That’s right. Bob Dylan. Literature.
He’s a man known for his lyrical indecipherability, whose distinctive style has earned him many accolades, not least of which is a very good parody by Weird Al himself. Dylan is a musician, not a novelist, poet, or short story writer. I’ll be the first to admit that as a writer myself, I’m a purist when it comes to all things literary. Musicians are musicians, writers are writers. Lyrics are not the same as poetry or storytelling, though there is certainly overlap there.
But Bob Dylan deserved it.
I’m not entirely sure what the Nobel Prize selection process entails, but I can only imagine the conversation hinging on the fact that Bob Dylan is not just the first, but the only, musician in memorable history who could have pulled off this win without incurring the rage of the masses. He's been considered a Nobel Prize long-shot for years, but no one thought it would ever actually happen.
Even other beautiful lyricists could not have called themselves literary. But there is something deeply compelling about the quality of Dylan’s songwriting that brings it beyond the capacity of mere song.
(Yes, I am aware that Bob Dylan has also written conventional books, although I’ve never read them. But that doesn’t negate the fact that the vast majority of his work, his path to fame and what he’s known for, is built on music.)
I don’t listen to Bob Dylan very often. I’m familiar with Blonde on Blonde and a handful of songs from other albums, while knowing full well that there are countless Dylan songs, and entire albums, that I haven't heard yet. But it is interesting to note when I listen to Dylan. When I’m going through anything rough or unsettling in life, I turn to his voice and lyricism for a sort of familiar stability; a grounding sensation from those earthy lyrics. His words feel like answers, and I turn to them at times when I also seek comfort from beloved books I’ve read before, like The Sun Also Rises, or Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger.
From a writer’s perspective, there are certain qualities to Dylan’s writing that make it fill a literary niche. The critically important one is the simplicity of his storytelling. His lyrics are often rife with metaphor and vaguery, but the presentation of story is ultimately simple. This is a mark of most, if not all, competent literary storytellers. They tell the story and let it succeed on its own merits, rather than using the distracting bells and whistles less competent writers often rely on.
Look at Dylan’s words. His verses may build metaphors around objects and images; his choruses may build on those metaphors ("tangled up in blue") or state their meaning more simply ("I want you"). But he is never caught up in over-explanation, in flowery language, in laying things out for the listener in the heavy-handed way many songwriters do. That heavy-handed method often works well for other singers because we listen to songs, and cannot pore over them on paper to dig out their meaning at our own pace the way we can when we read (unless, of course, we look up the lyrics online later, which was not always an option). But Dylan puts things as they are, and trusts the listener to follow along with him.
All the best writers I can think of follow this rule of simplicity. They state what happened. They let the merits of the story stand on its own. A mark of bad writing is an over-reliance on detailed description, or unnecessary introspective flashbacks, or other hand-holding that takes the reader out from the story itself. The overabundance of description in bad fantasy writing is an easy example. It can still make for fun reading, but it’s not literary. And literary is what wins Nobel Prizes.
The works of the greatest writers, whether Nobel laureates or not—Baldwin, Hemingway, Hugo, Nabokov, Achebe, Morrison (I could go on)—rely on the merits of story, not flowery language. They do not explain their metaphors. They do not hold the reader’s hand. They tell compelling stories in beautiful ways, thus constituting art. Some, like Victor Hugo, may delve into immense asides, long descriptions, and florid wordiness at time, but these are like Dylan’s verses, where the mass of details usually resides. In the scenes of action, where the story really happens, things are stated more simply so that the story can speak for itself, informed by all the detail that the reader already has in mind from previous pages. These are like Dylan’s choruses, which give more straightforward language to stitch together the details we have been given.
This is a difficult thing to explain, something best done by a Dylan scholar with deeper knowledge of his life and work than I have. But as a writer and avid reader, I can sense the literary quality of his writing, without being able to explain in concisely or precisely. It's not just that Dylan was a political revolutionary, a man of unquestionable talent, and a unique voice in a time of rapid change. These things have served his career well, but would not have won him a Nobel Prize. It is the fact that he writes something that transcends song. It might even transcend description. But it does not transcend human understanding.
Bob Dylan is the 2016 Nobel Laureate in Literature. Don’t think twice—it’s all right.
