On 13 October 2016, Professor Sara Danius, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, announced that the Nobel Prize in Literature had been awarded to Bob Dylan. Asked (in the wake of the announcement) if, in choosing Dylan, the “Swedish Academy [had] widened the horizon of the Nobel Prize in Literature,” Danius quickly and cleverly compared Dylan to Sappho and Homer. Both, she notes, wrote poetry so as to perform it; Dylan’s role as musician is, therefore, in no way inimical to his role as poet. And yet she goes on to insist that “he can be read and should be read, [for he] is a great poet of the English tradition” (our emphasis). Let’s not overlook Danius’ subtle shift in focus here—from celebrating Dylan’s work as a form of ongoing performance to justifying it as readable text. Danius (and, by extension, the Swedish Academy en masse) clearly realizes and accepts that Dylan’s identity as musician, as performer, needs to be defended. Awarding Dylan the Nobel in literature is not the same as awarding it to Yeats or Eliot. Dylan isn’t really a poet because he’s really a musician. And while it is true, as Danius notes, that some of the most famous poets have been performers (and that some of the most famous poems are remnants of an oral tradition), the litmus test (today) for “literary” greatness is efficacy in print: Dylan (like Homer, like Sappho) “can and should be read.” The fact that he (like Homer, like Sappho) writes so as to perform is therefore mentioned only to be muted, or subsumed by the fact that what Dylan writes can also be read.

In large part, the purpose of this collection is to interrogate the ways in which Dylan’s work engages or provokes this odd anxiety about the nature, or finite boundaries, of the literary—an anxiety that became ever more apparent in the hours and days and weeks that followed Danius’ announcement. While various journalists and bloggers and fellow musicians and writers published or posted or tweeted congratulatory “defenses” of Dylan, just as many (if not more) lamented or mocked the Swedish Academy’s “surprising” decision. Either way, Dylan’s status as Nobel laureate was approached as a notable exception—something that challenged (for good or ill) the very definition of “literature.” It’s hard not to hear in these various defenses and condemnations an echo of the anxiety surrounding the novel’s growing popularity in the late eighteenth century. A new form was suddenly challenging the static parameters of the literary—one, moreover, that could not be taken as a serious or valuable artistic endeavor. Consider, for instance, Rev. William Jones’ ([1780] 1810) assertion that novels “vitiate the taste, while they corrupt the manners.” This is because, as Jones goes on to assert,

many of them are but the waking dreams of those, who know neither the world nor themselves. Many of them also are mean imitations, which affect the style and manner of more successful compositions. Some of them are void of all regular design, and made up of heterogeneous parts, which have no dependence upon one another.

—late qui splendeat, tinus et alter

Assuitur pannus—

And thus they become like the party-coloured jacket of a little disordered fool upon the stage of a mountebank, who sets the rabble a-gape with the low and insipid wonders he has collected, to detain them in his company, and draw the money out of their pockets. (307–8)

Such commentary—focused, as it is, on the way in which certain popular literary forms draw our attention away from, and then corrupt, that which is better, more rigorous, and more authentically homogeneous—is surprisingly, if ironically, apropos in this contemporary context. Recall Gary Shteyngart’s (2016) scathing “response” on Twitter to Dylan’s Nobel win: “I totally get the Nobel committee. Reading books is hard.” While the irony of such an indictment may or may not be lost on Shteyngart (and the vast majority of his Twitter “followers”), it’s worth perseverating somewhat on just how neatly an eighteenth-century condemnation of the novel (as a mutation of proper literary forms) anticipates the current unease about Dylan’s status as a literary “master.” For good or ill, Dylan often seems to present himself as a “fool upon the stage,” one who refuses (or repeatedly exposes us to his inability) to express or “know himself ” in full and who offers up compositions largely “void of regular design, and made up of heterogenous parts.”¹ And most certainly a vast majority of his works can be called “mean imitations,” pastiche-like arrangements that play with and “affect the style and manner of [what many might call] more successful compositions.” It is hardly surprising, then, that, in a manner that is all too familiar, Dylan’s retractors have felt the need to imply—or to state outright—that Dylan should have been ineligible for the award. He is not a writer, and certainly not (ironically) a novelist. He is a musician—and not even a great musician. His win thus speaks to a certain diminishment of what is truly literary and (therefore) of society. And surely, on this point, Rev. William Jones would agree.

