In case you missed it, this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Bob Dylan.
Yes, that Bob Dylan.
What does it mean for the world of literature when the best it has to offer is not a poet (in the traditional sense) or a novelist or a playwright, but a rock star? In the words of the Nobel committee, Dylan received the award for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” Dylan’s poetry is certainly poetry, capable of standing on its own in a volume of black and white print. But the real power of his poetry lies in the fact that it is sung. Is it even possible to read, “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind,” without hearing the melody (whether in Dylan’s voice or Joan Baez’s) echo through your mind? Unlike the lyrical works of many great poets that were later set to music by other people, Dylan’s poetry was born on the strings of his guitar. It was delivered to the world by the vibrations of his vocal cords. If only the black and white print existed, does anyone believe he would have been half as influential as he is now?
So, the obvious question arises: Is music literature?
As both a musician and a writer, I have so long been intimate with both forms that my neural pathways are hard-wired to see (or rather, hear) good music and good writing as a single string being plucked in different ways. For me, writing is music and music is story. When an idea runs so deep that it cannot quite be grasped in words, it is the job of music to convey it; likewise, when the abstraction of musical sound is not concrete enough for human understanding, words step in to frame our thoughts and tell our tales. Each serves its own purpose, and each can exist quite well without the other, yet the marriage of the two is as old as humankind.
But is music itself literature, or only literature’s symbiotic partner? That depends how you define the word “literature,” of course. Most dictionary definitions confine it to the realm of the written word and thereby condemn the Nobel committee’s choice. There is, after all, something to be said for labels, organization, and not confusing everybody by trying to redefine well-established concepts. But there is also something within a strictly writing-based definition of “literature” that fails to capture its spirit. Writing is only a visual representation of sound. Writing exists only as an extension of the oral – and aural – traditions of language. How many of our most cherished folk tales were passed on by mouth before they were ever written down? What of the troubadours, who recorded history with song? The psalms would never have reached us if they had not first been sung. Music is the foundation and the beating heart of literature. The traditional structures and rhythms of literature can all be traced to the mathematics of music, just as the traditional dynamics of music correspond to the dynamics of storytelling. Literature and music might be two separate branches of human endeavor, but they carry the same waters from the source.
Or maybe – if the Nobel committee is right – there’s no distinction between them at all.
As Dylan might put it:
Gonna change my way of thinking, make my self a different set of rules. Gonna put my good foot forward and stop being influenced by fools.
A most illuminating article!
Thank you!
As a classics lover I have to disagree with your argument about the nature of literature. I am not talking about whether or not Bob Dylan deserves a Nobel prize. Some of the worlds great poets would have to be eliminated from “literature” if music and chanted or sung voice were to be a no, no. Homer if he sung or chanted or even played on his lyre would mean we would have to ditch both the Iliad and the Odyssey; Virgil would have to go and so would Horace, Lucan and Appolonius Rhodius and Sappho and on and on and on. At least big chunks of all the ancient Greek dramatists would go including Aeschylus. Some of Shakespeare’s finest lyrics would have to go, like the songs from The Tempest, some of which we know were intended to be sung on stage. One of the finest anonymous lyric poems from the Elizabethan era, the words to the song Greensleeves could no longer be studied by literary critics without reference to its music. It is a brilliant poem without it. Very few know the poem today. The melody is best known as the Christmas carol What Child is this. That it is better with the melody is arguable; that it is worth reading either aloud or in silence few critics would deny. Similarly the French would no longer be able to call troubadour poetry great poetry. In the British isles the great Scots poet Robert Burns cannot be studied without mentioning the earlier Border Ballads as major influences on his lyrical rhythmic style. Many of his songs were easily set to music after he died. The 19th century Irish poet Thomas Moore, one of Byron’s friends, also wrote songs easy to set to music. You should be able to find Oh My Love Is Like A Red Red Rose on YouTube. In the 20th century along with Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen also wrote lyric poems. His novel Beautiful Losers came before his musical career, and his famous hit Suzanne was first a published poem, which he later set to music.
So I think that the question might be better put like this: Were Bob Dylan’s words strong enough to be worthy of the Nobel Prize? Not that they aren’t worthy because they are not literature.
Thomas, it doesn’t sound like we disagree at all – just that you have put together a more exhaustive list of the reasons why literature and music are two halves of the same whole than I did. As to whether Dylan’s words are strong enough, of themselves, for a Nobel, I’m honestly not enough of a Dylan afficionado to answer that. I’m just happy to see music being recognized as literature.
