Discourse!

interventions in the debates of the day, hot takes, devastating ripostes and so forth

Jacques-Louis David, oil sketch for The Tennis-Court Oath (1790s)

I. Slightly more on Bob Dylan — sorry gang — the ride never ends.

I thought writing a gigantic essay on Bob Dylan would get him out of my system for a while, as writing gigantic essays on people tends to do, but such a thing did not occur and instead I continue to do deranged things like pay seven dollars a month for a podcast that exclusively discusses Dylan tour bootlegs. So I feel I have to briefly chime in on the questions raised in this recent answer from an interview with friend-of-the-newsletter Henry Oliver:

Manuel: There’s a line by Norman Mailer about Bob Dylan: “If Dylan’s a poet, I’m a basketball player.” I didn’t quite get it until I read about “philistine supremacy.” I’m not saying this is exactly what you mean by that term, but let me ask you anyway. Making pop songs is not the same as writing literary novels. It just isn’t. And I love Bob Dylan (though I wasn’t thrilled about him getting the Nobel Prize). Is it philistine to say that reading good novels is just as worthwhile as listening to Dylan — or to The Beatles, for that matter (and I love them too)?

Henry: Here is a little cluster of thoughts about that topic. I see no reason in principle why someone like Dylan should not win the Nobel Prize. Some of the Elizabethan poetry that we prize was written as song lyrics. (Personally, I think there should be room in the Oxford Book of English Verse for a page of Noel Coward’s lyrics.) However, in practical terms, Mailer is right: these are distinct art forms and it usually isn’t meaningful to call a singer a poet.

But when you say “just as worthwhile” I don’t think they can be directly comparable. There are better and worse uses of our time, just as there are better and worse works of art and culture, but in general, I take a catholic view of culture. Shakespeare is better than Curb Your Enthusiasm, but I enjoy both and don’t see them as being directly comparable. There is a plurality of good art, as there is a plurality of other goods.

Whether something is “just as worthwhile” will be a personal decision, not necessarily related to whether those things are “equally good”. There’s a great deal of merit in Dylan and The Beatles, irrespective of how much any individual rates them. The overall balance for any one person will depend on individual factors. If you prefer The Beatles to reading novels, that is fine. Enjoy the Beatles! But that preference has nothing to do with which of them is “better”. You can love them both, for different reasons! A lot of the time, when someone says Dylan is “just as good” as Tolstoy, or whatever, they simply don’t know what they are talking about, or they are confusing their preferences for critical judgement. One implication of pluralism is that we are forced to choose, and in those choices we might debate the superiority of one to another. But that is still a question of preference, not judgement.

Henry is of course right that these types of comparisons are often sort of nonsensical. (Is Bob Dylan better than Tolstoy? Are the Eagles as good as Sir John Suckling? Is biting into a hot Krispy Kreme donut better than The Seven Samurai?) And yet, with the caveat that it’s never easy to say exactly what one means in an interview, I think he is being slightly equivocal here and, without coming out and saying it, categorizing Dylan as closer to Curb Your Enthusiasm than to Shakespeare. I appreciate this instinct, because I am his ally against vulgar poptimism. I think we should be able to say that some things are better than others, even if you personally enjoy them less. But the curious thing about Dylan is that over the last few years, as I’ve gotten really deep into the history of English literature, he has risen in my estimation rather than fallen. If there’s such a thing as a spider-sense that goes off in your head when you encounter a capital-G capital-A Great Artist, a sense you can develop by reading widely and deeply in the literary canon (whatever that is), he sets it off.

Nevertheless, I agree with Henry (and Norman Mailer) when they say pop music is not poetry, because the lines do not stand on their own but are part of a cohesive unit that includes the song’s melody, its instrumental accompaniment, and the vocal delivery itself. Though they are related, writing lyrics is a very different art to writing poetry, and people who are accomplished at one can be only moderately good or downright bad at the other. In his book Finishing the Hat, Stephen Sondheim remarks that poets often make poor lyricists, “because their verse has its own inner music and doesn’t make allowance for the real thing.” Attempts by great poets like W.H. Auden or Langston Hughes to write lyrics or librettos “convey the aura of a royal visit,” they “announce the presence of the writer.” Anything overwritten will not survive as a lyric. As Sondheim points out, something as simple as:

Oh what a beautiful morning,
Oh what a beautiful day.
I’ve got a beautiful feeling,
Everything’s going my way!

takes on the grandeur of Robert Frost when set to musical accompaniment, while something like:

You are the promised kiss of springtime
That makes the lonely winter seem long.

becomes even more bathetic in song than in print.

