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LITERATURE

OPINION: Does Dylan realize what his Nobel snub is doing to musicians?

An American author writes an open letter to the Nobel Prize committee about this year's hotly debated literature prize.

OPINION: Does Dylan realize what his Nobel snub is doing to musicians?
Nobel laureate Bob Dylan. Photo: Vince Bucci/Invision/AP

To the Nobel Prize committee:

When I was an exchange student in Sweden during the 1980s, I had a fantastic opportunity to attend the Nobel awards ceremony – and I blew it. I was among the students in my exchange programme who were randomly selected to go, but I got lost on the way to the ceremony.

Even back then, as a dumb kid who knew little about the world, I realized what a big mistake I'd made. Why had I chosen to walk to the ceremony along the unfamiliar streets of Stockholm when I could have easily taken a cab and been there within a matter of minutes? When I got back to the house where I was staying, I felt awful. The family that was hosting me – not even my regular host family, but one that had agreed to put me up for the week I was in Stockholm – did its best to cheer me up.

Knowing that I was an aspiring writer, the mother in the family said: “Well, don't feel too bad. Maybe some day you'll come back to accept the Nobel Prize in Literature.” Those kind words from a virtual stranger obviously made quite an impression on me, since I remember them more than three decades later.

I couldn't help but think back to that time as I read about Bob Dylan's decision not to attend the Nobel awards ceremony on Saturday. Like many people, I was surprised when the Nobel committee selected Dylan for this year's prize in literature. But I understood the thought process: Dylan's music is poetry.

It was an unconventional choice, but it made sense to me. What hasn't made sense is Dylan's seeming indifference to this great honour. At first, he was silent about whether he would even accept the award. Then came the news that he would make it to the award ceremony “if possible”. Then, finally, word came down that he couldn't make it due to “prior commitments”.

(Note to Bob: It's the Nobel awards ceremony. Tell your dentist you can reschedule for the following week.)

I find Dylan's handling of this situation offensive on a couple of different levels. As a writer, I think of all the worthy authors of the printed word the Nobel committee had to pass over in order to make its bold choice. Some of those authors have written important books highlighting the highs and lows of the human condition. For many of them, there could be no higher honour than winning a Nobel prize.

But I also wonder if Dylan realizes what he's doing to the music profession he's spent his lifetime making richer through his awesome talent. By snubbing the committee in this way, I'm guessing that he's made it much more difficult for other musicians and songwriters to be seriously considered for this type of recognition in the future.

Dylan has cultivated a persona of someone who's quirky, someone who goes left when everyone else is going right. Which is fine under most circumstances. In this case, though, some appreciation and humility would have better served him and all of the musicians and lyricists who wish to follow in his footsteps.

I can't profess to speak for all Americans (at this divisive time in our country's history, I'm not sure who could), but I'm embarrassed. As a writer and a lover of music, I hope the Nobel committee will accept my personal apology. A Nobel prize holds a lot more value than this sad story suggests.

Blake Fontenay is an author and playwright who also works full-time in government communications. He is based in Nashville, Tennessee. Follow him on Twitter.

HISTORY

‘Lost’ manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

A book by one of France's most celebrated and controversial literary figures arrives in bookstores this week, 78 years after the manuscript disappeared

'Lost' manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

It is a rare thing when the story of a book’s publication is even more mysterious than the plot of the novel itself.

But that might be said of Guerre (War) by one of France’s most celebrated and controversial literary figures, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, which arrives in bookstores on Thursday, some 78 years after its manuscript disappeared.

Celine’s reputation has somehow survived the fact that he was one of France’s most eager collaborators with the Nazis.

Already a superstar thanks to his debut novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Celine became one of the most ardent anti-Semitic propagandists even before France’s occupation.

In June 1944, with the Allies advancing on Paris, the writer abandoned a pile of his manuscripts in his Montmartre apartment.

Celine feared rough treatment from authorities in liberated France, having spent the war carousing with the Gestapo, and giving up Jews and foreigners to the Nazi regime and publishing racist pamphlets about Jewish world conspiracies.

For decades, no one knew what happened to his papers, and he accused resistance fighters of burning them. But at some point in the 2000s, they ended up with retired journalist Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, who passed them – completely out of the blue – to Celine’s heirs last summer.

‘A miracle’
Despite the author’s history, reviews of the 150-page novel, published by Gallimard, have been unanimous in their praise.

“The end of a mystery, the discovery of a great text,” writes Le Point; a “miracle,” says Le Monde; “breathtaking,” gushes Journal du Dimanche.

Gallimard has yet to say whether the novel will be translated.

Like much of Celine’s work, Guerre is deeply autobiographical, recounting his experiences during World War I.

It opens with 20-year-old Brigadier Ferdinand finding himself miraculously alive after waking up on a Belgian battlefield, follows his treatment and hasty departure for England – all based on Celine’s real experiences.

His time across the Channel is the subject of another newly discovered novel, Londres (London), to be published this autumn.

If French reviewers seem reluctant to focus on Celine’s rampant World War II anti-Semitism, it is partly because his early writings (Guerre is thought to date from 1934) show little sign of it.

Journey to the End of the Night was a hit among progressives for its anti-war message, as well as a raw, slang-filled style that stuck two fingers up at bourgeois sensibilities.

Celine’s attitude to the Jews only revealed itself in 1937 with the publication of a pamphlet, Trifles for a Massacre, which set him on a new path of racial hatred and conspiracy-mongering.

He never back-tracked. After the war, he launched a campaign of Holocaust-denial and sought to muddy the waters around his own war-time exploits – allowing him to worm his way back into France without repercussions.

‘Divine surprise’
Many in the French literary scene seem keen to separate early and late Celine.

“These manuscripts come at the right time – they are a divine surprise – for Celine to become a writer again: the one who matters, from 1932 to 1936,” literary historian Philippe Roussin told AFP.

Other critics say the early Celine was just hiding his true feelings.

They highlight a quote that may explain the gap between his progressive novels and reactionary feelings: “Knowing what the reader wants, following fashions like a shopgirl, is the job of any writer who is very financially constrained,” Celine wrote to a friend.

Despite his descent into Nazism, he was one of the great chroniclers of the trauma of World War I and the malaise of the inter-war years.

An exhibition about the discovery of the manuscripts opens on Thursday at the Gallimard Gallery and includes the original, hand-written sheets of Guerre.

They end with a line that is typical of Celine: “I caught the war in my head. It is locked in my head.”

In the final years before his death in 1961, Celine endlessly bemoaned the loss of his manuscripts.

The exhibition has a quote from him on the wall: “They burned them, almost three manuscripts, the pest-purging vigilantes!”

This was one occasion – not the only one – where he was proved wrong.

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