Courtney McGrailThe World of Books
Ireland, as small country, is inordinately proud of its Nobel laureates for literature. The award to W. B. Yeats in 1923 was taken, and rightly so, as international recognition of the ancient and profound literary tradition of an ancient country which paradoxically was also a new state.
Likewise with Beckett and Heaney: one an award to a playwright whose dramas of few words seem to speak to the often bleak nature of modern culture, and to a poet who seemed in a deeply troubled Ireland emerging to peace to incarnate the traditions of Ireland, but with a totally modern voice and manner.
The Noble prize for literature has always been political: the awards to Winston Churchill and to Boris Pasternak are to be seen in this light.
These awards for literature are made by the Swedish Academy – some of the awards in other fields are made by other institutions. The working of the Swedish committee has always been mysterious. At one time it seems that there were too many Scandinavian authors, whose work has faded, were crowned. In later years many wondered why Steinbeck got the prize when Graham Greene and James Joyce were passed over.
Who is passed over is a crucial matter. The awards of the prize to Bob Dylan (pictured) recognises an artist who is by way of being an oral poet. But until quite recent times many of the literary cultures, from the Ituri Forest to the Australian outback, and Amazonia to the Siberian taiga, have been oral.
Our own Gaelic poetry and literary culture was completely oral until the arrival of Christianity. The orality of Irish poetry remains a striking characteristic. The Irish love to hear the voice of the poet in person.
Complaints about Dylan being old, white, and rich miss the point. As do claims that many courageous writers who work in fear for their lives in Russia, Asia, and Africa and Latin America are disrespected. But this is not so.
The orality of the Homeric tradition (illustrated by the folk poets of the modern Balkans) was resisted for a long time by more academic critics.
In awarding the prize to Bob Dylan the Swedish Committee that recognises a great mass of oral tradition which those who cannot conceive of ‘literature’ existing outside a printed book chose to ignore.
His songs of protest and emancipation moved his own generation when he was a young man – remarks about ageing hippies are also far from the point. More recently his work has been filled with Christian allusions and themes, a development from the Jewish culture of his birth into a new outlook.
This award recognises the direct power and passion of the spoken word, the word that can be passed from mouth to mouth, rather than the book from hand to hand.
Oral culture
Something of this verbal oral culture can be discovered in a remarkable book by the late Sir Maurice Bowra. Primitive Song (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962) arose from the his own studies of more recent more western literate cultures.
As is often the case with poetry the very nature of translation presents a barrier. Bowra quotes songs of hunting, of family life, of love and loss, and of man’s million year encounter with the divine – for much of the oral poetry of the world is taken up with the immanence of the transcendent.
All too often our involvement in forms of Western religion, of religions based on the books, like Judaism, Islam and Christian, even Hinduism and Buddhism, blind us to the nature of poetic traditions which some would like to trace back to the Paleolithic, others still to the imaginations of the earlier forms of humans (now extinct), who in the very nature of things must have had those “intimations of immortality” that Wordsworth, himself a poet of the common speech of the people of Cumberland, speaks of.
Far from being bizarre, as some commentators seem to think, Dylan’s Nobel Prize is an award made not just to a single culture, or a national, or a group. It is in reality an award made to all of humanity and perhaps to the world itself, “our common home” as we have been so recently reminded.