NYT on the Swedish Academy's 'Dylan adventure'

After the Swedish Academy announced Bob Dylan's 2016 Nobel Prize in literature, the literary world dove into a state of shock. Dylan's award brought the age-old question "Are song lyrics a form of literature?" to conversations outside of classrooms and to the pages of national newspapers. At the New York Times, Ben Sisario details Dylan's (and the Swedish Academy's) journey, from the songwriter's silence to his lecture delivery. "In the speech, which is just over 4,000 words long — and about 27 minutes, in an accompanying recording — Mr. Dylan shows that he has been thinking about the question too, and gave a defense detailing his literary and musical influences, and ending on a note that every lit major should know," Sisario writes. From there:

He begins with Buddy Holly, a hero that may surprise the professors but will be familiar to any Dylan fan. Holly presented the archetype of a performer who melded country, rock, and rhythm and blues, and gave an early inspiration. Expanding on a brief line when accepting the Grammy for album of the year in 1998, Mr. Dylan traced Holly’s inspiration to a single glance he received from the musician when he was a teenager known as Bobby Zimmerman.

“He looked me right straight dead in the eye,” Mr. Dylan wrote, “and he transmitted something. Something I didn’t know what. And it gave me the chills.” (On the audio recording, Mr. Dylan’s voice is accompanied throughout by jazzy piano chords.)
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He then chronicles the influence of Leadbelly and folk music before turning to several literary war horses that he said he read “way back in grammar school”: “Moby-Dick,” “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “The Odyssey.”

“Moby-Dick,” as he describes it, gave Mr. Dylan the tool of intertwining character voices and the theme of rebirth through a narrator. “Ahab gets tangled up in the harpoon lines and is thrown out of his boat into a watery grave,” he writes. But Ishmael survives the shipwreck, “in the sea floating on a coffin.” The theme “works its way into more than a few of my songs,” he wrote, but gave no examples. (That sound you hear is a dozen dissertations being started.)

Continue at the New York Times.

We'd be remiss if we didn't provide a slice of the lecture itself and a link over to Swedish Academy to read the piece in full. Dylan begins this lecture talking about his early influences—grammar school required reading and the artists who he idolized as a young adult. "If I was to go back to the dawning of it all, I guess I'd have to start with Buddy Holly. Buddy died when I was about eighteen and he was twenty-two. From the moment I first heard him, I felt akin," Dylan writes. And from there:

I felt related, like he was an older brother. I even thought I resembled him. Buddy played the music that I loved – the music I grew up on: country western, rock ‘n' roll, and rhythm and blues. Three separate strands of music that he intertwined and infused into one genre. One brand. And Buddy wrote songs – songs that had beautiful melodies and imaginative verses. And he sang great – sang in more than a few voices. He was the archetype. Everything I wasn't and wanted to be. I saw him only but once, and that was a few days before he was gone. I had to travel a hundred miles to get to see him play, and I wasn't disappointed.

He was powerful and electrifying and had a commanding presence. I was only six feet away. He was mesmerizing. I watched his face, his hands, the way he tapped his foot, his big black glasses, the eyes behind the glasses, the way he held his guitar, the way he stood, his neat suit. Everything about him. He looked older than twenty-two. Something about him seemed permanent, and he filled me with conviction. Then, out of the blue, the most uncanny thing happened. He looked me right straight dead in the eye, and he transmitted something. Something I didn't know what. And it gave me the chills.

I think it was a day or two after that that his plane went down. And somebody – somebody I'd never seen before – handed me a Leadbelly record with the song "Cottonfields" on it. And that record changed my life right then and there. Transported me into a world I'd never known. It was like an explosion went off. Like I'd been walking in darkness and all of the sudden the darkness was illuminated. It was like somebody laid hands on me. I must have played that record a hundred times.

Continue at the Nobel Prize website.