We were deliciously surprised last week to hear that Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature, as were any number of celebrated wordsmiths, from Salman Rushdie to Joyce Carol Oates to Stephen King.
Not everyone, however, was overjoyed.
Novelist Irvine Welsh, the author of Trainspotting, was exceptionally bitter, calling the decision “an ill-conceived nostalgia award wrenched from the rancid prostates of senile, gibbering hippies.”
While we’ll happily leave Welsh’s overwrought prose to someone else’s review, His Bitterness did go on to make a legitimate and debatable point: Can musical lyricism be considered literature?
If one considers literature to be the exclusive domain of those who write poetry or prose — especially fiction and especially of the consciously “literary” variety — then the answer would clearly be no.
But if one broadens the definition of literature to include what literature has been over the centuries and millennia, and if one evaluates that writing on more generous criteria than Welsh apparently does, then the answer would clearly be yes.
Parenthetically, those who grant Nobel Prizes for Literature have themselves already broadened those criteria. Previous winners have included non-fiction authors, playwrights, even — gasp! — journalists. There is no compelling reason why lyricists like Bob Dylan — and such fellow songwriters as Paul Simon, Leonard Cohen and Bruce Springsteen — shouldn’t be on the list.
If one judges “literature” by aesthetic standards, then Dylan is clearly eligible.
Anyone who has paid even minimal attention to his work knows that very few writers in any media are as skilled at wordplay as he is. His use of symbol and imagery are masterful. More significant, his ability to convey his meaning and intent, very literally to the masses, is virtually unprecedented for his generation.
If one judges “literature” in terms of the impact it has on those exposed to it, then Dylan is a shoo-in.
He not only reflected and articulated the times in which he lived — the tumult, restlessness, idealism, defiance of authority and even the naiveté of those who came of age in the 1960s — in many ways he charted its direction.
Dylan actively used his art as a force for social change, in the best tradition of such masters as Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne and John Steinbeck, authors whose literary credentials are beyond any credible challenge.
Ultimately, asking “but is it literature?” is akin to asking “but is it art?”
Over and above the obvious fact that songwriting is, after all, writing, the an-swers must necessarily be subjective in the end.
Beauty — like art and literature — are in the eyes of the beholder. In our eyes, Bob Dylan’s amazing body of work is all three.
Copyright © 2016 by the Intermountain Jewish News
