The awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan is not only merited. It is inspiring, thrilling, reassuring. It restores a bit of faith in the prize itself. In recent decades the Nobel committee had taken to honoring fashionable charlatans or, at best, writers of limited scope and only provincial relevance. Could somebody remind me again what Herta Müller won? Was it the women’s downhill at Lillehammer in 1994? Or was it the 2009 Nobel for her Romanian-German prose-poems? And who was Elfriede Jelinek? Was she John Belushi’s landlady in one of the Blues Brothers sequels? Or did she write the sadomasochistic novels that got the Nobel in 2004? Some people, even in these pages, seem affronted that the committee should have the crazy idea of honoring one of the world’s greatest living artists.
The literary establishment of Europe is unhappy, too. It is threatened. The French novelist and biographer Pierre Assouline thundered in the literary magazine La République des Livres that the Nobel committee had delivered an “up yours” (bras d’honneur) to real American writers like Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, and Russell Banks.
Assouline is making an argument that is understandable in a French context. France is a culture in which official prizes and honors can make or break you. Their misattribution can appear like a miscarriage of justice. Assouline is infuriated, for instance, that the prestigious Pléïade imprint should have admitted (and thus elevated to canonical status) the works of the novelist and pillar-of-the-Paris-literary-establishment Jean d’Ormesson. It is a fair enough point. He could have mentioned that the Library of America has performed a similar canonization praecox on the likes of Susan Sontag and Elmore Leonard. The jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004 awarded its Palme d’Or to Michael Moore for his anti-George W. Bush documentary Fahrenheit 9/11.
When they become important to the functioning of an artistic economy, prizes for creativity and genius can backfire. They can get hijacked by cliques but they can also be contaminated by questions of “fairness.” That is, they are bestowed not on extraordinary spirits where they arise but on people who have put in the time. Assouline, usually astute, is taking the side of the time-servers. Otherwise, why would he compare Dylan only to American novelists? He seems to assume American literature will get its “turn” for the Nobel only every couple decades, as if the prize were the equivalent of a set-aside ethnic seat on the Supreme Court.
Dylan is sui generis. He is very American. Even those Europeans who revere him have been puzzled and made nervous by him. There is a beautiful scene shot by the documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker during Dylan’s 1966 world tour. Dylan is sitting in a London hotel playing “Love Minus Zero” in front of a bunch of folk-singers. Donovan, then often hyped as the “next Dylan”, looks on. Those who have never smoked cigarettes may not notice the bizarre thing that happens at the very beginning of the scene, at 0:07-0:08. Donovan is so nervous that he dips his face into a roaring Zippo to light his cigarette, having forgotten to put a cigarette in his mouth.
At the risk of rising to Assouline’s bait, let us compare Dylan’s worthiness of the Nobel to that of recent French winners Patrick Modiano, J.M.G. Le Clézio and Claude Simon. Neither they nor any of the Americans Assouline would have preferred is an artist of Dylan’s scope and stature. Banks’s Continental Drift and McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, for instance, are a gift to future generations. But they are not so precious a gift as, say, “Mr. Tambourine Man”—as beautiful today as it was in the summer of 1964, when Dylan sang it with the wind from Narragansett Bay blowing through the microphone.
