Voice and Voicing: Genre, Poetics, and Metapragmatics in Bob Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue”

Abstract

Abstract: This article interprets the plurality of voices at play in the performance design of “Tangled Up in Blue” as the meta-pragmatic structures of the singer-songwriter’s relation to the listener. The author divides her task into a study of sonic, generic and stylistic, and pragmatic and metapragmatic planes upon which the singer establishes connection with the listener by implanting culturally expected patterns in his artistic configuration. These patterns are perceived as voices of co-speakers in the sense of Émile Benveniste’s theory of enunciation and put into effect for purposes of arousal and satisfaction of expectations, a rhetorical operation of all works of art according to Kenneth Burke. Though divided in terms of task, the three planes are revealed as interdependent in the act of performance as illustrated by the metapoetic instantiation of performer and audience, “From me to you.” The author concludes her study by proposing a textual approach in which the lyric (or text) manifests foremost as a linguistic system that, itself, interpellates both the singer and his audience through a counter-interpellation that constructs the voice of the artist, a function at the heart of all natural language events in socio-historical context as demonstrated in the works of Jean-Jacques Lecercle.