Bob Dylan sends warm words but skips Nobel ceremonies
For Bob Dylan, the nagging question of whether his songs qualify as literature was settled for good on Saturday at the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm — and his presence was not required to make the case.
As the always-slippery folk singer forewarned, he was not there to receive the 2016 prize in literature, but he sent a warm, humble statement accepting the honour, which was read by Azita Raji, the American ambassador to Sweden, at an evening banquet in Stockholm.
Invoking William Shakespeare, whom Dylan imagined to have been too consumed with practical matters — “How should this be staged?” “Where am I going to get a human skull?” — to bother with whether what he was doing was literature, Dylan wrote: “I too am often occupied with the pursuit of my creative endeavors and dealing with all aspects of life’s mundane matters. ‘Who are the best musicians for these songs?’ ‘Am I recording in the right studio?’ ‘Is this song in the right key?’ Some things never change, even in 400 years.
“Not once have I ever had the time to ask myself, ‘Are my songs literature?’” Dylan, 75, concluded. “So, I do thank the Swedish Academy, both for taking the time to consider that very question, and, ultimately, for providing such a wonderful answer.”
Earlier in the day, the Swedish Academy defended its nontraditional selection of a musician — and a seemingly uninterested one, at that — for the literary honour. (In his prepared remarks, Dylan would acknowledge his own inscrutable silence for two weeks after the prize was announced in October: “I was out on the road when I received this surprising news, and it took me more than a few minutes to properly process it.”)
In a speech in front of about 1,500 guests, including the Swedish royal family, Horace Engdahl, a member of the Nobel Committee, called Dylan “a singer worthy of a place beside the Greek bards, beside Ovid, beside the Romantic visionaries, beside the kings and queens of the blues, beside the forgotten masters of brilliant standards.
“If people in the literary world groan,” Engdahl added, “one must remind them that the gods don’t write, they dance and they sing.”