“THE SIREN TEARS THE NIGHT IN HALF”

“THE SIREN TEARS THE NIGHT IN HALF” Tom Waits, the Uncanny and the American Gothic Word count: 16,904 Tuur Vandeborne Student number: 01510970 Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Gert Buelens A dissertation submitted to Ghent University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Advanced Masters in American Studies Academic year: 2017-‐2018

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Oh, that city music Oh, that city sound

Oh, how you're pulling my heart strings and Oh, let's go downtown

Kevin Morby, “City Music”

I would like to express my infinite gratitude to Professor Gert Buelens, without whom this thesis would have never existed. I would like to thank my parents for their support and for allowing me to finish this degree. Last but not least I would like to thank my friends for their support, their encouragement and for putting up with me through thesis-‐times.

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Introduction ........................................................................................................... 4

Chapter 1: Uncanny Influences ............................................................................. 10 The Urban Gothic ............................................................................................................................................. 10 Edward Hopper: Sinister Sentimentalism ............................................................................................ 14 Jack Kerouac: Haunted by Nostalgia ........................................................................................................ 22 “Small Change (Got Rained on by his own .38)” ................................................................................. 29 Chapter 2: The Overt Gothic ................................................................................. 34 Rural Gothic: “Murder in the Red Barn” ................................................................................................. 34 Suburban Gothic: “What’s he Building?” ................................................................................................ 38 Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 48

Bibliography ........................................................................................................ 50

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Introduction Tom Waits, born in 1949, has always been a musician that could not be pinned

down, neither musically nor biographically. In his music, he often changed styles,

experimented to great extent with sound and words and throughout the years he

has indulged in many genres of the American music tradition. Be it the jazzy

Beatnik tracks of The Heart of Saturday Night, the electric blues of Heartattack

and Vine or the “full circle” conceived by the “jazzy saloon ballads and the weird

Harry Partch-‐meets-‐Bertolt Brecht dance-‐hall music from hell” from Mule

Variations (Jacobs 16), he has managed to escape definite labeling and has

continued to reinvent himself. The biggest reinvention took place at the end of

the seventies and the beginning of the eighties. The album Swordfishtrombones

(1983) heralded a new era in the oeuvre of Waits, which would grow ever more

diverse, experimental and critically acclaimed.

Several factors explain this enthusiasm for experiment. At the end of the

seventies, although his music was still pretty well received, Waits started to feel

stuck in the same groove. By 1978, Waits said “I kind of feel like an old

prizefighter who’s just going through the motions. I keep doing this character –

the down-‐and-‐out but amusing and interesting Bowery character. And it’s the

same routine that I’ve been going through for so long as a live performer” (Qtd.

in Hoskyns 203). In 1980, rescue came knocking on the door in the form of

Kathleen Brennan. Brennan and Waits soon married, and Kathleen proved

instrumental in pushing her husband to new extremes in music. “Basically”,

someone close to Waits stated, “Kathleen saved Tom. (…) If he’d kept going the

other way, it would have just been sort of a dead end. [Waits’ career] would have

fizzled out and nobody would have cared. But he somehow managed to reinvent

himself, and Kathleen had a lot to do with that” (Qtd. in Hoskyns 271). Finally

getting sober after years of heavy and increased drinking, Waits settled down

and started a family. “The irony of Tom Waits’ career”, according to Jacobs, “is

that after he found happiness, love, and sobriety, his music became more and

more experimental” (Jacobs 16). Jacobs might call it “irony”, but the homely

features of his life after marrying Kathleen Brennan, combined with the

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unhomely characteristics of the music he has since made, rather deserve the

label uncanny.

Indeed, his experimental music would be characterized by “darker

themes (…) such as death, loss, temptation, desire, and violence, matching the

jarring and nocturnal musical territory the songs began to inhibit” (Kessel 27). In

this respect, critics have noted how his music could be linked to the gothic:

“Waits’ vision is an American Gothic of three-‐time losers, lost souls, and carnival

folk” (Jacobs 1). His name is even included in Lost Souls of Horror and Gothic, for

“his work has frequently provided critically underexplored evidence of his

distinctively gothic inclinations” (McCarthy & Murphy 8). The intricate workings

of the gothic and the uncanny in the music of Tom Waits will thus be the central

aspect of this thesis.

However, we need to outline the two concepts more elaborately. Both are

closely related although the one is not exclusively bound to the other; the

uncanny frequently emerges in Gothic fiction to heighten the terror and horror

that are so typical of the gothic. In the next paragraphs, both concepts will be

briefly explained and situated in their respective contexts. At this point, a general

description of the gothic and uncanny and their connection suffices, for

throughout this thesis more specific strands of gothic and the subsequent

workings of the uncanny will be identified and illustrated in detail and with

examples.

The gothic, which represents situations marked by “extreme

circumstances of terror, oppression and persecution, darkness and obscurity of

setting, and innocence betrayed” (Lloyd-‐Smith 3) emerged in Europe in the

second half of the 18th century with such well-‐known novels as Walpole’s The

Caste of Otranto, Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho and Lewis’s The Monk. Often,

the American gothic was seen as an “offshoot” (Lloyd-‐Smith 3) of the English

tradition. American writers were seen as copying their English colleagues, which

was not so surprising since “American writers were effectively still a part of the

British culture, working in an English language domain and exposed, both

intellectually and in terms of their market place, to British models” (Lloyd-‐Smith

3).

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But historical differences between the continents pushed American

writers to search for their own take on the genre. On the one hand, certain

European gothic inspirations such as religious persecution, aristocratic

decadences and old castles and ruins proved wanting. On the other hand,

American writers weaved their own troubled history into the fabrics of the

gothic. Indeed, one can find certain aspects typical of American society that

influenced their gothic writing. These were the frontier experience, the Puritan

inheritance, anxiety about the new democratic experiment and race (Lloyd-‐

Smith 4). Thus, rather than the physical realities of the old continent, American

writers could focus on more psychological terror; the frontier provided

tremendous opportunities, but reveled in danger. The frontier was pushed by

frontiersmen attempting to spread the familiar into the unfamiliar, thereby

inherently touching upon the divide between the two and the overlap that

induces the terror. Both Puritan legacy and the democratic experiment were

foremost intellectual struggles rather than physical ones. Race, then, touched

upon the double moral standards of the Anglo-‐Saxon protestants with regard to

the suffering of Native Americans and African-‐American slaves. This might

explain the prevalence of the uncanny in the American Gothic; since the history

of America lacked the physical realities which European gothicists used for

inspiration to their works, an argument is to be made that the uncanny aides the

American gothic writers. As the genre evolved, they “probed deeper into

psychological areas” (Lloyd-‐Smith 6). Indeed, “the Gothic depends for many of its

effects on the production of a sense of the uncanny” (Lloyd-‐Smith 136).

