My own version of you, part 7: “Although I did not mean myself when I said ‘I’…”

by Jochen Markhorst

VII        “Although I did not mean myself when I said ‘I’…”

I study Sanskrit and Arabic to improve my mind
I want to do things for the benefit of all mankind

Karl May in 1906. Photo courtesy Karl May Museum, Radebeul, Germany.

“What if my readers think that by “I” I mean myself? Wouldn’t they consider me a liar and a fraud? No, surely not – any reasonable person understands that my main characters are imaginary, and that the “I” speaking is also imaginary. Right?”

One of the best-selling German authors of all time (after the Brothers Grimm, of course) is Karl May (1842-1912); sales figures of his “travel stories” featuring Indian chief Winnetou and his Western friend Old Shatterhand, and his Arabian travel stories featuring the main character Kara Ben Nemsi (“Karl, son of the Germans”) are estimated at around 200 million. By way of comparison, that is about the same as Dan Brown or J.R.R. Tolkien, and double that of names such as Ian Fleming, Lewis Carroll or Hermann Hesse. However, May’s career path is radically different from all those other names in the Top 100 most-read authors ever: May started out as a common con artist, an incorrigible thief with particularly poor criminal skills – he was caught time and time again and eventually, when he was released from prison for the last time at the age of 32, he had already spent half of his adult life behind bars. Eleven so-called Steckbriefe, “wanted posters”, are still kept in various Saxon police archives (only the last one, which also featured a photograph of Karl, led to his arrest). The first (Penig, 23 July 1864) is the most intriguing:

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Unbekannter Betrüger, angeblich ein Arzt aus Rochlitz. Alter: 21 bis 23 J.; Größe:68-69″; Statur: mittel u. schwach; Gesicht: länglich, blaß; Haare: dunkelbraun; Nase u. Mund: proport.; Stirn: hoch und frei; Kleidung: schwarzer Tuchrock mit sehr schmutzigem Kragen, dunkle Bukskinhosen, lichte Bukskinweste, schwrzseidene Mütze u. Schnürstiefel. Er hat eine Brille mit Argentangestell u. an einem Finger der rechten Hand 1 Ring getragen; von freundlichem, gewandtem und einschmeichelndem Benehmen, hat sich der Betrüger, welcher übrigens den in hiesiger Gegend üblichen Dialect gesprochen, auch noch den Anstrich einer wissenschaftlichen Bildung zu geben gewußt. Aus einem von ihm geschriebenen, zur Ansicht an Amtsstelle bereit liegenden Recepte, läßt sich, da die darauf vorkommenden lateinischen Worte fast ohne Ausnahme correct geschrieben sind, recht wohl schließen, daß der Betrüger eine mehr als gewöhnliche Schulbildung erhalten haben mag.

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Unknown fraudster, allegedly a doctor from Rochlitz. Age: 21 to 23 yrs; height: 68-69”; build: medium and weak; face: elongated, pale; hair: dark brown; nose and mouth: proportional.; forehead: high and clear; clothing: black cloth coat with very dirty collar, dark buckskin trousers, light buckskin waistcoat, black silk cap and lace-up boots. He wore glasses with silver frames and 1 ring on the finger of his right hand; friendly, skilful and ingratiating in his manner, the fraudster, who incidentally spoke the dialect common in this area, also knew how to give himself the appearance of having a scientific education. From a prescription he wrote, which is available for inspection at the office, it can be concluded that the fraudster may have received a more than ordinary school education, as the Latin words on it are almost without exception spelt correctly.

But during his last detention, he forms a deep bond with prison chaplain Kotcha, to whom he owes his “innere Wandlung, inner transformation.” He starts writing and is almost immediately successful; he sends his writings to his parents, who let “Kolportagebuchhändler, (pulp bookseller) Münchmeyer read them. Münchmeyer smells money, publishes them, and that is the beginning of Karl May’s dizzying writing career.

At least, that is what May reports in his “Selbstbiografie”, his autobiography Mein Leben und Streben (“My Life and Aspirations”, 1910). But, like so much else in May’s memoirs, it is not true. Writing was not possible in the Waldheim reformatory, and May’s version of how he ended up in prison, innocently of course, does not correspond at all with the official history. May embellishes his own biography many times more wildly and implausibly than Dylan did in the early years of his career. For example, he fabricates the notion that he was blind for the first five years of his life due to a vitamin A deficiency. And amazingly he is also a linguistic prodigy: he learns one language after another, Indian dialects and even Arabic in no time at all. All necessary, he explains, to make his mission a success: Old Shatterhand and Kara Ben Nemsi are role models, men “who possess the highest intelligence, the deepest nobleness of the heart and the greatest skill in all physical exercises.”

