which he presents his persona and employs his symbolism merits “Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues” a place in the line of distinguished “wasteland” poems that stretches from “The Wasteland” itself through “The Bridge” and “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” to “Paterson.” Therefore, even those teachers who are most cautious of dabbling in popular literature need feel no qualms about teaching Bob Dylan in their modern literature courses. Indeed, in that he is a writer with whom even the most anti-intellectual students feel an affinity, he could profitably be used not only as an important figure in his own right but as a bridge between popular and so-called respectable literature.

Notes

1. In “Desolation Row,” Highway 61 Revisited, side 2, band 4, Bob Dylan refers rather disparagingly to Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot “fighting in the captain's tower,” presumably for the right to be termed the greatest modern poet.

2. “Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues,” Highway 61 Revisited, side 2, band 3.

3. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” in Collected Poems, 1909-1962, by T. S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1963), p. 14. All subsequent references to Eliot's works are included in the text of my essay.

4. Although this is the most likely direct source for Dylan's use of the name of his first prostitute, the name Anne or Anna has a number of connotations which would aptly supply the ironic note that is clearly intended here. Gertrude Jobes, Dictionary of Mythology, Folklore and Symbols (New York, 1962), I, 99-100, points out that in Greek the name means “grace,” and in Chaldean, “heaven;” that Anna in the New Testament is a prophetess known for her piety; and that Anna Perenna is the Roman Goddess of Springtime.

5. As in “Tombstone Blues,” Highway 61 Revisited, side 1, band 2, and “Desolation Row,” Dylan employs the doctor figure in this song as the archetype of the modern scientist, the man who has replaced the mystic as the voice of authority in a world concerned only with the pursuit of factual knowledge. Tom Thumb can expect no help from this modern shaman in trying to fill his spiritual void.

6. Flora Haines Loughead, Dictionary of Given Names (Glendale, California, 1966), p. 191.

7. Any temptation to accept New York City as a valid alternative to Juarez is dispelled by an earlier song “Talking New York,” in which Bob Dylan paints a bleak picture of his first experiences in this city.

8. In “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine,” John Wesley Harding, Columbia 63252, side 1, band 3, Dylan admits for the first time that salvation is possible although he does not feel himself to be worthy of it. In a later song “Father of Night,” New Morning, Columbia KC30290, side 2, band 6, he seems to be completely free of doubts and celebrates the all-pervading goodness of God.