The uncanny is an elaborate concept and is, in its most general

description, “everything (…) that ought to have remained secret and hidden but

has come to light” (Freud 623). It was Sigmund Freud who put the phrase on the

academic map with his landmark essay “Das Unheimliche”, the German name for

the uncanny. Since then, the concept has attracted much academic scholarship

and has proved instrumental in many research fields. Apart from Freud’s work,

Nicholas Royle’s The Uncanny is an interesting monograph. In his introduction,

the scholar lists many examples and associations of the uncanny and, adopting

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his meandering style, we will present some of the most important aspects of the

uncanny for the present study.

The basis of the uncanny is a tension between what is familiar and what is

unfamiliar. It has a sense of something supernatural, without the conviction that

it actually is supernatural. Ghosts, or rather, an inkling of spectral presence is

uncanny. It is associated with a death-‐drive, a strong sense of a return to a past,

inorganic state. An “extreme nostalgia”, as it were (Royle 2). In this respect, the

womb of the mother is associated with feelings of comfort and longing. The

uncanny is “gruesome or terrible” and the “uncertainties of silence, solitude and

darkness” seem adequate conveyers of uncanny emotions (Royle 2). The secret is

another important aspect of the uncanny. The tension between what is known

and what is not known, the secrets that are brought to the surface and thus the

revelation of something that cannot be brought into the open are excellent

inducers of uncanny emotions. Furthermore, getting lost (especially in familiar

places) seems highly uncanny. Doubling and repetition are tropes strongly

associated with the uncanny. Doubling of characters and emotions, and their

subsequent convergence of qualities function to convey mystery and anxiety in

the gothic. Repetition then can imply doubling or hint at the return of something

that is repressed (Royle 1-‐2).

An important part of Freud’s essay on the uncanny dealt with the

etymology of the word. In order to define the concept, Freud looked to the

origins of “das Unheimliche” only to discover that the meaning of uncanny

actually broadened. “Unheimlich”, according to Royle, means frightening, eerie,

sinister and spooky. “Heimlich”, then, as its opposite, attracts such meanings as

intimate, friendly, familiar. However, rather then being the exact opposite of

unheimlich, heimlich also has other meanings, such as secret, secretive or kept

from sight. In this respect, heimlich already carries within it the meaning of its

opposite, something that cannot be brought into the open. Royle notes, “the

similarities between English (…) and German, regarding the ways in which

‘uncanny’ (unheimlich) haunts and is haunted by what is ‘canny’ (heimlich), are

themselves perhaps uncanny” (Royle 11). Indeed, the literal translation of

unheimlich in English would be unhomely. Hence, homely has to do with what

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belongs to the home, what one knows and what one is familiar with. Unhomely

then, is what is strange and what does not seem altogether right. Or, in the words

of Anthony Vidler:

The uncanny is rooted by etymology and usage in the environment of

the domestic, or the Heimlich, thereby opening up problems of identity

around the self, the other, the body and its absence: thence its force in

interpreting the relations between the psyche and the dwelling, the

body and the house, the individual and the metropolis (Vidler x)

This last description of the uncanny is perhaps the most fitting for this thesis. It

will become clear that in the music of Tom Waits many instances of the uncanny

have to do with the relationship between members of a certain community and

(perceived) outsiders, thereby stressing the importance of identity and the

emotions that converge with a certain locale.

Thus, with the context of both Tom Waits and the gothic uncanny clearly

defined, we can formulate a threefold thesis statement, from general to specific.

First of all, let us take in to account Harold Blooms statement: “The authentically

daemonic or uncanny always achieves canonical status” (Bloom 458). Although

Bloom talks about literature, could this statement also apply to Waits? Clearly,

Waits belongs to the canon of American songwriters, but is this acclaim

associated with his use of the uncanny? The second goal is to provide an in-‐depth

analysis of the gothic and uncanny in Waits’ work. This analysis is long overdue

and will in itself provide new insights into and readings of some of his songs.

Rather than attempt an exhaustive analysis of all of Waits’ songs, this thesis aims

to identify the gothic and uncanny in certain carefully selected ones, while often

referring to classic literary texts as an important point of reference. The last aim

of this thesis is to show that, although there is indeed a breach in styles between

the pre-‐Kathleen and post-‐Kathleen Waits, the gothic and uncanny were not

altogether foreign to the young Waits. Through an analysis of two of his biggest

influences – Jack Kerouac and Edward Hopper – this thesis aims to show that the

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seeds of the gothic and uncanny that so characterize Waits’ later work are to a

certain extent already present in his earlier work.

What remains are some words on the outline of the present study. In the

first chapter we will dive into the urban environment and elaborate on the

history and the aspects of the urban gothic. This will prove useful to analyze two

of Waits’ biggest influences in his early years, the writer Jack Kerouac and the

painter Edward Hopper. Rather than follow the general scholarship on these two

artists, we will uncover how the uncanny and the gothic function in their

respective books and paintings, all the while referring to relevant music of Tom

Waits. The culmination of the chapter is an elaborate analysis of Waits’ song

“Small Change (Got Rained on by his own .38)”. With the acquired knowledge of

the urban gothic, Kerouac and Hopper, the song will be firmly set into the urban

gothic tradition. In the second chapter we travel away from the city to the

countryside, where the rural gothic is the origin of terror. Again, after a brief

analysis of the rural gothic, we will look to Waits’ “Murder in the Red Barn” in

order to see how he employs the gothic and uncanny traditions to convey

haunting moods. Returning to the city but not quite so, we encounter the suburbs.

As an in-‐between place by definition, Suburbia proves especially fruitful for the

gothic uncanny which will be illustrated by Waits’ song “What’s he building?”

