Tangled up in blue - Bob Dylan may be a great songwriter and musician, but does that merit his being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature?

TT, October 15 , 2016: "I like Dylan, but where is the (literary) work?" This is how a French novelist has expressed his surprise at hearing that Bob Dylan has been awarded this year's Nobel Prize for literature. At the risk of a sort of spoilsport purism, it is a question that must be confronted and debated if this award is to be valued for its recognition of literary greatness - that most endangered of qualities in the current democracies of political correctness, populist sentimentality and artistic dissidence. The writer who raises this question also thinks that the decision made the Swedish Academy look ridiculous in a way that its giving of the award last year to the Belarusian journalist, Svetlana Alexievich, most eminently did not. Ms Alexievich's chronicling of the voices of Soviet suffering may have been reportage. But it did result in an epic and ongoing body of work that transcends its immediate historical context and asks to be placed alongside the achievements of a Dostoevsky or Tolstoy. And in being able to point this out to the world, the Academy had affirmed as well as enlarged the category of Literature itself.

At its wisest, and notwithstanding occasional failures of judgment, the Nobel Prize for literature has kept itself loftily apart from the Anglophone mainstream by holding on to an unapologetically narrow criterion of nothing other, or lesser, than literary greatness. And this is what it must continue to stand, and stand up, for. One does not have to be an especially conservative purist, therefore, to regard the prize going to a lyricist and singer, the merit of whose words cannot be valued in abstraction from how they are set to music and sung, as the questionable dilution of a certain purity of literary judgment. After all, Jean-Paul Sartre declined the Nobel for being a philosopher and not a man of letters, and nobody would argue for extending the classical definition of physics, economics or medicine in order to make the Nobels in any of these disciplines more radical or relevant. Besides, music and entertainment, unlike literature, have a number of prizes and honours, many of which have been given, most deservedly, to Mr Dylan.

Perhaps these questions would not have arisen at all if Mr Dylan had been awarded the Nobel Prize for peace. That might have been a better way of getting the world to think afresh of peace-making, of music as the land of the free and home of the brave, than allowing the achievements of a Mann, a White or a Coetzee, or in the narrower field of poetry, a Tagore or an Eliot, to be brought down to the level of what the committee generously calls "the great American song tradition". Letting the notion of great literature get all "tangled up in blue" might end up compromising a rare and remarkable ideal that the Swedish Academy, of all upholders of human excellence, can scarcely afford to lose sight of.

Bob Dylan may be a great songwriter and musician, but does that merit his being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature?