Dan: I’m afraid not as avant-garde as you. Call me unsophisticated, but isn’t Bob Dylan a songwriter? To my mind, the achievement of a great song is that words and music are seamlessly integrated, and you’d ruin the thing if you separated one from the other. But it seems like that is precisely what the Swedish Academy has done — in order to turn Dylan into a “poet” along the lines of Eliot or Milosz or one of the others they’ve honored. I’m also skeptical that it works on the merits. Have you ever recited the lyrics of “Mr. Tambourine Man”? They need that melody.
It’s not that music is a “lower” business than literature. It’s not. But it is different. It’s not knocking Stravinsky to say that he’s not part of our literary canon. He isn’t, because what he did wasn’t literature. Likewise, Philip Roth shouldn’t win a Grammy, and it would be silly if he did. I’m not sure what it gains the Nobel Committee, besides some global Cool Dad points, to blur those lines. Bob Dylan’s oeuvre will be a lasting part of our musical canon, which is as much as any artist could want. Meanwhile, the Academy would do more of a service by honoring any of the fine writers creating exactly the sort of work that Alfred Nobel hoped to promote: “outstanding work in an ideal direction” “in the field of literature.”