Oh, the anger of the fusty at the announcement of Bob Dylan’s Nobel!
The outcry from the academy—not the Swedish one, mind you, but that of the world church of literaturology.
The panic of the literary bureaucracy steeped in its certainties and snared in its petty calculations, its half-baked prognostications, its crafty shifts of position: Political or non-political? America or the rest of the world? Why not a woman? Or a voice, any voice, of a visible minority? Or this one who’s been waiting 20 years? Or that one who’s given up hope?
The truth, however unpleasant it may be for the fuddy-duddies, is that awarding the Nobel Prize in literature to an author who has written just one book is no more surprising than giving it to Dario Fo or Winston Churchill, neither of whom wrote many more.
And the even greater truth is that to give it to one of our last popular poets, to honor the distant relative of Rutebeuf, Villon, and all of the minstrels and songsters of solitude and dereliction who have strewn poetry down the byways of the planet and the sidewalks of poverty, to consecrate a troubadour, a bard of the brotherhood of lonely and lost souls, to crown the author of ballads that have been, to borrow André Suarès’s phrase about Rimbaud, “a moment in the life” of so many people in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—the truth, indeed, is that recognizing the excellence of this man makes a lot more sense than did pulling out of a hat the obscure Rudolf Christoph Eucken or picking poor old Sully Prudhomme instead of Tolstoy.It’s wrong to respond priggishly to priggishness.
But to those who, since Friday’s announcement, have been shouting, “That’s not literature! It’s just not!,” one is tempted to side with Francis Ponge, who citing Lautréamont, defined the poet (he would say “proet”) as a bard or troubadour who, by expressing the “voice of things,” becomes “the most useful citizen of his tribe.” And to whom does that definition apply better than to the author of “Chimes of Freedom” or “Long and Wasted Years,” which bring to life and to music the “invisible republic” (to borrow a phrase from Greil Marcus) of American culture?
Or with Mallarmé, who urged us, in more or less the same terms, to “give a purer meaning to the words of the tribe.” Again, who better than this collage artist, this chameleon of citation and intertextuality, this laconic lyricist, this plunderer of wrecks both celestial and marine, this verbal alchemist who spent his life reinventing the words of others and his own, uncovering the embers of the era under the ashes of the day’s defeats, and transmuting into gold the lead he heard on the radio ?
Or with the familiar distinction between scribes (who make instrumental use of language) and writers (who spin it into silk). Wasn’t Dylan saying something similar when, after years of struggle for civil rights, resistance to the war in Vietnam, and support for the feminist revolution, he entitled one of his most beautiful songs, “I’m Not There,” as in, I’m not here anymore, am no longer one of you, goodbye to all that, so long?
But the true question lies elsewhere.
And the most conclusive exercise would be to compare apples with apples and the author of “Blonde on Blonde” with those who were and remain his key contemporaries.
Dylan is a Kerouac who can sing.
He’s a Burroughs who put to music the great parade of the Beat generation with its wild parties and naked lunches.
He is what Ginsberg said in describing his shock upon first hearing “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” in 1963, a song in which the accents and pacing, the abrupt changes in emphasis, the voyage to the very heart of words and the imagination all echo the best literature of the time—but with music as well!
Are we going to hold that against him, charge him with the crime of having grafted the rhythms of the blues, of soul, and of country music onto those of the Bible, William Blake, and Walt Whitman?
Why should we withhold from the trouper of the Never Ending Tour (more than two thousand performances!) the dignity accorded without hesitation to the author of On the Road?
It was Aragon, I think, who said that setting a poem to music was like moving from black-and-white into color.
Aragon, the poet sung by Léo Ferré and others, who believed that a poem unsung was half dead.
Well, now, the musicality that is essential to great poetry, the second voice that haunts every poet but which he generally delegates to those who recite or read him, the power of song that is his ultimate and secret truth and that some have gone mad, literally and tragically mad, trying to pull from cage into canto—it seems that Bob Dylan was the only one of his era to have been able to embody them fully.
Bard and rhapsodist both. A poetico-musical revolution in one man and one body of work. I like to think that it was this tour de force—or stroke of genius—that the Nobel committee was recognizing in its selection.
