So, Dylan’s Nobel. Some weeks after the surprising news – and wasn’t it great to have a non-election-related surprise? – I am still thinking it over. Hot takes are not easy for a historian. Bear with me here.
On the one hand. Bob Dylan wrote some great songs with gorgeous lyrics. Mind you, he’s written some terrible clunkers, too. The ratio of crap to brilliance has shifted over the course of his long career; to my ear, he hasn’t written a great song since about 1975 or so; but so what? The great songs are fantastic.
On the other hand. The great songs are great songs. The Nobel was meant to be a prize for literature. And without the music, the words from Dylan’s greatest songs are … not great poetry. Some of them tell stories with admirable economy (“she bent down to tie the laces of my shoe/tangled up in blue”) but most of them, including some of the greatest, mire themselves in adjective after adjective. This is, of course, a matter of taste: I prefer plain-language poetry to poetry that sounds too much like poetry to me. Frank O’Hara over Tennyson, let’s say. Emily Dickinson over Longfellow. Carolyn Forché over Edna St. Vincent Millay. Ann Carson over … well, anyone at all.* See what I mean?
So if the Nobel selection committee had assigned me the task of picking a living songwriter born before 1950 for them to give a literature prize to, I might have gone for Caetano Veloso or maybe Silvio Rodriguez. But really I would have just argued for giving the prize to a poet, or a novelist, or maybe a short-story writer**, because they need the readers. And one who hadn’t been translated into English, for preference, because they need the readers the most. And if they wanted to reward politically relevant, historically significant song lyrics written by Americans of any age, then why not pick a foundational writer of rap music, the American genre that conquered the world, like Grandmaster Flash?***
But. The preceding paragraph was just my intervention in the dumbest of all word games, canon formation. In theory I am opposed to the whole business.**** To me, the existence of a canon of great literature, the very idea of great literature (and by implication the idea that most literature is not great) echoes and justifies the ways that power is distributed in the world. In my utopia there would be no lists of Great Books and no Nobel Prize for literature at all. Screw this highbrow/lowbrow shit.
And yet. The Nobel Prize is the least offensive literary prize, to me, because it rewards great writing from all over the world rather that only those places that use the big imperial languages – English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Chinese. (Mostly English.) And sometimes it rewards not-so-great writing in order to make a social or political point. Most years, the prize simultaneously recognizes sustained esthetic achievement and comments on current events. Here’s a guess about what the Nobel committee meant in awarding the prize to Dylan: they are gesturing toward the America they love in a year in which the United States, viewed from abroad, might seem terrifying, repulsive, hideous. Choosing Bob Dylan, in other words, is a way to remind us all – inside the United States and out – that Donald Trump’s leering visage is not America’s only face. Which is a great message to send.
Even so. Dylan may not be the best screen on which to project a message about America as a tolerant, peaceful, politically progressive place.
The selection committee, I imagine, were thinking of him as an emblem of the anti-authoritarian Sixties. (And that is the Dylan they got, too. It took him more than a week to get around to acknowledging that he had won and even then he only mentioned it in a website blurb hawking a volume of his collected lyrics, rather than directly thanking the Swedes.) And sure, Dylan does signify the hippie Sixties to a lot of people, alongside tie-dye clothes and patchouli oil and peace signs. At least some of the reaction against Dylan getting the Nobel came from a powerful aversion to the baby boom generation’s style: it was inevitable that reflexive hippie-bashers would be rolling their eyes at this news.
But it’s not like they gave the Nobel Prize for Literature to Country Joe and the Fish. This was not a prize for the Most Sixties Guy Still Standing. Dylan was not much of a sixties guy at all, in some ways. He wasn’t Elvis, don’t get me wrong: Bob Dylan didn’t allow himself to be drafted and never shook Nixon’s hand where a photographer could catch him doing it. But he never joined the antiwar movement either. Like Joni Mitchell, he skipped Woodstock. Unlike Joni Mitchell, he didn’t write a wistful song about missing that emblematic event. His best songs, even before he went electric, were surreal or romantic more often than they were political. He wrote fewer directly political songs after he went electric, and only one of them – Hurricane, from 1975 – was any good at all.