These strange appeals to a certain absolutism, or a sense of literary “purity,” are best represented by a now infamous tweet from the popular American novelist, Jodi Picoult: “I’m Happy for Bob Dylan. / #ButDoesThisMeanICanWinAGrammy?” (2016a). While Picoult quickly went on to clarify that this initial response was “just a gentle joke” (2016b), her question remains a likely symptom of the “unease” Dylan’s win effected within the literary and academic community. Picoult, who has (as far as we are aware) zero presence in the world of musical performance, feels warranted to suggest that Dylan has as much “right” to the Nobel Prize in Literature as she does to a Grammy. On the one hand, this is simply a ridiculous suggestion (joke or not). Besides the fact that Dylan has written books and screenplays, he is not merely or only a “composer” of music. He is a lyricist. Picoult, however, deals only in printed words—although, notably, she started her career writing issues of Wonder Woman. But surely suggesting that, because she is an author of books, Picoult is more “worthy” of the Nobel than Dylan is just as absurd as insisting that what Dylan does is (simply or only) a form of “literature.”

On the other hand, however, Picoult’s suggestion is utterly compelling—insofar as it implies an understanding of literature that Dylan’s body of work (when taken as whole) compels us to accept. Is not Picoult, also, like every other writer, a type of composer? Is not her work, in some sense, caught up in a type of performance—or, at the very least, susceptible to performance? Is it not necessarily imbued, or haunted, by the affective senselessness of musical polyphony? Such questions are, of course, justified most obviously by Mikhail Bakhtin’s famous effort to privilege novelistic discourse over poetic hegemony, an effort which implies (also and again) that Dylan has always been more of a novelist than a poet anyway. (We’ll return to this idea in a moment.) And while we are quite certain Picoult wasn’t thinking of Bakhtin when she posted her Tweet, the question she asks clearly belies her anxiety (even as it opens up the possibility) that the line between a mercurial performance and the fixity of print (as literature proper) is only ever a type of hysterical fantasy. For this very reason such a line needs to be policed. This is precisely the reason, as we already noted, why Dylan’s Nobel win provokes a sense of unease that is readily comparable to the unease sparked by the rise of the novel at the close of the eighteenth century. Not surprising, either, then, is the Swedish Academy’s attempt to forestall this anxiety by stressing the readability of Dylan’s work—the fact that it “can be and should be read.”

What we are suggesting, however—and what we hope the following chapters work to demonstrate in their respective ways (and especially when read together)—is that there is something absurd about such a move, that it (ultimately) does more to undermine Dylan’s win than it does to justify it. Most obviously, we cannot simply “read” the vast bulk of Dylan’s work. Reading the lyrics to one of his songs (silently and on a page) is akin to reading only every second line, or only every second page, of a novel. Or better, it is akin to reading a comic after removing the art. As a number of our contributors suggest (explicitly or implicitly), Dylan constantly stresses the manner in which lyrical meaning (or affect) occurs in the moment of a given performance—which is to say that Dylan’s “poetry” cannot be disentangled from issues of musicality and vocal expression. This is not to suggest that it is never useful to consider Dylan’s lyrics in silence and on the page. But it does mean that Dylan’s literary importance is in no way tied, merely, to his ostensible “readability.” We are always in danger of missing the point, or the value, of Dylan’s work if we view him, simply, as another “great poet of the English tradition”—a fact Dylan frequently intimates in interviews.² Dylan is not a “poet”—not, anyway, in any traditional sense; nor is his writing (in isolation) comparable to the work of “great poets” like Yeats or Eliot. It’s simply not the same thing—even if, at the same time (and however paradoxically), it works to confuse the very possibility of making such a distinction. We are not, in other words, interested in suggesting that Dylan’s work simply marks a unique space for itself anterior to a clearly delimited field of “literature.” Nor are we interested in “recovering” Dylan’s work as traditionally literary and, for that reason, of value. Our position is that it is unique insofar as it functions, rather (or finally), to straddle and confuse any number of modalities, any number of genres, any number of forms: it is literary only insofar as it is also musical; readable only insofar as it must also be heard; new only insofar as it is haunted by tradition. It is, we are saying, polyvocal.

Indeed: Dylan’s oeuvre seems, always, to be confronting the exhaustion (or false restrictiveness) of literary forms as such. By singing, by performing (his songs as well as himself), he constantly evokes the inherently dialogic and polyphonic nature of the literary. As Picoult’s tweet accidently suggests, a work of literature is always a kind of disharmonious singing—a performance tied to its moment of utterance, possessed by (in Roland Barthes’ terms) “the thousand sources of culture” ([1967...