You may have heard that on October 13 of this year, the Nobel Committee for Literature announced that it would bestow this year's prize on one Robert Zimmerman, alias Bob Dylan.
That was 11 days ago. You may also have heard that Mr. Dylan has since refused to acknowledge his award. Well, "refused" seems like too active of a word; "ignored" may be more accurate. Hardcore ignored. Bob Dylan, it seems, has been screening calls from Sweden as if they were creditors collecting the mortgage and not, you know, granting him one of the most prestigious awards in the world.
The situation is not entirely unprecedented. Jean-Paul Sartre refused the award when he won it in 1964. Albert Einstein took the prize and money but skipped out on the award ceremony in 1922. But at least they acknowledged the fact that they'd won at all and, presumably, answered the Committee's notices. But outside of an opportunistic publication of his complete lyrics (one that was itself removed from Dylan's website recently), Bob's said nary a word, despite the fact that he's played several concerts since the announcement of his win and has been the center of a vicious media frenzy, which has led one member of the Nobel Committee to call him "impolite" and "arrogant."
All of this is hilarious and A+ entertainment for multiple reasons, not the least of which is that Dylan's being "impolite" and "arrogant" was an absolutely predictable outcome; in fact, anyone who knows Bob Dylan's career at all should have expected some major-league trolling from the guy. Thumbing his nose at those who consider themselves important is something that's defined Dylan's mystique since at least his mid-'60s electric turn. The Nobel Committee's sputtering disbelief that one of their laureates wouldn't find their award all that interesting or important bears no little resemblance to the the bevy of befuddled, self-important journalists who try to crack the Dylan enigma in Dont Look Back.
Because let's be honest: as much as the Nobel Prize in Literature is a valuable platform for giving a platform to important but little-known writers, it's also at least as much an instrument of academic elitism: a self-declared authority of taste, a metric for how cultured and/or educated one is ("But of course, as Kertész writes..."). And in fairness to the prize, selecting Dylan this year seems to be, in part, a gesture toward a more egalitarian award by inviting songwriting under the umbrella of poetry. But that doesn't change the fact that the prize is exactly the sort of inflated, arbitrary marker of upper-crustiness that feels great to tear down to size, which is (intentionally or not) exactly what Dylan's accomplishing here. Irreverence is awesome, cathartic, and fun. Seeing the self-assured hilariously robbed of their self-assuredness is a wonderful feeling, and it's exactly why we put principals, bosses, and mayors in the dunk tank and not, I dunno, janitors. Being sardonic and flippant is an essential and powerful equalizing force in a world with few legitimate equalizers.
So I'm rooting for Dylan here.
And yet.
A few of my friends have argued that awarding Dylan the Literature prize makes that prize meaningless by virtue of broadening the definition of "literature" beyond any helpful scope. I disagree with their reasons (you mean songwriting can be literary, too?), but it's with a sort of melancholy reluctant that the more I think about this situation, the more I think they're right in general: Dylan is edging the Nobel Prize in Literature toward meaninglessness. There's an "emperor's new clothes" quality to any award, especially artistic ones: these things are all important because enough people have agreed that they are important. I could invent an award tomorrow for any random thing (The O'Malley Award for Best Knoxville Area Transit Bus Route [debut laureate: Route 24: Inskip]), and if I somehow mustered up enough people worldwide to be passionate about excellence in KAT route service, it could conceivably become as important as the Nobel Prize without any shift in what exactly that prize is. Take away people's respect for the award and it magically becomes no longer important. There's nothing intrinsic to these awards (and heck, even the money Nobel laureates receive has a fiat value that we've all pretty much just agreed exists). So when Bob Dylan acts like Bob Dylan and gives the freakin' Nobel Prize an icy shoulder, he's making the whole enterprise look foolish and petty and reminding us that there's really no such thing as the freakin' Nobel Prize—without our feeding the award's prestige, the Nobel Prize in Literature is just another title someone made up. Does anyone else here notice how wrinkly and pale the emperor is?
And that, as I've already said, is great and hilarious and cool, but it's also kind of, like... sad? As much as these awards can be stuffy and elitist and whatever, there's also something undeniably cozy about everyone in the literary world (and, to a certain extent, the culture at large) upholding this one award as a standard-bearer to be lauded and scrutinized and aspired to. In an age of increasing media accessibility, this sort of aesthetic gate-keeping and sign-posting is pretty useful (given five authors to chose to read, I'm going to chose the Nobel-winning one), not to mention unifying. Awards can only exist where there also exist shared values, and shared values are nice. These are how groups are formed. Without shared values, any community is just a bunch of individuals existing adjacent to one another. At least we could be a bunch of individuals existing adjacent to one another who also happen to all care about the Nobel Prize in Literature. Dylan's hijinks make even this latter prospect less likely.
This is the casualty of irreverence, I guess.
The trajectory of postmodernism into whatever cultural moment it is we're having right now is democratization, the undermining of traditional demarcations of power and value in order to point out the essential arbitrariness of those demarcations—within the arts, this is the convergences of high and low culture, how traditional trash can mix it up with classical compositions; there's nothing inherently better about traditional literary fiction over popular horror paperbacks, only the different metrics we use to evaluate them. And that's a really, really important thing to do—metaphysics aside (I'm a practicing Christian after all, and my beliefs about God, while not irrelevant, are completely beyond the scope of this post), authorities have a tendency to be exclusionary and oppressive, and they need to be brought down to size. But there's also something to be said for what's lost when we do so. At times, I kinda miss what we're losing (have lost): canons, legends, prestige, the Cinderella parable of toiling away until you're recognized as meaningful. I mean, yeah, those things in abundance can crowd out life, and the smart alecks, satirists, and parodists. I love the smart alecks, satirists, and parodists, too.
But can't we have both?
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