Bob Dylan Is Not A Fucking Poet (But He Still Deserves His Nobel)
I am not a huge Bob Dylan fan. Was into him for a couple months in high school/college when I was in a big folk music phase, but I liked folk music for being melodious and pretty, and that tended to mean that I preferred Dylan when someone like Peter, Paul, and Mary were singing him. Still, for the most part I’m even less of a fan of the arguments against him winning the Nobel Prize for literature, which tend to fall into two camps, both fairly appalling. The first is the outright snobbery, whether in its hilariously cliche form of “but what about Philip Roth” or in its more jocular but still fundamentally wrong-headed “does this mean X can win a Grammy?” My distaste for this position isn’t going to surprise anyone. Indeed, I consider it actively evil, albeit in a smoldering, unremarkable sense as opposed to something pernicious and large-scale like, say, Donald Trump.
The second is what you might call the populist snobbery – a position exemplified by, and I’m just going to go ahead and throw a friend under the bus here, Noah Berlatsky’s hot take, which manages to get it completely wrong almost without actually being wrong at any specific moment. In this position yes, of course it’s valid to give a Nobel Prize to someone from popular culture instead of just giving the middle finger to the American literary establishment year after year by picking people 99.9% of Americans have never heard of. It’s just that there were better choices than Dylan. Which, yes, of course there are. But this is still the Nobel Prize for Literature, an award that combines stodginess and highbrow snobbery in higher degrees than any other major award. It was never going to go to Leonard Cohen or Alan Moore or even Ursula K. LeGuin. Dylan is the available compromise – the step towards populism that the Nobel Prize could plausibly take. I would love to see it take more (and I’m sure next year’s award will be an ostentatious reaction against this one), but you’ve got to walk before you run.
But what I really want to talk about is one of the positions wheeled out by those supporting his victory, which has been to call Dylan a “poet.” Indeed, “is Bob Dylan a poet” seems at times to be a stand-in for the question “does Bob Dylan deserve his Nobel Prize,” with plenty of the outright snobbery folks sniffing that he’s not a real poet. And this is more than faintly strange, because the question should be straightforward: of course Bob Dylan isn’t a poet. The Nobel Prize committee has not made any sort of assertion that he is a poet. The Nobel Prize for Literature is not a poetry award. It’s a literature award. Giving it to Dylan meant acknowledging songwritng as a form of literature.
There is, of course, a purity discussion to be had on whether songs are a form of literature. Like most purity discussions, however, it gets stupid quickly.…
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There’s only one way to begin this.