Bob Dylan spent the early sixties among proto-hippies, for sure. He escaped from Hibbing, Minnesota, to join the folk music scene in New York. It’s worth asking why an aspiring folk musician would go straight to Manhattan. New York music in those days was stunningly diverse: Broadway and Tin Pan Alley, the best opera and orchestral classical music in the Americas, doo wop, big band jazz uptown, Latin-inflected jazz farther uptown, and cool “modern” jazz downtown. Miles Davis was there, moving from modal jazz to post-bop in front of big, knowing audiences who could tell one from the other. John Cage was making new work from silences and found sounds. Charlotte Moorman was playing her cello topless, for art’s sake. Out in Queens, the Shangri-Las were recording their off-kilter tales of desire and bad behavior. Acoustic folk music, which made a fetish of authenticity and tradition, did not fit comfortably in this sophisticated and innovative musical space.
When young Robert Zimmerman entered the scene, folk music meant old songs with no known authors, lovingly preserved by song collectors like Alan Lomax and recreated with obsessive care by professional or amateur performers (The Weavers, for example.) Songs by composers like Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie could be heard too, but only because folk fans believed that the composers’ biographies (African-American escapee from a Louisiana prison and rural white former hobo, respectively) made them into true representatives of “the folk.” Historians can trace a line backward from this folk music scene of the early 1960s to early 1930s Communist and socialist groups, whose cultural politics (often glossed as the Popular Front) encouraged leftwing intellectuals to abandon their off-putting interests in abstract painting and modernist poetry in favor of the potentially revolutionary arts of the masses, including blues and other forms of “folk” music. When rock and roll came along in the middle of McCarthy years, these same leftwing thinkers viewed it with grave concern, worried that rock had stripped the protest and resistance out of black music and white rural music in favor of celebrating materialism and hedonism. The folk music they promoted allied itself with the Civil Rights movement and the anti-nuclear-weapons movement and the solidarity-with-Revolutionary-Cuba movement as a deliberate counterbalance to the good times which Elvis promised.
That’s why people got so upset when Bob Dylan suddenly picked up an electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and started singing songs he had written himself about his fashionista ex-girlfriend and other idiosyncratic experiences and ideas. He wasn’t just expressing himself or exercising his artistic freedom – though surely he was doing that – he was at the same time rejecting his position as the most important young proponent of Old Left culture. He was, in fact, rejecting politics altogether.
And so. Assuming I am right about the intentions of the Nobel Prize selection committee, they were intending to reward a career of devotion to a personal vision that happened to express some of the best impulses of 1960s America. But at the same time as they did that, they also gave a big prize to a guy who, for better or worse, used the political structures he found in order to advance his own career, and helped to destroy those structures in the process. They gave the prize to a white man whose work is deeply individual yet owes enormous, unacknowledged debts to the art of African American blues musicians and women singers. They gave the prize to an artist whose best work avoided politics – however broadly construed – altogether. How much of that was deliberate? There is no way to know.
So yeah, I guess I’m glad he’s won a Nobel prize. But it’s complicated.
=====================================
* Please ask me for poetry recommendations. Please.
** I am still bummed that Donald Barthelme and Grace Paley died before they could get Nobelled. Alice Munro is perfectly OK but I like short stories to have more of their seams showing, and also to take place outside rural Ontario once in a while. And since Munro got it I bet no other English-language short-story writer will get a Nobel again in this century.
*** Or maybe Jay-Z, a great rapper who also wrote a terrific book, except that dream hampton actually wrote the book, so.
****In practice I would be a whole lot less opposed if I sat on the Nobel Prize for Literature selection committee.
I do make lists. I make lists of things to do. I make grocery lists. I make lists of stuff I’d like to buy some day. I make lists of my projects. I just started using Goodreads to make a list of what I’ve read this year (a lot of genre fiction (meh to very good). (OT: I completely recommend Marlon James “The Brief History of Seven Killings”.)
Blue Thumb Music Collective 