Seven decades after what Benjamin Schreier calls, “the dominant event of Jewish American literary history,” which is the “‘breakthrough’ – the irruption in the 1950s of Jewish American writers like Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Grace Paley into the heart of American cultural scene,” two Jewish American lyricists have received the Nobel Prize for Literature in a span of four years: Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota in 1941) in 2016 and Louise Glück (born in New York City in 1943 and raised on Long Island) in 2020 (Schreier, 2). Superficially, Glück’s Nobel complicates the meanings of the Dylan Nobel, a rebalancing to achieve equilibrium with a kind of a “equal and opposite” reaction to Dylan: Male/Female; popular musician/academically sanctioned page poet; folk rocker whose anthems inspired the Civil Rights movements of the early 1960s/apolitical lyric poet of the private sphere. In fact, like Dylan, Glück practices a recognizably contemporary secular Jewish American strategy of revisionary poetics. She draws together disparate cultures—Jewish, European, American—and makes them her own. By considering Jewish identity as a consensual relationship to the recollection of a prophetic strain of socio-political history (Dylan) and personal history (Glück) through revisionary relations to literature, myth, and religious texts, we may consider the two Nobel Laureates creative readings of classical texts as a type of commentary expressing their secular Jewish sensibilities. For Dylan and Glück, Jewishness is a way of thinking about revisioning texts. The literary inheritance is not considered sacred and so becomes available to variation through the author’s willingness to talk back to it.
In Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet, Seth Rogovoy argues that one way to approach Dylan’s lyrics “is to read them as the work of a poet mind apparently immersed in Jewish texts and engaged in the age-old process of midrash: a kind of formal or informal riffing on the texts to elucidate or elaborate upon their hidden meanings (Rogovoy, 6). He continues:
Perhaps the most famous of these riffs takes place in one of Dylan’s best-known songs, 1965’s ‘Highway 61 Revisited,’ his whimsical retelling of the Akedah, the story in which G-d commands Abraham to bind Isaac as if for a sacrificial offering, which Dylan posits as a conversation between two jaded, cynical hipsters. U.S. Route 61, incidentally, is the main highway leading from New Orleans to Dylan’s birthplace in Duluth, Minnesota. (6)
In Chronicles, Dylan himself interprets “Highway 61” as the literal and figurative pathway that, like the Mississippi River, links the Minnesota native to the roots of country blues in Louisiana and the Mississippi Delta:
I always felt like I’d started on it, always had been on it and could go anywhere from it, even into the deep Delta country. It was the same road, full of the same contradictions, the same one-horse river towns, the same spiritual ancestors. The Mississippi River, the bloodstream of the blues, also starts up from my neck of the woods. I was never too far away from any of it. It was my place in the universe, always felt like it was in my blood.” (Dylan, 240-241)
In “Highway 61 Revisited” (1965), Dylan affiliates himself with the origin story of the Delta Blues. It was, after all, at the crossroads of Highway 61 and Route 61 in Clarksdale, Mississippi that Robert Johnson was said to have sold his soul to the devil in a Faustian bargain for creative inspiration. In “Highway 61 Revisited,” Dylan crafts a secular Jewish commentary work by self-consciously refashioning the Delta Blues tradition of Johnson and Mississippi Fred McDowell to serve personal, political, and creative purposes. Dylan’s ingenuity emerges through his combining the sonic features of traditional acoustic blues – Philippe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon note that it was a “blues song in B flat, giving tribute to Robert Johnson and Blind Willie McTell” – with the “energetic blues-rock song [sound] carried by the electric guitar of Mike Bloomfield, who confirmed his virtuosity on the bottleneck” (Margotin and Guesdon, 199). As David Dalton points out, the lyrics specifically reference Fred McDowell’s “61 Highway Blues,” the penchant in blues songs to engage in magical numerology, and the blues tradition of including an “outlandish cast of characters” in the lyric (Dalton, 127-128). Dylan’s lyricism is also influenced by the French surrealist Arthur Rimbaud, the street wise sensibility of the peripatetic Beat icon Jack Kerouac, and the biblical resonances to Genesis 26, which, as Margotin and Guesdon argue, enabled Dylan, whose father’s name was in fact Abraham, to associate his rebellion against his father’s middle class, midwestern values with his “decision to become a musician” (Margotin and Guesdon, 198). Displaying, in Dalton’s terms, a talent for “projecting his personal situation into a mythic dimension,” Dylan’s contemporary secular Jewish revisionary sensibility enables him to put local and international creative resources into play to produce “a toxic cartoon denouncing American culture that somehow involves him and his dad, Abe (with whom he had an estranged relationship), in a diorama from Genesis” (Dalton, 128). Dylan’s midrashic mashup of sources and influences becomes what Dalton calls a fusion of “the political, historical, and personal into a hornet’s nest” that critiques American culture’s “slick surface and commercial jive promising impossible things” (Dalton, 129). As in “Highway 61 Revisited,” Dylan’s “‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ combines African American sonic features with biblical resonances to explore contemporary themes. Margotin and Guesdon note that “Blowin’ in the Wind” not only borrows language from Ezekiel and Isaiah, but also the “melody, as Dylan admitted, was musically based on ‘No More Auction Block,’ a spiritual that he heard Delores Dixon sing every night with the New World Singers at Gerde’s Folk City” (Margotin and Guesdon, 51). As with “Highway 61 Revisited,” Dylan’s creativity emerges in “Blowin’ in the Wind” through his revisionary strategies. He reframes Biblical prophetic language and a melody associated with African American spiritual traditions to speak to what Margotin and Guesdon describe as “universal themes that resonated in 1962 amid the Cold War and the struggle for recognition of civil rights” (51).