Afterwards, the most important ideas and aspects encountered throughout these

chapters will be combined into a general conclusion.

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Chapter 1: Uncanny Influences

SW: Both writer [Kerouac] and musician [Waits] are interested in that

nostalgia, aren’t they?

Hoskyns: Absolutely and it stands out in Edward Hopper, you know,

Hopper’s paintings. It’s a different sort of expression of that milieu, that

night-‐time Americana, it’s not reckless and Dionysian, but it’s more a

melancholy, lonesome flipside to that, to which I’m sure Kerouac felt

drawn many times when he was hungover. (Warner 283).

The Urban Gothic

The urban gothic did not emerge from a vacuum. In the early nineteenth century,

cities in Western Europe and America grew exponentially. Labeled as “the period

of the most rapid urbanization in American history” (Qtd. in Loman 93), the

years between 1820 en 1850 witnessed mass immigration from rural to urban

sites with cities multiplied in size several times. Evidently, many people of all

sorts of different economic, social and cultural background gathering in one

densely populated area, brought with it several problems. Diseases, riots, crime

and poor housing facilities were more rule than exception, and these

characteristics of urban life soon inspired writers, both in fiction and non-‐fiction.

Indeed, “dramatic urbanization fuelled American urban gothic” (Loman 93).

Connecting the emergent gothic mode in England with the rapid growth of urban

environments, Chad Luck points out that “American writers at the beginning of

the nineteenth century now had both the cause and the means to reexamine the

increasingly worrisome problems of urban life” (Luck 125).

But there is another, more romantic reason for American gothic writers’

affinity for the city as setting for their stories. “The gothic”, states Fiedler, “had

been invented to deal with the past and with history from a typically Protestant

and enlightened point of view; but what could one do with the form in a country

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which, however Protestant and enlightened, had (…) neither had a proper past

nor a history?” (Fiedler 128). Indeed, the fact that Europe had a long history

provided the writers with settings, characters and even plots for their gothic

fiction. In the new world, however, these old castles, ruins and aristocratic and

religious excesses proved wanting. American writers thus had to be inventive,

and, as Lloyd-‐Smith puts it, “the urban landscape could serve as a modern

version of the incomprehensible castle or monastery of early gothic” (49).

Immediately, we encounter one of the most defining and disturbing

characteristics of the urban gothic. Instead of placing the narratives in faraway

places or ancient times as the Pyrenees or the middle ages, the stories of the

urban gothic are set in familiar areas, places that people know from their

everyday lives. It is the here and now, or the fact that the “characters and events

exist at the same time, and often in the same place, as the reader” (Luck 125),

and the familiarity that comes with it that produces a fair degree of suspense. It

incited Henry James to revel “those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries

which are at our own doors”. He continued:

What are the Apennines to us, or we to the Apennines? Instead of the

terrors of “Udolpho”, we were treated to the terrors of the cheerful

country house and the busy London lodgings. And there is no doubt

that these were infinitely more terrible (Qtd. in Spencer 201).

There are many examples of modern settings and nearby horrors to be

found in urban gothic literature. Unlike earlier novels featuring vampires, Bram

Stoker “goes out of his way repeatedly to emphasize the modernity of his setting”

and Dracula is for the most part set in the vicinity of London (Spencer 219).

Another example comes from the pen of Charles Dickens, whose Bleak House is a

prime illustration “of the great modern city and its horrors” (Pritchard 433); His

originality lies in his use of earlier gothic tropes and his application of them to

the modern urban environment. In this respect, says Pritchard, Dickens also

features social criticism in his novel and thereby redeemed the gothic tropes

“from the triviality and mere sensationalism that had often characterized their

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use by earlier writers” (Pritchard 433). An important American example of the

here and now of the urban gothic comes from George Lippard. His novel The

Quaker City was to become one of the best selling antebellum novels and is set in

the city of Philadelphia. In the novel, the city becomes “a Gothic space adapted to

the slums, sewers, sinuous alleys, and glowering edifices of a modern city” (Luck

131). The closeness of the literary city to the everyday lives of the readers,

furthermore, made the novels adequate conveyers of social criticism. The strong

attention to all that was wrong in the city was an important aspect of the new

genre, thereby calling upon the “anxiety” that raged within the new urban

environment (Luck 131).

A crucial element of the city as gothic space is that it functions as a

labyrinth. In older gothic tales, castles and ruins provided the protagonists with

a sense of disillusion and estrangement. Now, the city with all its alleyways and

mazelike structures portrays the chaotic landscape of the old gothic in which

characters wandered randomly, got lost or were persecuted by villains and

where danger lurked behind every corner. In this modern labyrinth, this “jungle

of brick, stone and smoke” (Qtd. in Slater 136) there are both psychic and

physical agonies for the characters. Chad Luck sees physical suffering in the

“alarming density of the modern city, the claustrophobic profusion of bodies and

buildings that seem to leave no room for individual security” (Luck 132). Apart

from other physical agonies such as “plague and riot”, Loman focuses on the

psychic disturbances of the city. If the city functions as a labyrinth, the characters

cannot grasp its meaning or its intention. This “mystery without a solution”

(Loman 102) induces stress and anxiety upon the urban dwellers and in turn

creates uncanny situations. Yet there are illuminated people in the space of the

urban labyrinth. These characters function as guides and to them the city reveals

its secrets and opens its gateways. Edgar Allan Poe’s Auguste Dupin is a

prototypical figure of the urban guide in that he “detects a stable relationship

between signs and meaning in the city, revealing a consoling order in the

seeming chaos” (Loman 102).

But other figures, equally adept at enduring the hardships of life in the

city, roam the metropolis. These are however less benevolent than the

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aforementioned guides but prey upon other, weaker subjects in order to subsist

in their livings. It is these characters that are often the cause of terror and Loman

identifies them as either the “violent criminal [or] the confidence artist”. The

former is “typically a single, male figure that embodies crime and is

characteristically identified with the devil”. Further characteristics include being

“working class, (…) physical[ly] grotesque and racially ambiguous” (Loman 98-‐

9). The latter is defined as someone who “by means of extraordinary powers of

persuasion gains the confidence of his victims to the extent of drawing upon

their treasury, almost to an unlimited extent” (Qtd. in Loman 99). The confidence

artist can take many forms and is not bound to class, race or gender. That the

confidence artist is so undetermined is exactly what makes him or her so

frightening. It “testifies to the paranoia of urban gothic, to the fearful prospect

that no one in the city is to be trusted, that criminality is decentred [sic] and

ubiquitous (Loman 100).

Crime is thus an important factor in the gothic of the city and mostly, it is

located in the slums. It is often in the slums that gothic tension emerges and from

there it spreads to the rest of the city. Another source of gothic suspense are

diseases. Often, but not always, emerging from the slums and spreading to the

city proper, diseases are a frequently applied trope of urban gothic. (Loman 100-‐

2). A prototypical account of diseases in the gothic city is Charles Brockden

Brown’s Arthur Mervyn. Brown blends together “the familiar Gothic set pieces of

locked rooms, secret tunnels, midnight burials and gruesome murders with an

apocalyptic vision of the ravaged Philadelphia cityscape” (Luck 127-‐28).

As in so many American topics, race is an important factor not only of the

specifically urban gothic, but of the American gothic in general. Indeed, the

gothic features so heavily in American culture, according to some scholars

because of the loaded past of the history of the United States. Lloyd-‐Smith sees

race as one of the four defining aspects of the American Gothic (Lloyd-‐Smith 37).

If, for instance, the past of slavery haunts the rural South in the novels of William

Faulkner, “Blackness”, states Loman, “is accordingly a marker of urban abjection”

(Loman 98).

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These are some of the big themes that emerge throughout the history of

the American urban gothic. Many of them can be found in disparate accounts of

the gothic. But an important factor of the urban gothic that Lloyd-‐Smith points at,

is the subtlety of the gothic features in the urban environment. There are hardly

any freakish monsters or evil ghosts in the urban gothic, and the terrors are

often hinted at rather than presented forthright. If these fiends are present, they

are often symbolic and haunt the characters on a more profound level. The urban

gothic is thus “frequently the origin of a subtle Gothicism in otherwise more

realistic fiction” (Lloyd-‐Smith 176). In this respect, the scholar also sees a strong

connection between the urban gothic and the noir genre. This connection will be

further explored in the following parts, where with the help of Edward Hopper’s

paintings and Jack Kerouac’s writings, we will deduce some characteristic

aspects of the gothic and see how a subtle Gothicism emerges through the use of

the uncanny. Meanwhile, their work will be brought in connection with Waits,

which will subsequently result in an elaborate analysis of the musician’s song

“Small Change (Got Rained on by his own 38.)”.

Edward Hopper: Sinister Sentimentalism

A strong artistic link exists between Tom Waits and Edward Hopper. The

influential painter became famous with his depiction of urban environments,

portraying the loneliness and isolation that affected many inhabitants of the

modern American city. In this respect, there is a strong connection between

Hopper and many of his fellow American intellectuals who throughout the

history of the country criticized emerging cities and the life that accompanied it.

This so-‐called anti-‐urbanism found many leading artists, scholars and politicians

“express[ing] different degrees of hostility toward urban life in America” (White

& White 166). They juxtaposed the degenerate urban values to the values of

“small town and rural America” (Slater 136), clearly preferring the latter.

Thomas Jefferson for instance, famously propagated the agrarian lifestyle and

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“despised the manners and principles of the urban ‘mob’”. Writers such as Ralph

Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau wrote books romanticizing nature and

castigating cities in what is known as the “metaphysical period of anti-‐urbanism”

(White & White 168). Next in line were Edgar Allen Poe and Herman Melville,

whose urban crime stories depicted the city as a “scene of sin and crime”.

Although their stories were situated in European cities such as London or Paris,

the writers did witness “dark omens in the streets of American cities” (White &

White 166-‐69).

Hopper’s work on the other hand was strongly linked with the United

States, the “contemporary American city [being] the center of much of Hopper’s

work” (Goodrich 68). The painter, however, was quite ambivalent about the city;

the urban environment was an important factor in his work, yet it was not

always portrayed in a positive light. In this respect, he stands in strong

connection with another fierce but ambivalent critic of the American city, Henry

James, whose “animadversions on the American city are made more significant

precisely because [he was] not opposed to cities in principle” (White & White

170). Just as James, Hopper also had double feelings about the city and both

writer and painter shared a sense of “despair over modernity” (Levin Intimate

279). The latter’s critical stance on living in the city can be seen in the depiction

of people in the urban environment, who are “reduced to insignificance” (Levin

Intimate 200). Furthermore, the contrast between his paintings of the dark city

and the light and joy that emerges from for instance his boat-‐paintings is

striking. White & White’s assumption that James’ “reaction to the American city

is more esthetic, more literary, more psychological than that of [his]

predecessors Jefferson and Emerson” (170) seems adept for Hopper’s stance on

the city as well. The painter might have been ambivalent about the city, but in the

context of his urban paintings and the sinister, uncanny feelings accompanied by

them, the term anti-‐urbanism seems appropriate.

His anti-‐urbanism is linked to the depiction of life in the city as lonely and

isolated. Indeed, while many of his paintings depict people, Hopper had also

produced urban still lifes devoid of human activity. Approaching a City or Early

Sunday Morning foreground the city with a strong emphasis on how it forms a

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“huge complex of steel, stone, concrete, brick, asphalt and glass” (Goodrich 68).

In his paintings that do include people, those people are never in crowds.

“Usually they are alone”, states Goodrich, “seldom are more than two or three

gathered together”. The scholar continues:

Often they seem isolated in the wide impersonality of the city; they

seem to epitomize the lonely lives of so many city dwellers, the solitude

that can be experienced most intensely among millions. (Goodrich 69)

Nighthawks functions as a good example in this respect. Levin notes how the

couple sitting at the counter is “juxtaposed against the solitary diner seated

across the counter, suggesting that only eros can assuage the loneliness of night”

(Levin Hopper 66). Both scholars link the impeding sense of isolation and

solitude to the themes of escape and travel; many of Hopper’s paintings feature

train stations, trains, highways, boats and motels. Hopper thus seems an artist

who is often “out of things, yet drawn to them” (Goodrich 70).

Indeed, most admirers of Tom Waits will immediately recognize the same

motifs in many of his songs throughout the seventies and after. Some of his best-‐

known early songs indulge in the exact themes we have deduced from Hopper’s

urban paintings. An exhaustive analysis of these themes throughout Waits’

career would take us too far from the goal of this chapter. Some examples will

provide ample material to convince the reader of the close thematic connection

between Waits and Hopper. Closing Time’s “Virginia Avenue”, for instance,

depicts a man walking through the city in the late hours of the night, “trying to

find somebody to tell [his] troubles to”. All the bars are closing, and he is feeling

lost. The figure clearly has a hard time in the city; he is musing that “there’s got

to be some place that’s better than this” and he acknowledges: “This life I’m

leading’s driving me insane”. The city proves to be a strong force to be reconciled

with. Whereas the city can be “rich in potentiality for the ambitious”, it is also

“threatening to the weak” (Qtd. in Slater 136). Here, the protagonist clearly

belongs to the latter group, for he is agonizing that “this town has got [him]

down”. The bars and diners are closing and the man has nobody to talk to; what

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can he better do than “take a greyhound bus [to] carry [him] away from here”,

away from the town into the great unknown? The lonely evocations of the soul,

the late-‐night city wanderings and the musings on escaping from it all through

travel set the song firmly in the tradition of Edward Hopper.

“Shiver me Timbers” on The Heart of Saturday Night romanticizes the life

of a sailor who leaves his family and wife because he has been “called by the sea”.

He gives no logical explanation for his departure, so escape from the mundane

everyday life seems to be the main reason. He also experiences a loss of

connection with other people, for he prefers to travel alone. Whereas Hopper’s

boat paintings mostly depict middle class people trying to escape the hectic

everyday life and longing for romantic travel, Waits’ sailor takes it one step

further and longs for a complete escape, even if that means leaving his family:

And I'm leaving my family

Leaving all my friends

My body's at home

But my heart's in the wind

Where the clouds are like headlines

Upon a new front page sky

And shiver me timbers

'Cause I'm a-‐sailing away

“Fumbling with the Blues”, another song of the same album brings us back

to the city where we again encounter a figure brought down by the temptations

of the nightly city.

It’s hard to win when you always lose

Because the nightspots spend your spirit

Beat your head against the wall

Two dead ends and you’ve still got to choose

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While the first part of the song introduces the figure as a “pool-‐shooting-‐

shimmy-‐shyster shaking [his] head”, who spends countless nights in bars

drinking, the second part focuses on his relationship with women, on which he is

not positive at all. He sees them as “savage and cruel” and relationships have

constantly failed for him. Thus, instead of trying to get sober and commit to a

relationship, the protagonist rather spends his nights in bars getting drunk.

A last but highly interesting example of the thematic connection between

Waits and Hopper comes from the former’s third and aptly titled album

Nighthawks at the Diner, which sounds like an unofficial soundtrack to the

latter’s painting.1 The album was recorded live in a studio set up as a nightclub in

order to create the right atmosphere, thereby enhancing the late-‐night ambience

evoked throughout the performance. The song “Eggs and Sausages” in particular

strongly evokes the feelings associated with spending the late hours of the night

in a diner with other victims of the night such as “the gypsy hacks [and] the

insomniacs”. This “rendezvous of strangers” depicts the feelings of loneliness

experienced by the people present. The waitress is the only person seemingly

attentive and active, for she is working, talking, singing and calling at

“nighthawks at the diner”. There seems to be no intermingling between the

nighthawks themselves; the only thing they indulge in is reminiscing times past,

happier times when loved ones where still in their lives: “Now the touch of your

fingers/ lingers burning in my memory”. But the girl has left him, he has been

“86ed from [her] scheme”2, meaning that she got rid of him. Indeed, the

“melodramatic nocturnal scene” seems like the musical score for Hopper’s

Nighthawks, at the same time depicting the themes of loneliness, despair and

late-‐night musing on one’s life. Furthermore, the overt reference to nighthawks

serves as the glue that sticks Waits to Hopper. Yet, there is more to Hopper than

meets the eye. The fact that “Hawk” is slang for “a person who preys on others”

1 Just as Kathleen Brennan was Waits’ muse, so was Edward Hopper’s wife Josephine his muse. She came up with the title of the painting Nighthawks (Levin Intimate 349) 2 86 refers to 80 miles away from civilization and 6 feet under, the original meaning of the phrase being to kill somebody and bury him in a deserted place. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=86%27d

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opens the curtain on a deeper, more sinister level of Hopper’s anti-‐urbanism and

brings him in strong connection with the uncanny and urban gothic.

Sentimentalism is indeed not the only factor in Hopper’s works of art. As

Iversen points out, “terms like sadness and loneliness do not seem adequate for

works which are deeply unsettling and sometimes even menacing” (Iversen

412)3. Other than the loneliness in the city, Hopper thus frequently depicts the

dangers of the city, many of which can be brought in connection with the

aforementioned account of the urban gothic and uncanny. Returning to

Nighthawks with this new approach, one immediately recognizes danger in the

dark corners of the painting, which are strongly emphasized by the bright light of

the diner. The different facets of the city are clearly delineated along the lines of

brightness and darkness, with the symbolic meaning of respectively safety and

danger accentuated. This is further elaborated through the notions of inside and

outside, with the light coming from the inside. Rather than a dichotomy between

a completely safe inside and a dangerous outside, the two worlds overlap,

hinting at a convergence of two different parts of the city – a frequently recurring

aspect of the urban gothic.

The onlooker easily recognizes the influence of the film noir-‐thriller, a

genre that was rapidly finding its way through the contemporary American

cultural landscape. Krutnik’s often-‐quoted paragraph on the film noir provides a

good summary of the themes of the genre while at the same time providing us

with insight into the appeal of the genre to both Waits and Hopper:

Dark with something more than night, the noir city is a realm in which

all that seemed solid melts into the shadows, and where the traumas

and disjunctions experienced by individuals hint at a broader crisis of

cultural self-‐configuration engendered by urban America. The noir

thrillers replace the certainties of It’s A Wonderful Life with a more

nuanced, more disorganized, much bleaker vision. (Krutnik 103) 3 Although her article focuses on the uncanny in the work of Hopper, she has a strong emphasis on the psychoanalytical side of the uncanny, rather than, as this thesis aims to do, look at the more “literary” qualities of the uncanny and how they are present in Waits and Hopper.

