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The Case Against Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize Win
Bob Dylan is, without question, a musical genius. He's a legend, a hero, an absolute icon. But a Nobel laureate in literature?
When the Swedish Academy announced this morning that Dylan had won this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, I couldn’t help but think of a bit of writing wisdom that’s trickled down from Aristotle. The contemporary version of this little chestnut goes something like this: The ending of a story should be both surprising and inevitable.
And it certainly was surprising and inevitable. Surprising because, while he’s written numerous books, Bob Dylan is primarily a songwriter and performer, not a poet, playwright, journalist, or fiction writer, and inevitable because, as an absolute titan in the music world who’s long been beloved for his lyrics, odds-makers have had Dylan on their radar for the prize for years.
But the choice has left me feeling cold, and I suspect I’m not alone in feeling that way. In a world in which literary acclaim is scant and awards few and far between, Dylan’s recognition with the greatest global prize in literature strikes me as somewhat pointless. It’s not that I think he’s unworthy, exactly; it’s just that the opportunity cost of giving Dylan the prize is too high.
Beyond an argument over whether Dylan’s music can be considered literature or not (for what it’s worth, I think it can), it's odd that the Swedish Academy would recognize a global celebrity over, say, the Syrian poet Adonis, whose verse breaks from the formal conventions of Arabic poetry to present a wholly singular sensibility, or Japan’s Haruki Murakami, whose novels, stories, and essays so deftly depict and replicate what it feels like to live in a world that often seems long on information but short on answers.
In recognizing Dylan, the hush-hush Swedish Academy seems to have taken a cue from their colleagues at the Norwegian Nobel Committee, the group tasked with awarding the Nobel Peace Prize. They’ve not shied away from controversy. Giving the Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho in 1973; Arafat, Rabin, and Peres in 1994; and to a newly inaugurated Barack Obama in 2009 was certainly controversial, but it drummed up plenty of publicity. People still argue the relative merits of those decisions.