Dylan in the Pacific

For hundreds and sometimes thousands of years the peoples of this part of the world spoke, chanted, sung, and danced literature, rather than wrote it. Today, in societies like Tonga and Vanuatu, literature is till largely something that is heard, rather than read. Tongan punake compose music and dances to accompany the lines of their poems, and their compositions are performed at important public occasions like festivals and weddings.

Yet the oral literature of the Pacific is still underappreciated by too many universities and publishers. There are exceptions, like the magnificent collection of Tuvaluan songs issued as a bilingual book and a double CD set by the Institute of Pacific Studies, and Atuanui Press’ edition of Futa Helu’s essays on Tongan poetics, but too many important poems remain unknown outside the islands were they are sung and danced. 

Some writers have criticised the Nobel committee’s decision to honour Dylan, and accused committee members of wanting to prove how trendy they are, at the expense of serious literature. But this sort of criticism ignores the fact that, in the West as much as the Pacific, great literature was traditionally sung or recited, rather than read. Sappho’s poems were performed to the accompaniment of harps; Homer’s Odyssey was a campfire tale.

On twitter today Dylan enthusiasts are arguing about his best songs and albums. The art critic Hamish Keith has claimed that the Nobel is a reward for the protest songs the young Dylan composed. I find a lot of those songs smug and didactic, and prefer to listen to some of the more mysterious, poetic songs Dylan recorded later in the 1960s.

My favourite Dylan lyric comes from ‘Love Minus Zero/No Limits’, a song included on the 1966 album Bringing It All Back Home. I love the song’s use of paradox, and the way Dylan juxtaposes apparently unrelated images to create sudden jumps in scene and time: