A singing poet pushing boundaries

The polarisation of critical opinion regarding the work of Bob Dylan stems largely from the literary scholar’s reluctance to acknowledge his work as art. Dylan gets his due from politics, sociologists, musicians and popular culture, but there’s always a slight hesitation on the part of most of my worthy community.

Dylan came of age in an era teeming with political activism, the notion of change being the only constant. He propagated an idealism so necessary to the civil rights movement; an idealism that demands a naïve faith in freedom. 

The need of the hour was clear – songs that outlined the issues for all men to comprehend, offering a clear vision of freedom. Seems to me that this naivete is something we lost along the way and are thirsting for today. ‘So we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden’ (Woodstock) – the garden of an innocent idealism.

Poetry outlives journalism, I dare say. So Dylan’s songs, even the topical ones, universalise the themes of personal suffering brought on by racism and other perpetrators of inequality, resulting in that malaise of modernity – man’s alienation from man.

Older and more mellow, Dylan moved on as he always does, reinventing himself like a rolling stone, accepting chaos. He rem-ains, however, candid, non-hypocritical and frames for us, in his gaze, the absurdity around us.

A glance at his vast body of work reveals his earnest and endearing adherence to literary forms and devices: ballads and lyrics, rhymes and rhythms that will delight any teacher of literature. 

His gravelly voice, now snarling, now weary, and sometimes tender and vulnerable, but always self-aware, may for some be an acquired taste. Dissonance is at the heart of rock. So what better medium to offer an aesthetic of dissent than the happy marriage of art and politics. 

While Dylan was hailed as their favourite poet by college student and journalists alike in the 1960s, poets like W H Auden lamented that they did not know his work at all – there were far too many things to be read anyway. The problem then became one of credibility. Today, the digital world has stamped out that claim of obscurity. So what’s the problem now?

This is a generation of great faith and great folly. Now, more than ever, do we need artists who offer us disruptive thought. When we deny ourselves free thought, we need the abrasive voice of reason to offer us what I see as a new aesthetic. 

We are surrounded by volume…quantitative hysteria, loud voices of fundamentalism and the oppressive clamour of the majority. The lone voices of reason must be acknowledged and our collective attention forced to listen. The Nobel did just that.

Marrying music and lyricWhile he is no preacher, he definitely offers a process, of reason and rationale. As a performer, Dylan is like Guiiaume IX of the 11th century, an early troubadour, known as a trovatore bifronte – a poet with two faces. The trait of the singing poet is his multiple forms. Dylan exemplifies this particular trait, defying the very heart of academia which is the act of classification. 

Poetry is innately musical, even free verse, operating largely on metres and rhythms both apparent and implied. As universities diversified disciplines, the two were unhappily torn asunder – music and the word. The term lyric still implies a lingering melody, words set to the tune of a lyre, an ancient string instrument. Dylan achieves with ease what many set out to do – marry the disembodied lyric back to its musical origins. 

Dylan has been likened to Picasso (JM Curtis calls them assimilative artists), baptised a ‘guerilla minstrel’ (Wayne Hampton ) but my favourite analogy is that of Hermes, the mercurial inventor of the lyre and pipe, lord of the roads and of thieves, fleet-footed messenger of the god who navigates at times, even mischievously, the world of the gods and mortals. As the world today confronts absolute finalities, this is what we demand of our artists. Show us possibilities. Show us your ideals. Show us routes of escape.

This award has stirred up much-needed speculation on the quality of literature, the appropriacy of his nomination itself – whether artists should be brought under academic scrutiny, who is an artist, what is a text. Unwittingly or not (you never quite know with Hermes here), Dylan has us debating freedom. Or the spectre of it.I rest my case.

(The writer, an associate professor of English literature in Christ University, Bengaluru, is a scholar-fan of the balladeer. Her M Phil thesis was on “Folksong as poem: A critical study of the lyrics of protest of folksinger Bob Dylan”)