Criticism/Terry Eagleton: If all the people who have now heard Christopher Ricks lecture on Bob Dylan were laid end to end, they would be genuinely laid-back rather than, like Ricks, simply appearing to be.
There is something inescapably embarrassing about a middle-aged literary professor producing almost 500 pages on Dylan's lyrics, rather as there would be about Bono's views on Etruscan vases, or Garret FitzGerald gadding around in a rabbit costume. To adapt Samuel Johnson's scandalous words about the woman preaching: it is not that it is not done well, simply depressing that it is done at all.
It is not even as though Ricks is an ageing hippie, homesick for 1960s liberation. This is not a cool cat at all, whatever his prose's over-anxious effort to sound brisk and breezy rather than solemn and stodgy. It is the don being a bit of a devil.
Dylan's Vision of Sin is crammed with ingenious readings of some of the major songs, all evidence of its author's preternaturally keen eye for fine nuances of meaning. He is a masterly exponent of so-called close reading, an adept of what William Empson once called the lemon-squeezing school of literary criticism. Not a sliver of signification is allowed to slither from beneath his critical microscope. And much of this is genuinely illuminating. He uncovers a wealth of allusions and associations which no-one else seems to have noticed (not least, one suspects, the author of the lyrics), and can show us just what effect you get from rhyming "ground" with "town".
But Ricks makes the customary critical mistake of assuming that squashing your nose up against the art-work is always the best way of viewing it. If this isn't true of a Rembrandt, neither is it true of Like a Rolling Stone. Songs aren't poems: you need to get some daylight between them and you if they are to resonate in their own fashion. When Ricks points out in his usual perceptive way that the word "lady" in the phrase "Lay, lady, lay" "feels like or feels for a relaxedly languorous and open and welcoming expansion of 'lay' ", he is in dire peril of catapulting himself straight into Pseud's Corner.
As, indeed, is the whole book. What he says is instructive, and - even better - probably true; but as Uma Thurman remarks to John Travolta in Pulp Fiction when he reports on his visit to the bathroom, it's just a little more information than we need.
The song becomes an occasion for Ricks to demonstrate his Senior Common Room cleverness, and that slight stylistic affectation of needlessly repeating the copula ("langurous and open and welcoming") hints at the fact.
"Clever", in both its approving and pejorative senses, is a word invented for Ricks's brand of critical analysis. He is smart in both American and English meanings of the word, both a clever don and a clever Dick. He has a scintillating verbal intelligence, but doesn't seem to know quite what to do with it - partly because it acts as a substitute for moral depth or intellectual complexity. He is, in fact, a kind of Sophist - those professional word-pedlars of the ancient world who had no real roots in any moral or political tradition, no polis or city state to call their own, but who hawked their fine, rootless intelligence from text to text and place to place. They could argue on either side of a law-suit or political debate, just as Ricks can be coruscating about anyone from Milton to Mickey Mouse. He is also, however, the man for whom the phrase "coruscating on thin ice" was also specially invented. If his criticism is prodigal of insights, it is also incorrigibly brittle.
It is curious, then, that one with so fine an ear for others' linguistic effects can have such a duff one for some of his own. Dylan's Visions of Sin is disfigured throughout by a kind of arch, mannered idiomatic phrasing, such as "Sorry, I didn't quite catch that - who is it who's doing the oversimplification?" The prose is everywhere resonant with the sound of the Great Man unbuttoning. This is criticism as compulsive word-play, sometimes finely perceptive, sometimes plain silly (a word "goes without singing").
There is the odd flash of feeble humour, as when Ricks turns on a critic who accuses him of verbal fetishism with a labouredly mock-indignant: "What, me? All the world knows that it is women's shoes that I am into," a phrase which if it is to be used at all (it shouldn't be) would benefit from an elision of "it is" and "I am" and a removal of at least one "that". Ricks would surely have noticed this in the case of Dylan. And he would have a clever phrase about there being no blindness like self-blindness to go with it.
Terry Eagleton is professor of cultural theory and John Rylands fellow at Manchester University. His latest book, After Theory, has just been published by Allen Lane.
Dylan's Visions of Sin By Christopher Ricks Viking, 517 pp. £25