Dylan's Nobel: A populist sellout?

“He gave me a mile
I took an inch
He exploded a bomb
I felt the pinch,
My measure didn’t match
his measure
The formula for his
displeasure…”
From The Muesli Musings
by Bachchoo

Bob Dylan has been awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature. The word “literature” covers many genres of achievement and is the generic name for many sins. Nevertheless it evokes the connotation of a verbal contribution to civilisation. Novelists, poets, philosophers and essayists have been awarded the prize in the past but this is the first time a writer of songs and their meditative lyrics on themes ranging from politics to the entreaty, and even the venom, of personal relationships has been awarded the honour.

Every award of the Nobel Prize for Literature has brought in its wake derisory comments about the laureates — critical denigration of their work and often opinions about their extra-literary opinions. So it is with Dylan but the critics go further than that. They accuse the Nobel Committee of a populist sellout.

I for one am not only delighted that Zimmermann has been singled out for the award, but have to confess that the Swedish Academy have jolted me into widening my definition of “literature”. Having studied “English”, for part of my degree at Cambridge (the real one, not Massachusetts), I fell under the influence of the Leavisite school of criticism. The brilliant though stringent approach of F.R. Leavis, the most influential literary critical voice of his time, was a universe of narrow contention.

A journalist many years later asked me what in one sentence would I say was the most important thing I had taken away from Cambridge. “That one poem is better than another,” I said. I was preoccupied at the time with the vast expansion of Indian pulp publishing with no critical evaluation of any of it. Without a critical judgment none of it could claim the name of “literature”.

Novels, stories, memoirs, travel-writing, poetry and other collections of words were prolifically produced but without any evaluative discussion, academic or conversational even, the output seemed one monolithic subjective indulgence. Should one ask if a Shakespeare comedy is of more value than a pantomime and is it more accomplished in any way? Is Dickens a more worthy oeuvre than Mills and Boon? When is cliché an appropriate form of expression? Is Bob Dylan as good as T.S. Eliot?
Bob Dylan sings in puzzling metaphors:
“… circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate
Driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today
Until tomorrow”

The “circus sands” mean nothing apart from providing a compelling alliteration — and so with the rest of the verse. When I heard it, I danced to it, I drowned in it; it seemed to resonate with meaning in my youthful life. At the time it was a remove from what I had to read, think and critically write about for the university literature course. I’d be writing about Milton and listening to Dylan on the record player — each penetrating and appealing to a different part of my mind.

Dylan’s career began with the appeal of protest — the voice of one generation challenging another. His first hits, The Times They Are a’ Changin and Blowin in the Wind, were fairly clear in their messages of rebellion and the stance against the war in Vietnam. Then came anti-love songs, vicious messages to partners whom he accused of betrayals, together with love songs such as I Want You and Lay Lady Lay.

The surrealistic phase followed. Who was Dylan addressing as the Tambourine Man and why did he promise to follow him “in the jingle-jangle morning”? The song has been interpreted as a tribute to a drugged haze, a hymn to LSD. Dreams and surrealist fantasies are by definition undecipherable (sorry, Sigmund!) so a prosaic interpretation of these lyrics, and others on albums to follow, are futile. As Don McLean, the songwriter of the universal hit American Pie, when asked what it meant said: “It means I’ll never have to work again!”

The interpretation of these songs, unlike the works we study in school and university, are necessarily subjective. Each listener can take away an equally valid interpretation or construction from them — as they shouldn’t from any verse of Homer, Keats or Auden.

What is intriguing is how the Nobel Committee came to expand the definition of literature to embrace the work of Dylan, a “subjectivist”. They obviously came to the conclusion that within the milieu of literary music, he had pioneered a new genre which combined words and music to appeal to the mind and emotions not as, say, the sentences and paragraphs of Tolstoy or William Faulkner would, but could yet be called “literature” because they evoked meaning and emotion in a unique, if fluidly interpreted, way.

Divorced from the music, Dylan’s lyrics are not the sort of verse Tennyson wrote, but that being said, can any reader honestly say that a vast quantity of the verse of T.S. Eliot or the “prose” of James Joyce has that “necessary” literary transparency?

Alfred Nobel did specify that the prize be given to works which were “idealistic”. The word had a universe of possible interpretations and if the academy was still using this criterion, Dylan’s early anti-war songs tick the box. His detractors, some of whom have denounced the jumbled universe of his intriguing images, thrown together principally for the assonance created by rhyme and alliteration, seem to utterly reject the Nobel Committee’s determination to extend the definition of literature.

For me this purist contention is, on reflection, Luddite. If the world, encountering America, can define jazz and the compositions of the likes of Miles Davis as American classical music, or the work of Rothko and Jackson Pollock as inevitable discoveries of modern visual art, then an acceptance of Dylan as literature, complex, accomplished and pushing boundaries, shouldn’t be left behind.