He describes great literature at length both to explain his songs and to show why they\u2019 re beyond explanation.<\/b>
\nIf you\u2019 ve never gotten around to sitting down and reading Moby Dick, fear not, Bob Dylan will summarize it for you. Excerpted from his newly released Nobel Lecture in Literature, here is the opening paragraph of his description of Herman Melville\u2019s opus:
Moby Dick is a fascinating book, a book that\u2019s filled with scenes of high drama and dramatic dialogue. The book makes demands on you. The plot is straightforward. The mysterious Captain Ahab\u2014captain of a ship called the Pequod\u2014an egomaniac with a peg leg pursuing his nemesis, the great white whale Moby Dick who took his leg. And he pursues him all the way from the Atlantic around the tip of Africa and into the Indian Ocean. He pursues the whale around both sides of the earth. It\u2019s an abstract goal, nothing concrete or definite. He calls Moby the emperor, sees him as the embodiment of evil. Ahab\u2019s got a wife and child back in Nantucket that he reminisces about now and again. You can anticipate what will happen.
He goes on for about 800 more words relating the events, the characters, and the feel of Moby Dick. Then he gives much the same treatment to Erich Maria Remarque\u2019s World War I novel All Quiet on the Western Front (\u201ca horror story\u2026 a book where you lose your childhood, your faith in a meaningful world, and your concern for individuals\u201d) , and Homer\u2019s The Odyssey (\u201ca strange, adventurous tale of a grown man trying to get home after fighting in a war\u201d) . In the 27-minute audio clip released by the Nobel committee, you can hear Dylan deliver these Cliff Notes of classics in his extremely distinctive drawl over soft piano tinkling.
The lecture marks the fittingly odd culmination of Dylan\u2019s saga with the Nobel Committee. Last October, the Swedish Academy named him as the recipient of writing\u2019s top honor, triggering think-piece wars over whether music can be literature and then devolving into a comedy of manners. One committee member called Dylan \u201cimpolite and arrogant\u201d for not returning the Nobel committee\u2019s phone calls immediately; he skipped the main prize ceremony, though he did send a statement. The awarding of 8 million in Swedish krona that accompanies the Nobel was contingent on Dylan delivering a lecture by June 10\u2014a requirement it was not clear he would fulfill until his monologue arrived online Monday.
Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize Isn’t About Music
The speech itself is typically Dylan in a few ways: It seems perched between sincerity and trolling, draws from Western culture\u2019s most elemental influences, and works according to its own logic. Reaction has been mixed; some people have pointed out that Dylan\u2019s writing has the sophistication of a high-school book report (e.g.: \u201c Moby Dick is a seafaring tale. One of the men, the narrator, says, \u2018Call me Ishmael.\u2019 \u201d) . But part of the point surely is in the colloquial style of his retelling: He\u2019s turning tomes into folktales. He\u2019s also arguably doing something more subtle. Through summary, he\u2019s showing how literature and song defy summary.
The lecture opens with him \u201cwondering exactly how my songs related to literature\u201d and then turns to his musical influences. There\u2019s Buddy Holly, who at a concert, Dylan says, \u201clooked me right straight dead in the eye, and he transmitted something.\u201d There\u2019s the folk and blues legend Lead Belly, whose song \u201cCotton Fields\u201d \u201cchanged my life right then and there.\u201d And there are the American folk traditions: \u201cragtime blues, work songs, Georgia sea shanties, Appalachian ballads and cowboy songs.\u201d When he discovered folk tunes, he says, he realized they \u201cwere different than the radio songs that I\u2019 d been listening to all along. They were more vibrant and truthful to life.\u201d This \u201cvernacular\u201d formed the basis for his own songwriting: \u201cNone of it went over my head\u2014the devices, the techniques, the secrets, the mysteries.\u201d
Then he turns to literature, citing the novels he read in grammar school as an important influence: \u201cThe themes from those books worked their way into many of my songs, either knowingly or unintentionally.\u201d It\u2019s up to the listener to propose parallels between his songs and the books he cites, and it\u2019s not too difficult to do so. \u201cBob Dylan\u2019s 115th Dream, \u201d for example, obviously pays tribute to Moby Dick with its character Captain Arab. But more than that, what Dylan describes as Melville\u2019s collaging of \u201cZodiac symbols, religious allegory, stereotypes\u201d is a decent definition of \u201cDylanesque\u201d lyrics.
Dylan\u2019s connection to All Quiet on the Western Front is also fairly clear, with his anti-war lyrics sharing the novel\u2019s indignant, despairing spirit. \u201cYou\u2019 ve come to despise that older generation that sent you out into this madness, into this torture chamber, \u201d Dylan says of the book\u2019s protagonist, but the \u201cyou\u201d could also be Boomer youth rebelling against the Vietnam War. Certainly the surreal carnage depicted in a song like \u201cA Hard Rain\u2019s A-Gonna Fall\u201d isn\u2019 t far off from his rendering of Remarque\u2019s descriptions: Dylan sang of \u201cguns and sharp swords in the hands of young children, \u201d and now writes of \u201cyoung boys who are of little military use, but they\u2019 re draftin\u2019 \u2018em anyway because they\u2019 re running out of men.\u201d As for The Odyssey, Odysseus is a typical Dylan character: \u201ca travelin\u2019 man, but he\u2019s making a lot of stops, \u201d as he puts it.
But Dylan\u2019s not just trying to illuminate some of the themes of his work. With these knotty book summaries, rendered in prose that\u2019s alternately plain and purple, crammed with details, seething with feeling, he\u2019s paying tribute to art\u2019s irreducibility. To close, he reflects, \u201cI don\u2019 t have to know what a song means… When Melville put all his Old Testament, biblical references, scientific theories, Protestant doctrines, and all that knowledge of the sea and sailing ships and whales into one story, I don’t think he would have worried about it either\u2014what it all means.\u201d He also points out that \u201csongs are unlike literature \u2026 lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page.\u201d So it may be significant that this lecture arrives as a sound file with background music and Dylan\u2019s one-of-a-kind phrasing. To fully appreciate what he\u2019s saying, you can\u2019 t read someone else\u2019s write-up. You\u2019 ve got to listen.<\/p>\n

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