Hemingway won it in ’54. Churchill the year before that. Camus won it in ’57. Beckett in ’69, Neruda in ’71, Golding in ’83, and Morrison in ’93. Pinter in ’05, Pamuk in ’06, and Lessing in ’07. Munro won it in 2013. Modiano in 2014. Alexievich in 2015. And now Bob Dylan has won it in 2016. That’s right. Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize for Literature and it’s causing quite a stir. Here are some of my thoughts on the matter.
1. Jealousy and resentment run deep in the literary world
A few years back, I was fortunate enough to catch a lecture at Oxford University by the late Geoffrey Hill. I was enraptured by Hill’s talk but I left with only one thing in my mind: Hill’s proclamation that Bob Dylan’s music, though nice sounding, is “not poetry”. I couldn’t help but think…. If it’s not poetry, what the heck is it?!
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Now, after news that Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, many critics are making this same assertion. Many are going even further, asserting that the very notion of Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize makes a mockery of the whole institution. Many question whether Dylan’s work can even be appropriately called literature.
Negative reactions towards Dylan securing the prize make me recall a passage from Dale Carnegie’s How to Stop Worrying and Start Living:
Remember that unjust criticism is often a disguised compliment. Remember that no one ever kicks a dead dog.
That’s right. Bob Dylan is 100% deserving of his Nobel Prize. The Nobel Prize is given for a lifetime’s body of work within a field and I challenge anyone to tell me how Dylan has not fought the good fight, providing the world with gorgeous, thought-provoking, and resonant – honest to god – POETRY.
Attack Dylan and attempt to detract from his artistic merit and you better have one hell of a good reason for doing so. Many have tried in the wake of this decision. They’ve all failed. All I see from this camp of critics is jealousy and resentment towards an artist fully deserving of their prize.
2. Here comes the identity politics parade
Gender and race politics is really starting to make me sick and tired. And I know I’m not alone in this.
Put forth an argument why Dylan – or any laureate – is undeserving of the prize but do so based on artistic merit. Something that isn’t going to cut it at the grown-up debate table is this tired refrain:
But he’s a straight white male! Waahhhhh!!
It’s starting to get insulting now. If it wasn’t already. What does race, gender, and sexuality have to do with artistic merit?
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If you want to make a point about institutionalized sexism or racism or classism or whatever “-ism”, then make it. Make your argument coherently. Just don’t start with that “boycott all white male writers” crap. How can the people singing this refrain not realise that they are indulging in the prejudices that they supposedly hate?
Affirmative action is as pointless and damaging in literature as it is in medicine or law enforcement or any other field.
Does Dylan’s skin colour, gender, and sexual orientation make his lifetime of achievements any less relevant? Do these factors make him any less deserving of the Nobel Prize?
Anyone pushing forth this agenda is doing a grave disservice to equal rights. If I were to be read because of my skin colour, sexual orientation, or gender rather than the merit of my work, I would hang up my writing cloak today and never write another word.
Sure, the Nobel Prize isn’t the most diverse award if you’re looking purely from an identity politics point-of-view. But, as long as we’re into ticking boxes here, the winners over the last ten years have included a female Belarusian investigative journalist, a male French novelist, a female Canadian short story writer, a male Chinese novelist, a male Swedish poet, a male Peruvian writer, a female Romanian writer, another male French writer, a female British but Iranian-born writer, and a male Turkish writer. And now we have Bob Dylan, the first musician to win the prize and the next American to win after Toni Morrison in ’93.
But who’s ticking boxes? There’s no art in that soulless list of meaningless identification tags.
3. Bob Dylan does have original poetic expressions
The Nobel Prize committee awarded Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature for:
having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.
That’s bang on.
Listen to Blood on the Tracks.
Listen to Blonde on Blonde.
Listen to Bringing It All Back Home.
Try to listen to ‘It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ without holding your breath. It astounds me what Dylan has done ‘within the great American song tradition’ in that one epic song alone. Every single verse, every line, hits me right in the gut. Lines like:
For them that must obey authority
That they do not respect in any degree
Who despise their jobs, their destinies
Speak jealously of them that are free
Do what they do just to be
Nothing more than something
They invest in.
I’m not a music critic and I don’t play one on the internet. I don’t have tools or the enthusiasm to ruthlessly praise or rip anyone apart in “critic speak”. But anyone who has blissed out while skipping school on a summer’s day with ‘Buckets of Rain’ playing in their ears, anyone who has stuck the record player’s spike through the navel of Blood on the Tracks and listened to the whole album through and then flipped it and played it again, anyone who has spent long nights writing their own poetry with Dylan, Rimbaud, and Blake for company knows that Bob Dylan is completely worthy of any literary award a committee wishes to bestow on him.
4. It’s great to see many prominent literary figures delighting in Dylan’s award
There are haters, sure. But they’re pretty inconsequential really. It’s great to see that many big names have not succumbed to jealousy-fuelled and fruitless debates about the Nobel Prize institution and Dylan’s place within literature.
Salman Rushide, Joyce Carol Oates, Andrew Motion, Stephen King have all expressed their happiness at the Nobel Prize recognising Bob Dylan’s contribution to literature.
And Dylan’s reaction to receiving the Nobel Prize?
He probably has the best reaction one could possibly make. In true Dylan style, he’s not reacting at all.
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He isn’t thinking twice…. It’s alright.