The announcement that Bob Dylan will be given the Nobel Prize in Literature set off a predictable but not entirely pointless controversy. Is Dylan literature? If so, does he deserve a place next to Thomas Mann and T. S. Eliot? And, even then, is there a pragmatic argument to be made against giving another big prize to a pop-culture colossus at a time when so many worthy writers struggle in obscurity? Although my Dylan fandom is as immoderate as anyone’s—in 1998, I followed him around the country for several weeks and wrote about the experience for The New Yorker—I’ve been half-swayed by the less huffy protests. As the novelist Hari Kunzru has observed, a Nobel citation can exponentially increase a writer’s audience and help keep independent publishers afloat; in 2016, that opportunity was lost. On the other hand, Dylan did write the line “Behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain.”
The questions posed by this latest Dylan coronation go deeper than the winner-takes-all cultural economy of the early twenty-first century. We are confronted, once again, with the intricately tangled relationship between words and music. What happens when they merge? How does the language of one affect the language of the other? When a sung text takes hold of us, which is the more active force? (Two operas ponder the issue: Salieri’s “Prima la musica e poi le parole”—“First the Music, Then the Words”—and Strauss’s “Capriccio,” which asks, “Word or tone—which do you prefer?”) And how do we comprehend the rare artist who transforms both worlds at once?
The debate over the proper categorization of Dylan’s talent has been going on for more than fifty years. By the time he released “Highway 61 Revisited,” in 1965, he was being described not just as a songwriter in the American popular tradition but also as a poet in the vein of Whitman and Ginsberg. In December, 1965, Thomas Meehan wrote a piece for the Times Magazine asking whether Dylan was the “best writer in America today.” A Brown University student was quoted saying, “Any one of [Dylan’s] songs, like ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,’ is more interesting to us, both in a literary and a social sense, than an entire volume of Pulitzer Prize verse by someone like Robert Lowell.” People like Lowell tended not to agree. Stanley Kunitz and Louis Simpson, when approached by Meehan, preferred to label Dylan a “popular artist” or “entertainer” rather than a poet. W. H. Auden diplomatically said, “I am afraid I don’t know his work at all.”
There had been a phenomenon like this before. In the nineteenth century, arguments raged around a figure who made his name in the musical sphere but who also claimed literary significance. He was attacked as a dilettante, one whose music wavered between bombast and bizarrerie, whose poetic productions mixed platitude and gibberish. He was aligned in his early years with revolutionary politics and later appeared to betray those politics in favor of conservatism and mysticism. All the same, he became a magnetic figure for younger generations and exerted a vast influence on literature and other art forms. If you came of age in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, you had to know Dylan; in the eighteen-eighties and nineties, it had to be Richard Wagner.
To place Dylan in the same sentence as Wagner is to invite various objections, not least from the principals. A composer who infamously thought that Jews lacked the capacity for original musical creation would probably have made no exception for the former Robert Zimmerman. Dylan, for his part, seems to favor Mozart and Beethoven over Wagner, whom he colorfully described, in a 1993 interview, as “one of the archcriminals of all time.” The personalities could not be more unalike. Wagner was antic, garrulous, incapable of keeping his mouth shut. Dylan is, by all reports, shy, sly, inveterately oblique. (If members of the Swedish Academy believe that _this _time Dylan will bask in the attention and socialize with those who are honoring him, they haven’t spent much time on Maggie’s Farm.)
Yet the similarities are more than trivial. Nietzsche wrote that Wagner was, at bottom, neither a composer nor a poet but an actor, a theatrical personality, who seized on opera as his medium: “He belongs elsewhere, not in the history of music; one should not confuse him with the genuine masters of that. . . . He _became _a musician, he _became _a poet because the tyrant within him, his actor’s genius, compelled him.” The same might be said of the movie-mad kid from Hibbing, Minnesota. In any case, Dylan’s musical credentials are still being questioned. He could never really sing, people say; he can’t play the guitar particularly well; the songs themselves are said to be simplistic and unoriginal. With both Wagner and Dylan, these rumors of musical incapacity are erroneous, but the perception is telling: talent is not following the usual trajectory.
On the literary side, German speakers routinely wince at the more convoluted passages in Wagner’s librettos and prose writings. Audiences spellbound by “Tristan und Isolde” at the Metropolitan Opera will inevitably stumble over the subtitles (“universal stream of the World-Breath” and so on). Likewise, even Dylan’s greatest songs can look a little flat and feeble on the page. Listening to the third verse of “Simple Twist of Fate” never fails to make me stop in wonder:
But I doubt anyone would think twice about this passage without the gently devastating music that accompanies it—the vocal line that climbs an octave to “gate” as a descending chromatic line unwinds in the bass. (Incidentally, it is more or less the same bass line as the one that propels Dido’s Lament, in Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas”—an aria that ends, “Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.”)
What matters is the explosive fusion of words and music, and in both cases music is the igniting element. In my 1999 article, I argued that the musical component of Dylan’s genius has been consistently undervalued: the songs have an unshakable structure, an old-as-the-hills presence. Furthermore, Dylan’s habit of constantly fiddling with his work in performance, however much it may irritate his longtime fans, gives the songs mobility in time: they are saved from becoming fixed objects, cultural bric-a-brac. You could compare Dylan’s fluidity to the often bewildering metamorphoses that stage directors impose on Wagner operas—variations that the composer may not have explicitly desired but that the works themselves seem to demand, not least because of their dreamlike sense of time and space.
Still, it’s never the music alone. The Prelude to “Tristan” is an immensely seductive stretch of orchestral writing, but it functions as a shimmering backdrop to a drama that delivers shocks of contrast: for example, Isolde rasping, “Who dares to mock me?” as she enters. Dylan, too, burns brightest when music and lyrics operate not in tandem but at cross-purposes. In “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar”—listen to the 1980 live version with Mike Bloomfield—the band barges through a basic blues stomp while Dylan spits out lyrics that wallow in a mystical mire:
You have a feeling, at such moments, that popular tradition has been possessed by an alien, ironic intelligence. It’s unsettling to realize that the head-bopping music and the mind-bending words are products of the same disjunctive imagination. The song becomes a vortex. It thus becomes just a little Wagnerian.
The debate over Dylan’s Nobel will go on for a while, as it should: lockstep praise is never healthy. Chances are, however, that in fifty years the Swedish Academy, which has made any number of dubious and perplexing choices over the years, will have no reason to feel ashamed of the selection of Bob Dylan—and will have no need to explain who he was. Love him or hate him, he is a towering figure in modern culture: his appeal has transcended generations and inspired small libraries of commentary. He deserves the Nobel Prize in Word and Tone, but this will have to do.
