What took them so long? That's the only question for the Nobel committee that finally chose Bob Dylan to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.
It's not as if some new work suddenly clinched the deal. Dylan has been recognised by anyone who cares about words - not to mention music - since the 1960s, when he almost immediately earned an adjective as his own literary and musical school: Dylanesque. His most recent album of his songs was "Tempest," back in 2012; he has since been paying tribute to the so-called Great American Songbook of pre-rock pop, like "Shadows in the Night," his 2015 album of songs Frank Sinatra had sung. But there's no question that Dylan has created a great American songbook of his own: an e pluribus unum of high-flown and down-home, narrative and imagistic, erudite and earthy, romantic and cutting, devout and iconoclastic, finger-pointing and oracular, personal and universal, compassionate and pitiless. His example has taught writers of all sorts - not merely poets and novelists - about strategies of both pinpoint clarity and anyone's-guess free association, of telegraphic brevity and ambiguous, kaleidoscopic moods.
A longtime stumbling block for Dylan's literary recognition - which eventually didn't matter to the Pulitzers (2008) or the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2013) and now to the Nobels - has been that he is a songwriter, so his words are best heard with his music. Another is that his voluminous output includes some clinkers and throwaways. Both are absolutely true, and so what?
Dylan's good stuff, in all its abundance, is the equal - and envy - of countless writers who work strictly on the page. He can tell stories in a cascade of images, like "Tangled Up in Blue"; he can come at an elusive emotion from all sides and then twist the knife, as he does in "Desolation Row"; he can be the kindliest of confidants, as he is in "To Make You Feel My Love" and "Forever Young"; or he can be the most savage of adversaries, as in "Positively 4th Street" or "Pay in Blood."
As much as any literary figure to emerge in the 20th century, he has written words that resonate everywhere: quoted by revolutionaries and presidents, hurled by protesters, studied by scholars and taken to heart in countless private moments: thoughts like "When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose." That line, like so much of Dylan's work, speaks to the marginalised: to underdogs, outsiders, misfits. "To live outside the law," he advises, "You must be honest."
It's not as if some new work suddenly clinched the deal. Dylan has been recognised by anyone who cares about words - not to mention music - since the 1960s, when he almost immediately earned an adjective as his own literary and musical school: Dylanesque. His most recent album of his songs was "Tempest," back in 2012; he has since been paying tribute to the so-called Great American Songbook of pre-rock pop, like "Shadows in the Night," his 2015 album of songs Frank Sinatra had sung. But there's no question that Dylan has created a great American songbook of his own: an e pluribus unum of high-flown and down-home, narrative and imagistic, erudite and earthy, romantic and cutting, devout and iconoclastic, finger-pointing and oracular, personal and universal, compassionate and pitiless. His example has taught writers of all sorts - not merely poets and novelists - about strategies of both pinpoint clarity and anyone's-guess free association, of telegraphic brevity and ambiguous, kaleidoscopic moods.
A longtime stumbling block for Dylan's literary recognition - which eventually didn't matter to the Pulitzers (2008) or the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2013) and now to the Nobels - has been that he is a songwriter, so his words are best heard with his music. Another is that his voluminous output includes some clinkers and throwaways. Both are absolutely true, and so what?
Dylan's good stuff, in all its abundance, is the equal - and envy - of countless writers who work strictly on the page. He can tell stories in a cascade of images, like "Tangled Up in Blue"; he can come at an elusive emotion from all sides and then twist the knife, as he does in "Desolation Row"; he can be the kindliest of confidants, as he is in "To Make You Feel My Love" and "Forever Young"; or he can be the most savage of adversaries, as in "Positively 4th Street" or "Pay in Blood."
As much as any literary figure to emerge in the 20th century, he has written words that resonate everywhere: quoted by revolutionaries and presidents, hurled by protesters, studied by scholars and taken to heart in countless private moments: thoughts like "When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose." That line, like so much of Dylan's work, speaks to the marginalised: to underdogs, outsiders, misfits. "To live outside the law," he advises, "You must be honest."
© 2016 The New York Times