Since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature last year, Bob Dylan has been notably unenthused about the honor. After the award was announced last year he spent weeks more or less carrying on as usual, refusing to acknowledge his prize. Eventually, he did go on to accept the award during a very intimate proceeding in Stockholm with a dozen or so people, sending proxies in his place for the public celebration gala.
As with all Nobel laureates, in order to accept the prize money attached to the award, Dylan was required to give a lecture on literature–a requirement to which he begrudgingly acquiesced earlier this month with a thirty-minute-long online speech focused on three classic literary works: Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Eric Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, and Homer’s The Odyssey. However, since the speech’s publication on Monday, June 5th, some irregularities have appeared in his acceptance speech, making Bob Dylan either the worst-ever Nobel Prize in Literature holder or the best troll of the institution of the Nobel Prize in the award’s history.
Listen To Bob Dylan’s Long-Awaited 30-Minute Nobel Lecture In Literature
Yesterday, these doubts came to a head with accusations by Slate’s Andrea Pitzer that Dylan had plagiarized parts of his speech from SparkNotes, an online service that summarizes commonly-read books for time-pressed high school and college procrastinators everywhere. Pitzer’s investigation began after Ben Greenman noticed that Dylan may have inserted a made-up a Moby Dick quote into his speech — “Some men who receive injuries are led to God, others are led to bitterness,” which the singer-songwriter attributed to a Quaker priest onboard — and could not find the phrasing or the explicit sentiment directly within various editions of the classic Melville novel.
While Greenman was unable to find a quote about injuries and bitterness directly in Moby Dick, Pitzer found that the verbiage in question was found more-or-less directly in a SparkNotes summation of the novel, with the character list describing the Quaker preacher as “someone whose trials have led him toward God rather than bitterness” (emphasis Pitzer’s). Off this hunch, the Slate journalist began to compare Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize lecture to the SparkNotes for Moby Dick, finding a number of eerily similar passages across them (though some seem more damning than others) and noting, “across the 78 sentences in the lecture that Dylan spends time describing Moby-Dick, even a cursory inspection reveals that more than a dozen of them appear to closely resemble lines from the SparkNotes site. And most of the key shared phrases in these passages . . . do not appear in the novel Moby-Dick at all.”
However, whether Bob Dylan lifted lines from SparkNotes intentionally or not, the former would not be entirely uncharacteristic for the musician who has long made clear his stance on the legitimacy of stealing for art, particularly considering that Dylan has frequently covered a great range of classic tunes and made them his own. According to the Slate article, “When he started out, Dylan absorbed classic tunes and obscure compositions alike from musicians he met, recording versions that would become more famous than anything by those who taught him the songs or even the original songwriters. His first album included two original numbers and 11 covers.”
His view on the close ties between art and theft was made all the more explicit with Dylan’s 2001 release, “Love and Theft”, whose name (aside from being abundantly clear in its message) was quoted most probably as a direct reference to Eric Lott’s noted work, Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class.
Within his speech itself, Dylan warns to not dig too deeply into the meaning of texts, musical or otherwise, noting “If a song moves you, that’s all that’s important. I don’t have to know what a song means. I’ve written all kinds of things into my songs. And I’m not going to worry about it — what it all means.” However, this has always seemed like a bizarre note on which to end his speech, especially when considering that in order for something to evoke emotion in a listener or reader, there has to be some sort of inherent meaning that resonates.
Rather than parsing through the implications born of believing that this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature is so unfamiliar with a classic like Moby Dick that he needed to rely on SparkNotes to write his speech on the book–conjuring familiar grade school memories for many of us of the “studying” process ahead of a report on a book that we had not read—it seems simpler and more believable to view Dylan’s lifting from the SparkNotes summary as intentional.
A few sentences earlier, Dylan notes that “Melville put all his old testament, biblical references, scientific theories, Protestant doctrines, and all that knowledge of the sea and sailing ships and whales into one story.” Considering that Moby Dick is the only one of the three novels called out during Dylan’s speech that seems to teeter on the brink of plagariasm, the musician may have intentionally made direct references to the SparkNotes and then noted Melville’s inclusion of many disparate texts to parallel this phenomenon. When paired with the fact that Dylan has been a hesitant literary hero, particularly following his receipt of the Nobel Prize, this seems more likely, with Dylan effectively deconstructing the implicit weight of classic renowned texts by outlining their influence and repeated archetypal tropes while simultaneously declaring them meaningless both directly and by SparkNotes’ ability to present the text without ever reading them.
You can check out the similarities across the SparkNotes summation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize in Literature lecture compiled by Andrea Pitzer below and decide for yourself whether it’s likely that Dylan’s plagarism is intentional or not.
[Comparison chart via Slate]