Did Bob Dylan deserve to receive a Nobel Prize for Literature? - October 2016
Is American singer and songwriter Bob Dylan, now 75 years old, deserving of the Nobel Prize for Literature?
Numerous issues need to be disentangled here, probably too many for one article.
In
the first place, there is the matter of the Nobel Prize itself. No one
is obliged to accept the awarding process as either entirely objective
or disinterested. The prize has been handed out by the Swedish Academy,
whose 18 members have tenure for life, since 1901. The winners have for
the most part tended to be European, with Swedish writers especially
well represented in the first few decades of the prize’s existence.
The
list of 113 Nobel Laureates includes many writers––however one may feel
about the overall thrust of their work––who undoubtedly are serious
figures, including Harold Pinter, Günter Grass, Doris Lessing, Gabriel
García Márquez, Alice Munro, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Heinrich Böll,
Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre (who refused the award), Ernest
Hemingway, William Faulkner, T. S. Eliot, André Gide, Eugene O’Neill,
Luigi Pirandello, Sinclair Lewis, Thomas Mann, George Bernard Shaw, W.
B. Yeats, Anatole France, Knut Hamsun, Gerhard Hauptmann, Rudyard
Kipling, Pablo Neruda and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
There
have also been numerous mediocrities and nonentities among the award
winners, and inappropriate prizes, such as the one in 1953 given to
former British prime minister Winston Churchill, “for his mastery of
historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory
in defending exalted human values.”
Missing
from the list of Nobel Laureates are Leo Tolstoy, August Strindberg,
Anton Chekhov, Mark Twain, Henry James, Marcel Proust, James Joyce,
Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, Sean O’Casey, Isaac Babel, Theodore
Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Richard Wright,
Virginia Woolf, W. H. Auden, George Orwell, Ignazio Silone, B. Traven,
Jaroslav Hašek, André Breton, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Mariano Azuela, James
Baldwin, Philip Roth and a host of other intriguing and important
writers.
The
failure to bestow prizes on Tolstoy and Chekhov (who died in 1910 and
1904, respectively) in the first decade of the prize’s existence is
attributed to the anti-Russian inclinations of Swedish ruling circles.
So much for the Academy’s Olympian objectivity!
No
doubt politics of one sort or another entered into the 2016 choice. The
Academy seems to be making an attempt to widen its definition of
literature and perhaps prove its “relevancy” in the 21st century. Beyond
that, one has the sense that, in the midst of US-European tensions that
can only worsen and an unprecedented, tumultuous American election
campaign, this is a signal from sections of the European upper middle
class and bourgeoisie to their affluent counterparts in the US—the Obama
constituency—so to speak, offering support and the “hand of
friendship.”
There
is a “political-psychological” aspect of this particular honor as well.
The average age of the Swedish Academy members––academics, linguists,
poets, critics––is 69 (the youngest member is 44 and the oldest 92). It
may be that proceeding as though the American singer, who belongs more
or less to their generation, still represents something artistically
innovative and even socially oppositional is a means of convincing
themselves that they still do as well, what with their dim memories (in
some cases) of a radical youth and their abandoned idealism. In reality,
to speak frankly, the prize is handed out by affluent 60- and
70-year-olds who, like Dylan himself, have been thoroughly integrated
into the establishment and have not had anything politically interesting
or serious, let alone genuinely rebellious, to say for decades.
In
any event, leaving the Swedish Academy and the various political
considerations out of the picture, the unavoidable question is this: is
Bob Dylan worthy of a major literary prize?
Dylan
is a singer and popular song writer. Decades ago, high school English
teachers in America (and perhaps elsewhere), to inoculate their students
against the supposed threat of rock and roll, liked to read out song
lyrics and point to their inanity. It is doubtful that this ever
accomplished much of anything, because it was largely the energy, the
“beat,” the vaguely subversive feeling of the music that young people
were responding to.
Bob
Dylan has not been a composer of “hit songs,” by and large, but popular
songs of any kind have their peculiarities and limitations. Songwriting
and poetry are not the same thing. Rhythm and repetition have far
larger and more independent roles, even determining roles, to play in
the creation and production of popular songs, as the adolescents of
yesteryear instinctively recognized. The most profound or cleverest
lyric will die on the vine unless it is backed or accompanied by––or
counterposed to––the appropriate musical setting. In a truly memorable
popular song, the words and music interact to enormous emotional effect.