Seth Rogovoy ties Dylan’s protest songs to how biblical prophets “pointed out the hypocrisies and errors of their subjects’ ways, warning of punishments that could befall them and suggesting paths toward collective redemption” (Rogovoy, 9). By contrast, Richard F. Thomas, a Harvard Classics professor, links Dylan to Horace, Catullus, Ovid, and Virgil in Why Dylan Matters. Focusing on “Lonesome Day Blues,” from Love and Theft, for example, Thomas hears lines from Virgil’s Aeneid “loud and clear” with Dylan’s “I’m goin’ to teach peace to the conquered/I’m gonna tame the proud” closely resembles how Anchises’ “instructs his son from the Underworld on just how Rome is to rule the world: “to teach the ways of peace to those you conquer,/to spare defeated peoples, tame the proud” (Thomas, 7). As Thomas writes, the “idiom, rhymes, and music of these lines belonged to Dylan, but the thought and diction, rearranged by Dylan, came from Rome’s greatest poet, Virgil” (Thomas, 7). To cite one more example of Dylan’s intertextual bent, in “Who Killed Davey Moore,” a 1963 topical song about the death of a prize fighter, Amit Chaudhuri writes that “the material comprises the American folksong, the children’s rhyme, the public tragedy and the narrative “taken directly from the newspapers” and subjected to the sort of estranging synthesis in which [as Dylan notes] “nothing’s been changed … except for the words.”[1]
Glück’s Triumph of Achilles (1985), Ararat (1990), Meadowlands (1997), and Vita Nova (2001), illustrate her long habit of amplifying the weight and scope of her personal style of poetry by connecting individual poems into collections that frame the experience of contemporary speakers against the template of international literatures ranging from Homer to Virgil to Ovid to the Brothers Grimm to the Bible to European modernists such as Yeats and Auden. Glück often invokes Jewish sources in her poetry, but she limits their meanings to make room for the value, or emotional impact, of adversarial materials such as are found in Greek myth. “Mount Ararat” from Ararat discusses the family plot at the Jewish graveyard (named Mount Ararat), where her father and one of her sisters are buried. As with Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited” in which “God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son,’” Glück in “Mount Ararat” imagines the Jewish God as a ruthless deity. She describes Mount Ararat as a place “dedicated to the Jewish god/who doesn’t hesitate to take/a son from a mother” (Glück, Poems: 1962-2012, 213). By contrast to the Jewish God who destroys families in “Mount Ararat”, Glück represents the God-man Achilles in “The Triumph of Achilles” as a classical figure who embraces life, suffering, and the inevitability of death with a kind of Nietzschean intensity. In “A Parable,” from The Triumph of Achilles, she describes the pattern of King David’s biography as following the “trace” of “a mountain.” The mountain’s “arc” illustrates the shape of David’s narrative from obscurity to the incline of power, to a social decline brought about by the excesses of his sexual appetite and political ambition. Glück connects King David to Sisyphus, the legendary first murderer, by preceding “Parable” with a poem about the Greek mythic character entitled “The Mountain.” In “Mount Ararat” and “A Parable,” as well as “Day Without Night” and “Saints,” Glück interprets Hebrew Bible stories by juxtaposing them with classical myths and then by connecting the ancient sources to her own experience, sometimes, as in the work of other contemporary Jewish feminist midrash poets such as Alicia Ostriker and Jacqueline Osherow, from a gendered perspective. She maintains a balance between the lyric, with its emphasis on a first-person retelling of subjective experience, and what Maerra Y. Shreiber refers to as a “cross-cultural exchange” (Shreiber, 164). By commenting on Jewish as well as non-Jewish texts, Glück imagines a more “heterogeneous, inclusive version of Jewishness,” as well as honors “individuated emotive experience” alongside “collective diversity” (Shreiber, 165-166).