I think much of the grumbling about Dylan comes from a tendency in many of his fans to overrate his 60s lyrics and their easy-to-parody surrealist/symbolist style, a style that he only wrote in for a few short years at the height of his fame and influence. These songs are important and influential because no one had written pop music like this before. They’re full of memorable images, and they’re sung and performed brilliantly. But through the years, rock critics, most of whom haven’t read a lot of poetry, have tended to claim that they’re great poetry in themselves, which is not really true; for every good line in early Dylan there is an overcooked one. If a 24-year-old came to you with “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” or “Desolation Row” as a poem, you would think they had a lot of talent and a bright future. You wouldn’t say they’re as good as Eliot or Yeats. (This is why Geoffrey Hill thought Christopher Ricks was wasting his time in writing a book on Dylan’s lyrics.)

But when I think of what I love most about Dylan’s music, I don’t necessarily think of the really “poetic” moments, all the lines that are like “The Three Stooges and Captain Ahab are playing cards with Dracula” or “her perfume is a mask that drips with jewels” or whatever. (I made both of those up.) I think instead of moments like:

Last night I danced with a stranger
But she just reminded me you were the one

from “Standing in the Doorway,” or, from “Idiot Wind”:

We’re idiots, babe
It’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves

On the page, those don’t look like much. But in their proper context, they are beautiful and devastating, because lyrics, instrumentation, and vocal delivery all coalesce perfectly, with no one element getting in the way of the other. Is this a lesser art than poetry or novel-writing? I would invite those who think so to try it.

Let me take another angle. Imagine an artist. In his early career, he writes in a newly-revitalized folk tradition, making thrilling new art out of the old stories and legends of his country. His youthful idealism leads him into politics and he suddenly finds himself looked to as a messianic voice during a moment of great social crisis. He becomes disillusioned and retreats. He gets religion, alienating many of his former followers. After much personal tumult and romantic agony, he refines his late style into something magnificently grave, simple yet majestic, an old man’s perspective on an eventful life and all its failures and triumphs. He is respected by everyone and wins the Nobel Prize.

The above paragraph describes the career of both Bob Dylan and William Butler Yeats. Having similar careers doesn’t mean their art is necessarily equal, and one is free to believe that Yeats is great and Dylan is terrible. But with both of them, it is not a single accomplishment we prize but an accumulation of material that, taken as a whole, forms a portrait of a life lived through art. Yeats’s poems and Dylan’s songs are great in a vacuum, but it means more to read “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” if you’ve also read “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” just as Dylan’s most recent material is made more meaningful by the long career that preceded it. This is just an instinct, not anything I can convincingly argue, but having been deeply obsessed with both Dylan and Yeats at different times in my life, when I look at the careers of both, I feel as if I am seeing two figures of roughly similar stature.

If the question Henry and Manuel are trying to answer is simply “should you win the Nobel Prize in Literature for writing pop lyrics”—probably not, I guess? It would be odd if they gave it to Werner Herzog or something, even if his stature as an artist might merit it, because film is not literature and neither is pop songwriting, though it’s closer. Personally, I don’t care at all about the Nobel Prize and it really baffles me that people pay attention to all the inside baseball, the “they gave it to an American last year so they won’t do it for another ten years,” “giving it to Dylan was a secret middle finger to American literature,” sort of thing. Surely the mere fact that this inside baseball is played invalidates the stated purpose of the prize! To think of Susan Sontag and Philip Roth in their final years, agonizing over the fact that some faceless cabal of Swedes didn’t recognize them! Who cares!

But if the question is “is Bob Dylan as important and talented as the novelists and poets who were his peers,” well, with the caveat that only time will tell for sure, I would very strongly advocate that he is. The omnipresence of popular music as an art form makes it easy to forget how relatively new it is. The mass manufacture of 78rpm records (which could hold about 8 minutes per side; a Verdi opera was released as a 40-disc set) dates to the 1910s. The idea of a pop record as a cohesive work of art and of the songwriter as auteur rather than craftsman only emerged in the 1950s, when the long-playing record became common. Whatever this thing is, it has existed in its current form for less than a lifetime. Only now, as Dylan and his peers reach the end of their journeys, are we beginning to understand what it can artistically accomplish. To look at him is to realize it can accomplish quite a lot.

II. Short stories: are they any good?

One big issue with writing on Substack is that it is extremely hard to cultivate an Olympian grandeur and detachment in one’s work, to issue the kind of lofty-yet-controversial pronouncement that one enjoys so much in Gore Vidal and Susan Sontag and Camille Paglia and the like. This is because when you throw a little bomb into the discourse for fun, thanks to this website’s social features, you get instantly deluged with everyone’s opinion, not only the opinions of your friends and peers (with whom you might assume good faith and fellowship even if you disagree), but also the opinions of complete strangers who, only knowing you from a quoted sentence, assume you are some sort of idiot and claim that your offhand remark elicits violent impulses within them. (In Vidal and Sontag’s day, you had to write a letter to the editor in order to call someone an idiot.) Of course, there’s no point in crying about it—you threw the bomb! What did you expect? Nevertheless it is always aggravating to be misinterpreted, and though I wish I could glide over it all in true Vidalian fashion, the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. So here are my true unfiltered and honest thoughts about the contemporary short story.

