The prizes awarded to Bob Dylan include an Oscar, a Golden
Globe award, a number of Grammy awards, the Pulitzer Prize, induction into the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and now the Nobel Prize for Literature. Yet Bob Dylan understands more than most what
such awards mean: very little. Since the
announcement, Dylan has made no public statement regarding the award. Nor has there been any acknowledgement that Dylan
will attend the Nobel ceremony. Apparently, this is causing dismay.
The committee referred to Dylan as having “created new
poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” With the announcement of Dylan’s name as
winner, you could hear gasps in the audience.
A small number of authors also took umbrage – probably because they did
not receive the award. Some snubbed had
unkind words about Dylan. Others seem to
feel providing the award to someone so popular is beneath the dignity of the
Nobel Prize committee.
I suppose some history of the Nobel Prize for Literature is
necessary. Alfred Nobel, the inventor of
dynamite, purportedly created the Nobel Prize out of sense of guilt due to his
profiting from the sales of arms. In his
will, he bequeathed his fortune to finance the Nobel committee. So far as literature goes, members select the
award on an annual basis. The committee
includes professors of literature, members of various literary societies,
former winners of the prize, and presidents of various writing
organizations. The committee probably
doesn’t include any ditch diggers.
The first recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature was
Sully Prudhomme, a French poet, in 1901. Next we had Theodor Mommsen from
Germany, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson of Norway, Frédéric Mistral of France, José Echegaray
of Spain, Henryk Sienkiewicz of Poland and Giosuè Carducci of Italy. We can forgive even literary professors for being
unfamiliar with these authors. The first memorable writer to receive the award
was Rudyard Kipling in 1907, and he was likely controversial enough for the
committee to then not select any other winners that were household names prior to World War I.
There were some fairly well known authors who did not
receive the award, however. This would
include Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Henrik Ibsen, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, D.H.
Lawrence and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Admittedly, some of these writers died too young to ever win the
award. Still, these were deserving
authors who we will long remember. In
other words, the Nobel Prize committee was often wrong.
Like most committees, the Nobel committee from the start was
afraid to generate controversy. Individual
critics, on the other hand, are sometimes very contentious. And because committees make so many compromises,
the selections by the Nobel committee were often uninteresting. Some of its better choices only came about
following criticism that the committee needed to expand its horizons. Even in recent years, the committee could not
bring itself to award Vladimir Nabokov, Flannery O’Connor, Norman Mailer, Henry
Miller, Jack Kerouac, or Allen Ginsberg the Nobel Prize – almost certainly rejected
because of the controversial nature of their works. Cormac McCarthy is a living writer who may
still receive the award, but time is running out for him as well.
So that brings us back to Bob Dylan – the songwriter from
Hibbing (in the heart of Minnesota’s Iron Range) who many continue to accuse of
being unable to sing. One Iron Range
writer had fun with Dylan’s critics: “To those on the Iron Range that still
might not appreciate Dylan, they should know that the Nobel Prize is the
Stanley Cup of literature.” (For those
who do not understand the joke, the United States Hockey Hall of Fame is in Eveleth,
Minnesota, which is about 25 miles away from Hibbing and also in the heart of
the Iron Range.)
While in the end it really shouldn’t matter, there certainly
could be a lot worse choices for this award.
Dylan has made a number of controversial stands – some probably wrongheaded. Yet he kept himself almost always non-partisan
and never voiced support for any politician.
Whether you like or dislike his songs, he certainly had a personal impact
on many individuals that many writers who won the Nobel Prize never did. Unlike so many recipients of the award, Dylan’s
reach goes far beyond just those college students or professors whose greatest
interest in an artist is the kind of treatise they can write about the artist.
© Robert S. Miller 2016
October 26, 2016
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