Bob Dylan's Acceptance Speech to the Swedish Academy

 

Good evening, everyone. I extend my warmest greetings to the members of the Swedish Academy and to all of the other distinguished guests in attendance tonight.

I'm sorry I can't be with you in person, but please know that I am most definitely with you in spirit and honored to be receiving such a prestigious prize. Being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature is something I never could have imagined or seen coming. From an early age, I've been familiar with and reading and absorbing the works of those who were deemed worthy of such a distinction: Kipling, Shaw, Thomas Mann, Pearl Buck, Albert Camus, Hemingway. These giants of literature whose works are taught in the schoolroom, housed in libraries around the world and spoken of in reverent tones have always made a deep impression. That I now join the names on such a list is truly beyond words.

I don't know if these men and women ever thought of the Nobel honor for themselves, but I suppose that anyone writing a book, or a poem, or a play anywhere in the world might harbor that secret dream deep down inside. It's probably buried so deep that they don't even know it's there.

If someone had ever told me that I had the slightest chance of winning the Nobel Prize, I would have to think that I'd have about the same odds as standing on the moon. In fact, during the year I was born and for a few years after, there wasn't anyone in the world who was considered good enough to win this Nobel Prize. So, I recognize that I am in very rare company, to say the least.

I was out on the road when I received this surprising news, and it took me more than a few minutes to properly process it. I began to think about William Shakespeare, the great literary figure. I would reckon he thought of himself as a dramatist. The thought that he was writing literature couldn't have entered his head. His words were written for the stage. Meant to be spoken not read. When he was writing Hamlet, I'm sure he was thinking about a lot of different things: "Who're the right actors for these roles?" "How should this be staged?" "Do I really want to set this in Denmark?" His creative vision and ambitions were no doubt at the forefront of his mind, but there were also more mundane matters to consider and deal with. "Is the financing in place?" "Are there enough good seats for my patrons?" "Where am I going to get a human skull?" I would bet that the farthest thing from Shakespeare's mind was the question "Is this literature?"

When I started writing songs as a teenager, and even as I started to achieve some renown for my abilities, my aspirations for these songs only went so far. I thought they could be heard in coffee houses or bars, maybe later in places like Carnegie Hall, the London Palladium. If I was really dreaming big, maybe I could imagine getting to make a record and then hearing my songs on the radio. That was really the big prize in my mind. Making records and hearing your songs on the radio meant that you were reaching a big audience and that you might get to keep doing what you had set out to do.

Well, I've been doing what I set out to do for a long time, now. I've made dozens of records and played thousands of concerts all around the world. But it's my songs that are at the vital center of almost everything I do. They seemed to have found a place in the lives of many people throughout many different cultures and I'm grateful for that.

But there's one thing I must say. As a performer I've played for 50,000 people and I've played for 50 people and I can tell you that it is harder to play for 50 people. 50,000 people have a singular persona, not so with 50. Each person has an individual, separate identity, a world unto themselves. They can perceive things more clearly. Your honesty and how it relates to the depth of your talent is tried. The fact that the Nobel committee is so small is not lost on me.

But, like Shakespeare, I too am often occupied with the pursuit of my creative endeavors and dealing with all aspects of life's mundane matters. "Who are the best musicians for these songs?" "Am I recording in the right studio?" "Is this song in the right key?" Some things never change, even in 400 years.

Not once have I ever had the time to ask myself, "Are my songs literature?"

So, I do thank the Swedish Academy, both for taking the time to consider that very question, and, ultimately, for providing such a wonderful answer.

My best wishes to you all,

Bob Dylan



Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 2016

Why Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize is the best thing that can happen to the book world Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan performs at Desert Trip in Indio, Calif. on Oct. 7. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Carolyn Kellogg

When the Nobel Prize was given to Bob Dylan this week, it seemed to many in the book world like a lost opportunity.

Each year, the bright light of the Nobel falls across our cultural canvas and illuminates the work of a major writer — and in recent years that’s usually been a writer who is little-known to American audiences.

If that meant the Nobel had been feeling increasingly remote, it was expanding our conversation. Sure, we might be raising an eyebrow and asking one another who the heck Tomas Transtromer or Svetlana Alexievich might be, but this was good – it asked us to consider the written words of the wider world.

Americans notoriously read very little work in translation; it’s only about 3% of our annual book-buying diet. A Nobel raises the profile of its author considerably.

Before their prizes, recent Nobel winners have mostly been published by small, independent presses here in the U.S. (afterward, they are picked up by major publishers). When the prize is announced, there’s a rush on their work, which means an influx of cash to a struggling small press and runs to the independent bookstores that regularly carry those books.

So there were murmurings of dismay in the publishing community when the Nobel  Prize in literature went to a Grammy-winning musician who’s been making headlines for more than five decades. There would be no fall Nobel bump.

But it’s not the job of the Swedish Academy to bolster American independent publishing. Really, its task is to award excellence in literature.

By picking Dylan, it made a bold gesture to expand the definition of “literature.” It has, in effect, thrown open the doors to popular culture.

And that is a huge opportunity.

The divisions between “high culture” and “low culture” are as archaic as the gramophone and 5-cent silent movies. We live in a world where people read books and comic books, watch films and television shows, listen to podcasts and pop music, with equal avidity and intelligence. And the Nobel, in recognizing Dylan’s work as literature, acknowledges that artists create works of popular culture with just as much care, control, courage and genius as Ernest Hemingway did sitting down at a typewriter.

Dylan experts can battle over whether or not he writes poetry; he wasn’t given the prize for that. He was given the prize for writing lyrics and music.

If music and lyrics can count as literature, as plays have done, could not other forms?

Could we, someday, see a Nobel in literature go to Art Spiegelman, Barbara Kopple, Alejandro Jodorowsky, David Simon, Ira Glass, Hayao Miyazaki, Beyoncé?

Wait, wait, hear me out. We are experiencing an undeniable renaissance in storytelling in traditional media like television and film, not to mention new Web series, podcasting and emerging forms like the visual album.

Although it could be argued that authorship is complicated when considering collaborative works like film, television and music, the Swedish Academy swept that aside by giving the prize to Dylan. No matter how many names you can find on his records, the Nobel went to him alone.

When I talked to former L.A. Times pop music critic Robert Hilburn about Dylan’s work, he emphasized the words. “He’s a great cultural figure because of his words and his ideas,” he said.

And for all the flash and bang of any performed art or filmed project, it’s the words that count. “Breaking Bad” didn’t exist without Bryan Cranston’s brilliant performance — but he couldn’t get there without the words on the page.

Dylan’s Nobel says that words don’t have to be bound within covers to be literature.  It’s possible the Swedish Academy will back off its radical choice. Who knows what kind of pressure it will be under to return to the traditional choice, to return to the poets and playwrights and novelists who have traditional publishers, traditional books.

But for now, literature is all around us. Read it or listen to it or watch it.

Dylan’s Nobel Prize is a wonderful moment — a wonderful moment for literature.

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