Bob Dylan just won the 2016 Nobel Prize in literature. If you somehow do not know who Bob Dylan is, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Sara Danius, suggests you start with Blonde on Blonde.
But okay, sure. Give Dylan the prize for literature. Break Philip Roth’s heart like that. Really twist the knife. Why not.
After all, the Nobel Prize committee gets to decide what the Nobel Prize committee thinks is literature. Dylan certainly did, as the committee says, create “new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” And he is unquestionably one of the greatest songwriters who has ever lived. And songwriting might well be considered a form of literature. WHY NOT? I’d say that playwrighting is a form of literature, but would I say that screenwriting was a form of literature and give the prize to Charlie Kaufmann?
I’m getting off track. The point is this: in a post-announcement interview, Danius was asked whether Dylan deserved the award for literature. She said, “of course he does,” adding: “He is a great poet, he is a great poet in the English speaking tradition, and he is a wonderful sampler, a very original sampler.”
Now we got issues.
Dylan is a great songwriter, but he’s not a poet. Poets don’t get instruments. Poets don’t get a drum, and good poets often avoid one when offered. Poets have to find music in the language itself and arrange that music in meaningful ways on the page. That is very hard to do, and it’s a different task entirely from the act of writing a song. The poet can’t let a bad rhyme slide for the sake of x, y, or z musical concern. And while it’s true poets can perform their poetry, what really matters is what’s on the page. That’s what’s left after the poet’s death. The page is the medium of exchange between reader and writer for all of eternity, or at least until we all destroy ourselves.
And while it’s true Dylan is a “master of language,” it’s not true that all songwriting has to demonstrate literary mastery in order to demonstrate songwriting mastery. Let’s take an example from Dylan himself. Behold the chorus of “Had a Dream About You Baby:”
Her heart is jumpin’
It’s really somethin’
The beat is pumpin’
My heart is thumpin’
Spent my money on you honey
My limbs are shakin’
My mind is breakin’
Limbs are shakin’, he says! Mind is breakin’, he says! Give that man approximately one million dollars! (This year, the Nobel is paying out $908,776.) Now, these lyrics work fine within a musical framework, but the fact that they look naked here on the (digital) page, the fact that it seems cruel to reference them outside the context of the song, the fact that you’re thinking of seven stellar Dylan lines right now, is enough to show that the poet and the songwriter are working in very different—and importantly different—modes.
And please take the reverse case. Pegging Dylan as a poet or a writer of literature robs him, a little, of his musical genius. “The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face,” Dylan sings in “Visions of Johanna.” That’s a good line. Many poets would trade you an armful of hyacinths for a line like that. But that line reaches its fullest expression only when Dylan howls like a ghost on the words “ghost” and “howl,” as if he were that electric spirit.
Giving the medal to Dylan awards him for only part of his art’s greatness, which is ultimately a disservice to him and a disservice to literature. Many other great writers deserve this award. But I guess there’s always next year.
Wow, that’s kind of . . . dumb. The desire to police that boundary, I mean. That’s a little like saying that novels can’t be literature — which used to be said quite a lot — because they can be mash ups of non-poetic, non “literary” forms of language and are insufficiently pure relative to poetry — unless you narrow THAT category a lot too.
Kind of diminishes the genius of novels as entertainment to “reduce” them to the category of the literary, doesn’t it? They’re a lot more than that!
Because “literariness” used to be, and I emphasize the past tense, a thing that people felt that they could isolate and define.
I feel foolish even pointing this out, but LOTS OF POETS have had “drums” and other musical accompaniment from Homer to troubadors to Beat poets — and that’s just the western poetic tradition. Maybe even Italian poets in the 13th century. Read a book, dude.
Maybe to be totally obvious it could be pointed out that Dylan has been taught in college lit courses since the early 70s, since that’s maybe where the boundaries that you’re apparently referring to are often established and defined?
Apologies in advance if I’ve entirely missed some acute millenial irony and it turns out you’re just bullshitting.
I have to say this is a pretty terrible article. You sound awfully jaded and incredibly uneducated on poetry, art, music, et al. How do you feel you are the person who gets to draw the line between lyricism and poetry. I’m sure you are as well educated as the Nobel Laureate on the subject, so pardon me for being so upfront, but honestly, what are your credentials? Do you have published poetry or music (clearly never poetry…). Do you have the guts to stand up to these questions? Bob Dylan would. He would just say it in a way that would be remembered 50 years afterward. So…. Go!
Patti Smith.
You oh so politely say “I love ya Bob, but you can’t come to this party.” Are you out of your freakin mind? To icing what my illustrious colleagues say above, you intricately define what you think literature is and it’s not what Bob does and as a cheap shot example you pick a few lines from Had a Dream about you Baby. How about Blowin in the Wind….whoops maybe you believe he plagiarize that….okay Simple Twist of Fate, Every Grain of Sand, Girl from the Red River Shore, you want earlier stuff The Times they are a Changin, It’s all over now Baby Blue. These are Poems dude! They are great Poems by yours or anybody’s standard. I won’t even go into my “he’s a short story genius also” mode either. Even though Lily Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts or Tangled Up in Blue and earlier the Death of Hattie Carol certainly give you a glimpse of his storytelling charms. So I agree with you buddy…boo hoo for Philip Roth…better luck next year…..and Bob’s strutting down Hwy 61 this year.
Yup the writer is a hate filled sack of untalented douche rez. Of all the things you choose to go off on, you want to say Bob Dylan doesn’t deserve this?? Get a life!!