November 12, 2016 will live long in the memory. Four days ago, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded not to Philip Roth or Haruki Murakami, but to a singer-songwriter known for his poetic talent and the musical genre, folk rock, that he popularized in the sixties and developed throughout the seventies and beyond: Bob Dylan.
Even now, the man who inspired the likes of Francis Cabrel and Guns n’ Roses is proving his artistic genius with album after album. But does he deserve a Nobel Prize? It's hard to say. At Regard Libre, No one has a fixed opinion on the matter. No one can be insensitive to the musical universe of this creator of modern rock, that's not the question. The question remains: by awarding their prestigious prize to Dylan, aren't the Swedish academics mixing things up?
We might think, for example, that while everyone listens to Bob Dylan, nobody reads him. So we shouldn't reward him with a major literary prize, while other well-known writers rightly await their turn. I'll go even further: if an artist writes a song to be a song, it will always be a song. We can marvel at the poetic aspect of many songs, but that doesn't make them poems, unless they are conceived from the outset as being poems at the same time - as is the case with Brel's repertoire, which we like to read.
But even in Brel's case, no one thinks of the Nobel Prize. It would almost be an insult to award a literary prize to a man whose work cannot be considered in isolation from his musical wealth. «In song», Michel Polnareff said in a recent interview, «there's too much of a tendency to put people in drawers. We often talk about Brel the poet, but he wrote some fantastic melodies. In the same way, I think I've written texts that have their own importance.»
The best thing to do in this case is to retain the positive. Whether the award is justified or not, whether Dylan accepts it or not, it doesn't really matter. At least people who had never heard of Bob Dylan now have the opportunity to find out. Everyone on this earth should listen once. Mr Tambourine Man and Blowin’ in the Wind before his death. Long live Dylan's work, and long live music, which will never be literature because it is so superior to it!
Write to the author: jonas.follonier@leregardlibre.com
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