Tarantula - Bob Dylan

 TARANTULA - BOB DYLAN

First published in 1966, Tarantula is Bob Dylan's only ever work of fiction published in book-form unless, of course, you're someone who subscribes to the notion that everything Dylan has ever done is fiction and therefore Tarantula is simply business as usual? It's a moot point.

It's a book I first read as a teenager and at that time, a book I failed to understand. I had been baptised in the unholy waters of hardcore punk rock and what that had given me was a near-cleansing of the doors of perception. Never mind what Mott The Hoople had once said about 'who needs TV when we've got T-Rex?' How about who needs lysergic acid diethylamide when we've got punk rock?

The Year Zero concept promoted in some quarters of the punk fraternity where the past is erased as in 'No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones' was always mere posturing, I always thought, and was never really something I went along with. Patently, punk rock didn't just come out of nowhere. It might well have been 'here today gone tomorrow' for some but it was never 'here today not there yesterday'. In fact, punk rock actually presented the keys to the past where a whole treasure trove of culture and experience lay waiting to be ransacked. And so ransack it I did. Pillaged it, even.

During the years of the Punk Wars, Dylan had been cast as anathema and his songs almost as crimes against humanity but for me this actually made him a person of interest. It was Caroline Coon who hit the nail on the head with all this when she rebuked Johnny Rotten for him denigrating hippies. "The newspapers are going to come after you in the same way they came after the hippies", she told him. And she was right. So, Dylan being such a cultural icon and an ever-looming presence over the 1960s was obviously someone who demanded investigation and so investigate him I did. Which is how I first ended up reading Tarantula.

Not that they're fully-honed now at all but back then my critical faculties weren't even in their infancy. I'd had no education to speak of but school had at least taught me to read and like so many other others before me, I found that reading was the route to the root of the world. 'A house without books is like a body without a soul' as Roman philosopher Cicero said, so to the public library it was along with visits to the second-hand bookshops of Bristol. 'Libraries gave us power', as the Manic Street Preachers once sang, and it's true. This being one of the very few things of note they've ever come out with, I might add.

On first encountering and reading Tarantula I didn't understand it at all. It was stream of consciousness stuff without punctuation or form. It was gobbledygook. It was gibberish. It made no sense in the slightest and even searching out the odd, single slither of a line containing a hint of meaningfulness was a task too far. There was nothing in there of any note. Nothing to latch onto apart from a sense of cleverness for the sake of being clever but even this was quashed by the much larger sense of it not being half as clever as it presented itself to be.

There was a smugness about it, as if it was talking its own language and if you didn't understand that language it was because you were 'square'. You just wasn't hip to the beat, daddio. You were nowheresville. It was all just Greek to me, however. Double Dutch. Couldn't make head nor tail of it. I was failing to catch the wind. Falling at the first hurdle of the acid test.

So, years later and on reading Tarantula again does it now make any sense? The answer, not surprisingly, is 'No'. It's still very much gobbledygook, still very much gibberish. I have, however, now become wise to it. Tarantula is a vanity project that if written by anyone else other than Dylan would have been binned immediately. It's a disservice to book publishing. It's a fraud. An insult to intelligence. A waste of time and a waste of paper. It should never have seen the light of day let alone be presented as 'essential reading' and 'verbal playfulness and spontaneity'. 

It serves no use. It serves no purpose. It's the literately equivalent of erectile disfunction except it's not even literature. Rather than the works of Shakespeare, it's what a thousand monkeys clattering away on typewriters for a thousand years would come up with. It's rubbish. Utterly. Never in a million years would Dylan himself consider giving it a second glance let alone reading it, so why should anyone else? Why not instead consider destroying it, that's if anyone could even be bothered spending any energy on doing so? That's right, wipe it from the face of the earth metaphorically at least. Slap a sticker on every copy in the world like those 3 for 2 Waterstones ones as a public health warning stating something like 'Pretentious drivel. This book can seriously waste your time'.

John Serpico