He didn’t commit no ugly sin
Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize is coherent, legitimate, and rewards a great literary achievement. We don’t need to ask for more
It’s not important, in the urging debate about Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, to evaluate if there’s another writer who could get it this year, or before him. Pretty much yes, because, fortunately, the world still has hundreds of brilliant living writers, and a lot of them have the greatness required to win such a relevant award — and that some recent and past laureates, actually, don’t have. Not to the same wide-ranging extent of Dylan’s (and don’t worry: Murakami will win the Nobel Prize, it’s a safe bet).
However, it’s important to reflect on one complex question: if Dylan can win — because any answer has a dangerous power, drawing limitations over what is a literary achievement (which requires, in fact, some limits). And saying no to this question is even more dangerous, as it resonates with a rejection of beauty, of artistic impact, of cultural influence. And those fill the requirements for winning a Nobel Prize, while NOT being a musician, famous, or able to play a guitar don’t. Maybe a few decades ago.
As far as I know, only a few conditions can exclude you, entirely, from winning the Nobel Prize, by the rules of the committee: a) to be dead; b) never having proof (mostly in a physical form, as a book, or an album) of a writing act; c) to be Jorge Luis Borges; d) to be completely unknown as a writer of any sort, even among your friends and loved ones, because, well, somebody must think of you as a hell of a writer to send a nomination to the Swedish Academy. And yes, we could argue about the nomination procedures, but not now.
(In some literary academies, I may add, it’s a requirement to have at least one of the following aptitudes: a) to be completely stupid; b) a very, very bad writer; c) an important politician — who gives a fuck if you can write?; d) to be completely unknown as a writer of any sort, even among your friends and loved ones. That one is really important, for example, to the Brazilian Academy of Letters — which has a few marvelous, worthy exceptions).
Once we establish the requirements to be nominated, makes sense to draw some limits to the Literature category, without embarking on a long and academic genre-definition. First: it’s plausible to think about literature as an artistic work (a lifetime work) whose expression is, essentially, in a verbal language, excluding, from the Nobel, painters, sculptors, architects, moviemakers (but not screenwriters), and photographers. Sorry, Picasso (and Dylan for sure didn’t win the award for being a painter).
Second: even the winners in scientific categories, as Physics, Economics, or Chemistry demonstrated their knowledge and contributions primarily in writing form — in articles, books, lectures, essays. Verbal languages, after all, still prevail as an inherent human condition, even if not as the sole inherent condition to make artistic works. So, by this fact, it would be legitimate to give the Literature prize to a great physicist, or a great chemist. But we must go deeper and consider a difference between literature and science — and Bertrand Russell, mostly a scientist, won the award; and Churchill, mostly a politician, won the award; and Sartre, mostly a philosopher, won the award.
It’s not easy: should Foucault, Deleuze, or Heidegger have been able to win the Nobel? Maybe Wittgenstein, who wrote about really anything? I would give the Nobel prize to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But we must bend to a rule, and to do that, drawing a fragile line between literature and science, I will quote a Nobel laureate, William Faulkner, who wrote a masterful speech to the 1950 banquet, at Stockholm:
“He [the writer] must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed — love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but the glands”.
I believe the most important contrast between the literary work and the scientific work resides less on an artistic concern about the expression and more on a quest the artist, the writer, imposes on himself: to speak about the issues that rotten, trouble, threaten the human soul, with the power that only fiction, as storytelling, can provide. To be true to ourselves, we must, even to a small degree, be outside ourselves; it’s when we learn about innocence, compassion, dignity, love. And the scientific work has a distinctive priority: to speak about the world we all live in, where every phenomenon has a collective, social attribution, and we can’t be alone, or contradictory, or not abiding by mutual agreements. The literary world can be made of lies, oaths never fulfilled, of impossible rewards, and we can be selfish. The philosophical thinking encompass it all, in fact, but may lack the paradoxical loneliness we only achieve by being something else; philosophy, as mathematics, chemistry, biology, and linguistics, has a systematic purpose, wants to understand the laws behind a process, and, in literature, we can prescind of the answers — we only need to feel the pain, briefly, in our hearts. It’s our pain, and nobody else’s, even if the old truths stay the same: universal, however not absolute.
And we need a hero.
As a songwriter, Bob Dylan expresses himself mostly by verbal language, and, although it’s impractical to separate the music to the lyrics (they were made to be together, and, alone, don’t stay the same), I think what he told us is bigger and better than what we heard from him, and we can’t say the same about Jimi Hendrix or Eric Clapton but can say about Nick Cave, Chico Buarque, and Nas. Playwrights have, too, an explicit non-verbal form of expression deeply inseparable from the writing — the acting, the setting of a play, the gesture — , and we would never question Samuel Beckett’s Nobel. We couldn’t, we shouldn’t, and we will always have William Shakespeare. Hell, every poem has a non-verbal explicit construction, or what do we think about tempo, rhythm, and sound? Can’t poetry be, in a lot of ways, just like music? Ask T.S. Eliot (or better, watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmCoIfDn-f4). I don’t buy the musician versus writer opposition; it’s false, dishonest, and underestimates the creative force that makes us, humanity, endure.
