After The Flood: Inside Bob Dylan's Memory Palace

本書結合人物傳記與檔案歷史，《洪水過後》(暫譯)向巴布·狄倫提問：「如果你在二十歲時就實現了夢想，那麼餘生你該如何度過？」

大眾熟知的敘事往往是：巴布·狄倫，這位六零年代反主流文化的發聲者，在七零年代消聲匿跡，隨後在八零年代發行了職業生涯中最糟糕的音樂——直到 2016 年他備受爭議地獲得諾貝爾文學獎，才算再度「復興」。狄倫的演唱會甚至曾以報幕員用冷淡的口吻朗誦這段敘事作為開場。

但，這並非本書要講述的故事。

在這裡，展現的是狄倫的第二個三十年。從 1991 年那個紐約下雨的二月深夜開始——當時四十九歲的狄倫接受了葛萊美終身成就獎，這在實質上預告了他作為生命力強大、不可或缺的創作原動力已經結束、徹底完結——《洪水過後》透過按字母順序排列的章節，檢視自 1991 年以來他的專輯、演出、電影與著作，揭示了狄倫在過去三十年間的創作產出，其實是他職業生涯中最具野心且成就最高的階段。

知名詩人兼傳記作家羅伯特·波利托（Robert Polito）利用了奧克拉荷馬州圖爾薩市新開放的狄倫檔案中數千頁的資料，並剖析了數百首已發表與未發表的歌詞、專輯內頁文案等，向世人展示了狄倫如何演化出一種「晚期音樂風格」。這種風格既具象化了當前時代，又與之抗衡；它交織了民謠演進過程、美國與世界歷史，並將幽靈般的文化記憶轉化為驚人的創作靈感。波利托藉此確立了狄倫作為一名深度文學性創作歌手的地位，尤其是他近期的作品，更是充滿動態、錯綜複雜且影響深遠的拼貼藝術。

在 1992 年的《Good as I Been to You》到 2023 年的《Shadow Kingdom》之間，跨越了沙漠風暴行動、911 事件與新冠肺炎（COVID-19），波利托展示了狄倫如何活化來自古希臘羅馬、美國內戰及黑色電影等多元來源的詩句與背景：他將「邦聯桂冠詩人」亨利·蒂姆羅德（Henry Timrod）融入「藍調之父」馬弟·沃特斯（Muddy Waters）之中；將赫爾曼·梅爾維爾、約翰·溫斯羅普與朗費羅的筆觸傾斜注入史蒂芬·福斯特、丹·艾米特與艾爾·喬遜的旋律裡；甚至將馬塞爾·普魯斯特藏進他位於加州的後院。而這些，僅僅是狄倫那座令人驚嘆的「記憶宮殿」中少數幾間陳列室而已。

《洪水過後》擁有富有想像力的研究精神、大膽的編排方式，以及對狄倫歌曲背後巧思的哀歌式洞察。它是對狄倫傳奇故事至關重要的修正與延續，也是所有狄倫迷的必讀之作。

Blending biography and archival history, After the Flood asks of Bob Dylan, “If your dreams are fulfilled at twenty, what do you do with the rest of your life?”

A familiar narrative goes: Bob Dylan, the voice of sixties counterculture, disappeared in the 1970s, then released arguably the worst music of his career in the 1980s―only to be resurrected in 2016, when he was controversially awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Dylan’s concerts once began with an announcer intoning a deadpan version of just such a narrative.

That is not this story.

Here, instead, is Dylan’s second thirty years. Across an abecedarium of chapters surveying his albums, performances, films, and books since 1991―since that rainy February night in New York City when Dylan, then forty-nine, accepted a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, signaling in effect that his extraordinary vocation as a vital and indispensable creative force had ended, was over―After the Flood reveals Dylan’s creative output during the last three decades as his most ambitious and accomplished yet.

Drawing on thousands of pages from Dylan’s newly opened archive in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and anatomizing hundreds of published and unpublished lyrics, liner notes, and more, celebrated poet and biographer Robert Polito demonstrates how Dylan evolved a late musical style that has equally embodied and resisted its era, interweaving folk process and American and world history, and transforming spectral cultural memory into devastating inspiration. Polito thus establishes Dylan as an intensely literary songwriter whose recent writings, especially, are dynamic, intricate, and far-reaching collages.

Between Good as I Been to You (1992) and Shadow Kingdom (2023), across Desert Storm, 9/11, and COVID-19, Polito shows that Dylan revitalized lines and contexts from sources as diverse as classical Greece and Rome, the American Civil War, and film noir, tipping Henry Timrod, poet laureate of the Confederacy, into Muddy Waters; slanting Herman Melville, John Winthrop, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow into Stephen Foster, Dan Emmett, and Al Jolson; and secreting Marcel Proust into his own literal California backyard―to touch on just a few of the storerooms inside Dylan’s astonishing “memory palace.”

Imaginatively researched, boldly arranged, and with elegiac insights into the cunning behind his songs, After the Flood is an essential revision and continuation of the Dylan saga, and a must-read for all Dylan enthusiasts.