By Stephen Pate – While many congratulated Bob Dylan on the announcement of his 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, some of Philip Roth’s fans were outraged.
“The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016 was awarded to Bob Dylan “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.” said the august Nobel Prize site.
“He can be read and should be read, and is a great poet in the English tradition” said Sara Danius, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, was interviewed by freelance journalist Sven Hugo Persson about the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan. You can watch her interview on YouTube.
The Twitterverse went wildly opining that Philip Roth, the US novelist who’s early success was plying the Jewish consciousness, was more worthy than Dylan. 27 Tweets That Perfectly Capture How Baffling Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize Win Is.
For a more complete read of what people say Roth is or should be thinking, see Twitter.
As one wag, put it “Phillip Roth could not be reached for comment.”
Awards always bring out the accolades and detractors. It’s the way criticism works.
Notwithstanding the critics, sour grapes or otherwise, Bob Dylan is highly acclaimed with more than 1,000 books published discussing his works. Dylan as a literary creator is taught at more than 250 universities.
“His song “Desolation Row” is in the 2006 Oxford Book of American Poetry, and “Mr. Tambourine Man” is in the tenth edition of The Norton Introduction to Literature. Quartz
“Packed with allusion and multi-layered meaning, songs like “Desolation Row” and “Mr. Tambourine Man” are fodder for critics like the legendary Christopher Ricks, who argued for Dylan’s status as a poet in Lyrics: 1962-2001. “A day doesn’t go by when I don’t listen to Dylan or at least think about him and his art,” Ricks told The New York Times when his 2003 book Dylan’s Visions of Sin came out.”
Christopher Ricks is “the Professor of the Humanities at Boston University (US) and Co-Director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University, and was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford (England) from 2004 to 2009. He is the immediate past-president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics.“ Wikipedia.
Ricks knows his poetry. He has published works on Milton, T.S. Elliot, Keats and Tennyson among dozens of other major poets. He is past editor of the Oxford Book of English Verse, The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse, and his own book dissecting Bob Dylan’s literary output Visions of Sin. I covered “Visions of Sin” in an earlier article – The Poetry of Bob Dylan Christopher Ricks: Dylan’s Vision of Sin
Other scholars weigh in to the discussion. “He’s a historical magician — a writer who’s capable of creating this zone where it’s 1935 and 1835 and right now and tomorrow,” said Sean Wilentz. “That’s his genius.” Los Angeles Times
“Wilentz also pointed to “Dylan’s Visions of Sin,” a weighty exegesis by British literary scholar Christopher Ricks, as a driver of the star’s growing recognition as an important arranger of words.”
Even the British give Dylan high credentials. “If the former professor of poetry at Oxford University Christopher Ricks’s interest in Dylan has been treated with a certain bemusement, it might have less to do with its subject than the fact that his books on Dylan occasionally seem a bit barmy.”
“Anyone who’s dutifully struggled through the bit in Dylan’s Visions of Sin where he spends four pages dissecting the lyrics of All the Tired Horses, which consist in their entirety of “two lines of words followed by a musing hmmm sound that might be one line or two”, will concur. The Guardian
None of this will, of course, silence the critics which makes no difference to Bob Dylan’s tens of millions of fans. Despite being in his 70’s, Dylan has almost 7 million followers on Facebook.
Bill Zebub
And the award for the most misleading headline goes to…
Tom Lennox
Yea disgusting NJN Network..I’ll avoid your posts.
Stephen Pate
You must admit it’s a great pun for the literary
John Mulligan
I think Roth knows Dylan is too insignificant to discuss
Stephen Pate
This is the conundrum for novelists. They write books that take a year or years to write and have low readership. “The average U.S. nonfiction book is now selling less than 250 copies per year and less than 2,000 copies over its lifetime.” Berrett-Koehler Publishers No matter what writers say, its all about audience and sales. Audience gives the writer fame and sales make money.
The audience for books is shrinking. “Fifteen years ago, Philip Roth guessed there were at most 120,000 serious American readers—those who read every night—and that the number was dropping by half every decade.” NY Times
Take a year to appeal to 120,000 people or write a song in a week or days that has an audience of 100’s of millions – that’s the conundrum for writers. Dylan has proved that literate songs with complex themes, symbolism and stories can reach huge audiences.
Apart from changing the importance of song writing and influencing others, Dylan has sold more than 44 million records and he is not even close to the highest sales. Lennon and McCartney songs have sold 270 million copies. No novelist in the past 100 years has had the same number of readers or sales.
As Roth speculated, books are declining and song writing is on the ascent. Bob Dylan has affected the thinking of more people in a meaningful way than Roth or any modern novelist. It’s a sad story but culture changes and that’s life.
Thelonious
“write a song in a week or days” – that’s a rather condescending and trivializing assumption. One not necessarily supported by facts
Mr. Muerte
The Swiss academy is promoting illiteracy and you rejoice. Giving the Nobel to Bob Dylan is absurd because he is not a writer nor a poet and considering Dylan a literary figure is an act of ignorance. Your message seems to be: reading is so hard and so lame ( the proof is that people read less these days) that listening to pop music with lyrics is equivalent or better to reading a great writer. Shameful.
Stephen Pate
Shameful – worthy of or causing shame or disgrace #hardly. A different opinion yes.