What do Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Bob Dylan have in common?
Together with their power to stir emotions with words, each writer received a Nobel Prize for Literature. My selection of three White men to put on the stage with Dylan is not intended to suggest that I believe this 2016 prize and its bestowing institution are elements in some sort of Western, macho, racist, language-oppressive, canonical-coddling, spiffy, symbol-crash conspiracy, floating in history on a stagnant Aristotelian vanilla hegemony, a band of elite gypsies hiding a broken flag behind a flashing ring bogged down in a magnetic field, struggling to disconnect some cables from a lost audience of persistent, serious readers—and reconnect with the new thinking in a trumpian world where a folk singer from the Sixties rates right up there with the top of the class.
Not.
To quote my friend, Joe, “indeed,” Svetlana Alexievich from Ukraine won a Nobel the year before Dylan, “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.” The prize is morally legit, not a self-serving synecdoche like all hands on deck to save the good ship literature, a tacit metonymy like the tuning fork is mightier than the printing press. That Robert Zimmerman (aka Bob Dylan) from Minnesota was named a Nobel laureate in 2016 “…for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition” is further evidence that our trust in the Nobel protocol is warranted. Dylan’s accomplishment is a badge of authenticity, at least to me. It strengthens the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The writer of “Blowing in the Wind” himself did not feel particularly suited for his Nobel prize. He didn’t attend the ceremony because of a calendar conflict—I know, I remember Mike Pence and Ukraine—but finally accepted the award three months later, producing a video speech for the Swedish academy well worth a listen on YouTube. His opening line says it all: “When I received the Nobel Prize for Literature, I got to wondering exactly how my songs relate to literature. I wanted to reflect on it and see where the connection was. I’m going to try to articulate that to you.”
I am not a Dylan scholar, by any means. My eclecticism runneth over in music as in literature, especially unburdened in music by academic culture and turf (I’m barely literate as a musician, though I know my sharps from my naturals), but unlike the fanciful job of ‘poet,’ ‘Dylan scholar’ is, beautifully, a real job with a job description, tenure track even, etc. Sean Latham, for example, an English Professor at the University of Tulsa, heads the TU Institute for Bob Dylan Studies.
Of course, journalists of higher academia trump meanly on Dylan Studies and the Institute (there’s that word again) along the lines of the New York Times editorial. It is a hybrid academic niche, Dylan Studies, an extra-curricular space with inroads into the credit curriculum, though the course credit decision may turn on the current makeup of the curriculum committee in Academic Affairs, a niche famously, hilariously satirized in DeLillo’s novel White Noise, an amazing book, vis a vis the ‘Institute for the Study of Hitler.’ Professor Jack Gladney at a small, rural liberal arts college somewhere in the heart of America hosts an institute, a conference, as he frets and struts his hour upon the stage. The Ivory Tower has some loose screws.
“All Along the Ivory Tower” headlines an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (June 11, 2019) which hooks its reader with “…At the World of Bob Dylan gathering in Tulsa, amateur geeks and scholarly nerds come together to discuss the man and his music….” Amateur geeks? Scholarly nerds? I see the ugly truth in Dylan’s Thin Man who carries his eyes in his pocket: There’s something happening here but you don’t know what it is—do you, Mr. Jones… (think: Matrix… it’s safe).
Personally, having already confessed to an eclectic habit of mind when it comes to literature and music, I have to weigh what I know about Dylan’s lyrics and what I feel about hearing and singing his songs against the Nobel standard for literature. He would have had to produce recent publications (in the past year), to be alive before the announcement, and to have benefited mankind as a writer. Institute statutes define literature as “not only belles-lettres, but also other writings that…possess literary value.” How’s that for help? We’re back to the start: Do Dylan’s writings possess sufficient literary value to warrant a Nobel Prize for Literature? Or were other reasons operating in the shadows?
I take poetry where I find it—happy accidents in the take folders of life or focused, systematic analysis of imagery, metaphors, rhythms, assonance, pace, theme. Bob Dylan reeled me in with Mr. Tambourine Man. It was no she loves you yeah, yeah, yeah; no yummy yummy yummy I’ve got love in my tummy. My bootheels have been wandering behind the Tambourine Man through the twisted ruins of time since I was knee high to a grasshopper.
