'The Swedish Academy?s mid-October announcement regarding literature
seldom fails to occasion second-guessing, if not outrage. Whenever a
foreign writer mostly unknown to English speakers is awarded the
Nobel, a certain constituency will suggest that the Swedes are
trolling us. Whenever someone who is already a household name across
the world gets it, a different faction is crestfallen, because he or
she did not need the publicity. This has presumably been going on
since Sully Prudhomme took it away in 1901, his honeyed verses to
dance forevermore on every child?s lips.
Bob Dylan was awarded the big prize this morning, and my social-media
timeline has been alive with indignation ever since. The Nobel did not
go to Ngugi wa Thiong?o, did not go to Ursula K. LeGuin, did not go to
an overlooked novelist in a small country working in a
seldom-translated language. But even more people are upset that the
prize went to a ?songwriter.? Some of those same people are still
grousing that last year it was awarded to Svetlana Alexievich, a
?journalist.? They have decided, for whatever reasons, that song
lyrics and non-fictional prose do not qualify as literature. Which
would come as a surprise to most writers before the mid-eighteenth
century or so, although they have the disadvantage of being dead.
And people are upset because Bob Dylan is the voice of some generation
other than theirs, because he works in a popular idiom, because he
does not work in this minute?s popular idiom, because he appeared on a
car commercial that aired during the Super Bowl, because his
songwriting skills dropped off after this record or that one (the
candidate albums are broadly varied)?because he was famous long
ago. But note that phrase: ?famous long ago.? Although undoubtedly
people used it in speech and writing before Dylan was even born, it is
nonetheless now tied to him: ??for playing the electric violin on
Desolation Row.?
You may not think of Dylan as a poet, because his lyrics don?t always
scan well on the page, but consider how many lines of poetry he has
embedded in common discourse: ?But to live outside the law you must be
honest?; ?She knows there?s no success like failure/And that failure?s
no success at all?; ?Ah but I was so much older then/I?m younger than
that now??those are just off the top of my head, and we could go on
like this all night.
Somebody will argue that ?You?re the top, you?re the Colosseum? rolls
off the tongue just as trippingly, and nobody gave the big Swedish
prize to Cole Porter. And somebody else will point out that ?My smile
is my makeup I wear since my break-up with you? does likewise, and
that Dylan himself allegedly once named Smokey Robinson the greatest
living poet in the nation, and where?s Smokey?s Nobel?
Song lyrics and poetry might have been interchangeable concepts for
the Elizabethans, but two streams divided later on. As great as Porter
and Robinson were as songwriters, they were working in?and profiting
from?the air of frivolity that attended lyric-writing by the
mid-twentieth century, an era that prized verbal dexterity and rapid
evaporation. Dylan, through his ambiguity, his ability to throw down
puzzles that continue to echo and to generate interpretations, almost
singlehandedly created a climate in which lyrics were taken
seriously. And Dylan accomplished something that few novelists or
poets or for that matter songwriters (pace Joni Mitchell) have managed
to do in our era: he changed the time he inhabited. Through words,
with music as the fluid of their transmission, he affected the
perception, outlook, opinions, ambitions, and assumptions of hundreds
of millions of people all over the world.
The Nobel Prize in Literature cannot ever be all things to all people,
and while this year?s award failed to accomplish various possible
objectives, it was not in any way misapplied. Me, I just wish I?d had
the foresight to plunk down a fifty on Dylan at Ladbroke?s. ?The
highway is for gamblers, better use your sense/Take what you have
gathered from coincidence.?'
http://bit.ly/2eelRET
This all seems to me to be very well put. Dylan's lyrics are a different
sort of poetry from "poetry on the page". For the overall effect, it's
really necessary to consider the combination of the lyrics with the
music, the latter more than "the fluid of their transmission", and
perhaps even with his rather odd singing voice. As someone noted,
the critics of his time and later primarily focused on the lyrics,
which certainly represented something new in popular song. But most
pop music critics comment mainly about lyrics, not being competent
to really address the music. It's really the combination, all at
once, which mattered.
Is it "literature"? It's certainly a stretch of the conventional
definition, although not an implausible one. Should this have received
a Nobel Prize? I have no idea. (Does Dylan himself actually care?)
--
Al Eisner