Not really, I’m afraid. My point is rather that music is NOT literature. There have been serious musical critics, in fact, who have poo-poohed opera (as opposed to so-called “absolute music”} as a lower form of art. I think wonderful things can and have happened when the two combine. But literary study does not include the study of the notes and the melodies. Which makes it difficult for lyricists to stand out and be appreciated, But the works of W.S. Gilbert, the lyricist of the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, have lasted in continuous print in book form to this day, while Arthur Sullivan’s music is rarely played at all without Gilbert’s words. He was that funny and boisterous and a brilliant but gentle satirist. Sullivan could write brilliant parodies of the musical clichés of the day, but musical clichés come and go over time and he has fallen seriously more out of style than Gilbert has.
In my opinion (and that’s all it is), the failure of musical critics to study literature and literary critics to study music is to the detriment of them both. Imagine physicists who refused to study chemistry, or vice versa. Just because the people in a field can’t appreciate its links to other fields doesn’t mean those links are any less real. I completely agree that lyricists have tended to go unnoticed by the literary establishment because the establishment doesn’t really understand what they do. That’s why I’m so glad to see a songwriter win the Nobel. Maybe both fields will expand their horizons, and find themselves the better for it.
Close enough. You have some very interesting ideas. I don’t want to be a bother, but if you would like to continue this discussion I would be happy to continue, just let me know. If not, I will just say that I have enjoyed it.
Thomas, it’s my pleasure.
I’m glad to hear that. I want to warn you in advance, though, that I can be as pedantic as the worst of pedants. At least that’s what my wife says, and I tend to believe her. But then, on the other hand, she has still stuck with me for over 45 years.
May I ask what you think musical study can offer to serious literary criticism? Or, maybe better put, what musical study can offer, that other studies can’t?
I started to write an answer, but I think it might require more citations than I have time to find right now, and possibly a separate post. Stay tuned.
No problem on my end. Well thought out is much better than knee-jerk response.
Thomas, I’m not sure I’m ever going to find time to do the homework this answer really requires. I’m not really a critic or a student of criticism in either field, so I can only approach the topic from my point of view as an in-the-trenches practitioner of both. My musicianship informs my writing in ways that are so ingrained and so instinctive it’s hard for me even to explain them, but they have a great deal to do with meter, tempo, pacing, tone, and timbre. These are all literary concepts, too, but musicians practice them in much more regimented, repetitive ways that develop a kind of “muscle memory” in the brain. The same musician’s instinct that tells me instantly when someone plays the wrong note also tells me when someone’s sentence isn’t quite as well-phrased as it could be. There is a certain pattern recognition process that musicians develop that I find lacking definitely in the teaching and often in the execution of literature. This has been enforced a thousand times over in my mind because I’m a singer by training, so all of my actual music-making is in fact storytelling, too. I don’t know if this makes any sense without data to support it, but it’s something experience has taught me to be true.
To put it another way – with the exception of metered poetry, I find that literature does itself a disservice by its lack of attention to the aural qualities of the words and their effect on the reader.
Sorry for the delay– I have been seriously under the weather. I agree with what you have just said, period. But now we cannot blame literary criticism for that. I think too many writers think that they write right well and they have no knowledge that there can even be such a thing as beauty in prose. Even Dickens had to learn that. Read some of the Sketches by Boz, his first published book.
Good solid funny stuff, some of it, in perfectly fine 18th century prose. And so on through Pickwick, Oliver Twist and others. He knew his Fielding and his Smollett. He rang changes on their work. And then…
Thomas Carlyle wrote The French Revolution.
Dickens read it. We know that. It is full of highly effective prose rhythms in important places in Carlyle’s narrative. And Dickens the already successful best-selling author began to change his prose. I suspect that Dickens felt something like, I can do that. I can do that in tragedy and I can do that in humour (English you know, not Yankee) and I can do that better.
And so we have the great “Fog.” scene which opens Bleak House and “It was the best of times…” and all the others.
Also involved in keeping your equilibrium about what passes as literature (both pop lit and snob) is a constant historical truth: in any art in any age only 10% at the very most will survive its generation. That is an optimistic percentage I think, now that the computer means that anyone at all can self publish without even passing the tome through an editor.
