24/03/2019 A world that gives Bob Dylan a Nobel Prize is a world that nominates Trump for president

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A world that gives Bob Dylan a Nobel Prize is a world that nominates Trump
for president
Follow TIM STANLEY

13 OCTOBER 2016 • 3:29PM

Bob Dylan has been compared to Sappho and Homer.

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24/03/2019 A world that gives Bob Dylan a Nobel Prize is a world that nominates Trump for president

B ob Dylan has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/news/breaking-bob-dylan-wins-2016-nobel-prize-
in-literature/)Why not? If the Nobel Committees can give a peace prize to Henry Kissinger then it can give a literature prize to a
man who hasn’t written any literature.

“Where that all ends, I don’t know. Perhaps a Nobel Prize in 2025 being awarded to Donald Trump
for lyrical tweeting.”

This is not a question of taste. Bob Dylan is a great folk artist, maybe the greatest alive. But the Nobel is supposed to be awarded not on
the basis of what the public likes (if it were, Doris Lessing wouldn’t have won it) but on ability matched by idealism. Dylan has both,
but his body of work falls far short of that produced by past winners: Yeats, Gide, O’Neill, Solzhenitsyn etc. The scale of their output
and the thematic density of their texts outstrips Dylan by light years. He is a dim star strumming a guitar; they are suns around which
we orbit. We are lucky enough to live among them today.

If the Committee wanted an American then it could have chosen Don DeLillo, Philip Roth or even – why not? – Thomas Pynchon. It
did not have to make this choice. So why did it? Nostalgia. Politics. To please the crowd. To name someone who would shatter the
Committee’s reputation for intellectual snobbery – a reputation that it only has among those uninterested in literature. It’s like
worrying that the Davis Cup is too closely associated with tennis. And if popularising the prize is the aim, then why not Leonard
Cohen or Paul McCartney? Why not Debbie Harry, who crazy folk think invented rap? Moreover, why popularise a prize which isn’t
elected but chosen by the knowledgeable on the basis of achievement? This is the Nobel Prize for Literature. Not Sweden’s Got Talent.

Bob Dylan’s 30 greatest

songs

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Ah, but this is where we are in cultural terms. Distinction is gone; discrimination is a dirty word. Egality is in. Emotion is in. Nothing
matters unless it sells. But anyone celebrating the death of quality – anyone imagining that the elimination of elitism leads inexorably
to justice – should be very wary of what they wish for. A culture that gives Bob Dylan a literature prize is a culture that nominates
Donald Trump for president. It is a culture uninterested in qualifications and concerned only with satisfying raw emotional need.
There is pandering on the Left and pandering on the Right. It becomes very hard to engage on the basis of reason because reason is
discriminatory. It requires thought and effort not only to use it but to understand it. Much, much easier to go with your gut. It’s not a
huge leap from saying “Dylan because I like him” to “Trump because I feel like him.” It's all lowbrow.

I will be called a fogey, a snob, elitist etc. On this point, I don’t care! The culture is demonstrably poorer than it was a few decades ago
and this has an impact upon politics. With each year, standards seem to slip and what was once considered absurd seems quite
normal. And what is excellent is sadly forgotten. Where that all ends, I don’t know. Perhaps a Nobel Prize in 2025 being awarded to
Donald Trump for lyrical tweeting.

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24/03/2019 A world that gives Bob Dylan a Nobel Prize is a world that nominates Trump for president

Nobel prize for literature | Winners since 1980

2016 Bob Dylan, United States

2015 Svetlana Alexievich, Belarus
2014 Patrick Modiano, France
2013 Alice Munro, Canada
2012 Mo Yan, China
2011 Tomas Tranströmer, Sweden
2010 Mario Vargas Llosa, Peru
2009 Herta Müller, Germany
2008 Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, France
2007 Doris Lessing, Britain
2006 Orhan Pamuk, Turkey
2005 Harold Pinter, Britain
2004 Elfriede Jelinek, Austria
2003 JM Coetzee, South Africa
2002 Imre Kertesz, Hungary
2001 VS Naipaul, Trinidad-born British
2000 Gao Xingjian, Chinese-born French
1999 Günter Grass, Germany
1998 José Saramago, Portugal
1997 Dario Fo, Italy
1996 Wislawa Szymborska, Poland
1995 Seamus Heaney, Ireland
1994 Kenzaburo Oe, Japan
1993 Toni Morrison, United States
1992 Derek Walcott, St Lucia
1991 Nadine Gordimer, South Africa
1990 Octavio Paz, Mexico
1989 Camilo José Cela, Spain
1988 Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt
1987 Joseph Brodsky, Russian-born American
1986 Wole Soyinka, Nigeria
1985 Claude Simon, France
1984 Jaroslav Seifert, Czechoslovakia
1983 William Golding, Britain
1982 Gabriel García Márquez, Colombia
1981 Elias Canetti, Bulgarian-born British
1980 Czesław Miłosz, Polish-born American

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