Bob Dylan the Author?
Bob Dylan has won a Nobel Prize in Literature and some people are rather disgruntled about it. I presume this has to do with his being a musician and not an author; or rather, primarily a musician and not an author, because he has published a book of poetry and written an autobiography. But he’s not strictly literature so he doesn’t belong in that category. Literature and music are entirely separate entities and whilst it’s absolutely fair that he has won all the music awards, he doesn’t get to steal ones from the literature category. This is the general sentiment from the articles against Dylan’s award but — to put it in non-literary phrasing — I call bullshit.
The first reason is a pretty obvious one and it’s that he is an author. I’m not referring to the book of poetry or the autobiography, I haven’t read either of them and don’t plan to. I have read his lyrics, though. I’ve read them repeatedly. I’m not a huge fan of his voice, although it doesn’t turn me off the way it does with many other people, but I am a huge fan of his songs and the reason for that is primarily the lyrics. When Dylan sat down to write his songs he wrote the music; he did his notation and scribbled musical notes down or however he went about composing his music, and he also sat down and composed lyrics. He thought about rhyme and vocabulary and he wrote poetry. Lyric poetry is the term we use to describe poems that express feelings and Dylan does that throughout his work, and he takes his place amongst other lyric poets such as Catullus, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Robert Burns, Goethe, Coleridge, Keats and many other names that I and other Literature students studied for our degrees, often bemoaning or loving. Just like those renowned poets Bob Dylan wrote verse that expressed emotions, with meter and rhyme scheme and the last time I checked poetry definitely fell under the domain of ‘Literature’.
And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son?
And what did you hear, my darling young one?
I heard the sound of a thunder that roared out a warnin’
I heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world
I heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazin’
I heard ten thousand whisperin’ and nobody listenin’
I heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin’
Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter
Heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.
Back to the ‘lyric’ thing, though, because we are talking about song lyrics as poetry. The word “lyric” is derived from lyrikos, an Ancient Greek word for ‘singing to the lyre’. Lyre. An instrument. Because back then music and poetry were quite closely entwined; they had to be. Writing things down wasn’t as easy and most of the poems of the ancient past were oral poetry, passed down through an oral tradition, meaning that people would have to memorise the entire text. And here’s a fun fact: it’s easier to memorise things when they’re set to a tune. Think about song lyrics that you know and recite them to yourself and see how you do. Do a whole song. Then see how you do when you sing it to yourself. Beowulf is the first major piece of literary work in the English language, albeit in heavily Germanic Old English but it was an epic poem just like Homer’s epics or the skaldic epics and it too was performed with an instrument accompanying it; a sort of harp type instrument that we don’t know the proper name of. Music and poetry — that is, literature — have been close friends for longer than the English language has existed, which makes the controversy around Bob Dylan winning a Nobel Prize for Literature seem pretty dumb. Yes, he is a musician, but he is also a writer. The two are not mutually exclusive and nor should they be. I don’t think that every musician to publish their music deserves the title of poet (in some cases I don’t think they deserve the title of musician); as much as I like Nirvana I don’t think anyone will be championing Kurt Cobain’s rights as an author and if they do I will laugh myself silly. The case with Bob Dylan, though, is clearly different.
Of course, some people could just not like him. He’s quite hippy dippy a lot of the time, his voice is abrasive and maybe he seems overrated to some people and that’s fair enough. Honestly, I think Simon and Garfunkel deserve that prize more than he does, or Leonard Cohen. But I won’t and don’t begrudge Dylan for that, and I appreciate that the great lyricists of our lifetime are being recognised for their literary contributions, because they have made them. Sometimes they made them in a nasal, strangely pitched whine, but the words were written nonetheless and they are evocative, resonating and sometimes beautiful and heartbreaking.
Congratulations, Mr Dylan.