Thomas, I hope you’re feeling better. (My whole family had stomach bug last week and I had surgery yesterday – hence the lack of time for homework!) I agree we cannot blame criticism for bad literature. But we can blame it for lauding bad literature as good, and for being just as ignorant about the aural qualities of literature as those who write it – not that there aren’t exceptions, I’m sure. But I think we’ve reached a consensus. “I think too many writers think that they write right well and they have no knowledge that there can even be such a thing as beauty in prose.” Exactly.
I hope you are recovering nicely from your surgery and that both you and your family are feeling much better. I know I am but Mary, my wife, seems to be coming down with the same respiratory plague I have pretty well shaken off. Such is family life. Thanks for a pleasant discussion.
I have nothing to contribute to the discussion. I simply want to thank both of you for an intelligent and civil combox conversation
Damaris, thank you, and that is one of the reasons I love Dappled Things!
No strong opinion one way or the other on the Nobel being awarded to Dylan, but here are a few disorganized thoughts about the Prize itself. The Nobel Prize has come to represent ultimate literary achievement in an overblown way that draws attention away from the winner and focuses it back on the decision-making process, politics, and idiosyncrasies of the academy and its members. This is probably true of all literary and other prizes to some degree, but with the Nobel I think the myth and symbolism of the prize have to a unique extent taken on a life of their own, what with betting markets, recent debates about the insularity of American literature, and the proverbial all-night vigils of hopefuls waiting for “the call.”
There can be little doubt that writers who have attained a certain stature, and perhaps even some who have yet to do so, may find themselves tempted to fashion their work, and even their public persona, along lines that could make receiving the Prize more likely. Moreover the Prize’s outsized visibility and influence have created the perception, which may or may not be accurate, that care is taken to ensure geographic diversity and a minimum of globalist political bona fides, such that two writers from the same country are highly unlikely to receive the award in successive years (or even decades in some instances), while recipients from countries experiencing turmoil may see their victory cast as a political statement rather than as the well-deserved recompense for an exceptional body of literary work.
Indeed the prize, because of the wishes of its founder (“…in an ideal direction”), has never been awarded solely on the basis of aesthetic merit, to the best, truest, and most beautiful literary oeuvre out there, but has always of necessity taken other factors into account–factors that could be summed up by saying that the Nobel stands less for sheer literary excellence (even if many if not most of those who receive it have indeed produced work of undoubted excellence) than it does for overall importance and general good literary citizenship.
Finally, as with any cultural ritual that is sufficiently repeated, the whole thing has taken on a degree of self-reflexivity that I think the choice of Dylan underscores pretty well. Now, as past decisions pile up and loom over current and future ones, the committee not only has to find deserving recipients but also has to think about how its choice will reflect on the Prize itself, in other words about what journalists, critics, and even social media will say in the aftermath. The temptation to thwart expectations, so as to maintain an aura of mystery and surprise, must play some role in the academy’s deliberations, though of course the contrarian principle can only be taken so far without revealing itself as such (“Let’s make the oddsmakers and betting markets look silly and give the prize to Enrique Vila Matas!”).
If every Nobel awarded these days not only sends a message about the recipient’s merit in the eyes of the committee, but also any number of meta-messages, it’s certainly tempting to speculate about what signals the academy was trying to send by giving the Prize to Dylan. Is it a slap in the face to Roth, DeLillo and other novelists (or even poets, like Richard Wilbur) operating in an American literary landscape that Horace Engdahl notoriously decried as provincial and insular? A nostalgic feel-good choice made by a bunch of aging Swedish Dylan fans? A plug for poetry in an age of prose narrative? One thing’s for sure: in giving the million dollars and the attention to a celebrity musician, the academy deprived publishing houses the world over of the surge in revenue that comes with owning rights to a Nobel recipient’s oeuvre. It’s easy to see this as a terrible thing, especially when you think about all the young, relatively unknown writers a windfall like the Nobel might, in the best-case scenario, enable a publishing house to support. But perhaps it’s also a bracing reminder to writers and publishers that the elite literary establishment has become too inward-looking and disconnected from the popular culture. From that point of view Dylan is an insurgent winner, a populist choice in a time of crisis, reflecting a general and almost world-wide frustration with the way the guardians of our institutions, both political and literary, have been operating.
Trevor, I don’t really have anything to add to this except, thank you for such insightful and circumspect commentary. You’ve covered a lot of ground here.
Ditto, Trevor