Interpreting Dylan, Always Treacherous, Was Lehrer\'s Undoing

By BEN SISARIO

As the news spread on Monday that the writer Jonah Lehrer had fabricated quotes by Bob Dylan for his most recent book, there was a common, dumbfounded reaction: Bob Dylan? Of all people?

The idea that someone would invent quotations by one of the most famous musicians alive would seem incredible. Mr. Dylan's every word, after all, in lyrics as well as in the relatively small body of interviews he has granted, has been scrutinized in extraordinary detail, by admirers and students ranging from ordinary fans to Oxford dons. Surely the misrepresentation of such a famous figure would eventually be found out. And indeed it was, by a writer for the magazine Tablet, whose exposé on Monday quickly led to Mr. Lehrer's resignation as a staff writer at The New Yorker.

But for anyone writing about the creative process, as Mr. Lehrer did in his book “Imagine: How Creativity Works,” Mr. Dylan is a problematic subject in other ways . The oracular, mysterious voice in his songs is often reflected in Mr. Dylan's words about himself, and some described his memoirs “Chronicles: Volume One” as the work of an unreliable narrator.  Over the decades he has frustrated many an interviewer who wanted to penetrate his mind and method.

“Dylan has never been at all revealing about those kinds of issues,” the music critic and author Anthony DeCurtis said in an interview on Tuesday.

“He has always been dismissive,” Mr. DeCurtis said. “He has certainly said things that have minimized his lyrics in the attempt to fend off or downplay any attempt to see him as a prophet. So he'll say, ‘Oh, I just wrote what came to my mind.' Whatever kind of offhand thing you could say to try to deflate someone who is trying to inflate your lyrics with meaning.”

So did Mr. Lehrer put words into Mr. Dylan's mouth that he never would have said, making him a straw man to support an argument about neurosc ience and creativity? Or did he forge some quotations that are not far from things Mr. Dylan might have said anyway? Or is Mr. Dylan such a sphinx that a few words - genuine or not - could never really provide a reliable guide to his own thought process?

Perhaps this is one reason that Mr. Dylan is so endlessly fascinating. Not only is his music brilliant, but you can spend a lifetime trying to figure him out and you never will.

Mr. Dylan has hinted at this in the past. In 2004, he was interviewed by Ed Bradley for “60 Minutes,” and when asked about how he wrote a song like “Blowin' in the Wind,” he echoed a theme about the creation of art that goes back at least to Socrates, who once asked poets where they got their inspiration; they said they had no idea.

“It just came,” Mr. Dylan said, answering Mr. Bradley's question about about the source of the song. “It came from, like, right out of that wellspring of creat ivity.” He added, “I don't know how I got to write those songs.”

There's a book in there somewhere.

Ben Sisario writes about the music industry. Follow @sisario on Twitter.