Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan Read Online Free Page A

contemporaries there is a short list of those who have simply ploughed on – Neil Young, Paul McCartney, the egregiously avid Stones – and a vastly long list of the faded and fallen. His case was different. Beginning with his initial work on
Time Out of Mind
in 1996, and pressing on to
Tempest
in 2012, he forged another of those 16-year careers, became still another ‘Bob Dylan’, and vindicated himself. Critics fell into the habit of exhuming and adapting a famous line from Minnesota’s F. Scott Fitzgerald and his unfinished
The Love of the Last Tycoon
(1941). 4 As it turned out, there was a second act in at least one American life.
    In these pages it will be argued, among other things, that in the process Dylan created a body of work – less sumptuous, less startling, less intoxicating – to match any of the products of his 1960s. He did it, moreover, while contending with everything, the whole accreted legend, the multiplicity of identities, that ‘Bob Dylan’ had come to mean. He did it while contending with age, with the fact of time, and with the burden of memory.
    So we look again for the answer to the old, plain and perplexing question: how did he do that?
    *
    The Swedish Academy does not publicise its discussions or chat about the tastes of its 18 members when they are done selecting the Nobel laureate in literature. Dylan has been nominated each year since 1997, and each year the arguments over his place on the bookies’ lists have resumed. How can one whose art depends on pop music be suitable for the highest honour available to a writer? Where Dylan is concerned, the game is now ancient: poet or not? If a poet, of which variety, and by which criteria? Specifically, how can poetry be said to exist if it fails to ‘survive’ on the page?
    Some still talk and write as though the very question demeans the august prize. Some of Dylan’s own admirers meanwhile dismiss the entire debate, as though to clear the ground for bigger claims.
Of course
he is not a poet, they will say, but he is the greatest songwriter in a golden age for songwriting and that alone is a big enough thing. Talking to the fan magazine
Isis
in 2005, the author and Dylan scholar Greil Marcus made the familiar point. The prize is for
literature
(it turns out). Our boy sings, performs, and writes
songs
. Besides, said the scholar, Dylan has plenty of awards and no shortage of money. Marcus argued that ‘thousands’ of novelists were more deserving. Elsewhere, he had said confidently that Dylan’s songs are not ‘true literature’. 5
    Dylan doesn’t need the Nobel and the Nobel doesn’t need Dylan: point taken. But even implicit questions need answers. If you cannot place him among the poets, where would ‘Desolation Row’ figure in the development of post-war popular songwriting? It’s very hard to say. If you cannot set Dylan among writers of verse, what has all the fuss, 50 long years of it, been about? For some critics, that’s even harder to say. And what is this thing, this self-evidently exclusive thing, we call literature (if the Swedish Academy so pleases)? Where American poetry is concerned, a mid-century professorial parlour game, sometimes still misidentified as a ‘New Criticism’, has done its reductive work on art.
    Tomas Tranströmer, an octogenarian Swede for whom the honour is long overdue, wins the Nobel in 2011. A year on, the honour and eight million kronor go to Mo Yan, the first Chinese novelist to be recognised, a writer controversial for his failure to be politically controversial in his homeland. In the present context, the fact leaves a trace of irony. On each occasion, nevertheless, there is no sign that Dylan gives a damn. He accepts his honours, when time allows, but shows no inclination to argue over definitions of his work.
    Tranströmer, though, is a
real
poet (who once wrote of ‘Jangling tambourines of ice’, and elsewhere of being ‘north of all music’). His status is not in dispute: