In his essay "The Right to Lie" Thomas Disch asserts that a national admiration for liars (Tom Sawyer, Oliver North, etc.) has made it easy for Americans to "pretend to believe." This willed credulity has in turn paved the way for UFO abduction stories and Dianetics (and has, according to Disch, given science fiction "a special claim to be our national literature"). But what Disch calls an unfortunate blurring of the line between truth and fiction, Keats called negative capability : the ability to be "in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."
From his self-portrait in "Chronicles: Volume One," we can see that Bob Dylan is an admirable liar, an embodiment of Keats's ideal, and, as a result of these qualities, a fantasist. He happily confesses to some whoppers: pretending to rediscover Judaism, fabricating a biographical blurb for his first album to pump up his folk cred, and others. But he never comes across as a con man. Rather, he seems to regard surface truth as trivial compared to deeper emotional truths and purposes. And this same approach to outer truth has endowed him with a powerful credulity when it comes to the mythology of folk music:
Folk music was a reality of a more brilliant dimension. It exceeded all human understanding, and if it called out to you, you could disappear and be sucked into it. I felt right at home in this mythical realm made up not with individuals so much as archetypes, vividly drawn archetypes of humanity, metaphysical in shape, each rugged soul filled with natural knowing and inner wisdom (236).Similarly, when he tells us with a straight face that Johnny Cash "killed a man in Reno just to watch him die," Dylan is pretending to believe order in order to illustrate how a culture possessed him. With respect to "Chronicles" itself, this ability to channel myths yields an additional benefit. Young Dylan is a sponge who absorbs vivid details of the characters and places of the folk scene so that old Dylan can echo them back to us. It's worth suspending your disbelief long enough to absorb some of these vividly drawn archetypes of humanity.
