Bob Dylan, Diane Arbus, and Sword Swallowers (Albino and Otherwise)

Well, the sword swallower, he comes up to you
And then he kneels
He crosses himself
And then he clicks his high heels
And without further notice
He asks you how it feels
And he says, "Here is your throat back
Thanks for the loan"
--Bob Dylan, "Ballad of a Thin Man"

Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man" and Diane Arbus' photographs of carnival performers essentially do the same thing, make the same point, establish the same relationship between subject and object.

There is a curiously defined notion of otherness in both artistic visions represented here, and in Arbus' case (because she worked in the realm of the visual, presumably, and not the aural: because we can tell that a particular individual is represented in this piece of work) this has resulted in criticism of her photographic method. These critics accuse Arbus of exploiting outcasts and those on the fringe; they claim that she has depicted others as Others from her own privileged perspective on the inside. They claim that her photographs do not ennoble their subjects, that they posit freaks only as freaks. Without attempting to elaborate upon what Arbus might have intended with these photographs, I will still claim that these criticisms are misplaced. These photographs capture something that is and, without a narrative context, ask us to interpret its significance entirely on our own. This is, of course, what any photograph does, and in this respect photography is in a way perhaps the purest of media. Susan Sontag pointed out many years ago that photography bears great potential for corruption--"the worst form of mental pollution," she called it--neglecting, however, to point out that her own chosen medium, that of written text, has just as much capacity to pollute. We are reasonably intelligent people, are we not? We can determine the value and function of a photograph on our own, without text, without narrative. Those who are reasonably imbued with humanist sentiments will see the humanity of the photographic subject. Those who are not so reasonably imbued will likely go elsewhere to get their kicks. Moral function just might have to come from somewhere else, from some source entirely external to the photograph, to the song, to any work of art. Ultimately the artist doesn't get to choose how the work of art will be decoded.

Arbus' sword swallower one-ups Dylan's by being albino to boot, and it's worth noting that it is more the albino quallity that makes this performer a "freak" than it is sword swallowing, which, though unusual, is an acquired skill and not a natural aberration.

As for Dylan, his Highway 61 Revisited is an album full of freaks. They march in and out of the songs, especially "Ballad of a Thin Man" and "Desolation Row," the latter of which announces in its first stanza that "the circus is in town" -- as if it weren't apparent from the managerie of oddballs on display. Furthermore, the freaks seem primarily to serve the purpose of pointing out how weak in understanding--how morally thin--the rest of Dylan's characters are. The Thin Man of Dylan's ballad is, it would seem, the ignorant one, the one who doesn't understand: "And you know something is happening / But you don't know what it is," Dylan intones at the end of each stanza. The Thin Man bears witness not only to the sword swallower but also to a one-eyed midget and a host of others. It was 1965, and things were getting strange; it was time to freak out the squares. In the case of this Thin Man, his squareness takes on the quality of a moral fault, an inability to understand the other, and Dylan seems to harbor little sympathy for such a type. If the lyrics don't convince you of this, the tone of derision that unmistakeably inhabits Dylan's voice in this song should do so. Dylan has an advantage over Arbus here; while she works in one-dimension, his words function on the page and through the added dimension of sound.