Whereas Dylan, at least in his brief but signature phase of engaged folk singing from around 1962 to 1964, wrote and performed songs that commented on racial injustice, nuclearism, and the growing involvement of the United States in military activity in Southeast Asia, Glück has made a difference within literary culture itself. Most prominently, she has attempted to fuse modernist impersonality with postmodern confessional modes by working in a mode reminiscent of late 19th century British authors such as Robert Browning and Alfred Lord Tennyson, the dramatic monologue or persona poem, but also, ala James Joyce in Ulysses, by affiliating the contemporary quotidian experience of middle-class American culture with mythic and narrative templates drawn from ancient and modern world literature. Besides the title poem, other poems from The Triumph of Achilles that emphasize classical material include “The Reproach,” an apostrophe to Eros; “Night Song,” which Glück has herself read as a reflection upon the figures of Eros and Psyche; “The Mountain,” which discusses the myth of Sisyphus; and “Mythic Fragment,” which recalls Ovid’s story of Apollo and Daphne, who, to avoid the “captivity/in praise” from the “stern god” who is also her suitor, turns for help to her father, the river god Perseus, who transforms her into a “tree forever” (Glück, Poems: 1962-2012, 156). As Helen Vendler points out, since a myth such as that of Daphne and Apollo is already known to most readers, “interest consequently has to center almost entirely on interpretation and manner” (Vendler, 438). In “Mythic Fragment,” Vendler continues, Glück’s retells the myth as a “Freudian story, the tale of a girl too much in love with her father to accept a lover,” and as a “modern story of virginity, revealing its roots of incestuous desire” (Vendler, 438-9). As Vendler’s commentary indicates, The Triumph of Achilles turns to the mythic mode for the detachment that allows Glück to explore components that would have likely been subjects for the analytic process she had undertaken years earlier. Ever evolving, Dylan and Glück, regularly engage with a lyric practice that has been identified by the late German-Jewish Yale literary theorist Geoffrey Hartman as a “struggle for the text.” By so doing, Dylan and Glück participate in a recognizably Jewish tradition of creative commentary on canonical proof texts that include, but are not limited to, the Old and New testaments to Homer and Virgil, and to Romanticism and Modernism. I claim the revisionary tendency in their lyricism to be the thread that binds Dylan to Glück and links them both to a significant aspect of a contemporary secular Jewish kind of creativity. Both are diasporic Jews who do not reject their Jewish identity, but do not make it central. They are weaving and constructing identities out of multiple strands, with in Dylan’s case American folk art – besides Guthrie, Dylan early on revised songs associated with African American blues composers and performers such as Jesse Fuller, Bukka White, Memphis Minnie, and the Reverend Gary Davis – being the strongest and in Glück’s case European high culture.
Born two years apart, Dylan and Glück are only the 11th and 12th U.S. citizens to win the Nobel for Literature. Three other Jewish Americans had previously won the prize; all were immigrants: Saul Bellow, born in Quebec, in 1976, Isaac Singer, born in a village near Warsaw, in 1978, and Joseph Brodsky, born in Leningrad, in 1987. Other than Brodsky, who emigrated in 1972 at the age of 32, Dylan and Glück are the only U.S. lyricists/poets – and, as noted, the only U.S. born lyricists — to win the Nobel. (Glück is the 16th female laureate). Given, as Schreier argues, the immigration narrative has been the only “real theory” that has “been able to carry any currency” to explain the “breakthrough” of Jewish American culture in the United States, we can understand Bellow, Singer, and Brodsky. What theory of Jewish American literature explains Glück and Dylan? Assimilation? A celebration of Jews as a model ethnic group that now, in Schreier’s terms, represents “confidence, security, and success” (Schreier, 2)? The Jew, again following Schreier, “as the representative modern figure,” or, perhaps, as a nod to the values of ethnicity, difference, and multiculturalism in a global period marked by reactionary white nationalist movements (Schreier, 3)? None of these explanations fits for Dylan or for Glück, mercurial figures attracted to masks that destabilize authorial identity. Bestowed in the wake of the Black Lives Matter Movement, immigration conflicts on the Southern border of the United States, and Trumpism, Glück’s Nobel came as a shock even to herself. Rather than defining herself in an interview with Alexandra Alter in The New York Times as a Jewish-American (from a Jewish Hungarian background on her father’s side), she describes herself as “Completely flabbergasted that they would choose a white American lyric poet. It doesn’t make sense.”[2] Dylan famously changed his family name from Zimmerman, but it is inaccurate to suggest he did so to erase his personal history as a Bar Mitzvah in 1954, a member of a close-knit community of Jews in Hibbing and Duluth, Minnesota, a summer participant at Camp Herzl “about a hundred miles south of Duluth,” and a third-generation immigrant whose “grandfather had come over from Russian in the 1920s. He was a peddler and made shoes” (Heylin, 28; 22). An ongoing project that spans six decades, Dylan’s mythologization has made room for multiple revisions of self. His self-fashionings range from Oklahoma native Woody Guthrie’s orphaned son, to electrified urban neo-Beat hipster in dark jeans, shades, and puffed up hairdo, to smiling Nashville country boy, to Born Again Christian, to Hasidic Jew, to entertainer on an endless tour, to Sinatra-like crooner of pop standards on Shadows in the Night (2015).[3] Seth Rogovoy comments on how Dylan – like Glück — imagined his identity as a performance subject to constant change. Following Woody Allen’s Zelig (1983), a “fictional documentary about the life of human chameleon Leonard Zelig, a man who becomes a celebrity in the 1920s due to his ability to look and act like whoever is around him,” one could argue that Dylan’s identities – portrayed for example in Todd Haynes’s 2007 film I’m Not There – by itself reflects the uncertain relationships to identity – to whiteness – that characterize one dimension of contemporary secular American Jewishness (IMDb).[4] At the same time, Rogovoy notes in “Bob Dylan’s Ten Most Jewish Songs” that while Dylan has rarely foregrounded his Jewishness, as when he engaged with Lubavitch Hasidism, he has rarely concealed his Jewish heritage:[5]
This son of a middle-class appliance salesman from the Upper Midwest, who grew up with a Yiddish-speaking grandmother down the hallway in an extended Jewish family that was at the nexus of Jewish life in Hibbing, Minn. — mom was president of the local Hadassah, and dad was president of B’nai B’rith — wound up making several trips to Israel in the late-1960s and ’70s (during one visit, he even began the application process for moving his family to a kibbutz). He sent his children to the same Jewish summer camp in Wisconsin that he attended for four or five summers as a teenager.
