Accusations About Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize Lecture Rekindle an Old Debate

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/14/arts/music/bob-dylan-nobel-lecture-sparknotes.html

Version 0 of 1.

Perhaps it was just a matter of time.

Bob Dylan makes a major artistic statement, and eagle-eyed students of his work soon find evidence that he had “borrowed” — or, to be less kind, plagiarized — significant parts of it.

It has come up in song lyrics and in passages from Mr. Dylan’s memoir, “Chronicles: Volume One.” The sources have included the work of a Japanese doctor and a Confederate poet, and fed an unending debate about whether Mr. Dylan is a Rauschenberg-esque master of pastiche or simply a thief. The stakes for Mr. Dylan’s reputation are even higher now that he has been elevated to a Nobel laureate.

The latest allegation, in fact, is related to Mr. Dylan’s Nobel lecture, which he delivered in a recording last week as a requirement of accepting last year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. In the speech, Mr. Dylan recounted how he is influenced by Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick,” Erich Maria Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” and Homer’s “The Odyssey” — the kinds of well-worn classics that most students encounter in school, and may consult a study guide to help understand.

A Slate article on Tuesday accused Mr. Dylan of doing what schoolchildren get scolded for every day: cribbing lines from that study guide and passing it off as his own work. The author, Andrea Pitzer, combed through Mr. Dylan’s 4,000-word speech and, in the case of his 78 sentences of commentary on “Moby-Dick,” found at least 20 examples in which phrases from his text closely resemble lines in a SparkNotes online guide to the novel.

Dylan: “The ship’s crew is made up of men of different races.”

SparkNotes: “… a crew made up of men from many different countries and races.”

Dylan: “Finally, Ahab spots Moby. … Boats are lowered. … Moby attacks Ahab’s boat and destroys it. Next day, he sights Moby again. Boats are lowered again. Moby attacks Ahab’s boat again.”

SparkNotes: “Ahab finally sights Moby Dick. The harpoon boats are launched, and Moby Dick attacks Ahab’s harpoon boat, destroying it. The next day, Moby Dick is sighted again, and the boats are lowered once more … Moby Dick again attacks Ahab’s boat.”

And so on.

For astute Dylan fans, such accusations are nothing new.

Some lyrics on his 2001 album “‘Love and Theft’” closely resemble lines from “Confessions of a Yakuza,” a 1991 book by Dr. Junichi Saga about the life of a Japanese gangster. In 2006, lyrics on Mr. Dylan’s album “Modern Times” were found to have been lifted from works by Henry Timrod, an obscure 19th-century writer who has been called the poet laureate of the Confederacy.

And the 2014 book “The Dylanologists: Adventures in the Land of Bob,” by David Kinney, devotes substantial space to tracking the many apparent sources that Mr. Dylan used for his 2004 memoir, “Chronicles: Volume One.”

Over the years, many scholars and critics have defended his techniques, comparing them to the folk process — in which material from the past is recycled and adapted by new generations — and even to hip-hop sampling.

In 2003, Jon Pareles, The New York Times’s chief pop music critic, wrote that the “hoopla” over “‘Love and Theft’” was “a symptom of a growing misunderstanding about culture’s ownership and evolution, a misunderstanding that has accelerated as humanity’s oral tradition migrates to the internet. Ideas aren’t meant to be carved in stone and left inviolate; they’re meant to stimulate the next idea and the next.”

Others have not been as forgiving. In an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 2010, Joni Mitchell called Mr. Dylan “a plagiarist,” and added: “His name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception.”

When other writers have invented Dylan quotations, there have been severe consequences. In 2012, Jonah Lehrer, then widely viewed as a media wunderkind, resigned as a staff writer at The New Yorker after it was found that he had made up quotes attributed to Mr. Dylan for his book “Imagine: How Creativity Works,” and lied to a reporter when confronted about it.

(Mr. Lehrer had also been accused of recycling his own material for The New Yorker and elsewhere.)

A spokesman for Mr. Dylan had no comment on Wednesday.

But Mr. Dylan has addressed similar accusations in the past, in pugilistic terms. When asked in a Rolling Stone interview in 2012 about how he had borrowed from Timrod and Dr. Saga without attribution, Mr. Dylan said that “in folk and jazz, quotation is a rich and enriching tradition,” and complained that he has been subjected to “different rules” than others.

And then he had a few words about his accusers.

“These are the same people that tried to pin the name Judas on me,” he said. “Judas, the most hated name in human history! If you think you’ve been called a bad name, try to work your way out from under that. Yeah, and for what? For playing an electric guitar? As if that is in some kind of way equitable to betraying our Lord and delivering him up to be crucified. All those evil [expletive] can rot in hell.”