This year’s Nobel Prize in Literature should be announced in early October, and over on the high-toned British betting site Ladbrokes, Haruki Murakami of Japan, riding the waves of acclaim for his fantastical novel 1Q84, is the favorite. Other well-known names—Milan Kundera, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates—are bandied about, but Murakami is unique: Among perennial Nobel front-runners, it would be difficult to find a writer more influenced by the popular music and culture born of the social and cultural upheavals of the 1960s.
That fact prompts a pressing question: Why isn’t Bob Dylan, the most vital of the artistic catalysts of those upheavals, a front-runner for the prize? A fierce and uncompromising poet whose writing, 50 years on, still crackles with relevance, his work remains utterly lacking in conventionality, moral sleight of hand, pop pabulum or sops to his audience. His lyricism is exquisite; his concerns and subjects are demonstrably timeless; and few poets of any era have seen their work bear more influence.
It’s time to take the idea seriously. The Nobel Prize in Literature is not awarded posthumously, and Dylan, now in his 70s, has battled heart disease. Alfred Nobel’s will decreed that the prize should go to a writer with “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.” Why hasn’t Bob Dylan received one?
Given his medium (songwriting) and profession (rock star), Dylan may have some strikes against him.
He is not in the mold of the sober creator of “great literature.” But in 1997, the literature prize went to Dario Fo, the incorrigible and profane Italian playwright, at whose selection the Roman Catholic Church in particular was amusingly aghast. The vast majority of literature prize recipients are world titans (Mario Vargas Llosa, Günter Grass) or less-well-known but established candidates (Orhan Pamuk of Turkey, the late Seamus Heaney of Ireland), with a relatively obscure recipient every so often (like Elfriede Jelinek of Austria nine years ago), just to keep us all on our toes.
Those who would use the word “pop” as a cudgel or tool of exclusion of Dylan’s work do so at their peril. Dickens and Twain, Hugo and Shakespeare and Euripides all soaked up the acclaim of their day. Alfred Hitchcock, whose work at its height met critical condescension, would have some useful thoughts on the subject as well.
Still, doggerel verses are not literature. In the 1950s in America, rock was a mongrel music, created out of the cultures of the downtrodden—people who built their lives around the blues, folk, gospel or country. Electric guitars got involved, and then some leers and hip thrusts. A new post-war generation of youth took notice, and a cultural revolution was born.
Dylan added literature. He was a singer of folky loquacity and a serious student of the music’s antediluvian influences, what critic Greil Marcus calls “the old, weird America.” To this he wedded the yawp of the Beats and the austere intellectualism of the Symbolists. Drugs didn’t hurt, and passing but pungent imagery shows that Dylan had absorbed the Bible as well.
That disruptive mélange gave us the imagery and power of songs like “Chimes of Freedom” and “Desolation Row,”“A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” and “Visions of Johanna,” among scores of others. He has displayed a mastery of everything from the political jeremiad (“It’s Alright, Ma [I’m Only Bleeding])” to the romantic epic (“Tangled Up in Blue”), and lines like “Money doesn’t talk, it swears” show his way with the lancing aperçu. Dylan is neither a saint nor a moralist. Epic anger and personal petulance erupt out of his lyrics. But so do tender mercies, extravagant and deep love, self-castigation and what turns out to have been no little wisdom.
He was surely the first pop artist to tell his audience things it didn’t want to hear. In 1963, from the dais at a civil rights dinner, he looked with some contempt at the well-dressed crowd and said, “My friends don’t wear suits.” The drama surrounding his lurch into electric music is perhaps overstated; “Like a Rolling Stone” was a huge hit. What’s really radical about the song is its derisive look at his privileged listeners. Dylan reveled in the comeuppance he saw on the horizon:
You said you’d never compromise … and now … you stare into the vacuum of his eyes/And ask him do you want to make a deal?
Dylan spent the rest of his career rejecting his audience’s expectations. He dropped out of sight at the height of his fame; the cover story was a motorcycle accident, but as his autobiography Chronicles: Volume One makes clear, he really just wanted to raise his kids in peace, away from the hippies who harried his family. After going electric, he went country. In the late 1970s as the New Wave era crested, the singer, raised a Jew, declared himself a Christian, and not the warm and fuzzy sort, either. What sort of pop artist works so diligently to systematically undermine his own popularity?
By his own account, Dylan spent the 1980s in a bit of a fog, but revivified himself in the last years of that decade and went back on the road. Now 25 years into his “Never Ending Tour,” Dylan continues to perform in relatively modest venues with an unprepossessing backing combo, growling out chestnuts from his vast catalog and new songs as well.
If the academy doesn’t recognize Bob Dylan, a bard who embodied the most significant cultural upheaval of the second half of the last century, it will squander its best chance to honor a pop poet. What other songwriter would remotely qualify? Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen? Perhaps. Randy Newman? Chuck D? (In truth, the only other pop artist with work as timeless as Dylan’s is Chuck Berry, but that’s an argument for another day.) With his superstar peers either silent or content to collect the big bucks playing ingratiating stadium shows, this artist, iconoclastic and still vital, demands that we take the product of his muse on his own terms, and refuses to go so gently.
Perspective, Pages 82 on 10/06/2013