Dylan is a musical magician, a literary alchemist, a conjuror who writes and sings his poetry and moves people around the world decade after decade. He published recently (the Nobel recency requirement); he was alive before the announcement (the undead requirement); and after reflecting on why in the world he, a song writer who gets irritated when asked ‘hey, what does this or that song mean?,’ would be chosen, he accepted it.
He understood the gifts he had given people like me, and it had to cross his mind that it would be very uncool to reject this thank you. He graciously accepted the well-deserved, surprising, culturally potent award, an affirmation that poetry is carried on the wings of the human voice, words like birds reaching carefully manicured nests of filaments of meaning wrapped in an infinity of shapes in each human consciousness. The guitar can be mightier than the pen. The silence of a page written centuries ago can be brought to life in vivid sounds in consciousness through the inner tongue. But poems can reach us carried on guitar strums. Poetry does not live in textbooks, though I thank the powers that be for them. Poetry lives inside consciousness, Sylvia Plath’s “echoes traveling off from the centre like horses,” Dylan’s “…things that last longer than you think they will….”
That and three or four dollars will get you a cup of great coffee at the Fig Tree.
You know where you’ll find the answer…
I have another means by which we might use to measure the scale of his works impact upon the individual, the culture, and the global community. I can think of few writers who could have extended their mind through all these levels through such an extended period of tme.
His creation process seems more like a poets in that the words spring from a level boiling up to consciousness. As he has said, he doesn’t know the person who wrote those works.
He reflects the Id of america through all its diverse strains, that pull each other apart into a unique cultural harmony. Little Bobby Zimmerman is america, thus the love/hate relationships poeople have with him..
He is the great voice of the american people, as disparate and divided as that might be.
I agree with you Paul, as Clements said, “I hate writing, but love having written.” I think part of this is that a writer doesn’t really know the destination when they start a project. A writer does create a story line perhaps, but once the characters develop they take the pen in hand. I have always been fascinated with lyrics that invoke irony (Prine’s Sam Stone), or humor (LaFarge”s Getting By on Central Time) as a hook. Dylan’s lyrics are full of irony, but I wondered if you have examples of Dylan using humor as a hook?
From court jester to ‘song and dance man’ his humor is often lying one step below the words. He is most clear in his talking blues.
When he first blew into NYC from the plains of Minnesota, he would regale people with his ‘travelin tales’, from out west. When he would disappear he would tell people he was headed out west again:’Goodby New York hello East Orange.’ Mostly he traveled across the Hudson River to East Orange, New Jersey to visit Woody at the hospital..
Funny in that most people had trouble sorting Bob’s illusions from reality but at the same time he was imbued with deep feeling for a man who had deeply inspired him.
I remember hearing a song Dylan called Po’ Boy maybe 10 years ago. I think he wasn’t quite sure whether he was going for humor or just flat craziness. His consciousness was boiling to borrow a phrase from Paul.
The last verse is a Dylanesque knock knock joke: “Knocking’ on the door, I say, “Who is it and where are you from?”
Man says, “Freddy!” I say, “Freddy who?” He says, “Freddy or not here I come.”
Poor boy ‘neath the stars that shine
Washin’ them dishes, feedin’ them swine.”
It doesn’t help much to read explications of the lyrics. Nobody knows what the song means (Othello and Desdemona show up) but nobody doubts that it does mean something. I think it’s funny. It’s not poetic gibberish.
Interesting query Randy. I haven’t analyzed the hard for schemes and tropes.
Nothing I like better than a good trope! I wrote a song (Never Stand Between Crazy and the Falls) about all the lunacy associated with the pandemic, I went for crazy parity in the verses and tried to bring it back to sanity in the chorus.
Oddly some people read it as an anthem for anti-maskers. One verse used a metaphor for social cooperation that was completely over the top (and pretty funny if I say so myself), “I never use a signal, when I’m behind the wheel, Nobody’s business where I’m going, I go anywhere I feel.” So really crazy parody of redneckness, and funny to boot, and some people (mostly lightweight liberal friends) were worried it might send the wrong message, Uggggggh!
I was especially pleased when Neil deGrasse Tyson used my hook “I only pee in my end of the pool” in one of his articles. I doubt if he got it from my tune but at least I know it was a metaphor that Neil gets.