At
least until the late 1960s, many popular tunes were written by duos,
one member of which would concentrate on the music and the other the
lyrics. To treat Dylan’s work as “literature” is unfair to him, because
one is then obliged to judge him solely on the basis of his lyrics, of
what lies cold and dead on the page, and even in the best of
circumstances that will almost always seem inadequate or lacking with
vocal music or theatrical works, which are meant to be performed.
So,
we have to rephrase our question again: did Bob Dylan, in his popular
songs, write lyrics that are worthy of a significant literary prize?
On this score, a good many foolish claims are being made at present. Dwight Garner in the
New York Times
on October 13 contributed a few of them. “This Nobel,” Garner wrote,
“acknowledges what we’ve long sensed to be true: that Mr. Dylan is among
the most authentic voices America has produced, a maker of images as
audacious and resonant as anything in Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson.”
The
Times
journalist goes on to cite “venerated [British] critic and scholar
Christopher Ricks,” who has made “the case most fully for Mr. Dylan as a
complicated and complicating poet.” In his 2003 book, Dylan’s Visions of Sin,
Ricks “persuasively” compared the singer-songwriter to “personages as
distinct” as Yeats, Thomas Hardy, John Keats, Andrew Marvell and Alfred,
Lord Tennyson.
In
an interview following the announcement of the prize winner, Sara
Danius, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, placed Dylan in the
company of Homer, believed to be the greatest epic poet by the Ancient
Greeks, and Sappho, one of the greatest lyric poets.
Historian Sean Wilentz, in the introduction to his
Bob Dylan in America,
was slightly more cautious, suggesting that Dylan belonged to the
“tradition” of “Whitman, [Herman] Melville, and [Edgar Allan] Poe, which
sees the everyday in American symbols and the symbolic in the everyday,
and then tells stories about it.”
Such
comparisons are out of place and unnecessary (and speak more than
anything else to the debased state of present-day criticism and
commentary). In the end, it will not do Bob Dylan any good to be placed
in such company.
By any objective measurement, contrary to Garner in the
Times, the
singer and songwriter has not created “images as audacious and resonant
as anything” in Whitman (1819-92) or Dickinson (1830-86), two remarkable
figures of the “American Renaissance,” the period intimately bound up
with the coming of the Second American Revolution, the Civil War.
As literary historian F. O. Matthiessen noted, “The half-decade of 1850-55 saw the appearance of
Representative Men
(1850) [by Ralph Waldo Emerson], The Scarlet Letter
(1850), The House of Seven Gables
(1851) [both by Nathaniel Hawthorne], Moby-Dick
(1851), Pierre
(1852) [both by Herman Melville], Walden
(1854) [by Henry David Thoreau], and Leaves of Grass
(1855) [by Whitman].” Matthiessen added: “You might search all the rest
of American literature without being able to collect a group of books
equal to those in imaginative vitality.”
In his introduction to the first edition of
Leaves of Grass,
Whitman wrote: “Of all nations, the United States with veins full of
poetical stuff most needs poets, and will doubtless have both the
greatest and use them the greatest. Their Presidents shall not be their
common reference as much as their poets shall.” This insight was
confirmed within a half-dozen years by the elevation of a poet into the
White House, Abraham Lincoln, who was also America’s greatest president.
Whitman went on to assert that the poet “bestows on every object or
quality its fit proportions neither more nor less. He is the arbiter of
the diverse and he is the key. He is the equalizer of his age and land.
... he supplies what wants supplying and checks what wants checking.”
He
continued: “If the time becomes slothful and heavy he [the poet] knows
how to arouse it . . . he can make every word he speaks draw blood.
Whatever stagnates in the flat of custom or obedience or legislation he
never stagnates. Obedience does not master him, he masters it. …”
And
further: “The attitude of great poets is to cheer up slaves and horrify
despots. The turn of their necks, the sound of their feet, the motions
of their wrists, are full of hazard to the one and hope to the other.”
Does this bring to mind Bob Dylan’s body of work? Would
he
even maintain, were he to be honest with himself, that it does?
Of
course, in all fairness, not every poet could live up to Whitman’s
vision––in fact, probably few have. But his overwhelming ambition points
to the complexity and demands of poetry, language concentrated and
charged with meaning to the greatest possible extent. Whitman’s own
life-work is an illustration. He spent nearly four decades writing and
adding to
Leaves of Grass,
expanding it from a slim volume of 12 poems in 1855 to a work of nearly
400 poems in the final edition published during his lifetime in 1892.
It
would be false and misleading to suggest that Bob Dylan has been
“poetic” in the Whitman-Dickinson meaning of the word. He has been doing
something else.
