Long before the Swedish Academy provoked the world’s literati by naming Bob Dylan as a Nobel laureate for literature, his “poetic expressions within the great American song tradition” had been noticed by several devotees. More than a decade ago the English don Christopher Ricks, better known for close readings of Milton, Marvell, Keats and Tennyson penned a scholarly book on “Dylan’s visions of Sin.” A year ago, The New Yorker editor David Remnick, described him as “the greatest and most abundant songwriter who has ever lived.” What seems to rile Dylan’s critics is the fact that his work didn’t appear between cloth boards, sanctified by the colophon of a major publishing house; but that is precisely why many fans prize his oeuvre, for without the usual cultural baggage that attends works of literature, it has become part of the lives of tens of millions who would otherwise shrink from the idea of indulging something as ideologically suspect as “poetry.”
Noting that one of Dylan’s earliest songs was written “to” Woody Guthrie (rather than “for”), Christopher Ricks writes that even at the beginning of his career “Dylan was sufficiently secure of his genius. … able to rise above envy.” Even before he had recorded his first album he consciously placed himself in the pantheon of American folk music, an art that proudly displayed its social conscience on its sleeve. But rather than merely competing against men like Guthrie and Hank Williams, Dylan knew, in Ricks’ words: “That to give gratitude is to be the richer, not the poorer, for the giving. … Gratitude is the sublime sublimation of envy.” In the same spirit, perhaps, it should be acknowledged that while Philip Roth would have been a more predictable laureate – and, yes, the Academy’s aversion to American writers has been a longstanding shame – that there are solid grounds for sublimating the envy on display in so many quarters and that accepting Dylan’s poetry as worthy of a literary prize.
After an early period of increasingly assured songwriting, Dylan rattled his fans in July 1965 by “going electric.” It was a deliberate choice to flirt with and, intermittently, enter the cultural mainstream. The transition – not unlike T.S. Eliot’s mildly scandalous decision, half a century earlier, to draft his poetry on a typewriter – has occasioned a body of secondary literature that is spectacular even by American standards. In addition to the small library of works that examine lyrics and contemplate the nuances of a Fender Stratocaster with almost theological intensity, true devotees can enjoy an eighteen-CD collection that covers two special years in Dylan’s career (1965-66). Costing US$600 this special edition includes first drafts of the songs, conversations with the band and sound engineers, and contemporaneous interviews. Like Jean-Luc Goddard’s wonderfully idiosyncratic 1968 documentary “One Plus One” – which followed the Rolling Stones’ recording of “Sympathy for the Devil” in a London studio – such attention suggests just how lavishly Dylan’s best songs reward sustained attention. Godard’s film showed the Stones meticulously working through their material but also how open they remained to the world around them – they famously changed a lyric about the Kennedy assassination to a plural after Robert Kennedy’s shooting. Likewise, Dylan’s audio archive reveals that much of his work arose from similarly thoughtful feedback and collaboration.
There may be a simpler way to grasp the literary merits of contemporary music. The runaway success of the “hip-hop’ musical about Alexander Hamilton, for instance, has been one of the cultural triumphs of the early twenty-first century. Its author, Lin-Manuel Miranda, has already received a clutch of music awards but it won’t be long before his work receives the attention that it is due to it as a work of literature, brimming with allusions, operatic leitmotivs, and the sort of carefully worked-out imagery that we tend, incorrectly, to associate only with “classic” literature. If these songs are a bona fide literary accomplishment – which they assuredly are – why not Dylan’s?
Closer to home, the St Lucian Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott has often cited calypsonians as inspiration for his own poetry. Walcott, who has as distinguished a literary sensibility as any the Caribbean has ever produced, would recognize Dylan as a peer. As he once told the poet Edward Hirsch: “I grew up in a place in which if you learned poetry, you shouted it out. Boys would scream it out and perform it and do it and flourish it. If you wanted to approximate that thunder or that power of speech, it couldn’t be done by a little modest voice in which you muttered something to someone else.” Walcott’s confidence ought to remind us that literature wasn’t always the preserve of culture vultures and quietly sensitive types who sample it at literary festivals, it used to be memorable speech that was declaimed, or sung, unapologetically, in public spaces. “I came out of that society of the huge gesture,” Walcott told Hirsch, “And literature is like that, I mean theatrical literature is like that, whether it’s Greek or whatever.”
