For many years, my friend Jim Baird taught a class on Bob Dylan at the University of North Texas (UNT) where he worked as an English professor. When Dylan won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2016, many questioned whether a songwriter, or a poet rock star, or a folk singer, or whatever you want to call Mr. Dylan, deserved the momentous award, after all, the award was almost always given to novelists, not musicians.
Along the way, the reader will also discover how hard it is to give an award of this importance and maintain a semblance of fairness, since it’s not only the work of the author that comes into consideration, but nationalities, politics, gender, etc. Following is Jim’s conversant explanation of why the award was well deserved and one that should soften, if not outright convince the most hardened skeptics.
After Jim’s essay, I will post a link to what some consider Mr. Dylan’s most enduring, if not perfect song, “Boots of Spanish Leather.” And no, I don’t have one where Bob Dylan sings it, although they are easy enough to find, I posted one with Joan Baez instead, who I like very much and has the lyrics with it . . . to boot. 🙂
Manuel Taboada, Sept 6, 2020
Bob Dylan, Nobel Laureate—Why?
by Jim Baird
Last October, the world was stunned when the Nobel Prizes for 2016 were announced and Bob Dylan was named the recipient of the Prize for Literature. The Prize for Literature had not been given to an American since 1993; then the award went to Toni Morrison, a novelist. In fact, all the previous American winners, Sinclair Lewis (1930), Eugene O’Neill (1936), Pearl Buck (1937), William Faulkner (1949), Ernest Hemingway (1954), John Steinbeck (1962), and Saul Bellow (1976), were novelists except O’Neill. The prize had never been given to an American poet, if that is what Dylan is, unless you count T.S. Eliot, who won in 1948 and although he was born in St. Louis and grew up in the United States, had lived in England for decades and become a British citizen.
As you can see from this opening paragraph, merely to mention the name of a Nobel laureate is not only to begin an argument about whether the person deserves the award, but, in some cases, even whether the recipient is who they say they are. So before we return to the battleground between warring forms of artistic expression, let’s first look at the reasons for the existence of the Prizes and the criteria established for their bestowal.
Alfred Nobel (1833-1895) was a wealthy Swedish industrialist who is most noted for the development (not the discovery–an important point, because some of the science prizes are awarded for an important discovery) of dynamite. Nitroglycerine was used for big explosions before dynamite, but it is highly unstable and often exploded before it should, causing unwanted destruction and many injuries and deaths. Nobel found that if nitro is mixed with an inert material such as diatomaceous earth, it can be handled safely and exploded when one wishes. This invention revolutionized many industries and became one of the most important inventions of the nineteenth century, making Nobel a very wealthy man. He never married and travelled extensively, developing a global, cosmopolitan attitude toward society and its future.
In 1888 Nobel’s brother died, and a Paris newspaper, thinking that Alfred Nobel had died, printed an obituary which scored him as a merchant of death and a war monger. Thus Nobel was able to see how he would be remembered after his death, and he decided to correct that judgment by leaving most of his large estate to endow annual prizes in the fields of Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature, and Peace. Another prize for contributions in Economics was added in 1968 and named for the organization which established and endowed it, the Central Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Each recipient is honored with a gold (now gold plated) medal presented by the King of Sweden, a degree from the Swedish Academy, a ceremony in his or her honor, an opportunity to make a speech of acceptance, and a cash award, now in six figures. Nobel’s original motive was not only to establish himself as a humanitarian, but to move the entire world in the direction of understanding, good living conditions, unity, and peace. The nineteenth century held that the rapid technological progress of the first half of that era would be accompanied by as well by social progress, so that it did not seem impossible that all the world’s peoples could come together as brothers and sisters. From our current perspective it is easy to see that this viewpoint ignored challenges to its certainty based on colonialism, racism, sexism, Darwinism, Marxism, and several wars, but particularly the upper classes liked to believe in it, and Nobel, stained by the negative impact of dynamite, sought through the awarding of the prizes to help bring about such a world.
