Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan Read Online Free Page B
Author: Ian Bell
anything but. The Swedish master, formerly a psychologist, makes sparse, dazzling arrangements of words to be delivered and received, uttered and heard. So what is it that Dylan does, exactly? Mo Yan’s fictions are rooted in folk tales and given what is described routinely as a ‘hallucinatory’ edge. So why does that sound so familiar? The Nobel, it is sometimes forgotten, is
in
literature. Lexicographers, paid to think twice, will not stretch the definition of the thing beyond ‘the art of composition in prose or verse’, or ‘the art of written work’. Academicians are a little harder to describe.
Judging by some of the press discussion over a song and dance man, a lot of people still define literature by a process of elimination. The only agreed truth is that no one else in Dylan’s ‘field’ – which would be? – could even merit consideration as a candidate. In this game he is too big, or just too old, to be contained within mere popular music, yet simultaneously insufficiently literary to stand alongside others who pattern words obsessively. Where the recent history of the Nobel is concerned, Dylan might also be, quite simply, too American.
Gordon Ball, the Professor of English and Fine Arts at the Virginia Military Institute who first proposed Dylan for the 1997 Nobel, had attempted to deal with some of the arguments in his nomination letter for 1999. Backed by an international committee of like-minded academics, the editor and friend of Allen Ginsberg had reminded the Nobel judges that, in honouring the Italian playwright Dario Fo in 1997, they had already recognised an artist whose work ‘depends on performance for full realisation’. Ball had then recalled the prize given to W.B. Yeats in 1923, despite, as was said at the time, ‘a greater element of song than is usual in Modern English poetry’. Thereafter the professor had invoked the praise given by Yeats to Rabindranath Tagore, a previous laureate, who was, said the Irishman, ‘as great in music as he is in poetry’. Ball could no doubt have piled up more evidence for his thesis. The literature award has been given in years past to historians and philosophers. There is no obvious, definable reason why Dylan’s way with words should be accounted the wrong way. But it would be unwise to risk money on the argument.
Remarking on the speculative betting generated by the 2011 Nobel, the permanent secretary to the Swedish Academy, one Peter Englund, compared Dylan to ‘a literary UFO’. It was a neat way to dismiss a phenomenon and an inadvertent confession. Englund, and perhaps the Nobel Committee itself, didn’t know what to make of Dylan. This said nothing about the singer, but it amounted to a slightly depressing comment on the guardians of world literature in the twenty-first century. Dispassionately, their response throughout has been puzzling. Either they want to say – but do not dare – that the Nobel must not be sullied by popular song, or they don’t want to get into arguments liable to raise questions about their criteria, and hence about the nature of literature itself.
In March of 2013, nevertheless, an interesting fragment of news goes around the world. It seems that Dylan has been elected to join the elite group, generally 250 strong, of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. To most observers of such matters in the United States, this is not just another scintillating bauble to add to the pile in the artist’s crowded trophy cabinet. There is more to it than a hearty handshake and a souvenir photograph. For better than a century the academy has had a reputation, never denied, for disdaining popular culture and anyone deemed too modern for their own or society’s good. Once upon a time, those who ran the institution would not have deigned even to notice Dylan’s existence.
In 2013, in contrast, he is offered honorary rather than full membership simply because the academy cannot decide whether he is worthy – though
in
literature. Lexicographers, paid to think twice, will not stretch the definition of the thing beyond ‘the art of composition in prose or verse’, or ‘the art of written work’. Academicians are a little harder to describe.
Judging by some of the press discussion over a song and dance man, a lot of people still define literature by a process of elimination. The only agreed truth is that no one else in Dylan’s ‘field’ – which would be? – could even merit consideration as a candidate. In this game he is too big, or just too old, to be contained within mere popular music, yet simultaneously insufficiently literary to stand alongside others who pattern words obsessively. Where the recent history of the Nobel is concerned, Dylan might also be, quite simply, too American.
Gordon Ball, the Professor of English and Fine Arts at the Virginia Military Institute who first proposed Dylan for the 1997 Nobel, had attempted to deal with some of the arguments in his nomination letter for 1999. Backed by an international committee of like-minded academics, the editor and friend of Allen Ginsberg had reminded the Nobel judges that, in honouring the Italian playwright Dario Fo in 1997, they had already recognised an artist whose work ‘depends on performance for full realisation’. Ball had then recalled the prize given to W.B. Yeats in 1923, despite, as was said at the time, ‘a greater element of song than is usual in Modern English poetry’. Thereafter the professor had invoked the praise given by Yeats to Rabindranath Tagore, a previous laureate, who was, said the Irishman, ‘as great in music as he is in poetry’. Ball could no doubt have piled up more evidence for his thesis. The literature award has been given in years past to historians and philosophers. There is no obvious, definable reason why Dylan’s way with words should be accounted the wrong way. But it would be unwise to risk money on the argument.
Remarking on the speculative betting generated by the 2011 Nobel, the permanent secretary to the Swedish Academy, one Peter Englund, compared Dylan to ‘a literary UFO’. It was a neat way to dismiss a phenomenon and an inadvertent confession. Englund, and perhaps the Nobel Committee itself, didn’t know what to make of Dylan. This said nothing about the singer, but it amounted to a slightly depressing comment on the guardians of world literature in the twenty-first century. Dispassionately, their response throughout has been puzzling. Either they want to say – but do not dare – that the Nobel must not be sullied by popular song, or they don’t want to get into arguments liable to raise questions about their criteria, and hence about the nature of literature itself.
In March of 2013, nevertheless, an interesting fragment of news goes around the world. It seems that Dylan has been elected to join the elite group, generally 250 strong, of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. To most observers of such matters in the United States, this is not just another scintillating bauble to add to the pile in the artist’s crowded trophy cabinet. There is more to it than a hearty handshake and a souvenir photograph. For better than a century the academy has had a reputation, never denied, for disdaining popular culture and anyone deemed too modern for their own or society’s good. Once upon a time, those who ran the institution would not have deigned even to notice Dylan’s existence.
In 2013, in contrast, he is offered honorary rather than full membership simply because the academy cannot decide whether he is worthy – though
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