This has been a year of many major
surprises. First, Britain chose to leave the European Union (Brexit) through a
referendum. Then Donald Trump proved most pollsters wrong and won the election
for the US Presidency. In between these two stunners came another huge surprise
when the Nobel committee confounded all and conferred the year’s prize for
literature on the American singer and songwriter, Bob Dylan. The literary world
was immediately awash in dueling opinions and spirited controversy. Americans
who were starved of a literature Nobel prize in over two decades were
nonplussed: how to react to the elevation of a lyricist to a major,
Nobel-laureate poet? People outside of the US, and especially in the developing
world, noted with disappointment the persistent reluctance of the Nobel
committee to look “East of Suez” for an appropriate honoree. And on a personal
level, I revisited a thought I have had for quite a while but been hesitant to
bring up in polite company: is Bob Dylan the American counterpart to Tagore the
lyricist of Rabindrasangeet?
The American literati had felt slighted as a
group for being overlooked by the selectors of the literature prize for more
than twenty years – since 1993, in fact, when Toni Morrison last won it. Their
annoyance and peeve would find expression in occasional sniping and snide
comments directed at the Nobel committee. There was pervasive disappointment
that John Updike (1932 – 2009) did not win the prize, and an annual expectation
of the award going to Philip Roth (1933 -) and more recently, to Don DeLillo
(1936 -). Still the initial reaction to the award going to Bob Dylan was one of
shock and bewilderment.
On one side were arrayed those whom I would
call the purists. They had difficulty imagining Dylan as the worthy successor
to T.S. Eliot (who was born in America), Ezra Pound and even maybe Allen
Ginsberg. The issue ultimately was whether lyrics written for music should (or
can) be elevated to the level of poetry and literature. Writing in the Editorial
Notebook of the New York Times, Anna North was blunt. “Bob Dylan does not
deserve the Nobel Prize in Literature,” she wrote. “He is great because he is a
great musician, and when the Nobel committee gives the literature prize to a
musician, it misses the opportunity to honor a writer.” And then there was this
caustic post on Twitter: “If Bob Dylan can win the Nobel Prize for literature
then I think @Stephen King should get elected to the Rock N’ Roll hall of
fame.”
But Dylan had supporters aplenty for his
honor too, with literary figures having a more expansive view of the definition
of a writer solidly in his corner. Joyce Carol Oats called the award “an
inspired and original choice. His [Dylan’s] music and lyrics have always
seemed, in the deepest sense, ‘literary.’” Salman Rushdie was more effusive.
“From Orpheus to Faiz song and poetry have been closely linked. Dylan is the
brilliant inheritor of the bardic tradition. Great choice #Nobel.” Others saw
elements of Walt Whitman’s poetry and mood reflected in Bob Dylan’s lyrics.
*** *** ***
I grappled in my younger days with the
question of whether writers of lyrics for songs should be elevated to the rank
of full-blown poets. I was unsure of where to place Broadway luminaries like
Alan Jay Lerner and Oscar Hammerstein II, or their contemporaneous, celebrity
Indian lyricists like Gouri Prasanna Majumdar and Sahir Ludhianvi, in the
pantheon of poets. My bias was clear, but there was an obvious counter-example:
Rabindranath Tagore was both a writer of profound and transcendent poems and
the creator of deeply moving lyrics of songs. He had numerous contemporaries,
most notably Nazrul Islam, who straddled the two universes as well.
For a while I tried to reason that Tagore’s
long poems that were not typically set to music were more literary and
insightful than his far shorter lyrics for songs. In fact, I got into a serious
argument once with a friend when I declared that Sonar Tari and Africa – just
to take two examples of Tagore poems not set to music – were unquestionably
superior as poetry to his lyrics meant for songs. But my friend countered with
a simple question: what would you say if someone set those to music? I did not
have a ready answer. The argument was somewhat counterfactual and belonged in the
realm of suppositions, but Sonar Tari, with its gorgeous alliterations and
lyrical cadence, would not cease to be a superior poem if someone perchance
decided to set it to music and sing.