May views the “unstoppable decline” of the red race as a terrible tragedy and denounces the enmity between the Orient and the Occident.  May seeks connection, preaches that the human race is one, emphasises the importance of friendship and communication, and illustrates his point by portraying noble, intelligent Indians and noble, intelligent Arabs: he writes his works “zum Wohl der Menschheit – for the benefit of all mankind”.

Still, he is and remains a liar and a deceiver, albeit now within legal limits. In his autobiography, he seemingly presents himself as rather like the suffering Dylan of the future, as a man who finds it annoying that his readers identify the “I” in his novels with the author, but there are more than enough testimonies from contemporaries who say that May, at presentations, lectures and other gatherings, allowed himself in a quasi-coquettish manner to be “caught”, reluctantly revealing that he himself was indeed hiding behind the “pseudonyms” Old Shatterhand and Kara Ben Nemsi and had experienced all those adventures himself. Perhaps motivated by commercial considerations – give the people what they want, after all – but even in the memoirs he wrote at the end of his life, he left that door open:

“Ja, ich war sogar fest überzeugt, trotzdem ich mit dem ,,Ich” mich nicht selbst meinte, doch mit bestem Gewissen behaupten zu können, daß ich den Inhalt dieser Erzählungen selbst erlebt oder miterlebt habe, weil er ja aus meinem eigenen Leben oder doch aus meiner nächsten Nähe stammte.

Yes, I was even firmly convinced that, although I did not mean myself when I said ‘I’, I could say with a clear conscience that I had experienced or witnessed the content of these stories myself, because they came from my own life or at least from my immediate surroundings.”

“These stories came from my own life.” Yeah, right. Well, if not with Dylan, then Karl May can at least identify with an imaginary self from a Dylan song, with the Dr. Frankenstein-like self from “My Own Version Of You “, that is. Both learning Arabic to improve their minds, both working for the benefit of mankind. Words and images that Dylan, adding another fictional layer to the imaginary self, does not borrow from Dr. Frankenstein, but from the narrator of Mary Shelley’s novel, from the “I” in Frankenstein – The Modern Prometheus: Captain Robert Walton. In his first letter, Walton writes to his sister at home in London:

“You cannot contest the inestimable benefit which I shall confer on all mankind to the last generation , by discovering a passage near the pole to those countries, to reach which at present so many months are requisite.”

… though the exhausted and dying Victor Frankenstein says something similar in Chapter XXIV, quoted by Walton: “You were hereafter to be hailed as the benefactors of your species; your names adored, as belonging to brave men who encountered death for honour and the benefit of mankind,” both times referring to finding a navigable passage near the North Pole – which would be pleasant indeed, but still somewhat less spectacular than Karl May’s ambition to reconcile all peoples and all religions.

Even more evident is Dylan’s borrowing re the study of exotic languages. In Chapter VI, Frankenstein tells of his fellow student Clerval, who shares none of Frankenstein’s passion for natural sciences, but nevertheless, there is a connection between them: “The Persian, Arabic, and Sanscrit languages engaged his attention, and I was easily induced to enter on the same studies.” However, Frankenstein considers it nothing more than “temporary amusement” and has no higher ambitions, unlike Clerval, Karl May, and Dylan’s narrator in “My Own Version Of You”.

Which brings us, after a labyrinthine detour, back to the unscientific but nonetheless intriguing question: imaginary “I” or autobiographical “I”? Well, despite all the lies, deceit and romanticisation: after his wild years (or the Vagantenjahre, as May’s benevolent biographers euphemistically refer to his criminal career, “the vagrant years”), Karl May did indeed have a sincere ambition, just like “I, Kara Ben Nemsi” and just like “I, Old Shatterhand”: to reconcile cultures and unite races.

And the Frankenstein-like narrator from Dylan’s songs unearths cultural treasures, restores and rebuilds them, and passes them on to the next generation – for the benefit of all mankind. Which, admittedly, is an imaginary “I” that is indistinguishable from the autobiographical “I, Bob Dylan”. The autobiographer who, in Chronicles, talks about his passion for learning “Robert Johnson’s code of language”, his fascination with “singers who seemed to be groping for words, almost in an alien tongue”, and who explains once again in his Nobel Prize speech: “By listening to all the early folk artists and singing the songs yourself, you pick up the vernacular.”

Alright, not Arabic or Sanskrit, but close enough.

To be continued. Next up My Own Version Of You part 8: A truly fascinating song

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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
• Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden: Bob Dylan kicks open the door
• It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry b/w Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues – Bob Dylan’s melancholy blues