So the prizes were described so that it was clear that the recipient had contributed to the advancement of the human race. In the fields of Science and Medicine, it would seem to be clear what constitutes advancement, but exactly what does art of any kind contribute to such progress? Those of us who study art know that one must grant to the creative person the right to express that energy in whatever way or through whatever subject is needed. Also, sometimes the artist needs to give society a kick in the pants. Such a service is usually not recognized immediately as valuable–it could take some time, maybe never, for society to change its judgment.
Nobel gave those responsible for awarding the prize in literature some guidelines. He asked that the artist’s works “tend to toward the ideal” and that they should be of general appeal. Both these criteria push the selection in the direction of the social uplift the prizes were designed to stimulate. Nobel himself wrote poems and plays, and one of his favorite poets was Shelley, who, in such works as “Prometheus Unbound” advanced hid own radical and social agenda. In more mundane housekeeping matters, Nobel said that a prize could not be given posthumously unless the recipient died between the announcing of the prize and the presentation ceremony. Also, a work of art produced during the year prior to the granting of the prize could be noted as of special value representative of the artist’s entire work. Giving the prize to two people at the same time was allowable, but the work of both recipients must be of equal value, another puzzler. In fact, in the science and medicine categories Nobel knew that several people often worked together on experimental projects, but no more than three people could get a prize for the same work. This restriction was reasonable in 1896, when many experiments were done in a laboratory the size of this room. But now, work on parts of major projects may be farmed out to people around the world, each of whom has part in a discovery, but the prize must still be awarded to just three people. Both the awarding of the prize and the money were means of both recognizing and encouraging the artist to grow and contribute.
And those responsible for awarding the prize in Literature are–the Swedish Academy, which makes commendations to the Nobel Prize Committee. The academy, modeled on the French Academy, is imagined as a supreme court on matter of national life and culture. There are eighteen members who are nominated and elected by other members of the academy and selected commoners. Membership is difficult to attain but for life, as one member found when he protested a selection and resigned. He was told that he couldn’t resign–rather liked the secession of Arkansas from the union, the separation is not possible. Three members resigned when the Academy lacked the guts, in their view, to give the prize to Salman Rushdie, still under a death threat from radical Islamists. Technically, they are still members of the Academy. Perhaps the rest of the members decided that political and social controversies are bearable but religious fights should be avoided.
In fact, both the French and Swedish Academies are ignored by the people of their countries (Marxism again) but much respected by the government and academia as a speaker for Sweden on the world stage. Another of Nobel’s strictures was to warn the granters against awarding too many prizes to Scandinavians. Those who grant the prizes must remember that they are designed for the improvement of the world, so their recipients must come from all over. The granting of the prize for Literature magnifies this role.
In spite of its guidelines, the Academy overturned a bucket of eels with its first selection. Neither Nobel, the Academy, or anybody else has been able to define what “the ideal” is, but they chipped away at it for about fifty years. Among those considered for the first prize was Emile Zola, who had a huge body of well received work, but wrote most of poor, uneducated people–coal miners, workers, courtesans. Further, he made few suggestions for the improvement of such people in his works. That’s probably true; his narrative approach was straight naturalism. What suggestions he made as a citizen were socialistic–well, clearly no uplift there. Nobel and his wealthy associates preferred western style democracies as a models for the future society. One improved society by maintaining its mercantilistic structure and raising the living standards of all citizens. So there were political considerations in one of the first rejections. Another first time rejection involved Henrik Ibsen. Besides writing dramas highly critical of modern society, Ibsen wouldn’t do because the Swedish Academy couldn’t award the first prize to a Scandinavian. At the time of Nobel’s death, Norway and Sweden were in a political union which was weak because of Norwegians’ feeling that the union was of little help to them. Nobel had given the awarding of the Peace Prize to the Norwegian Parliament as a way of including the sister country in the effort to improve this bond, but Norway soured on the union and left peaceably in 1905. Unlike some other unions, this one could be dissolved. Another non-recipient of the first prize was Leo Tolstoy, who had written some terrific stuff but was a rabble rouser and a Christian Anarchist. You couldn’t tell what he was going to do next, and world uplift depended, apparently, on stability. Nobel’s stipulation that the prize be awarded so that the person’s creative ability would be stimulated also worked against the granting of the prize as a reward for a lifetime of work, as if an old dotard were about to shamble away into the sunset.
