The news that Bob Dylan cribbed parts of his Nobel speech from SparkNotes, of all places, serves one excellent purpose: It has quieted down the high-brow Dylan fans who were competing to see who could overpraise the lecture most. (Don’t worry, they’ll be back.) The first cheerleader was the Nobel committee itself. Dylan’s speech arrived in Stockholm last week in both a written and recorded version, but not in a human version, because he declined to appear in person. “The speech is extraordinary and, as one might expect, eloquent,” said the Nobel spokesman. Then the critics got hold of it.
“Through summary, he’s showing how literature and song defy summary,” a writer for the Atlantic declared mysteriously, under the headline “Bob Dylan’s Nobel lecture Says the Unsayable.” The New Yorker sang of the “Rambling Glory of Bob Dylan’s Nobel Speech.” Etc.
A few brave souls disagreed. More than one noted that long stretches of the 4,000– word lecture, the parts where Dylan recalled reading Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front, and the Odyssey as a school boy, have the feel of high school book reports. That set the writer Andrea Pitzer to thinking. In a dazzling feat of forensics, published in Slate, she discovered that more than a dozen phrases and sentences in Dylan’s discussion of Moby Dick were paraphrases from SparkNotes. Like Cliff’s Notes of old, SparkNotes pretend to be study guides, disguised with discussion questions and contextual information. In truth, of course, they are book summaries for anyone who doesn’t want to read an assigned book, including high schoolers and, as of last week, Nobel laureates.
Dylan’s plagiarism has been documented before. The writer Scott Warmuth, for instance, published an exhaustive study of Dylan’s best-selling memoir, Chronicles: Volume 1, called “Bob Charlatan.” In , Warmuth wrote, “Dozens upon dozens of quotations and anecdotes have been incorporated from other sources.” “Incorporate” is a gentle word. Warmuth showed that at some points Chronicles was little more than a pastiche of other people’s work, reproduced without credit. Descriptions of New Orleans were taken from a local travel guide. Parts of a conversation Dylan recalls having with the poet Archibald MacLeish were lifted from MacLeish’s introduction to a collection of poems by Carl Sandburg. A list of urban incidents that Dylan includes is lifted from a novel by John Dos Passos. His colorful description of Johnny Cash is taken from a short story by Jack London. SparkNotes is in good company, but it’s got competition. Soon after the Nobel lecture was released, Warmuth discovered that one particularly evocative phrase from Dylan’s discussion of All Quiet appears in the Cliff Notes for the book but not in the book itself.
This latest rash of “borrowings” gives us another chance to measure the lengths to which scholars and journalists will go to defend their one-time teen idol. For her article, Pitzer called several academics for comment, and only one took offense at what Dylan’s done. “If Dylan was in my class and he submitted an essay with these plagiarized bits, I’d fail him,” Juan Martinez, a professor at Northwestern University, told Pitzer.
Martinez might want to seek a safe space, because he’s evidently in a tiny minority. “I was very moved by his speech and I’m not any less moved knowing this,” a professor from Syracuse University told Travis Andrews of the Washington Post. Andrews also quotes a University of Minnesota music professor, who told the Minneapolis Star Tribune: “His lecture is wild and strange. It’s meant to be a post-modern work of art. Any kind of a collage technique is fair game.”
It’s an argument as old as Dylan’s plagiarism: the song-writer is a magpie, gathering influences and material from sources far and wide and making them his own through the magic of his genius. There’s merit to the argument, if it’s taken as a commonplace: All creative activity owes something to the creative activity of others. No less a personage than the former president of the Poetry Foundation once told Warmuth that Dylan’s “borrowings” are “among the most daring and original signatures of his art.” But you got to hit a limit somewhere. And I think you hit it when the act of claiming someone else’s work as your own is called “original.”
The classic formulation of the pro-Dylan argument was produced more than 15 years ago, during another Dylan plagiarism scandal, by a music critic for the New York Times: “The hoopla over [Dylan’s plagiarism] is a symptom of a growing misunderstanding about culture’s ownership and evolution, a misunderstanding that has accelerated as humanity’s oral tradition migrates to the Internet. Ideas aren’t meant to be carved in stone and left inviolate; they’re meant to stimulate the next idea and the next.”
Though wrong about everything else, this Times writer was right on the money when he mentioned the subject of “ownership.” It is the nub of the matter. When Dylan takes other people’s stuff for his own work, he doesn’t just pass it along so that others in the “folk tradition” can then take it and claim it for their own, as part of the long glorious evolution of culture. No, he copyrights it. He makes people who want to use it pay for it. And he’s got a nice big house in Malibu to prove it.
The website of SparkNotes has a little section on plagiarism. “Plagiarism is copying the words or the ideas of another person or institution without acknowledging that you got those words or ideas from that source.” Right below that, it says: [copyright sign] 2017 SparkNotes LLC. All rights reserved.”
