Bob Dylan's Nobel lecture seems as incoherent and ambiguous as ever:

Bob Dylan's Nobel lecture seems as incoherent and ambiguous as ever:

“Moby-Dick,” as he describes it, gave Mr. Dylan the tool of intertwining character voices and the theme of rebirth through a narrator. “Ahab gets tangled up in the harpoon lines and is thrown out of his boat into a watery grave,” he writes. But Ishmael survives the shipwreck, “in the sea floating on a coffin.” The theme “works its way into more than a few of my songs,” he wrote, but gave no examples. (That sound you hear is a dozen dissertations being started.)

“All Quiet on the Western Front” — which is also admired by President Trump — portrays the hell of war, and the role of an artist to document it and give the world a reason to survive. Finally, Mr. Dylan turns to “The Odyssey,” with its themes of wandering, adventure and danger, and of returning home to a changed place.

What does it all mean? Mr. Dylan dodges answering directly. But he argues that songs both are and are not literature, the work of novels and plays and epic poems. “Songs are unlike literature,” he wrote. “They’re meant to be sung, not read.” And he asks people to encounter his lyrics the way they were intended to be heard, “in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days.”

But, he added, the granddaddy of Western literature was a singer and a lyric writer, too. “I return once again to Homer,” he wrote, “who says, ‘Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.’”

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