I`ve read a few challenging books in my time, but gave up on
Tarantula pretty quickly, as all those ampersands wore me down after a few pages. But I was interested to read your post,
blastingas, as well as the review you attached, and would like to volunteer a comment on both :-
Firstly, you`re quite right about drug-inspired nature of the writing, though in fact Dylan wrote the book at a time when he was supposedly taking methaphetamine, which is more of a performance-enhancing drug than a hallucinagenic - in fact one of its first uses was to improve the endurance of USA fighter pilots in the Second World War. Known as Bennies, Speed and Crystal Meth in its recreational forms, it usually has the effect of making people talk fast and at length, which I guess suited Dylan well when he found himself boxed into a corner and obliged to write a book. He was, after all, only following in the footsteps of Jack Kerouac who used the same drug when he famously inserted a continuous 120-ft roll of paper into his typewriter and wrote
On The Road in three weeks. What makes Kerouac`s book altogether more readable, though, is that he was just typing up a story that he had been working on beforehand for about three years; he had notebooks replete with characters, incidents and plot, all of which Dylan was hoping to get by without.
TBH I wasn`t really impressed with the Mark Spitzer review. Did you notice how a lot of his article is spent boasting about his superiority to other readers and reviewers, but he doesn`t say much to justify his conclusion that "there`s an undiscovered continent of sense to be made from the seemingly nonsensical pages" ? Instead of doing all the usual "historical precedent" research into Rimbaud and Lautremont, I think Spitzer could have learnt more by reading that well-known children`s fable,
The Emperor`s New Clothes, or by paying more attention to Bob`s own appraisal of
Tarantula, which he made a mere two years after finishing the book:-
Quote:
I just put down all these words, and sent them off to my publishers and they`d send back the galleys, and I`d be so embarrassed at the nonsense I`d written I`d change the whole thing. And all the time they had 100,000 orders ... The trouble with it, it had no story. I`d been reading all these trash books, works suffering from sex and excitement and foolish things.
- Dylan in a 1968 interview
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So, who am I to dispute Bob`s opinion ? It`s nonsense and makes for a very unsatisfactory read.