There are many admiring things to say about Bob Dylan. While he may not be the hardest-working man in show business—the title once held by the martyred James Brown—he’s still pretty close, recording and touring continuously at the age of 75. He’s probably written more publishable songs, music and lyrics both, than anyone in the era of mass media. His book Chronicles: Volume One is full of vivid set pieces and atmospheric detail, beautifully rendered. On stage he dresses humorously—bolo ties, cowboy hats, sequined shirts, suit jackets with velvet collars—as if he’s discouraging anyone from taking him too seriously. Best of all, you and I know almost nothing about him.
About him as a person, I mean. His family life is a mystery. If his kids hate him, they’ve managed to keep quiet about it, and nobody seems to even know how many times he’s been married. He rarely gives interviews, and when he does it’s not because he has an urgent message he wants to convey to the world but because he’s selling a new Dylan product. His last TV interview, with 60 Minutes in 2004, was intended to publicize Chronicles. His most recent interview, in early 2015, appeared, appropriately enough, in AARP magazine, timed to the release date of his most recent album. In neither interview—or in any interview, from what I can tell—did he reveal anything of substance about his nonpublic life. He was just moving units. And whatever his political opinions, they are hidden from view; his religious faith, beyond an ardent and self-evident belief in God, is a mystery too.
He has thus proved two propositions that seemed increasingly unlikely in the age of media-saturation: You can shun publicity and still be hugely famous, and you can be hugely famous and not be obnoxious about it. This is an achievement of a very high order.
But among the admiring things you can say about Bob Dylan, you probably shouldn’t say this: “[I]t’s perfectly fine to read his works as poetry. . . . If you look back, far back, you discover Homer and Sappho, and they wrote poetic texts that were meant to be listened to. They were meant to be performed. It’s the same way with Bob Dylan. But we still read Homer and Sappho. He can be read and should be read. He is a great poet in the grand English tradition.”
You probably shouldn’t say this, because it’s not really true. But Sara Danius said it. She is the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy. As the world knows, the academy awarded Dylan the Nobel Prize for Literature on October 13.
Of course, Danius is not alone in her high, even stratospheric, assessment of Dylan’s songs, and after she made the big announcement, millions of people around the world tucked and rolled in hopes of escaping the avalanche of sentimental and pretentious writing that was sure to follow. But escape was futile.
Within hours the pop music critic of the New York Times had gone mad with antitheses: “[T]here’s no question that Mr. Dylan has created a great American songbook of his own: an e pluribus unum of high-flown and down-home, narrative and imagistic, erudite and earthy, romantic and cutting, devout and iconoclastic, finger-pointing and oracular, personal and universal, compassionate and pitiless.” Anyone who can pack that much pluribus into a mere unum, went the argument, had to be worthy of the Nobel.
The Times‘s critic was quickly followed by Cass Sunstein, a law professor at Harvard, writing at Bloomberg.com. (A Harvard professor celebrating Dylan on a website devoted to stock market news—that’s how thoroughly he has saturated American culture.) “Bob Dylan,” Sunstein wrote, “has surpassed Walt Whitman as the defining American artist, celebrating the capacity for self-invention as the highest form of freedom.”
Only Whitman? Why the demotion? Sunstein must have felt the Whitman comparison was insufficient. This is a job for Shakespeare!
“If ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ is Dylan’s ‘Hamlet,’ ” Sunstein wrote, “ ’Desolation Row’ is his ‘King Lear.’ It’s a fever dream, or a love letter, about an unruly procession of humanity.”
There was a lot of talk about Dylan’s self-invention in all the encomiums, but it’s pretty clear who’s doing the inventing around here—an alchemical transformation of a hardworking and witty pop star into a towering poet of world-historical achievement. Dylan hasn’t shown many signs that he’s ever fallen for his own press. He has a healthy amour-propre (a fitting term for someone who was awarded the Légion d’honneur), but he’s not one to fling the word “genius” at himself; you won’t hear any John Lennon-like declarations from him (“If there’s such a thing as a genius, I’m one”).
Like most successful entertainers, Dylan had excellent timing. He came of age just as intelligibility vanished as a criterion for successful poetry. This gave him the freedom to write any old thing that came into his head, and gave his fans license to pretend they knew what he was singing about. Sunstein applies his exegetical powers to a long Dylan song from 1965 called “Desolation Row”—that’s his “King Lear,” remember—and it’s as good a place to see Dylan’s method as any. A sample lyric:
There are 10 more stanzas of this, 11 minutes’ worth of proper names and random actions tossed together by free association. It’s funny and some of the rhymes are clever, but—I think we should all be grown-up about this—it doesn’t make any sense. You can see this glaringly on the page, when you read it (as Danius instructed us to do). It’s gibberish.
And it’s a wonderful record! Neither the lyrics nor the tune are interesting enough to stand on their own. But the tune distracts us from the weakness of the lyrics, and the lyrics give the tune a purpose and direction. Put together with a lovely arrangement, the song becomes an entity that’s larger than the combination of its elements. It’s a genuine achievement. But it’s not Whitman, not Shakespeare. It’s not literature.
Probably the most revealing fact about Dylan’s vastly inflated reputation is also a matter of timing. His most fervent and articulate admirers, accomplished baby boomer eggheads like Sunstein and the historian Sean Wilentz and the Milton scholar Christopher Ricks, came to Dylan’s stuff very young. Their attachment to him is intensely personal, bound up as it is with their youth. I assume the same is true of the Nobel committee: baby boomers who can’t quite escape the lure of their formative years, back when the world was young, and so were they, and everyone had hair and 30-inch waistlines.
So they justify this undying attachment to their favorite pop singer by overselling it, declaring him a genius, “the greatest American songwriter,” an artist whose career demands at least a Nobel. Boomers are always gilding the lily. I guess it’s impossible for us to take Bob Dylan for what he is, an impressive man worthy of admiration, affection, and respect, and leave it at that.
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
