Why Bob Dylan shouldn't have gotten the Nobel Prize for literature(slate.com)
slate.com
Why Bob Dylan shouldn't have gotten the Nobel Prize for literature
https://slate.com/culture/2016/10/why-bob-dylan-shouldnt-have-gotten-the-nobel-prize-for-literature.html
6 comments
I opened the article expecting to agree with headline, but after reading it, I think, based just on the one short example it gives, it is wrong.
The first poem that the author points to as a masterpiece is a tortured exercise in formal meter. I had to read it out loud, very deliberately leaning into the meter to hear any musicality. It is difficult not because the feeling communicated are necessarily hard to communicate, but because the author enjoys the puzzle.
The second piece just flowed effortlessly. The rythym and meaning were immediately grasped, in complete silence, while still rewarding someone who sat with it a little longer.
The first poem that the author points to as a masterpiece is a tortured exercise in formal meter. I had to read it out loud, very deliberately leaning into the meter to hear any musicality. It is difficult not because the feeling communicated are necessarily hard to communicate, but because the author enjoys the puzzle.
The second piece just flowed effortlessly. The rythym and meaning were immediately grasped, in complete silence, while still rewarding someone who sat with it a little longer.
I guess I had the opposite reaction sort of? I'm not sure I was expecting to disagree with it but I was skeptical that they could make a reasonable argument, and came away thinking that their core argument was fundamentally sound, even if someone might disagree with it in the end.
I'm not sure their examples are really the best but for me you could cut out the examples and I think the argument would still stand. Maybe put differently, I'm not sure anyone would be talking about Bob Dylan's work if it were not for the music; that's a counterfactual that's impossible to determine but I suspect it is true. Given that, you have to ask yourself about the role of the music and whether or not you're comparing apples and oranges at some level when you compare poetry with and without music. There's lots of examples throughout history of written poetry and other works that would probably be forgotten were they not integrated into more famous musical works (Schiller's Ode to Joy is a good example, being part of Beethoven's 9th Symphony).
I can see why someone would disagree though. For me the decision always seemed off, and this rationale put into words for me why. I think there was a pattern around that time with major awards but that pertains to several slightly different issues.
I'm not sure their examples are really the best but for me you could cut out the examples and I think the argument would still stand. Maybe put differently, I'm not sure anyone would be talking about Bob Dylan's work if it were not for the music; that's a counterfactual that's impossible to determine but I suspect it is true. Given that, you have to ask yourself about the role of the music and whether or not you're comparing apples and oranges at some level when you compare poetry with and without music. There's lots of examples throughout history of written poetry and other works that would probably be forgotten were they not integrated into more famous musical works (Schiller's Ode to Joy is a good example, being part of Beethoven's 9th Symphony).
I can see why someone would disagree though. For me the decision always seemed off, and this rationale put into words for me why. I think there was a pattern around that time with major awards but that pertains to several slightly different issues.
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I agree. I'm also not familiar with Bob Dylan in more than an abstract "he's a musician" sort of way. The second flowed effortlessy, conveying tone, intention, and imagery.
The music is an essential dimension of the text. To remove it and only leave the words is like deciding whether a movie is great based on its screenplay, or taking all the words of a poem and writing it out as prose. The piece that as created to be heard, and of course it won't be good if you remove a whole dimension of it.
The author's argument seems to be "literature equals words," which I, and evidently the Nobel committee, think is a naive way of viewing literature. Music has always been tied to poetry, and the advent of recorded audio made sound people's primary way of experiencing poetry again, as it was before mass literacy. In my opinion, Dylan brought music back to poetry, not poetry to music (which is how many like to characterize his work).
The author's argument seems to be "literature equals words," which I, and evidently the Nobel committee, think is a naive way of viewing literature. Music has always been tied to poetry, and the advent of recorded audio made sound people's primary way of experiencing poetry again, as it was before mass literacy. In my opinion, Dylan brought music back to poetry, not poetry to music (which is how many like to characterize his work).
You could look it up, at least if you have an NY Times subscription.