By the time he arrived in New York City’s Greenwich Village, he intended to make a name for himself on the folk scene — and that name was Dylan, not Zimmerman (the name is German and not Jewish, anyway, although his forebears were from Russia), and Bob fashioned himself a latter-day Woody Guthrie (as it turns out, Guthrie himself had a whole secret Jewish side to his work, born of his close relationship with his mother-in-law, Yiddish poet Aliza Greenblatt). [Rogovoy, “Bob Dylan’s Ten Most Jewish Songs.”]
Like Dylan, Glück eschews an ethnic identification with Jewishness in most of her poetry. An exception would be “Legend” from Triumph of Achilles (1985), in which she recollects the family “legend” told of her paternal grandfather – and by so extension to the “legend” of the early twentieth-century Jewish American immigration narrative associated with the Ellis Island experience. Glück may wish to resist an ethnic identification of the self, because of her fear that it would limit her scope, but “Legend” reveals an escape from one’s familial background – and the Ellis Island immigrant narrative – is not possible. Like Dylan, Glück does not choose a single mythic template or intertextual echo to address current events or personal issues. Neither fully assimilated figures, nor representatives of multiculturalism, I regard Glück and Dylan as, if not exactly “non-Jewish” Jews, then ambivalently Jewish, or only sometimes overtly Jewish Jews. To varying degrees, both participated in an upbringing that included Jewish cultural practices and education, Dylan more so than Glück, who has written to the author that she “had a rudimentary Jewish upbringing,” that she grew up in a “Jewish suburb, but Jewish practice was, as I remember, casual,” and that she “rebelled early against a religious education, partly because it was an education in addition to music lessons, dance lessons, and so on.” Dylan and Glück occupy different relations to mainstream versions of literary culture, but both engage in a recognizable pattern of Jewish revisionary strategies to compose and decompose their lyric personae. As with Dylan, Glück’s primary engagement with Jewishness involves how she positions her persona in literary, mythic, and folkloric environments. Both frequently create commentary lyrics on biblical and other non-Jewish classical texts ranging from Homer to fairy tales, to modernists such as Yeats in Auden in Dylan’s case to create a surreal/prophetic atmosphere in iconic songs such as “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “All Along the Watchtower” and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.”[6]
For Dylan and Glück to win the prize only four years apart is unusual, but also, in both cases, the subject of debate about the what the Nobel Committee was trying to say by awarding each the coveted literary award.[7] Dylan’s award was contentious because many observers regard him as a producer and performer of cultural productions that are undeniably significant and influential, but in a genre – the popular recorded song — that exists outside the traditional “literary” genres (page poetry, narrative fiction, drama), and so not worthy of the Literature Prize. [8] The Nobel committee picked Dylan for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” They also honored his “profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the west.”
Already a household name with eleven Grammy Awards, an Academy and a Golden Globe award to his credit, as well as induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, some asked if Dylan needed a Nobel, a form of global recognition sometimes awarded to relatively obscure authors from less powerful countries than the United States.[9] Anna North, for example, acknowledges that Dylan is a “brilliant lyricist,” but she feels awarding the Nobel to a popular songwriter amounted to a lost opportunity for the Nobel committee to recognize an underappreciated author in a traditional literary genre: “Yes, it is possible to analyze his lyrics as poetry. But Mr. Dylan’s writing is inseparable from his music. He is great because he is a great musician, and when the Nobel committee gives the literature prize to a musician, it misses the opportunity to honor a writer.”[10] Stephen Metcalfe acknowledges Dylan’s “almost unparalleled influence”: “It was Dylan, more than anyone, who took Truth from out of the Victorian attic and put it into rock ’n’ roll; put it on the AM radio.” [11] At the same time, in this sense like North, Metcalf remains opposed to Dylan’s Nobel on the ground that Dylan is more of a cultural phenomenon than a poet whose skills with language match up to mainstream academic page poets such as, in Metcalf’s example, Richard Wilbur.[12] Following my main argument about Dylan and Glück as contemporary secular Jewish Americans whose creativity stems from their revision of prior texts, I regard Dylan as a revisionary artist who is taking inspiration from different traditions. Discussing the contemporary secular Jewish revisionary project that binds together Dylan and Glück, Ethan Goffman writes that such a project asks the contemporary secular Jewish artist to be “cosmopolitan and multicultural, to be diasporic but also integral to the new cultural and an innovator within that culture as a way of fitting in while not jettisoning one’s Jewish identity entirely.”[13] Following Goffman, we may say that critics of Dylan’s Nobel do not fully appreciate that he, like Glück, appealed to the selection committee because he, like Glück, is a wide-ranging, revisionary figure, a cosmopolitan internationalist who also sympathizes with local cultures.
