A Nobel Prize for the Masses?

ANY REASONABLE person should admit that Bob Dylan’s 54 years as a great American artist deserve some kind of monumental recognition, maybe even a real monument somewhere. But the monumental recognition Dylan received in October from the Nobel Prize committee for literature has generated plenty of argument, much of it among reasonable people. Scottish novelist Irvine Welsh had the best one-liner. “This,” he said, “is an ill-conceived nostalgia award wrenched from the rancid prostates of senile, gibbering hippies.”

But, generational animosities aside, the most cogent complaint about the Dylan Nobel goes like this: “Sure, most of his music is great. But is it literature?”

And of course it’s not. At least not if literature is limited to its dictionary definition as the stuff composed to be read from a page (or, today, a screen). However, in announcing Dylan’s prize, the Nobel committee dodged that whole question. They didn’t call him a “poet.” Instead, they honored his “new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”

I’m not sure exactly what the Nobel committee meant by that cryptic utterance, but it hits pretty close to the heart of Dylan’s achievement. At his best Dylan has brought the sensibility, philosophical stance, and rough-hewn sound of what Greil Marcus calls “the old, weird America” into our postmodern era not as archaeological artifact, but as a living tradition.

The voice of the old, weird America, echoing through Dylan’s songs, is the voice of the medicine-show snake oil peddlers and the Appalachian snake-handlers. It’s the voice of the slave, or his recent descendant, for whom the rising waters of the Mississippi were a metaphor for his entire life. It is the dirt farmer driven mad by the wails of his hungry children. The Southern poor white committing racist violence as a pawn in the rich man’s game. It’s the Sunday morning believer and the Saturday night cynic. The oral culture of Dylan’s America was raw, unmediated, life on life’s terms. And that’s the voice we can still hear in the best of his songs.

At this writing, we have no idea whether Dylan will go to Sweden in December to accept his Nobel Prize. But he did accept the 2015 MusiCares Person of the Year Award and gave a long speech in which he explained his work as thoroughly as he ever has.

“I learned lyrics and how to write them from listening to folk songs,” Dylan said. “For three or four years ... I went to sleep singing folk songs. I sang them everywhere. ... If you sang ‘John Henry’ as many times as me ... you’d have written ‘How many roads must a man walk down?’ too. ... If you’d listened to Robert Johnson singing, ‘Better come in my kitchen, ’cause it’s gonna be raining outdoors,’ as many times as I listened to it, sometime later you just might write, ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’ ... I sang a lot of ‘come all you’ songs,” he continued. “... ‘Come along boys and listen to my tale / Tell you of my troubles on the old Chisholm Trail.’ Or ... ’Gather ‘round, people / A story I will tell / ‘Bout Pretty Boy Floyd, the outlaw / Oklahoma knew him well.’ If you sung all these ‘come all ye’ songs all the time like I did, you’d be writing, ‘Come gather ’round people where ever you roam, and admit that the waters around you have grown.’”

So, whether they know it or not, when the Nobel committee honors Bob Dylan, they are also honoring the centuries of nameless laborers and wandering minstrels who gave Dylan a voice and something to say. And these days that’ll pass for justice in my book.