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Surely, Nighthawks features many of the themes that are so essential for the dark

portrayal of a frightening city. Apart from the light we can also discern the lonely

figure sitting at the counter, juxtaposed to and at the same time contrasted with

the couple sitting together and arguably interacting with the waiter. He is the

only one in the painting who is sitting there ostensibly without any goal (the

waiter has to work, the couple is going for night out) and thus he is surrounded

with a strong sense of mystery and possibly danger. What is he up to? Where

does he come from? Referring back to the title of the painting and its implicit

meaning of city people preying on each other, the sense of danger is reinforced

even more.

What further strengthens these menacing feelings is the fact that in the

noir thriller as well as in this painting the streets are “curiously empty” (Krutnik

95). The only people present are set inside, with no connection to the outside

urban scene, which is completely devoid of human existence. It is the emptiness

that endows the painting with a certain uncanny quality. Normally, there are

hardly places and times in the city where there is no-‐one walking outside. In this

scene, the familiar setting of a city-‐corner is thus reversed and turned unfamiliar

due to its lack of people. Yet, as mentioned, the dark corners behind the counter

clearly show there is potential danger outside in the city. By hinting at the

secrets of the city’s underbelly without explicitly portraying them, an eerie sense

of discomfort is generated. The feeling that there is indeed a city within a city is

increased; the city does not reveal its secrets. In the words of Tom Slater: “an

empty city at night, captured at standstill, is always more threatening, more

sinister, than an animated or extreme portrayal of urban fears” (145). The

scholar also provides a good summary of the combined efforts of the

sentimentality and the more sinister approach of Nighthawks. It is indeed the

“interlocking scripts of alienation, isolation, loneliness, fear and a suggestion that

something disorderly might occur outside” (Slater 145) that provide the painting

with its haunting quality.

Another painting, or rather sketch, that is of great importance for the

present argument is Hopper’s Night Shadows. Portraying a still of New York with

a lonely man walking across a deserted pavement, the sketch is an unmistakable

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progenitor of the film noir, emphasized by the high angle of the painting that can

be likened to a movie shot. Yet the anti-‐urban – that is, urban gothic – and

uncanny qualities are more present and overt than in Nighthawks. Rather than

the mere sense of danger lurking in the darkness behind the corner, explicit

qualities of the uncanny induce the feeling of impending doom upon the

onlooker. Again, the contrast between dark and light is a strong indicator of

urban danger. Whereas the light provides safety and (relative) comfort, the dark

hints at approaching terror. In Night Shadows, however, there is a clear indicator

of the divide between light and dark. The shadow of the lamppost cuts the

pavement in half right before the street corner where the ominous darkness

begins. Indeed, the shadow “generates an unmistakable sense of menace (…) as if

the man’s walking route were taking him beyond a divide and into a danger

zone” (Qtd. in Slater 143). In this sense, the sketch can be seen as portraying

“two cities at once” (Loman 107), an important trope throughout the history of

the American urban gothic. Here, the lurking danger and safety are portrayed in

one painting, thereby doubling the city as it were. The same city has different

sides to it, revealing the secrets of either part depending on place and time. It

seems that to Hopper, just as to the writers of nineteenth-‐century urban gothic,

“the profoundest mystery of the city was how it could be both magnificent

expression and disturbing example at once” (Loman 108). The menacing feeling

however, remains because Hopper still does not show the actual terrors of the

city.

Not only the city is doubled in Night Shadows, however. The late-‐night

wanderer is also doubled through the shadow thrown by the lamppost. Without

linking it to the uncanny, Slater notices that there is “a large shadow doubling the

menacing effect of the unknown” (Slater 143, emphasis added). Just as the dark

corner harbors the unknown, so is the man walking across the divide unknown

to the observer. From the sketch itself, it is impossible to know what his

intentions are in the dead of night in the city. What strikes attention, however, is

his deliberate pace; his head is up and he is looking in the direction to where he

is going; the distance between his feet is rather large and his arm is firmly

22

extended, both hinting at a fast pace. Indeed, he shows no hesitation to cross the

shadowy divide into the “other”, perhaps dangerous city.

However, with the knowledge of urban gothic tropes, it is possible to

make some implications as to who he might be. As mentioned before, the urban

gothic landscape is peopled with certain stock characters. In this respect, the

man in the sketch could be a “guide” in the city, reminiscent of Poe’s Dupin, who

knows his way in the urban environment and therefore does not fear the danger

zone. The other possibility is him being an urban devil, preying on other

inhabitants of the city who dare enter the unsafety of the night. It does not really

matter which character we liken him with, for the shadow doubles his persona

and therefore, it can be argued that both qualities are present, just as in that

other double-‐person of the urban environment, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In this

respect, he shares some qualities with the lonely man at the counter of

Nighthawks. It is also impossible to know what he is up to and he is contrasted

with the couple that is sitting together at the bar. Remembering the fact that the

light from inside reflects to the outside and thus brings two parts of the city

together, one can argue that the man equally belongs to the safe inside and the

dangerous outside, providing him with the same qualities as the lonely wanderer

in Night Shadows.

Jack Kerouac: Haunted by Nostalgia

Apart from being obsessed by music, Tom Waits was also an avid reader. Outside

the Heritage, the folk bar where he worked as a bouncer, the young Waits could

always be seen with a book and oftentimes, the beat writers were on his literary

menu. This fascination for the beatniks started in his teens:

I found [them] when I was a teenager and it saved me. Growing up

without a dad, I was always looking for a father figure, and those guys

sort of became my father figures. Reading [Kerouac’s] On the Road

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added some interesting mythology to the ordinary and sent me off on

the road myself with an investigative curiosity about the minutiae of life

(Qtd. in Hoskyns 25).

Indeed, one of the main themes in On the Road is the search for a father figure by

Dean Moriarty/Neal Cassedy, whose father had left him at a young age to pursue

the life of a hobo. The original scroll version of the novel – the unedited

manuscript Kerouac initially aimed to publish – opens with the death of

Kerouac’s father: “I first met Neal not long after my father died… I had just gotten

over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about except that it really had

something to do with my father’s death and my awful feeling that everything was

dead” (Kerouac 109). The search for father figures being a major theme in the

novel, it is no surprise that Waits felt comforted by the wild adventures of the

beat-‐protagonists in the book. Just as Neal Cassady, who was “the perfect guy for

the road because he actually was born on the road (…) in a jalopy” (Kerouac 109),

Waits also spread the myth that he was born in the back of a taxi (Hoskyns 6).