The Nobel Prize in Literature is, of course, awarded to an author of literary distinction, but because it is well known that the selection committee’s decision is also a form of social and political commentary, it is unsurprising that observers try to interpret what the selection committee was trying to say when a new laureate is announced. If Dylan signifies the Jewish artist as an unruly figure who, as it were, draws outside the lines, disturbing the boundaries between insider and outsider, as simultaneously a countercultural figure and iconic voice of the social protest movements of the 1960s and a media mogul who recently sold the rights to his song catalogue to Universal Music Publishing Group for a reported $300 million dollars, Glück’s selection represents the Nobel’s appreciation of a poet who, as it were, thinks inside the box, thus stabilizing the meanings of genre terms such as “poetry,” and “lyric,” and “literature.” [14] Given the traumas the world – and America – endured in 2020 – it struck many observers – including Glück — as peculiar that the Nobel committee would turn to an apolitical bona fide lyric page poet whose work seems to fit squarely inside traditional, canonical, and academically sanctioned interpretations of literary merit. Is it odd that a Jewish American woman would come to represent the safety and comfort of the status quo in 2020? If you are thinking that in some symbolic way Glück a represents a postmodern version of Emma Lazarus’s open-armed Lady Liberty, or the stereotypical Jewish mother or Yiddishe Mama, you would be off course. The Nobel committee’s citation does appreciate Glück’s penchant for treating “radical change” with “clarity” and “biting humor.” Representing personal and familial trauma ranging from a sibling’s death to a battle with anorexia nervosa, to divorce, to psychological disability, to ambivalent expressions of desire and repulsion in sexual relations, one may contextualize Glück’s selection during a worldwide pandemic and an American president who engaged in documented cases of sexual violence towards women. By and large, however, Glück’s poetry steers clear of identity politics and multiculturalism. Eschewing the role of poet as activist, she mocks social-oriented authors as “stadium poets” in her Nobel lecture. Glück attacks “stadium poets” such as Dylan, but, unwittingly, she has in common with Dylan her situation as a diaspora Jew, clinging to some aspect of her identity but largely revisioning other identities within her home to create a new identity as an American but also, for Glück, an inheritor of European culture. Like Dylan’s, Glück’s contemporary American version of Jewishness is characterized by a protean sensibility that imagines the self as an elusive trace of allusions through masked performance. As with Dylan’s metamorphic self-fashionings, Glück appears to some readers as a feminist, to others a Jew, a postmodernist, a confessionalist, a modernist, a religious author, a mystic, an elegant stylist, a blunt poet, a bitter poet, an ecofeminist nature poet, a pagan poet, a cultivated poet, an elegist, a lyric poet, a narrative poet, and, as Lynn Keller argues, an antifeminist poet who “raises crucial, disturbing issues about women’s complicity in their own oppression.” (Keller, 123). As with Dylan, Glück’s various masked identifications are symptomatic of her enactment of a dialogue between identity as biological essence and identity as a usable social construction in which the subject is in a state of constant flux of verbal recasting of self in different disguise. My argument is that Glück and Dylan are contemporary secular American Jewish cultural figures because they reflect the situation of contemporary secular American Jews whose subject positions function as figurative spaces, enabling the author (Glück; Dylan) to operate within the frame of literary or musical conventions that convey established values from the past through texts, even as these conventions are recast to remain relevant to the author’s experience in the present tense. Glück’s poetry and, for that matter, her relationship to such patriarchal constructs as the Western literary canon and to the Jewish God, Yahweh, are traditional in that she employs the voices of characters from ancient narratives and sacred texts to amplify her experience beyond personal circumstance. Following Hartman’s understanding of Jewish ways of reading as a Midrashic “struggle for the text” through creative commentary on canonical proof texts, however, Glück and Dylan can interrogate the source material and make it conform to their life and times without having to “confess” to the reader or listener the details of their autobiographical existence, the disclosure of which defines the speaker’s vulnerability in most recent lyric poetry.