Bob Dylan is a storyteller; he gave us a lot of heroes and a lot of villains to hate and feel pity for. He gave us tales of bad dreams, lust and vicious behavior, and songs about impossible victories that we still strive to get; some darker, some closer, some funnier. He gave us the problems of his heart, so we could see them and accept them or reject them, embracing as ours or shunning as theirs, and we could get lost for a few minutes, amazed, devoted, like watching a mythic event — a falling sky, a burning wind, a cold fire, a flying broomstick. Witchcraft material. I could say the same things about Faulkner, Hemingway, Saramago — who had the fucking idea of giving a white palette to the blindness that science can’t color properly.
Apart from the differences between literature and science, both have in common a very important subject: innovation. The scientific achievement and the literary one stay profoundly bound by a desire for a novelty, a progression of meaning or method, changing the way we perceive the world; in the scientific reasoning, by the breaking of a mythic paradigm, with an explanation (which itself contains some kind of mythical property, as John Maynard Keynes once said about Isaac Newton being a magician, for he revealed a new world for us, set by surprising rules).
Some of the most innovative and relevant writers of the 20th century didn’t get a Nobel — Proust, Joyce, Nabokov, Tolstoy, Borges. And nobody argues against any one of them deserving the prize, and we all know they had been deprived of a well-earned glory. The Nobel is, even without needing to, a statement, a confirmation of a political, cultural or academic odyssey, reaffirming the prominence of an original realization; a winner gets to be renowned as an outstanding figure of a field of knowledge, as a standard-bearer of creativity, genius, and influence. And as a figure of a specific period — reflecting not only the artistic and scientific production of an age but as well the historical and political state of the world. The last hundred years can be retold by the Peace Prizes, and the same is true about the evolution of science and the literary forms, its developments, and mutations.
This is the reason behind not only my opinion that giving the Nobel Prize to Bob Dylan is legitimate and coherent, but is correct. It gives a statement, recognizing songwriting as literature, as a high-quality art form, and, most of all, gives an endorsement to rock ’n’ roll as the greatest artistic genre of the last 60 years. The award given to Dylan, undisputedly one of the most respected, well-known and inspirational musicians of the world, is also an award to Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones. It reiterates the central place occupied by American culture after World War II in shaping and redefining almost every other local or national culture from western civilization — like it or not, the United States has the same status, today, as Greece in ancient times (the Greece of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, who we still read). The Nobel Prize amplifies what is already big, what has already got recognition and acceptance.
I’ve read a few articles questioning Dylan’s Nobel with a vast assortment of arguments — a few quite pertinent. Yes, the Swedish could have boosted another less-known writer, contributing to an interest in literature, and the times, they’re a-changing, people read much less today. Yes, Dylan doesn’t need a Nobel — he already has an Oscar, a Golden Globe, hell, a Pulitzer, and other writers don’t have shit. Well, Murakami has hundreds of awards, like Philip Roth, Javier Marías, Joyce Carol Oates. Yes, we won’t see any novelist competing for a Grammy; who knows? But the Nobel, as I’ve said, amplifies what is already big, and, frankly, for the last 20 years has been pretty much democratic, awarding a lot of people with very narrow readership, influence, and recognition. It’s easier, for a writer from a developing country, who doesn’t write in English, French or Spanish, to win the Nobel than any other big literary prize. I like that, but I don’t think it’s a fundamental principle of the award. Besides the fact that he’s rich, famous, respected, admired, and American, Bob Dylan is a fucking genius, and what he writes is different, beautiful, relevant, poetic. Half the living writers, Murakami included, have been influenced by him.
This accolade opens up possibilities. We will, after Dylan’s Nobel, accept better the recognition of artists — writers, really — who use unexpected forms of expression to produce great art, and we will respect them, and we will admire them as exuberant creators from the field of literature. After 2016, why not award a groundbreaking screenwriter, like Matthew Weiner, if he makes another Mad Men? Or David Simon, who changed the world with The Wire? Or Nas, or Rakim, who represent the pinnacle of craftsmanship in the genre that came to overrun rock ’n’ roll as the most popular and innovative of the 21st century?
Under this reasoning, awarding Dylan unfolds a democratic window, not an elitist, exclusionary one, because great music is way more accessible than great books, and brilliant musicians from less privileged parts of the world get fame, respect, and voice easier than brilliant writers. It widens opportunities for African, Asian, South-American artists. Expanding the acceptance of what is literature, the Nobel Foundation gets better in understanding the world we live in, a multicultural, multilanguage world, and very fertile and rich in written ideas, achievements, and masterpieces. It’s a welcome change, and Bob Dylan is just the perfect icon of this change, for everything he is and for everything he gave us.
PS: I have, however, a sad note. The 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan means that no other great American living novelist will win the award, and, so, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, and Thomas Pynchon won’t be properly rewarded. I’ll always root for Pynchon, forever.
