A LITERARY GIANT for these TIMES
WHY YOU CAN’T DISMISS THE NOBEL PRIZE WINNER AS YOUR DAD’S THING
The dream of every hippie English teacher has come to pass: Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. If you are anywhere near my age, of course, “hippie English teacher” is a redundancy. My recollection is that even my younger English or language arts teachers — women not far from my own age who could barely remember the Seventies, let alone the Sixties — tended to be accompanied by a certain miasma of hemp and idealism.
I don’t think any of my teachers used Dylan specifically as a means of conveying the importance of the poet- legislator. ( When they chose songs and records to study as poetry, they chose much worse.) Throughout my childhood and adolescence, Dylan’s reputation in popular culture, as opposed to the realm of the critic, was in eclipse. It only began to shine again around the time I reached the age of majority, when Daniel Lanois got hold of him.
But Dylan remains the source of and model for all classroom experiments in making poetry “relevant.” And God bless those ladies in turtlenecks, because they were trying to get across something essential: poetry’s sacred tie to the art of song.
Dylan is still making celebrated records long after the comic tropes about groovy with- it teachers have come and gone. But he remains the commercial recording artist with the cachet of a first-class poet, heir to Rimbaud and Lamartine and Keats. I am not sure I believe it. It’s an old debate, and even the Swedish Academy isn’t going to settle it.
But I think we can agree that Dylan’s lyrics translate to the page imperfectly — more so, I would argue, than a true folk ballad does. You can somehow hear the music in “Barbara Allan” or “Lord Randal” even if you have never heard the tunes.
Dylan is the most convincing balladeer of the recording age when he is in a mood to play it straight-ish, but his many puzzles, allusions and pure- gibberish inspirations of sonority don’t take all their charm with them into print. A comparison with one of the few songwriters who can hang with Dylan, Leonard Cohen, is instructive. Cohen achieved fame as a poet, on the humble level appropriate to a poet, before he thought of barging into a recording studio. Could this have happened to Dylan, assuming someone else pointed the way as he did for Cohen? A skeptic must admit Chronicles Volume One (2004) revealed Dylan to be a strong prose writer; it might have been a factor in the Nobel decision.
If song lyrics are only questionably “literature,” well, Bob Dylan is a monumental figure in world culture, and it is not because he is such a brilliant singer. He was the person who plugged a crass disposable medium for young people into the billion- watt grid of the Western tradition: “prophet” is a term used too freely of charismatic guitarplonkers, but Dylan wears it like a glove. He swept down among artists who were still trying to impose basic professional standards on folk and rock — people whose highest ambition might have been to make a record as nice-sounding as one of Bob Thiele’s — and established himself immediately as a descended elder god speaking in tongues of flame.
Every pop songwriter this side of a certain date is a Dylan imitator, period. Careers, major careers, were built on late-night listenings of tapes and acetates that Dylan didn’t even officially release. His castoffs were other men’s meals. (Granted, Dylan has sometimes thrown out the steak and kept the salad.)
I was l ate in comprehending the stature of Dylan, and some of you still think of him as your dad’s kind of thing, or your grandfather’s. This is an error. If you have any sense that there is a corpus of rock music that will endure permanently, and that is worthy of continued contemplation and assessment in the same way that Italian opera and the German symphony and Elizabethan theatre are, you ought to understand that Dylan is probably the individual most responsible for this. This is true whether or not you fancy his records: maybe Mozart’s not your cup of tea, either.
The award of a Nobel prize to Dylan is, in a way, an escape from embarrassment for the Swedish Academy, which has the rest of eternity to live down incorrigible snubs of Borges and Nabokov and a dozen others. Part of the academy’s Nobel business is to honour poets, and it usually picks worn- out communists or unknown lesbian weirdos when it’s not setting aside extra medals for the Scandinavian home team. No doubt they are all brilliant artists well deserving of the world audience a Nobel gives them. But at some point, to deny the impact of pop lyrics on the human imagination — a specifically literary impact, detectable in a thousand ways — would begin to look like a perverse prejudice, pursued with pathological truculence. The academy was right to surrender, and it did so at the feet of the proper victor.