If we regard Glück’s selection as a realignment of the Literature prize to a narrower understanding of how to define the literary than was the case with the Dylan selection, I also consider both selections, in different ways, as implicit critiques of Donald Trump, another prominent American born in the early 1940s. Like Dylan, Trump is a cultural and political figure associated with New York City. Representing one road not taken by Trump, Dylan’s version of anti-establishmentarianism and populism understands institutions of political power as obstacles to real change. We think of songs such as “Masters of War” and “Only a Pawn in their Game,” as well as lines from other iconic songs such as “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” in which even the President of the United States must stand naked, and “The Times They Are A Changin’,” in which senators and congressman are urged to stop blocking the halls to inhibit political transformation. Trump used the presidency as a bully pulpit to announce a nativist form of populism that raged against urban elites and multiculturalists. Contra Dylan, Trump’s message empowered racial and ethnic resentment among working class rural whites, the very audience that Dylan saw as “pawns” in the game of elites who wish to divide races and classes to maintain social, economic, and political power. We may think of the Dylan Nobel as less about rewarding an individual and more about honoring a person who stands as a symbol, a voice that spoke for a generation in the early 1960s on behalf of civil rights and against war and the culture of nuclearism.
What about Glück as a response to Trumpism? The Nobel committee noted that one reason they rewarded Glück was because she deployed international mythic templates that counteracted the committee’s disappointment with America’s isolationism, anti-immigrant policies, provincialism, and withdrawal under Trump from international treaties. Glück’s poetics represents an implicit rebuke to Trumpian isolationism, bombast, and American provincialism. [15] In The Triumph of Achilles, Glück implicitly expresses an appreciation for universal values through an international perspective. She deals with typical lyric themes such as taking the risk to love what one knows must be lost, but, as eminent critic Helen Vendler has commented, Glück gives “experience the permanent form of myth,” without, as in the “confessional” poetry of Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, attempting to make the author’s autobiographical experience itself mythic. Discussing the universalizing role of myth in “The Triumph of Achilles,” Caroline Malone writes, “myth allows Glück the distance to approach what is most intimate and vulnerable – to love another human being. The godlike Achilles finds himself grief stricken over the loss of his beloved Patroclus. This loss forces Achilles to confront his own mortality. With these new boundaries of self, Achilles is able to achieve his greatest triumph: Becoming truly human.” In “The Triumph of Achilles,” Glück sets the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus at the intersection between friendship – defined by the principle of democratic sameness (they wear the same armor) – and the hierarchical principle of difference that characterizes both the feudal model of master-slave relations and the aristocratic attitude toward warfare that produces the significance of few individual warriors at the cost of the destruction of the anonymous many whose stories are left untold. “Always in these friendships/one serves the other, one is less than the other: the hierarchy/is always apparent” (Glück, Poems: 1962-2012, 159). In Glück’s complex presentation of friendship, competition for mastery and empathetic identification with the partner coexist. Glück’s treatment of friendship as well as how she imagines characters in “The Triumph of Achilles” who renounce their desire for affection as a strategy to achieve their goals of making themselves known to the beloved also connects to the poetics of commentary which I am identifying as a Jewish dimension of her work. As the Bible scholar Michael Fishbane has observed, the Midrashist sublimates the desire for recognition of his or her originality by performing the apparently subservient role of commentator. [16] At the same time, the self-effacing acts of analysis and explanation become a veiled statement of freedom, creativity, aggression, and originality, which emerge in relationship to reading the Torah. The Midrashist intends to reassess the Bible’s meaning by filling in gaps and hollow places, thereby reconstructing scripture as a polysemous text, while appearing to submit to its influence through appraisal of its timeless values.
Dylan’s midrash on the Akedah in “Highway 61 Revisited,” noted earlier in this essay, illustrates Fishbane’s observations. Contra Abraham’s submission without question to God’s commandment to bind Isaac in Genesis 22, “Abe” in the song, at first, says, “’Man, you must be puttin’ me on.’”
Oh God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe says, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
God say, “No.” Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin’ you better run”
Well Abe says, “Where you want this killin’ done?”
God says. “Out on Highway 61”
As if he were negotiating with another human being, Hipster Abe ‘s initial response – “Man, you must be puttin’ me on” – suggests the patriarch’s readiness to challenge God’s threatening command. In this way, Dylan’s Abe’s differs from the silently acquiescent Abraham of Genesis 22. Dylan emphasizes Abe’s agency, and thus his humanity, but we must still face his unsettling willingness to quash his own instinctive resistance to God’s caprices. Abraham turns himself (quickly) into a model of compliance: “Where you want this killin’ done?” In the end, Dylan has made the Akedah over with black humor, tuning it to anti-war irony and protest against elders’ readiness to send the young into harm’s way. In his book on the patriarch, Alan Dershowitz regards the Abraham of the Akedah story as “the world’s first Jewish fundamentalist – a man who elevates faith over morality, fundamentalism over reason” (36). To a degree, Dylan rejects the biblical version of Abraham as faithful to God in “Highway 61 Revisited” and replaces it, not with the moralist Abraham of the Sodom story, but with an interrogative version of the patriarch who pivots between resistance and vehemence. A disturbing aspect of Dylan’s song is, in fact, how fast Abe’s initial resistance to killing a son in the name of the lord shifts to a willful agreement to do so. In the Sodom story, as Dershowitz points out, Abraham, like a pugnacious defense lawyer, negotiates a principled agreement – a contract – with God in which “the presence of a certain number of innocents [ten] among the numerous sinners of Sodom will result in the ‘whole place’ being spared” (20). As with Gluck in “The Triumph of Achilles,” Dylan in “Highway 61 Revisited” reflects in emotionally ambivalent ways on a human relationship – Abraham and Isaac – shadowed by a hierarchical relationship involving a human and a God. Both of our newest Jewish American Nobel laureates put their Midrashic imaginations to work to explore the fragility of human relationships in the face of inhuman terrors.