So my opinion was beginning to soften and
become more tolerant when I came across Bob Dylan and his music. I never found
his voice appealing in its tonality, but boy, were the lyrics gorgeous! Dylan
wrote poetry that was often complex and set them to songs. From “Blowing in the
Wind” and “The Times They Are a-Changin’” to “Just Like a Woman” and “Lay Lady
Lay,” he sang songs that covered myriad emotions and was, although numerically
smaller, almost Tagorean in range and scope. I began to wonder if it would be
fair to consider him to be Tagore’s counterpart in American music.
Little did I imagine then that Dylan would
one day follow Tagore and himself become a Nobel laureate in literature. The
Nobel committee, in announcing the prize, cited him for creating “new poetic
expressions in the great American song tradition.” In a subsequent interview,
the committee’s secretary went farther and harked back to Homer and Sappho as
poets to be both read and listened to -- often with music -- and by comparison
put Dylan squarely in what Rushdie called “the bardic tradition.”
India of course has a bardic tradition of
long standing. Ramayana describes how Lava and Kusha, raised by Sita in Rishi
Valmiki’s hermitage, came to Rama’s royal court and sang the Ramayana like
balladeers to their father. The tradition continues to this day with
Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas, for example, which is not just read but often sung.
And much to my surprise, in the 1970’s, the left-wing firebrand Bengali poet,
Subhash Mukhopadhyay, wrote a version of Ramayana for children in rhymed verse
which was set to music, sung by established singers, recorded on an LP disc and
much enjoyed by my children and their peers.
*** *** ***
The surprise of the 2016 Nobel prize in
literature did not end with just its announcement; it continued with Dylan’s
reaction to it. First, he did not have an official response to the award for
some two weeks, confusing and even infuriating the Nobel committee, which found
his stance “arrogant.” A month later, he announced that because of prior
commitments, he would be unable to attend the Awards Ceremony in Stockholm on
December 10. Granted that at 75 years of age, Dylan does not make public
appearances often, but he still performs in an occasional concert. The off-hand
way his decision was made public was, at best, impolite.
Dylan’s is not the first instance of a Nobel
prize recipient declining to attend the Awards Ceremony. Ernest Hemingway did
it in 1954, citing his lack of oratorical skill, and sent a short message to be
read on the occasion. The best-known non-attendance perhaps is that of
Jean-Paul Sartre in 1964. Sartre argued that “the writer must refuse to let
himself be transformed into an institution, even if it occurs under the most
honorable circumstances, as in this case [of the Nobel Prize].” It is not clear
if Dylan’s reticence about the prize has any connection with the feelings
expressed by Sartre. The late news is that for the Awards Ceremony, “he has
written a speech that will be read by the [Swedish] Academy member Horace
Engdahl, and that Patti Smith will perform Dylan’s 1963 song ‘A Hard Rain’s
a-Gonna Fall’.” The song chosen for the occasion is particularly apt for our
times. It is a long lyrical poem that is often dense and complex. Here I
excerpt the first stanza, which is evocative of Banalata Sen by Jibanananda
Das:
“Oh, where have
you been, my blue-eyed son
And where have you
been, my darling young one
I've stumbled on
the side of twelve misty mountains
I've walked and
I've crawled on six crooked highways
I've stepped in
the middle of seven sad forests
I've been out in
front of a dozen dead oceans
I've been ten
thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard
And it's a hard,
and it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard
It's a hard rain's
a-gonna fall.”
All in all, the story’s likely ending looks
like a sensible compromise between a haughty awarding organization (the Swedish
Academy) and an idiosyncratic awardee (Bob Dylan). In planning to surprise and
confound the world with their choice of this year’s recipient, the Swedish
Academy ended up being way more confounded than it ever wished to be!
(December 2016)
[AMITABHA BAGCHI]
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