So for that first award in 1901, six years after Nobel’s death. the Academy chose poet Sully Prudhomme, who I am sure you have never heard of unless you have been reading the same books about the Nobel Prizes that I have. Poetry was considered more uplifting than prose, and if the prize were given to a dramatist, it would have to have been Ibsen, so they picked Prudhomme, who wrote lyric poetry in the style of what we would call the Victorian Era. I guess, because I have not read his poetry and so far have found no reason to seek it out, this had a tendency toward the ideal. Because Prudhomme was French, this choice got the Nobel Committee out of the problem of giving the award to a Scandinavian, but started them now the path toward another difficulty.
For over a decade after the first prize, the prize for literature went to a European writer, leading to the complaint that the award had become euro-centric, when the selection was supposed come from a world bursting with powerful artists. Aside from their own cultural backgrounds, the Swedish Academy had the problem of trying to assess writers whose work had been translated into Swedish or another language familiar to them. Sometimes they had to rely on the word of nominators who were familiar with the original language. In 1913 the Academy answered the charge of insularity by breaking out of previous assumptions and awarding the prize to the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. In fact, the work he produced in the previous year (remember that stipulation) was a translation into English of one of his own works, making him a safe selection. The Academy often answers criticism by making an unexpected choice, and this one redeemed the whole enterprise for a while. The committee has done some globetrotting since. Often responding to the charge that it has rewarded too many Europeans by making an unexpected globally based choice, like that to the Australian novelist Patrick White in 1973. Although two Japanese writers have been recipients, the Academy finally corrected a glaring omission by giving the 2014 prize to Chinese writer Mo Yen.
Russia has always been a problem for the Academy, because after Tolstoy there was the Soviet Union, more than a challenge to the kind of world order that Nobel envisioned; in fact, it proposed a world order of its own to replace that of Nobel. By the 1930s, it was clear that the Soviet Union was not just a different type of social and economic system but a totalitarian dictatorship. The first literature prize award based largely on political considerations that involved the Soviet Union was actually given to a Finn. In 1939, freed from its fears of Germany by a non-aggression pact, the Soviet Union invaded Finland over territorial claims. At first the Finns repelled the Russians, but eventually they yielded. The Swedes, who didn’t like the Soviets much either, gave the Literature prize to novelist Franz Sillanpaa in an obvious rebuke to Soviet militarism. Later, when Russian writers were thought qualified for the Prize, it was in part because they were critical of the Soviet regime, so to underline their protests might cause trouble for them at home. Boris Pasternak received the prize in 1958 and Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1970; Pasternak was not allowed to travel to Sweden for fear that he would not return, Solzhenitsyn did get out but did not return. But the most controversial award to a Russian was the one to Mikhail Sholokhov, an officially approved Soviet novelist, in 1965. The Academy justified its choice by noting that in his trilogy about the Cossacks who lived along the Don River, he described the Cossacks as fighting against a central authority that denied them their rights.
In trying to make recent literature fit the Nobel’s wishes, the Academy noted in the 1930s that some writers deserved to be recognized as people who had pushed things in a new direction by being pioneers of new ways of writing and new attitudes toward contemporary life. Hermann Hesse, who had been on the list of nominees for many years, finally received the prize in 1946, although the greatest innovator of the twentieth century, James Joyce, never got it. The choice of Hesse began a period in which the Academy got it right quite often. Andre Gide won in 1947, T.S. Eliot won in 1948, Faulkner in 1949, sort of a shadow Joyce noted for his innovation, and Hemingway in 1954, Camus in 1957, Sartre, who of course refused, in 1964. Samuel Beckett, who is about the most pessimistic great writer of recent years, would never have won under Nobel’s original guidelines, was selected as an innovator in 1969.