Notes
[1] See Amit Chaudhuri. “Bob Dylan is not the first songwriter to win the Nobel prize for literature.” The Guardian. October 21, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/21/dylan-is-not-the-first-songwriter-to-win-the-nobel-prize-for-literature
[2] In The Guardian, Alison Flood reports: “At Glück’s UK publisher Carcanet, which has published the poet for more than two decades, Michael Schmidt said staff were “completely surprised” at the news but also “astonished at the justice of the win”: “What the Academy seems to have done is they’ve gone for a poet who is, in a sense, aesthetically, imaginatively, at odds with the age,” Schmidt said. “She’s not a cheerleader. She’s in no way a voice for any cause – she is a human being engaged in the language and in the world. And I think there’s this wonderful sense that she is not polemical, and maybe this is what’s being celebrated. She’s not a person trying to persuade us of anything, but helping us to explore to explore the world we’re living in. She’s a clarifying poet. There doesn’t seem to be much political engagement in her poems. They’re really about the individual human being alive in the world, and in the language.” “Louise Glück wins the 2020 Nobel prize in literature.” The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/08/louise-gluck-wins-the-2020-nobel-prize-in-literature ref=upstract.com&curator=upstract.com
[3] In Bob Dylan Behind The Shades: A Biography, Clinton Heylin writes that while many biographers read Dylan’s “desire for a new identity” through a mythologization of his origins that erased his Jewishness as a sign of Jewish self-hatred, the early self-fashionings may have stemmed less from “a rejection of his Jewish identity” and more from “a rebuttal of the limits placed on imagination on the bulk of the citizens of Hibbing” (22) and “an attempt to disavow his small-town background” as well as the “undercurrent of anti-Semitism” faced by the small, close-knit Jewish community of Hibbing, which was dominated by “an essentially Catholic infrastructure” (22).
[4] Zelig information from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086637/
[5] As David Cloud reports, “Dylan has dabbled in Lubavitch Hasidism, an ultra-orthodox form of Judaism, suggesting that he was exploring his Jewish roots. ‘Bob Dylan, the Midwestern Jew who drifted away from Judaism while pursuing his career as singer and songwriter, appeared at synagogue prayers on the Yom Kippur Day of Atonement and was honored with a call to the reading of the Torah, according to Shmais.com. He attended the Chabad synagogue of Beth Tfiloh in Atlanta, Georgia. The crowd of 900 other worshippers quickly identified the 66-year-old Dylan, whose original name is Robert Zimmerman. He was called to the sixth of seven parts of the Torah reading and remained for the sermon and the memorial service of Yizkor” (“Day of Atonement Draws Dylan to the Torah,” Arutz Sheva, Israel National News, Sept. 24, 2007). See “Bob Dylan.” Way of Life Literature. Updated March 16, 2015 (first published May 29, 2001) https://www.wayoflife.org/reports/bob_dylan.html
[6] Margotin and Guesdon point out, for example, that Dylan’s “Gates of Eden” (1964) was influenced by William Blakes’s The Gates of Paradise (1793) and Dylan’s “As I Went Out One Morning” (1967) was inspired by W.H. Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening” (170;284).
[7] Unlike Dylan and the Austrian novelist Peter Handke, who won in 2019, Glück’s selection is neither surprising nor scandalous. As Daniel Trotta and Anna Ringstrom reported in Yahoo News (October 8, 2020), however, commentators have interpreted Glück’s selection as a way for the Nobel committee to make amends for the controversial choices of Handke in 2019 and Dylan in 2020:
Glück ‘s Nobel prize followed years of controversy surrounding the literature award, but [Academy Permanent Secretary Mats] Malm sidestepped questions about whether Glück was chosen to address any related concerns.
Alluding to past disputes, he told reporters: “I’d say that in our Nobel (prize) work the crisis hasn’t been decisive.”
In 2019, the Academy exceptionally named two winners after postponing the 2018 prize in the wake of a sexual assault scandal involving the husband of one of its members.
The secretive, 234-year-old Academy later announced changes it billed as improving the transparency of the awards process.
But one of the literature laureates announced last year, Austria’s Peter Handke, had drawn international criticism over his portrayal of Serbia as a victim during the 1990s Balkan wars and for attending the funeral of its nationalist strongman leader Slobodan Milosevic.
The 2016 literature prize granted to American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan polarized opinion over whether a popular musician should be given an award that had been largely the domain of novelists and playwrights.
The Austrian Peter Handke received the award in 2019, “attracting criticism for his outspoken positions on the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s and for his close ties to former Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević, who was charged with war crimes associated with the conflict.” See: Bianca Britton, CNN report, “Peter Handke’s Nobel literature prize win sparks outrage.” Updated 3:59 PM EDT, Fri October 11, 2019 https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/11/europe/peter-handke-nobel-prize-criticism-intl-scli/index.html).
