Love & Theft
Bob Dylan and... Middlemarch?!
Hello friends, welcome to another week of making our way through my old sketchbook journals! We’ve made our way though the late 90s and we were just about to get into my comics from 2000. But this week, we’re taking a detour to a couple of pages I drew around 2003, because it’s time for a Bob Dylan comic.
Over the last year, I shared some old comics I wrote about Bob Dylan, and I pretty much got to the end of them. But a couple of days ago, a Calgary friend mentioned Dylan’s wonderful 1965 song Love Minus Zero/No Limit, and that reminded me of this still-unpublished story. So, dear comics readers: be warned, this one is a bit of a deep dive into Dylan! I wrote WAY more about this, than I should have. Even the Dylan fans may be deterred. If you like, just skip the essay and read the comics!
Back in 2003, I wrote in The Drawing Book about the then-recent revelation that Bob’s album Love and Theft seemed to have stolen some lines from the novel Confessions of a Yakuza. Was Bob a thief? Is it ok for artists to steal from each other? Those are big questions, which prompted these reflections…
(By the way, those lines from Sweetheart Like You have sure been on my mind a lot in the wake of recent political events in the western world. But I digress.) On to the next page, and my theory about Love Minus Zero: No Limit. I’m pretty curious to hear what you think about this.
Middlemarch!
I read George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch in a fourth year English class in 1994, just at the same time I was really getting into Dylan. To me, the connection seemed obvious! But I’ve asked lots of Dylan fans about this theory over the years, and never found anyone who had noticed it. Just now, I searched “Bob Dylan - Middlemarch” and I found two links. One was to my own site (I blogged about this in 2013). But the other one was a 2021 article by prolific Dylan author Jochen Markhorst on the Untold Dylan site! Markhorst knows his Dylan (and by the way, he’ll be the featured guest at the Bob Dylan Book Club meeting on February 9th, to talk about Blood on the Tracks!) I was so excited. Maybe someone else was going to confirm my theory after all these years?
But Markhorst didn’t think so. He acknowledged that Middlemarch was about a banker’s niece, but wrote:
“…it is unlikely that an unbridled, slightly revved-up, 23-year-old cool hipcat in Greenwich Village like Dylan would have wrestled through those 800 pages, let alone been touched by them.”
Well, I am no Dylan expert. But it’s well known that Bob has always been a voracious reader, so I don’t think it’s impossible that he read Middlemarch. I read it when I was 21. In 2019, it was selected as the “greatest British novel of all time,” so it was probably on a few course lists in the 1960s.
We don’t know, either, whether Bob really read and was “touched by” Confessions of a Yakuza, either - but he was still able to borrow a few lines from the book. Even if Bob just flipped through Middlemarch, I think he could have been inspired to put the reference into a song. And even if he didn’t read Middlemarch himself, I wonder if he could have heard about the story from some literary folks in that Greenwich Village coffeehouse scene. After all, as Bob says in Love Minus Zero:
“In the dime stores and bus stations,
People talk of situations,
Read books, repeat quotations…”
What if Love Minus Zero is painting a picture of Bob’s experience talking with those book-reading, quotation-repeating folks mentioned in the song? Maybe Bob joined, or overheard, a conversation about the novel, even if he hadn’t read it himself. After all, the novel’s subplot about the idealistic country doctor who marries a superficial, materialistic banker’s niece, is one of the most interesting aspects of the novel: it’s about the tragedy of realizing you’ve married the wrong person, and figuring out what to do when your dreams fail you. If you were talking about the book, it’s the part you’d probably talk about.
It isn’t impossible to imagine that Bob found himself in a conversation, maybe with some scholarly folks, about Lydgate, the young doctor who marries the banker’s niece. You might wonder why this subject would have stuck in his mind. It could have been that he had the subject of marriage on his mind. Love Minus Zero is widely understood to be about Dylan’s soon-to-be bride, Sara. The song release, and their wedding, both took place in 1965.
As I was thinking about all this, I listened to an episode of the late, great Pod Dylan. Rob Kelly discussed Love Minus Zero with his guest, noting (I’m paraphrasing) that Dylan sets up the heroine of his song as someone superior to those superficial folks who do things like “make promises by the hours.” As Rob put it, “He’s complimenting the person he’s singing about, by knocking somebody else!” I think that’s absolutely right, and I wonder if the “somebody else” isn’t just anybody. The superficial person who could be bought by a valentine, the person who thinks that success is only success, the person who has no time for failure… it’s a perfect description of Rosamond, the banker’s niece. She’s everything the heroine of the song is not.
I’m no good at math, but the song’s weird title is worth a mention. According to Dylan, the title “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” is meant to represent a mathematical equation, a fraction that expresses infinite love. (That’s pretty cool.) One thing I didn’t know, was something I just read on Wikipedia: “…the title is based on gambling terminology which would mean that all love is a risk.[12]" I have no idea about this theory, but picking the right person to get married to, is surely one of the riskiest choices you can make (and that’s one of the takeaways of Middlemarch).
Wuthering Heights!
Well, since we got this far, you might as well stick around for one more theory about “Love Minus Zero.” It’s about the last two lines of the song:
The wind howls like a hammer, the night blows cold and rainy
My love she’s like some raven at the window with a broken wing.
A lot of folks seem to think that this is a reference to Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven,” but I really disagree. The creepy raven in Poe’s poem isn’t anybody’s love. (Can you imagine comparing your love to the raven in that poem????) And the raven isn’t at a window. Famously, it’s “rapping at my chamber door.” It’s a door, not a window! There are no windows in that poem!
But who is a lover trying to get in though a window, on a night when “the wind howls like a hammer, the night blows cold and rainy?” The ghost of Catherine Earnshaw, in the novel “Wuthering Heights.” (Yes, the same one Kate Bush wrote about in her 1978 song “Wuthering Heights.” You know, the one that goes: “Let me in at your window!”)
I read Middlemarch and Wuthering Heights in the same class about 19th century English literature. It doesn’t seem impossible that the two novels could have come up in the same conversation. If my theories are right, the song sets up the singer’s love as a foil to Rosamond, the superficial banker’s niece - but at the end, his love is compared to Catherine, a true and faithful lover even after her death.
What do you think?
After all that, there’s one more page in this comic about love and theft. (For the record, I was wrong about “Counting Crows” - the band in question was “Hootie and the Blowfish”).
Ok, enough about that! Have a listen to Love Minus Zero. It’s a beautiful song, no matter what it’s about.
P.S. I thought I was done, but I realized there’s one more place where you can find “Bob Dylan” and “Middlemarch” on the same page. It’s in this mini-comic I wrote in maybe 2001, called “The Art of Finding your Balance.” In this comic, I mention Mr. Causabon (a character in Middlemarch, who struggled for years to write a gigantic, all-encompassing scholarly work) with Dylan (who effortlessly dashed off dozens of song ideas in no time at all). That’s another story, but this felt like the right place to mention it! Ok, that’s all for now. Go and read some 19th century literature - or listen to Dylan - or both?
