Storytelling has changed, and the Nobel has noticed

The Nobel Prize committee appears to be ahead of the curve when it comes to appreciating that the way in which the world has been telling stories is changing. Indeed, its decisions have caused more consternation than elation in recent years, with its departure from expectation this year being the most dramatic, when it honoured a folk musician, Bob Dylan, with the most coveted literary prize.

When it unveiled him as this year’s nominee, the committee said it had settled on Dylan “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.

Last year, the award went to another unlikely candidate, Svetlana Alexandrovna Alexievich, a Belarusian investigative journalist and non-fiction prose writer. Svetlana was chosen, in part, because she interviews people affected by major events, such as the Chernobyl disaster and the Second World War. Though her stories are true, Svetlana masks the identities of her subjects — many of them women — to allow their stories to come through.

Svetlana’s reputation is that she is a chronicler of oral histories. When the Nobel Committee awarded her, it was “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time”.

And like other winners of recent times — including Bob Dylan — Svetlana has addressed herself to the effects of the Second World War on Europe.

TIMES OF WAR

In terms of themes, the way writers have tackled the question of the war, which is still a major point of interest and reference in European scholarship, political and social-cultural debates, has played an increasing large role in influencing the choice of nominees.

For instance, when Frenchman Patrick Modiano won the prize in 2014, he was recognised “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the Occupation”

The Occupation here, of course, refers to the German occupation of parts of Europe during the Second World War.

Although Modiano is known more for his films, he is also a novelist in his own right. Similarly, Svetlana is better known for her investigate journalism. And although she has not written fiction, she is a published author in the sense that the testimonies of her subjects have been compiled into books.

Bob Dylan, too, is a die-hard literateur in his own right, having published a novel, Tarantula, in 1971, and his memoirs, Chronicles Volume 1 in 2004.

Here is how he remembers the war: “I was born in the spring of 1941. The Second World War was already raging in Europe, and America would soon be in it. The world was being blown apart and chaos was already driving its fist into the face of all new visitors. If you were born around this time or were living and alive, you could feel the old world go and the new one beginning.”

In one of his songs, 'With God on Our Side', he takes a critical look at war, and at the folly of combatants believing that God is on their side. He even takes a swipe at World War Two Germany and its policy of extermination.

“Now the Germans, too, have God on their side,” he says in the song and for good measure, challenges his audience to ponder whether God was on the side of Judas Iscariot when he betrayed Jesus with a kiss.

In 2013, the Nobel Prize winner was Alice Munro, a Canadian short story writer that the Nobel Committee described as the “master of the contemporary short story”. She, too, like other recent winners of the Nobel, has tackled the question of the Second World War.

According to Internet sources, her story, Dear Life, examines how the war affected individuals by influencing what happened to them and the choices they made as a result.

HARD RAIN

“Memory,” she once said, “is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories — and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.”

What is the point of the foregoing? Two observations, basically.

The first is that the authors who have won the Nobel award in recent years are not from the traditional stable.

This is what is flummoxing literary purists all over the world. However, the bigger lesson here is that, as Bob Dylan himself would say, “the times are a-changing” and the way we tell our stories is morphing as a result.

First we had a short story writer, next we had a film-maker, then we had a journalist and now we have a folk singer. All of them had long-running affairs with literature as readers and as writers. All of them were committed to becoming the best in their respective crafts. Indeed, as Bob Dylan says in 'A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall', “I know my song well before I sing it”. All the laureates were master artists without a doubt.

The Second World War has largely influenced all the recent choices for laureates, pointing, probably, to the need for the world to ask itself hard questions about the conflicts raging all around the globe and the humanitarian crises that they have caused even in Europe itself, which is now grappling with how to accommodate refugees from the troubled Middle East.

“If God is on our side,” as Bob Dylan says, “he will stop the next war”.