He is the author of The Shadow of Unfairness and The Eyes of the People.
Green applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Bob Dylan: Prophet Without God, and reported the following:
From page 99 [footnotes omitted]:Learn more about Bob Dylan: Prophet Without God at the Oxford University Press website.…Whitman answers the child by treating the grass as the “flag of my disposition,” a mirror of Whitman’s own selfhood and, in keeping with the Emersonian tradition, what is reflected in this mirror is imbued with a quasi-divinity, pointing to the elevation and ennoblement of the self: “hopeful green stuff,” “the hand- kerchief of the lord,” “a scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,” a “produced babe,” “a uniform hieroglyphic.” Even the darkest rendering is still affirmative: “the beautiful uncut hair of graves.” In Dylan’s poem, a child, in contemplating the grass and through the grass himself, savagely rips grass out of the ground, remorsefully acknowledges yet also interrogates his guilt (asking “How can this bother me?”), and then likens himself to “a frightened fox” and “a demon child.” This is but one example of how Dylan departs from Emerson and Thoreau, the latter of whom, for instance, concludes and counterbalances his grim castigation of his fellow citizens for their insufficient outrage against slavery in “Slavery in Massachusetts” by finding promise of redemption in a white water lily: “What confirmation of our hopes is in the fragrance of this flower!”In this case, the Page 99 Test would be partially vindicated. Page 99 has a lot to say about a significant element of Part I one of my book—the part in which I argue that Dylan is almost unique in the history of political thought in publicly disclaiming his willingness to commit himself to a social justice cause he has helped to lead (the civil rights movement) because he has come to believe that the commitment to social justice conflicts with his commitment to being a self-reliant, free individual. The only other thinkers I know of who do something roughly similar are Emerson and Thoreau. Yet as much as Dylan belongs in their tradition, he is also importantly distinct. He is less self-satisfied in his self-reliance than are Emerson and Thoreau. There are numerous features of Emerson’s and Thoreau’s self-satisfaction, and of Dylan’s contrasting lack of self-satisfaction. One key issue—the issue discussed on page 99—has to do with providentialism. Emerson and Thoreau would have agreed with what Theodore Parker and later Martin Luther King Jr. said: “that the arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice.” Dylan, however, disagrees. When he practices self-reliance, he does so with the expectation that there is no arc to moral universe, or that it tends toward injustice. Part of their disagreement concerns nature. Whereas Emerson and Thoreau—and poets inspired by them such as Whitman—could find evidence of providentialism in nature, Dylan, in such works as his “Poem to Joanie,” refuses to find in nature a source of moral comfort. Dylan perhaps agrees with Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman that nature is a mirror of humanity, but what this mirror reflects is something far from comforting. If anything, when Dylan treats nature as a mirror, what it reflects back is the human being as a dangerous and unreliable being.
While Dylan does think that local improvements in specific social contexts can be made—at least his own episodic political efforts imply as much—he rejects providentialism, contemplating that the arc of the moral universe either does not exist or bends toward permanent injustice. Even if Dylan is less forthcoming than Emerson and Thoreau in expounding this competing, more pessimistic vision, his reticence in this respect itself has theoretical implications insofar as it leads him to refrain from the metaphysical excesses of Emerson and Thoreau when they imagine a divine spark existing within each human being, when they find moral reassurance in natural beauty, and when they postulate a divine energy working for the ultimate good of the world. Dylan’s conception of self-reliance, and of the problem of a self-reliant individual turning away from the fight against injustice, is simply not buttressed by these speculative, self-congratulating logics. The question at stake is not simply whether, in the abstract, people should be optimistic or pessimistic about the direction of the world, but for whom such dispositions are relatively more appropriate. Hope…
But there are more reasons Dylan rejects providentialism than what is discussed on page 99. There are also more bases on which to compare and contrast Dylan to the nineteenth century tradition of self-reliance besides providentialism. Further, there are more features of my argument that Dylan—almost unique within the history of political thought—testifies to the collision between freedom and justice besides his relationship to the nineteenth century tradition of self-reliance. And, in the broadest sense of the message of my book, my book is concerned with tracing three sets of conflicts Dylan testifies to (and the ethical implications that follow from these conflicts): not just the conflict between freedom and justice, but also the conflict between freedom and God as well as between God and justice. Put differently, the book is not just concerned with Dylan’s remarkable withdrawal from the civil rights movement in the 1960s, but—among other topics—his conversion to evangelical Christianity in the late 1970s and its aftermath as well as his longstanding pessimism about politics and the possibility of achieving peace and justice in the world. So page 99 gives a part of a part of a part of a part—I hope an interesting and illuminating part, but still a fragment.
The Page 99 Test: The Eyes of the People.
--Marshal Zeringue
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