Although the artists are different in many respects, they also connect on

many others. Field states: “Fêted respectively as the ‘King of the Beats’ and

inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Kerouac and Waits are nonetheless

guarded outsiders whose work confounds generic expectations. Both artists are

chroniclers of everyday American life; their work is shot through with haunting

wistfulness – black and white snapshots of a mood that flickers between nostalgia

and sentimentality” (Field 265).

On a broader level, both Waits and On the Road can be seen as

anachronisms; they often do not seem to fit in entirely in their contemporary

times. On the Road was written between 1948 and 1952 but was only published

in 1957, after being heavily edited. Through this fact, together with the

employment of the confessional mode which was to become popular in the

1960’s, “it has become common to associate [On the Road] with the ferment of an

emerging counterculture of protest and revolt rather than with the repressive

years following the end of World War II” (Mercer 167). This inherent

“doubleness” of the novel, according to Mercer, is achieved through the use of

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common literary tropes such as the confessional mode and the picaresque, but at

the same time Kerouac underscores his presentation of an ideal America with

images of “haunting and spectrality”. Mercer continues:

The very presence of ghostly figures and the novel’s insistence on

homelessness create a sense of something not quite right beneath its

exuberant surface. Kerouac’s novel is perhaps the clearest illustration

of the shift between an era marked by repression and the uncanny, and

the following decade defined by confessionalism and ironic black

comedy (Mercer 168).

In the same vein, Waits is someone who was “always slightly out of time and out

of step” (Warner 282). Rather than either belonging completely to his folksy

colleagues at Asylum records – the label where he brought out his first albums -‐

or indulging in the hippie-‐spirit of the late sixties and early seventies, Waits

reached back to the forties and the fifties.4 His fascination for these times is

clearly present in the early years of his musical career and in many songs he is

overtly nostalgic for times past. His admiration for the Beatniks can be seen in

the same anachronistic light. While the beat frenzy happened in the late fifties,

early sixties after the publication of On the Road and subsequently influenced the

emerging counterculture through the likes of Bob Dylan and others, Waits was

never part of that counterculture but referred back directly to the beatniks in his

early career.

Indeed, the strong anachronistic impulses of both artists are often

expressed through extreme nostalgia. Both refuse to fall in line with

contemporary artistic evocations and in their work frequently evoke feelings of

times past. “The work of Waits and Kerouac”, states Field, “is haunted by

poignant meditations on the vanishing world of freight trains, hobos and the

unexplored West” (267). In this respect, Field uses Svetlana Boym’s theoretical

explanations of nostalgia to reflect on Waits and Kerouac. “Modern nostalgia”,

argues the scholar, “is a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the 4 Waits often states that he “slept through the sixties” (Jacobs 23).

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loss of an ‘enchanted world’ with clear borders and values” (Qtd. in Field 268).

Furthermore, her distinction between “restorative and reflective” nostalgia

provides us with more insights in how the mechanism functions in Waits and

Kerouac. While restorative nostalgia puts emphasis on the return of the home,

and it “attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the homecoming”, reflective

nostalgia focuses on the longing for the past, without attempting to recreate it –

it “delays the homecoming” (Qtd. in Field 268).

In this respect, it is interesting to look at the distinction made earlier

between the different meanings of the uncanny. Boym’s restorative nostalgia,

with its aiming for the return of the home, can be perfectly juxtaposed to the

homely, or that which is familiar. The reflective nostalgia contradictorily

embraces the estrangement from the past, the unhomely. Indeed, “to exist in

time is to suffer through an endless exile, a successive severing from those

precious few moments of feeling at home in the world (Qtd. in Field 268). If as

Field states, Kerouac and Waits focus strongly on those “precious few moments”

without aiming for their return, what they actually do is strongly emphasize the

unhomely, the uncanny as it were.

The omnipresence of ghosts in On the Road is an interesting case in point.

On the Road contains many references to the word “ghost”, and they

systematically evoke feelings of things lost, “reminders of an American past that

refuses to go away” (Field 269). This is indeed, as Field states, an acknowledging

of “the impossibility of recovery whilst simultaneously endeavouring to [recover

past times]” (Field 268) and the reminders of an American past are therefore a

combination of Boym’s two modes of nostalgia. At the same time attempting to

restore the lost home when one knows full well that it is impossible, induces

uncanny feelings: the return of something that is lost through something else,

closely resembling but not quite the same. If the ghosts are a strange entity of

past things in the novel, it is through their subsequent familiarity that they

provide the novel with an uncanny quality.

At other times as well, Douglas Field describes textbook examples of the

Freudian uncanny in On the Road – without labelling them as uncanny himself,

that is. The “Shrouded Traveller” for instance is a dark figure, a sort of ghost that

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haunts Kerouac throughout his travels. The first explanation the author provides

for this figure is that it is he himself, a sort of double as it were. But rather than

sticking to this explanation, Kerouac states that it was a combination of himself

and death: “the one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh

and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some

lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be

reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death” (Qtd. in Field 269-‐70). Here,

Kerouac combines the uncanny motifs of the death-‐drive and the “phantasy (…)

of intra-‐uterine existence” (Freud, Qtd. in Royle 142). Freud elsewhere wrote

this about the subject: “Unconscious thoughts about life in the womb (…) afford

the deepest unconscious basis for the belief in survival after death, which merely

represents a projection into the future of this uncanny life before birth” (Qtd. in

Royle 144).

Furthermore, when Field states that he is “more interested in the ways in

which the voice in the work of both artists haunts the reader and listener

through the ways that it is manifestly present through the rendering of the past”

(Field 262, emphasis added), the scholar is unknowingly subscribing to Royle’s

assumption that “to affirm the uncanny ‘presence’ and power of ghosts is not to

give oneself up to some gothic fantasy or lugubrious nostalgia: it is the very basis

of trying to think about the future” (Royle 53-‐4). In this respect, both Kerouac

and Waits are thinking about the future in their works of art. In short, the many

recurrences of death and ghosts of times past in the novel can be seen as

uncanny repetitions, which subsequently hint at a strong belief in the afterlife.