A perusal of
Bob Dylan––Lyrics: 1962-2001,
at least its first half a dozen years or so, reveals a lively
imagination at work, and sometimes deep feeling. Dylan can be witty,
satirical, insightful and, as well, genuinely outraged at American
society’s injustices. The lyrics are capable of conveying physical and
psychic longing, both for “the beloved” and for recognition by society
at large.
The
songs from 1963-66 possess many appealing characteristics, but there is
hardly one that does not suffer, if assessed solely by literary
standards, from occasionally sloppy imagery, wordiness, and strained and
obscure verbal juxtapositions (borrowed from the Beat and perhaps
surrealist schools, among others, with mostly unhappy results). The
songwriter passes between genuine spontaneity and informality, at one
pole, to mere carelessness, at the other, sometimes within a single
tune.
Of course, he
aspires
quite deliberately to be the opposite of rigorously self-disciplined; on
the contrary, part of the charm (and social unruliness) of the early
music, before a certain self-pity and paranoia set in in the mid-1960s,
is often its self-deprecating, breezy, unfettered feel. This was
material, one must say forcefully, even at its angriest and most
socially focused, that was not
written and performed with the view in mind of securing prestigious
literary prizes. And that is no insult, by any means. This is another
reason why the Nobel Prize seems so false and out of keeping.
To
his credit, in May 1963, Dylan walked out before a scheduled appearance
on the popular “Ed Sullivan Show” on CBS Television, at a time when
performing there was one of the preferred routes to stardom, after CBS
officials refused to allow him to sing “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid
Blues,” which satirized anti-communist hysteria in the US. Would the Bob
Dylan of that day have passively and obediently resigned himself to the
upcoming Stockholm ceremony?
As
noted above, the Swedish Academy’s rather grandiose gesture will only
have the paradoxical result of diminishing Dylan’s reputation in many
eyes. That would be unfortunate. I think it is an error to dismiss his
best work. It meant a great deal to a certain generation, or more than
one, and for good reason.
In
the early to middle part of the 1960s, but only during that period, as
far as I can see, Bob Dylan represented an attitude to life that
resonated strongly with many middle class young people in particular.
There
was at the time among these same young people a sudden and strong
desire for honesty and authenticity. Official America was obviously
lying through its teeth about everything. It was lying about its concern
for democracy and freedom, it was lying and had been lying for years
about “communism.” A dreadful hypocrisy prevailed, which almost no one
challenged. Authorized morality, including the rules governing conduct
between the sexes, did not begin to correspond to elementary human needs
and feelings. And there was terrible anxiety too. In October 1962, at
the time of the Cuban missile crisis, many people felt the world might
be coming to an end.
In
hindsight we can see that the growing skepticism about what the
government, the corporations and the military were telling everyone had
something to do with the unresolved and mounting problems of American
capitalist society. But the young people did not see that, they merely
felt they might suffocate if things continued as they were.
It was inevitable that someone would articulate some of these earnest but confused feelings in a popular-artistic way.
This
is not the occasion to delve into the sociological background of the
“folk music revival” in the 1960s and the extent to which it reflected
the ideological influence of Stalinist Popular Frontism. The Stalinists’
modus operandi consisted in finding “progressive” tendencies in every
national bourgeoisie and its cultural traditions, as a means of helping
to justify the alliance of workers with––or, in practice, their
subordination to––the supposedly liberal, democratic sections of that
ruling class.
It
would be wrong to view the “folk” outburst as something purely
artificial or invented, although it is often challenging to distinguish
the authentic from the inauthentic in the case of the folk music world
as a whole or the career of a given performer.
But
there is no question that to the extent that this music was seen in the
early 1960s as a center of anti-establishment sentiment and even social
opposition it drew into its ranks some immensely gifted and sensitive
artists, including Dylan, Dave Van Ronk, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, Tom
Paxton, Joni Mitchell, Odetta, Judy Collins, Fred Neil, Eric Andersen,
Gordon Lightfoot, Donovan, Tim Hardin, Carolyn Hester, Ian and Sylvia
and a good many others.
The
desire for what was perceived to be greater sincerity in popular music
meant a rejection, which also had a generational element, of the
polished and more easily palatable. There was a resulting interest in
“abrasiveness” and “rawness,” in imperfection even and in greater social
and personal urgency.
