Here in part is what I wrote after the Nobel Committee announced Barack Obama as the recipient of its 2009 Nobel Peace Prize:
You’d be hard-pressed to find a more ardent and hopeful supporter of President Barack Obama than me. But this award is … well … a bit much.
For no matter the rationalization, there’s no denying that the Nobel Committee awarded it – just nine months into his presidency – not for what he has done, but for who he is…
It is naïve to think that politics do not govern its purportedly merit-based selections.
(“Obama Awarded (Affirmative Action) Nobel Peace Prize,” The iPINIONS Journal, October 10, 2009)
To be fair, I’m not even a fan of Bob Dylan. Frankly, I could never get past his nasal and incomprehensible tonality to appreciate the “poetic” lyrics in his songs.
But I’ve read enough of his lyrics to know that he is no more deserving of the Nobel Prize in Literature than Obama was of the Nobel Peace Prize. Not least because I can think of too many writers whose body of work is far more meritorious.
Take Chinua Achebe, for example:
One of the great ironies of my life is that an English girl in America introduced me to African literature. The book she gave me, which sealed my abiding affection for this genre, was Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe of Nigeria.
Nobody familiar with his work would be surprised that I think one of the great injustices in the world of literature is the Nobel Committee never awarding Achebe, 76, this hallowed prize. Especially given that he is universally acclaimed as “the father of modern African literature.”
(“Achebe Awarded the Man Booker International Prize,” The iPINIONS Journal, June 15, 2007)
To the Committee’s list of egregious oversights, I could add such writers as Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, James Joyce, Zora Neale Hurston, Philip Roth, and James Baldwin (whom its chairman, Thorbjørn Ragland, deemed only worthy of passing mention when he quoted Baldwin during his presentation speech for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize). Others would surely add the likes of Vladimir Nabokov, JRR Tolkien, WH Auden, Jorge Luis Borges, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, et al.
In any event, unlike Obama, Dylan is giving this Committee the middle finger, which its arbitrary prize deserves:
Bob Dylan doesn’t give a f*ck about his Nobel Prize. The Swedish Academy isn’t sure if he’ll show up to the ceremony…
Days after winning the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, Bob Dylan still hasn’t been bothered to acknowledge he won one of the most prestigious awards on the planet.
(Esquire, October 17, 2016)
Ironically, the Committee is vindicating Dylan’s reaction by decrying him as “impolite and arrogant.” After all, everybody knows Dylan as a “Mr. Tambourine Man” who marches to the beat of his own drum.
More to the point, that the Committee is throwing a hissy fit says far more about its arrogance than Dylan’s. After all, Dylan is merely ignoring an award he never applied for and, evidently, couldn’t care less about.
That said, I’d like to think he can’t be bothered for the same principled, anti-establishment reason Jean-Paul Sartre famously refused to accept the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature:
The writer who accepts an honor of this kind involves as well as himself the association or institution which has honored him…
The writer must therefore refuse to let himself be transformed into an institution, even if this occurs under the most honorable circumstances.
(“Sartre on the Nobel Prize,” The New York Review of Books, December 17, 1964)
Except that I know all too well that Dylan began selling his artistic soul long ago. Perhaps you’ve seen him shilling in commercials for corporate demons like Apple, Chrysler, Pepsi, and even Victoria’s Secret, for Christ’s sake. Granted, he might argue that this just reflects the fact that “The Times They Are a-Changin’”….
No doubt Dylan gets millions whenever he betrays his renegade values in this fashion. Therefore, it may be that the $923,179.20 that comes with this year’s Nobel Prize is just not enough for him to do so in this case.
Still, it would not surprise me if, like Sartre, Dylan is wondering if the Committee would consider giving him the cash without him acknowledging the award, let alone showing up to formally accept it. Whatever the case, I suspect this eccentric troubadour would say, “It’s All Good.”
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