False Prophet (2020) part 11: Say my name

Previously in this series

• Part 1: “The beam that is in thine own eye”
• Part 2: The Dead are from a different world
• Part 3: Right up there in the stratosphere
• Part 4: Sing to me, O Muse, of that man of many troubles
• Part 5: Cut off the head of the owl, it’ll look like a chicken
• Part 6: The gospel of rock ‘n’ roll
• Part 7:  A minstrel collecting words
• Part 8: They call me the Gris-Gris man
• Part 9: Just a closer walk with Thee
• Part 10: I found the sound that was my holy grail

False Prophet (2020) part 11

by Jochen Markhorst

XI         Say my name

You don’t know me darlin’ - you never would guess
I’m nothing like my ghostly appearance would suggest
I ain’t no false prophet - I just said what I said
I’m here to bring vengeance on somebody’s head

The standard for the perfect introduction was set back in 1987, by Mandy Patinkin in Rob Reiner’s The Princess Bride: “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” The sequence polite greeting – establishing connection – manage expectations has since been considered the format of choice for both business and dramatic overtures, but seems to be accepted in only very broad terms by Dylan’s prophet. Its compact effectiveness, for instance, the prophet certainly does not acknowledge. The polite greeting already took place in the second verse (“Hello Mary Lou – Hello Miss Pearl”), the verse in which we learn that the entire text is a dramatic monologue. At least, there is a “you” to whom the speaker addresses his words.

The return of the you, however, takes a while – lasting until this seventh verse. Whereby the switch from plural (“you girls” in the third verse) to singular in this verse (“You don’t know me darlin’”) suggests that the prophet is now addressing someone else in his audience. And all the while, the narrator has still not completed his polite greeting – after the hello, we still miss the My-name-is-Inigo-Montoya part, the part where the prophet is supposed to reveal who he is.

We are now over halfway through the dramatic monologue, and still the narrator smears his introduction – by boastfully piling up the qualities he says he possesses, by ad nauseam pontificating on what he is not all about, and by handing over meaningless calling cards like “I’m the enemy of treason”.

Gradually, we become suspicious. We are familiar with this kind of drawn-out, cryptic introduction. From Goethe’s Faust, for instance;

I am a part of that power,
That always wants evil and always creates good.
I am the spirit that always negates!
And rightly so; for everything that comes into being
Is worthy of destruction;
Therefore it would be better that nothing should come into being.
So everything you call sin,
Destruction, in short evil,
My actual element.
I am a part of the part that was everything in the beginning,
A part of the darkness that gave birth to the light
[etc.]

… the words with which Mephistopheles, the Devil, keeps delaying his answer to Faust’s simple question (“Wie nennst du dich? – What do you call yourself?”). Or from Jagger, who teasingly opens with “Please allow me to introduce myself”, then for 324 words does not introduce himself, but provides an endless string of hints to guess his identity, and then sings at the very end:

Ah yes, what's my name?
Tell me, baby, what's my name?
Tell me, sweetie, what's my name?

 

… who thus still does not say his name (“Sympathy For The Devil”, 1968). Similar also to one of the most famous dialogues from one of the most successful TV series of this century;

[Declan picks up the bag of meth and turns around. He looks at the bag 
    and turns back around. He laughs nervously]
Declan: Who the hell are you?
Walt: You know. You all know exactly who I am. Say my name.
Declan: What? I don't have a damn clue who the hell you are.
Walt: Yeah, you do. I'm the cook. I'm the man who killed Gus Fring.
Declan: Bullshit. Cartel got Fring.
Walt: Are you sure? That's right. Now. Say my name.
Declan: You're Heisenberg.
Walt: You're goddamn right.

… Walter White’s refusal to say his own name (or his pseudonym) in episode 7 of the fifth season of Breaking Bad (2012). Or like Death keeps beating around the bush in basically every anthropomorphic personification in any art form. In Casella’s 1923 play La morte in vacanza, Brad Pitt as Death in the film Meet Joe Black (1988) based on that play, in the TV series Supernatural (2005-20) and in Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel The Sandman, also televised: Death, too, employs cumbersome, cryptic and, above all unspecific hints to introduce himself.

Death, the drug dealer, the Devil… it is hardly a merry little club in which our prophet joins; the convention of saying unequivocally and clearly who you are seems to be something only the bad guys shy away from.  

We see a similar restraint when the prophet performs the middle part of the perfect standard introduction, establishing the connection. Here again, the reflex of every bad guy resembles that of our prophet: mainly telling what the connection is not, and refusing to reveal what the connection then, in fact, is. I’m not someone you can know, oracles the prophet here, adding that outward appearances are deceptive: “I’m nothing like my ghostly appearance would suggest.” Nineteenth-century word choice, a personality description we might recognise from the works of Jules Verne, or Charles Dickens, but above all another “hint” in the enumeration of all that he is not, and indeed the active denial of any conclusions we might draw from his appearance. Conclusions that, on the whole, would not be very cheerful either; ghostly appearances usually are awakening sham deaths (in Verne’s Around The World In 80 Days, for example), cursed souls (Catherine in Wuthering Heights) or actual ghosts with usually little good in them (as in Dickens’ oeuvre, quite abundantly). Anyway: so our prophet is none of those, despite his ghostly appearance.

The only thing then that comes reasonably close to Inigo Montoya’s textbook example is the prophet’s bouncer, which indeed approximates “managing expectation”: I’m here to bring vengeance on somebody’s head. However: even this is only approximate – what the vengeance will be and on whose head it will descend remains as vague as the identity of our prophet. It even could still be Inigo Montoya, of course. In a verbose mood.

To be continued. Next up False Prophet part 12: A manic depression is a frustrating mess

——————

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
• Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
• Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2^nd Big Bang
• Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
• Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
• Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
• Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
• I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
• Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
• Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
• Bob Dylan’s 1971