Bob Dylan: Nobel Laureate?

I can’t say that I am a huge Bob Dylan fan. I may have been born just a little too late to have been caught up in the folk craze, though I do remember singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” along with “This Land is Your Land” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” during chorus in elementary school. I have my share of Dylan discs, of course, covering all periods from the early “protest” stuff to the mid- and late-1960s electric period and onto more recent back-to-the-roots material with Love and Theft being a particular favorite. I was surprised, though not unpleasantly, to get the news of Robert Allen Zimmerman receiving this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature.

I personally have been rooting for Thomas Pynchon to get the nod, though somehow I don’t think he would be begrudge The Bard, as he’s often been called, for acing him out. For one thing there’s the fact that Pynchon was friends with Richard Farina who hung with Dylan in the early days, married the sister of his one-time squeeze Joan Baez, and was one of the four figures profiled in David Hajdu’s bestseller Positively 4th Street. Gravity’s Rainbow is dedicated to Farina who died in a motorcycle accident in 1966, the same year Dylan survived his. (Read Pynchon’s appreciation of Farina here.) For another there is the fact that Pynchon no doubt would acknowledge Dylan’s significance, not only to the 1960s counterculture whose failed utopia he has mourned in novels from Gravity’s Rainbow on down, but to the world at large.

Dylan legitimized being hip, more so than the Beats who came before him or the Beatles who came after. By the time I entered undergraduate school in the 1970s, English professors talked in terms of Dylan’s “poetry” whereas other pop icons had to settle for mere “lyrics.” Indeed, Dylan’s best songs dig deeply into America’s social imaginary (the love) and refashion it for contemporary mass-market consumption on a global scale (the theft).

As with any major prize, there has been no dearth of controversy since the announcement broke. There’s the matter of personal taste (again for me Pynchon; for others Phillip Roth, and so on.). But for readers of Public Seminar, more significant conversations are bound up with notions of culture, especially in terms of “Culture” with a capital “C.” And the reactions in that regard were immediate, pro and con, typically along the lines of cultural hierarchies that continue to be resilient even in these days of supposed cultural omnivorism.

I’m on the side of the omnivores, understanding culture in the most pluralistic sense. Clifford Geertz once defined culture as “the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.” Bob Dylan is a storyteller par excellence. And that’s at the root of literature from the ancient epics of the rhapsodes (from the Greek meaning literally “to sew songs together”) to their postmodern inheritor Dimitri Lyacos.