Obviously, for the purpose of an essay defending the essay form itself, I was being a little hyperbolic when I claimed to “secretly sort of dislike” short stories. “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” “The Lady with the Dog,” “A Hunger Artist,” “A Clean Well-Lighted Place,” “Signs and Symbols,” “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period,” “The Dead,” “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “Defender of the Faith” — you’ll get no argument from me that these are great works of art. Still, I always find myself slightly reluctant to read a short story. There is something about the vast majority of even the best ones that I admire but cannot quite bring myself to love. I admit I have always been puzzled by my own feelings in this matter. How best to explain them?

Outdoor enthusiasts distinguish between “Type 1” and “Type 2” fun. Type 1 fun is fun while you’re doing it: walking on the beach at sunset, blasting music with the top down, sex, drugs, blue skies, cold drinks. Type 2 fun is difficult or strenuous in the moment, but rewarding and enjoyable later: climbing a mountain, running a marathon, reading the most complex stretches of Joyce or Proust. What I was trying to say is that most short stories, at least most contemporary realist or realist-adjacent short stories (as opposed to tales, yarns, legends, or Borgesian thought experiments, which are often fun while you’re reading them), feel distinctly Type 2. When they’re good, I’m glad to have read them. But the process of reading them is often not very fun, so even if I know it’ll be good for me, I find myself putting them off for the more capacious and immediate pleasures of the novel.

This sounds counterintuitive. Surely one has to work for the rewards of a novel more than those of a short story, which might take ten or twenty minutes to read? But the novel distributes its pleasures throughout. Think of the thrill you get, when you start a new one with all its possibilities. Think of the rush that comes in the last fifty or sixty pages, when you get the feeling of accomplishment that comes with finishing something long. Think of how it feels to live with a character for so much time, and the strange sensation that comes when you are done with a great book and feel as if you have parted with a friend.

The pleasures of the short story, conversely, so often exist largely in retrospect. Take “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” I think this is a magnificent story, one of the most haunting and powerful ever written. I have nothing but admiration for it and my life is better for having read it. But while you’re reading it, until the final few pages, it’s kind of boring! Most of it is just a family arguing, a family that is purposefully portrayed as not particularly interesting or notable and even rather annoying. It’s only once you’ve read the entire thing that you understand why the first ten pages were necessary. So many short stories are, to put it vulgarly, setup for a punchline, and getting to that punchline is often a lot of work, and only rarely worth it.

The best essay about contemporary realist short stories is Elif Batuman’s “Short Story and Novel” from 2004, in which she says:

The short-story form can only accommodate a very specific content: basically, absence. Missing persons, missed opportunities, very brief encounters, occurring in the margins of “Life Itself”: when the content is minimalist, then it makes sense to follow the short-fiction dictates: condense, delete, omit.

Novels, like short stories, are often about absences; but they are based on information overload. A short story says, “I looked for x, and didn’t find it,” or, “I was not looking anymore, and then I found x.” A novel says, “I looked for x, and found a, b, c, g, q, r, and w.” The novel consists of all the irrelevant garbage, the effort to redeem that garbage, to integrate it into Life Itself, to redraw the boundaries of Life Itself.

For me, much as I may enjoy and admire many short stories, the reason to read fictional narratives is ultimately contained mostly in a, b, c, g, q, r, and w rather than x. I love watching characters grow and develop. I love strange digressions and longueurs. I love passages of descriptive prose that are not strictly necessary. I love waking up each day excited to return to a fictional world. I like to be taken on a journey; I don’t think it’s an accident that so many of my favorite novels—Moby-Dick, Mason and Dixon, The Savage Detectives, Mating—involve long journeys of some sort. I don’t know how we would set up the system differently, but it seems a shame to me that so many contemporary authors must toil in the short story mines for a while when their strengths may not necessarily be suited to its very specialized kind of narrative.

This is certainly not true for everyone— some people, like Lincoln Michel, claim to prefer the elegant short story to the “inevitably bloated and repetitive” novel. Though this reads to me like claiming to prefer a stick of plain celery to a sizzling steak, I take him at his word. And of course, one doesn’t actually have to choose between the two forms, it’s certainly possible to enjoy both and I do, most of the time. But the inconvenient fact remains. I wish I could feel differently, but in my heart of hearts, in my secret self, in the mask below the mask below the mask which I only reveal when I’m alone, even when I’m reading a short story collection of undeniable brilliance and power, even if I turned the last page of the previous story and had to just sit and stare out the window for a while because I was so moved by its beauty and pathos, when I start on the next one and the opening sentence says something like “Diane was in the kitchen doing the washing-up when the doorbell rang,” some small, shameful part of me is always going to think: Oh God, not fucking Diane!