Now let’s move to the specific case of Dylan. I’m sure that anyone who would attend this panel would probably think that Dylan deserves any prize that he is likely to receive, even if they are personally unsatisfactory to him. When elected to the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame, he said that he would rather have been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, but, lacking the qualifications for that, he would accept the lesser honor. Some have complained that the Literature Prize should not have been given to a songwriter, although that is only one of his talents as a user of the language, as his liner notes, Tarantula, and Chronicles Part One demonstrate. But the Nobel Committee had already moved beyond print media with its Literature Award for 2007 to Italian Dario Fo, a performance artist whose printed output is limited to sketchy outlines of his presentations, and whose style is based on improvisation. Given this precedent, Dylan seems as voluminous a writer as Balzac. Furthermore, if we consider his role as a pioneer who transformed popular music and turned it into an art form, Dylan qualifies for sure.
Making the case for the value of his work has gone on for fifty five years now, so one could make a case for him in any number of ways. I will do that by examining just one song, “Boots of Spanish Leather.” This song is a gearshift point in Dylan’s development. Still thought of as a folk song singer and writer, he was about to begin writing songs of a very different nature, in part no doubt to escape the naive political and social assumptions that lay behind the Folk Song Movement, as blind in their way as was the Nineteenth Century and Nobel’s assumption that progress was inevitable. The song is a ballad written in the alternating dialogue form familiar in such old folk songs as “Edward, Edward.” The first speaker tells her lover that she is sailing across the ocean and asks what he wants her to bring him as a gift. In the next stanza, the lover who will be left behind insists that he doesn’t want anything but her love, and mostly, he doesn’t want her to leave. Her stanzas reflect her excitement about the new places and things that she will see and are filled with big, lyrical open vowel sounds: she asks him if he wants a gift “either from the mountains of Madrid or from the coast of Barcelona.” By contrast, the lover’s lines are bald and direct, but reflect the pain he will feel with her impending absence: “How can, how can you ask me again, it only brings me sorrow, for the same thing I would ask from you today I would ask again tomorrow,” The two continue to talk past each other until she leaves. Then he receives a letter from her mailed from her ship even before she has reached her destination. She says that she doesn’t know when she will return, and the forgotten lover understands what this really means. “If you my love, must think that-a way, I know your thoughts are not with me, but with the country to where you’re goin'” At this point the song has reflected many qualities and themes of the traditional folk song: ballad form, consciously funky diction (“that-a way” and the dropped “g’s”) the inconstancy of lovers, the pain of a broken heart. Then Dylan adds something else “So take heed, take heed of the western wind, take heed of stormy weather (invoking his own “Girl of the North Country” ) and yes there’s somthin you can send back to me–Spanish boots of Spanish leather,” the title of the song, which has not yet been mentioned, and which now appears in emphatic last position.
Here is something different. The speaker, who has presented himself as a lover who loves for the sake of love, unchanging, and without expectation of reward (sounds rather like a tendency toward the ideal), falls back to the position of simply answering the question with which she has been pestering him and about which he doesn’t care at all. Love is gone, but he can still get something out of this disaster.
Returning to the pesky criterion of “tending toward the ideal,” surely the searfch for truth is part of that goal. In such songs as “Boots of Spanish Leather,” Dylan takes us deep into our emotions to reveal what Nathaniel Hawthorne called “the truths of the human heart.” Often those truths, like those revealed in “Boots of Spanish Leather are unpleasant, perhaps depressing. But we can hardly hope to join with other people to make a society if we do not understand our own limitations and those of others. There, Dylan leads us toward the ideal.