The Nobel Prize committee awarded Bob Dylan with the prize for literature Thursday, which will no doubt prove to be a controversial selection. The issue is not that Dylan is yet another obscure figure the committee named apparently to score political points, nor that he writes in a language little known outside a relatively small community of native speakers. The issue rather is that it’s not clear that the lyrics that Dylan, aka Minnesota’s own Robert Zimmerman, has been writing for more than half a century qualifies in any meaningful way as literature.
Arguing most famously for the affirmative is Boston University professor of English literature Christopher Ricks. One of the world’s top Milton scholars, Ricks has been making the case for Dylan as a great poet for decades. In 2004 he published Dylan’s Visions of Sin, a 400-page volume interpreting a large part of Dylan’s opus. The late Christopher Hitchens reviewed Ricks’ dossier in THE WEEKLY STANDARD and found it unconvincing, though it appears Hitchens objected more to Ricks’ faux folksy style than his claim.
There are many who’ve argued the opposite case, perhaps most famously Robbie Robertson, who played with Dylan for many years as a member of the Band. As Andrew Ferguson wrote for the STANDARD in 2009, Robertson had “always been puzzled by the overwrought encomiums” to Dylan. “‘I heard some great lines, sure,'” said Robertson. “‘But a poet?'”
Ferguson’s article does a pretty fine job of puncturing Dylan’s reputation as a poet. “As a lyricist he was poleaxed by the Symbolists early on and never quite recovered,” wrote Ferguson.
I think Ferguson’s assessment is correct. Dylan just doesn’t come off the page. Ricks likens him to a number of renaissance poets, but there is simply no comparison to, say, Andrew Marvell. When you read “To His Coy Mistress,” you hear the music of Marvell’s design, the words as they fall, syllable by syllable. It’s unmistakable, like an inevitable rhythm that stays in the body, like a child counting his steps. Reciting Dylan’s lyrics, you have to hear the music that accompanies them, because if you don’t the lyrics are usually pretty inane.
And yet as the Nobel committee was careful to note, they did not honor Dylan as poet, but rather for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” I think Ferguson would disagree with that as well. “I like to think that if [Dylan’s admirers] ever listened to Ned Rorem or Virgil Thomson, or Cole Porter or Hoagy Carmichael,” Ferguson writes in that same article, “they would be overwhelmed and delighted by hearing the real thing at last.”
I juxtapose this with the opinion of another colleague, Christopher Caldwell, who wrote on Dylan just last year.
I think—I hope—this is what the Nobel committee was getting at by awarding Dylan. They’re honoring one of America’s great artists—though not a poet—and also a great American form, one that we gave to the rest of the world. The neat trick is that folk music is itself part of a longer tradition that starts with the music of African slaves, and negro spirituals, which hands it down to folk and rhythm and blues and then rock and roll and everything else the world listens to today. That is to say, the men and women dragged to America against their will are at the source of one of the two fountains of America’s artistic genius.
The other great native American art, as the novelist Jim Lewis—one of America’s best living novelists—once told me, is American comedy. This form, now perfected as the American sitcom at its best (Seinfeld, etc.), was handed down through generations of comics, character actors, and improvisers in a line that begins with the Yiddish theatre on New York’s Lower East Side at the end of the 19th and start of the early 20th century. Dylan, one of our great showmen, always trying out roles and characters, is heir to this tradition as well.
There are plenty of great American writers the Nobel committee might have named today—the novelist Philip Roth and the poet John Ashbery come immediately to mind as exemplary American figures worthy of the honor. But today it seems that the Nobel committee went further than just naming one talent. In awarding Dylan the 2016 prize, the honor goes not only to a great artist, but to the genius of American art more generally.