Bob
Dylan brought to bear some of these elements. There were no doubt
numerous irritating features to his first musical efforts: the
inevitable dropping of the final “g” (as in “goin’,” “freewheelin’,”
“travelin’,” etc.), the other folksy pretenses, including second-hand
and not very convincing Woody Guthrie imitations (and Guthrie’s music
already contained an element of not entirely convincing “folksiness”),
the self-consciously rough voice, and so on.
Some
of the initial “protest songs” are affecting, or contain affecting
passages, including “Masters of War,” “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,”
“With God on Our Side,” “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” and
“Chimes of Freedom.”
In
the last mentioned, the singer makes an impassioned plea on behalf of
“the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones and worse /
And for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe.”
There are also heavy-handed and mawkish “socially conscious” songs on Dylan’s first few records.
It
is possible to argue that Bob Dylan’s strongest and most enduring tunes
are his love songs, and that the latter, for better or worse, contain
some of his most pronounced feelings of opposition and protest, although
of course expressed in semi-bohemian and “individualistic” tones. In
that regard, one could point to songs like “Boots of Spanish Leather,”
“All I Want to Do,” “Spanish Harlem Incident,” “To Ramona,” “I Don’t
Believe You,” “She Belongs to Me,” “Love Minus Zero/No Limit,” “Farewell
Angelina,” “Love Is Just a Four Letter Word,” “One of Must Know (Sooner
or Later)” and “Just Like a Woman,” along with other personal pieces
such as “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.”
These songs produced some of Dylan's clearest and “cleanest” lines, including these, from “To Ramona”:
The flowers of the city
Though breathlike
Get deathlike at times
And there’s no use in trying
To deal with the dying
Though I cannot express that in lines
Though breathlike
Get deathlike at times
And there’s no use in trying
To deal with the dying
Though I cannot express that in lines
From
his music of 1963-64 in particular we come away with the image of the
artist in energetic and sensual pursuit of the woman (or women) he
adores in the face of the collective disapproval or hostility of
official society. In the earliest songs, one has the impression at times
that the various warmongers, racists and “John Birchers”
(right-wingers, after the ultra-reactionary John Birch Society) provoke
the singer’s ire, as much as anything else, because they threaten to
deprive him of life with the object of his affections. A little later,
in the more sophisticated efforts, family obligations, conventional
wisdom and “public opinion” seem the chief impediments.
It is outside the scope of this article to discuss in any depth Bob Dylan’s abrupt “jumping ship” in 1967 or so.
Suffice
it to say that given the relative thinness of his own commitment and
understanding, Dylan inevitably rejected the role that had been prepared
for him by the “left” folk music world, as the new “people’s
troubadour.” He was not wrong to do so. Arch-Stalinist Irwin Silber’s
“Open Letter,” published in
Sing Out!
magazine in November 1964, which criticized Dylan’s new “inner-directed
…, inner-probing, self–conscious” material, had unmistakably repressive,
even threatening overtones. Silber, a longtime member of the Communist
Party, went on to an inglorious career in Maoist pseudo-culture and
politics.
The
musical-lyrical status quo was untenable. It was impossible to go on
playing at “hobos” and “freight trains” and “Walkin’ Down the Line,” and
so forth. The singer himself recognized that, titling a new album
Highway 61 Revisited.
Inner city riots erupted in New York and Los Angeles. A Democratic
Party president, after having promised not to send “our boys” to
Southeast Asia, was doing precisely that, in large numbers. Something
new and tense was in the air.
Less
and less convinced (if he ever had been) by radical politics, ever more
attracted by the siren song of commercial success, intensely envious of
those who enjoyed that success, and not immune either to “good,
old-fashioned” American anti-communism, Dylan used Silber and company
and their crude efforts to direct him as a pretext to turn his back on
any concerted social involvement or interest. In the time-honored
manner, he threw the baby out with the bathwater.
It
had all been a terrible misunderstanding, he had never meant to be a
“leader” or a “protester,” he now regretted idle talk about “equality”
(“Ah, but I was so much older then / I’m younger than that now”). His
evolution was rapid and ignominious. There is precious little to show
for the past 45 years or more.
Bob
Dylan was neither the first nor the last American popular artist, or
artist of any kind, to imagine he could outwit historical and social
processes––which threatened to “slow down” or even block his rise––by
avoiding their most vexing questions and problems. What he didn’t
realize was that in turning his back on social life and softening his
attitude toward the existing order, he was at the same time cutting
himself off from the source of artistic inspiration, that he was
surrendering forever what was best in him.
Links:
Other performers singing Bob Dylan songs:
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