George Mason English professor Roger Lathbury was delighted and surprised by the announcement of Bob Dylan's Nobel prize. “As someone who has followed Bob Dylan since the early 1960's,” he says, “I've derived great pleasure from his albums, his writings, and his persona.”
Lathbury was ahead of his time, teaching Dylan in a literature course at Mason forty years ago. “In 1976, I taught a junior-senior level English course in the work of Bertolt Brecht, W. H. Auden, and Bob Dylan. It dealt with popular forms influencing and reflecting so-called ‘high’ art, with social consciousness and the stance of the teller informing the narrative, with the psychological language permeating, and with the extent to which satire compresses and possibly reduces the object satirized.”
Some people have been surprised that a popular musician has been awarded the most prestigious prize in literature, a prize won by the likes of American writers such as Faulkner, Hemingway and Morrison. In Lathbury’s eyes, the award bespeaks a larger recognition of what it means to understand “art.” “The awarding of the prize to Dylan invigorates the arts,” says Lathbury, “in just the way that Dylan's ideas, sounds, and presence invigorates them, blurs lines between mass and select appeal, between poetry and music (in the Renaissance these were not far apart), between genres.”
Lathbury also praises Dylan for the way his art has changed and grown with modern America itself. You may “not need weatherman / To know which way the wind blows,” as Dylan famously sang in “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” but Lathbury sees Dylan as an artist who has helped to define the cultural climate of the United States. He calls Dylan “a bellwether for everything that happened in the 1960's and much that has happened since.” And he remains, Lathbury believes, “a protean figure, telling Martin Scorsese in his biographic film, No Direction Home, that an artist has to keep moving, not to repeat himself or to go for what Auden calls 'the rehearsed response.'"
But what about other great writers who didn’t win the Nobel prize? Does Dylan’s art really surmount the work of great writers James Joyce or Vladimir Nabokov, neither of whom was awarded the Nobel? Or what about living writers such as Phillip Roth or Ursula K. LeGuin? (Betting odds before the announcement had Roth at 7/1 and Dylan at 50/1.) Lathbury’s answer is that, ultimately, it doesn’t matter. “The happy aspect of reading and listening and looking in the arts is that, irrespective of awards, there is always something to read, hear, or see, so wonderful though they be, prizes don't ultimately matter. (I remember Dylan's refusal of a prize, in 1962, for his album The Freewheeling Bob Dylan.)”
And, he concludes, there’s something particularly American in the Nobel committee’s choice. “His ascension to the ranks of Nobel laureates energizes the prize in an American, democratic way. It keeps the arts alive by bringing new material and new modes in and, as in some of Dylan's latest songs, by connecting that material to skeins of cultural reference that ensure its enduring relevance.”
October 19, 2016