[8] Dylan was not the first Nobel Laureate in Literature to have excelled in music; that honor would belong to Bengali author and musician Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) who in 1913 “became the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.” https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rabindranath-Tagore; Britannica.com; author is W. Andrew Robinson; “Rabindranath Tagore Bengali poet.”
[9] Supporters have emphasized Dylan’s impact of popular music. Stephen King, for example, says that “without Dylan, Paul Simon maybe ends up in the Brill Building, writing songs like ‘Hey Schoolgirl’ like he did in the beginning.”
[10] Anna North. “Why Bob Dylan Shouldn’t Have Gotten a Nobel.” The New York Times. October 13, 2016.
[11] Stephen Metcalfe. “Bob Dylan Is a Genius of Almost Unparalleled Influence, but He Shouldn’t Have Gotten the Nobel.” Slate. October 13, 2016. https://slate.com/culture/2016/10/why-bob-dylan-shouldnt-have-gotten-the-nobel-prize-for-literature.html
[12] Comparing a passage from a Wilbur poem to a Dylan lyric, Metcalfe writes:
Wilbur has spent a lifetime refining an ancient practice, of making a hard, seemingly intractable thought dance to the rhythm of his chosen words—and in so doing, in working through the difficult thought, for a moment, the cosmos is placed at our fingertips. In the second, which is from my favorite Bob Dylan song by far, the words are colloquial, spare, painterly, and without the accompanying music, inert. The first is poetry, the second are lyrics. You don’t go to the hardware store for oranges, as they say, and if you want poetry, you don’t go to Bob Dylan.
[13] Ethan Goffman. “On Contemporary Jewish American Secular Creativity.” Unpublished manuscript.
[14] Anastasia Tsioulcas writes, “Nearly 60 years after writing such counterculture classics as “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Like a Rolling Stone,” Bob Dylan has sold his entire songwriting catalog — more than 600 songs — to Universal Music Publishing Group in a deal announced Monday morning by Universal.
The agreement was first reported by The New York Times, which said it is worth more than $300 million. The deal with Dylan may be the highest price ever paid for a musician or group’s songwriting rights. (Universal has not disclosed the purchase price.)” “Bob Dylan Sells Songwriting Catalog in 9-Figure Deal.”
(NPR: https://www.npr.org/2020/12/07/943818966/bob-dylan-sells-songwriting-catalog-in-nine-figure-deal) December 7, 202011:28 AM ET
[15] The Australian critic Ian Warden has read Gluck’s decision to focus on Emily Dickinson’s “I’m nobody – who are you” in her Nobel lecture as an implicit rebuke to Trump’s excessive Tweeting and publicity seeking: “In her acceptance lecture, Gluck testifies that her favourite poets and poems are the antithesis of the Trumpian “Look at me! Listen to me! Mate with me! I’m Somebody!” way of doing things. She, Gluck, loves Dickinson’s poem in praise of ‘nobodyness’ because it is a poem not brayed to a whole bog but just spoken, quietly, intimately to one reader at a time.
Reading it as a teenager, Gluck remembers, she knew that “she [Dickinson] had chosen me, or recognised me”.
“We were an elite, companions in invisibility, a fact known only to us … I believe that in awarding me this prize, the Swedish Academy is choosing to honour the intimate, private voice …”
[16] See Michael Fishbane. “Inner Biblical Exegesis: Types and Strategies of Interpretation in Ancient Israel.” In Hartman and Budick, Midrash and Literature, 19-40.
Works Cited
Alexandra Alter. “‘I Was Unprepared’: Louise Glück on Poetry, Aging and a Surprise Nobel Prize.” The New York Times. October 8, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/books/louise-gluck-nobel-prize-literature.html
Bianca Britton. “Peter Handke’s Nobel literature prize win sparks outrage.” Updated 3:59 PM EDT, Fri October 11, 2019 https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/11/europe/peter-handke-nobel-prize-criticism-intl-scli/index.html.
Amit Chaudhuri. “Bob Dylan is not the first songwriter to win the Nobel prize for literature.” The Guardian. October 21, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/21/dylan-is-not-the-first-songwriter-to-win-the-nobel-prize-for-literature
David Cloud. “Bob Dylan.” Way of Life Literature. Updated March 16, 2015 (first published May 29, 2001) https://www.wayoflife.org/reports/bob_dylan.html
David Dalton. Who is that Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan. New York: Hyperion, 2012.
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Allison Flood. “Louise Glück wins the 2020 Nobel prize in literature.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/08/louise-gluck-wins-the-2020-nobel-prize-in-literature?ref=upstract.com&curator=upstract.com
Louise Glück. “Nobel Prize Lecture.” December 8, 2020. https://english.yale.edu/news/department-news/louise-glucks-nobel-prize-lecture
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Seth Rogovoy. Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet. New York: Scribner, 2009.
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DECEMBER 19 2020 https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/7054495/mating-call-of-the-45th-president/