This belief then, is more linked to thinking about the future than it is to thinking

about the past, which provides a new reading of the sentimentalism in Kerouac,

and subsequently in Waits.

Closing Time’s “Martha”, one of Waits’ earliest successes and best-‐known

songs (although the version of The Eagles attracted a wider audience in the

seventies), conveys strong emotions of nostalgia and longing for past times.

However, through the aforementioned uses of uncanny elements linked to

nostalgia, the song can obtain new meanings. One of the most peculiar and

attractive aspects of the song is the 22-‐year old Waits who impersonates an old

27

man looking back on his life and calling to his long lost love. His career not even

decently started, Waits seems to already look back to the past with regret for

chances not taken, which can be seen as an awkward instance of doubling; the

young Tom Waits with his whole life in front of him takes on the personality of

the old Tom Frost whose life is pretty much over. Lamenting over the past, he

states

And those were the days of roses, poetry and prose

And Martha all I had was you and all you had was me.

There was no tomorrows, we'd packed away our sorrows

And we saved them for a rainy day.

Although the nostalgia is strong in this chorus and Waits/Frost says that “there

was no tomorrow”, saving something for a rainy day does imply that the future is

on the mind of the singer. Combining these textual indications of thinking about

the future with the broader feeling of nostalgia and the uncanny readings of

nostalgia, it can be argued that the young Waits was actively thinking about his

own future. By artistically employing the old soul that was obviously present in

the young Waits, the singer managed to produce a song in which his personality

was doubled with an uncanny nostalgic effect as a result.

Yet, the heart of Waits’ early career can be found on his second album, The

Heart of Saturday Night. Whereas Closing Time drew heavily on folk and standard

singer-‐songwriter songs, its successor breathed the atmosphere of the beatniks

and their “late nights and freeway flying [that] always make [them] sing”. Indeed,

“Diamonds on my Windshield” is one the prototypical spoken word narratives

that Waits would revisit many times throughout his career and which are

reminiscent of the Beatniks who delivered poetry or prose over music. Kerouac

himself recorded an album reading his texts over a single piano in the

background, Poetry for the Beat Generation. In “Diamonds on my Windshield”,

celebrating the random wanderings through a “metropolitan area with

interchange and connections”, Waits comes closest to the uncanny experience of

being lost and returning to the same point over and over. He conveys strong

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emotions of the city as a maze, with many possible directions to go to, but rather

than actually getting lost, Waits romanticizes the pointless rides through the city:

The eights go east and the fives go north

And the merging nexus back and forth

You see your sign, cross the line, signaling with a blink

And the radio's gone off the air

Gives you time to think

Again, we encounter the image of the city as a “midnight jungle” with “rolling

hills and concrete fields” where it is not only easy to get lost, but were the

personified car functions as a sort of guide who safely brings you back home:

The engine talks

Whispers 'home at last'

It whispers 'home at last'

Whispers 'home at last'

Just as Kerouac sees the personifications of the old, lost America as ghosts

in On the Road, so does Waits see the survivors of a regular Saturday night as

ghosts. “The Ghosts of Saturday Night (After Hours at Napoleone’s Pizza House)”

is the last song of the album and describes the last customers of the night at

Napoleone’s, the place where Waits worked “the graveyard shift” as a teenager

(Jacobs 25). The ghosts in this respect acquire multiple meanings. Most literally,

people who are still up in the dead of night do not always look so fresh, hence

their ghostly qualities. Secondly, ghosts obviously are supposed to appear in the

night and therefore it is logical to see the last customers as ghosts. But

remembering the repeating patterns of the ghosts in Kerouac, it is also possible

that Waits labelled his own characters ghosts because they so regularly showed

up. The repetition of each time coming to the same place might have attracted

the young Waits; the late-‐night wanderers who stumbled upon the pizza place

and brought with them stories from the dark night that almost surely might have

29

amused the young Waits. Lastly, the ghosts might also hint at a past America. All

the characters in the song – the sailor, the girl, the taxi-‐driver – are romanticized

and can be seen as typical American characters. Waits has immortalized them in

his song, perhaps in order to refrain them from disappearing. A taxi driver at the

end of his shift, a solitary sailor, all are seen as survivors of the disappearing

night and soon they will have disappeared themselves, only to return the next

Saturday night. For Waits, it is on these Saturday nights that the real America

shows itself, the people who wander through the city in order to forget their

sorrows and who are led back to their homes by the oncoming morning:

And the early dawn cracks out a carpet of diamond

Across a cash crop car lot filled with twilight Coupe Devilles,

Leaving the town in a-‐keeping

Of the one who is sweeping

Up the ghost of Saturday night

“Small Change (Got Rained on by his own .38)”

In “Small Change (Got Rained On With His Own .38)”, featured on the album

Small Change and “arguably the jewel in Waits’ Beat-‐verse crown” (Hoskyns

169), Waits paints a picture of a scene of urban crime he witnessed firsthand.

During a stay in New York he came across a police blockade and a young black

man who was shot to death. Indeed, the song shows the “urban underbelly” of

New York and is in that sense reminiscent of the “hardboiled crime fiction” by

among others, Dashiell Hammett (Hoskyns 169). In Hoskyn’s description, he

already hints at two important factors of the song: the influence of the beat

poetry and music, and the film noir representation of the city as a place of

darkness and danger. Yet, as Lloyd-‐Smith points out, the noir-‐thriller, both in

film and literature, is also closely related to the urban gothic (176) and in the

previous part it has been adequately elaborated on how both the beats and the

work of Edward Hopper – closely related to the film noir tradition – showed

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aspects of the urban uncanny. It is these aspects that will shed new light on

“Small Change” and establish for it a firm place both in the general urban gothic

tradition and in the specific gothic and uncanny works of Waits’ later career.

“Small Change” provides a still of the city, just as the urban paintings of

Hopper. There is not much movement, nor is there focus on actions or narrative

progression. It is a mere description of the victim and of the people and the

environment surrounding the scene. In this respect the focus is neither on the

detective nor on the investigation. The here and now of the scene and the details

surrounding it, are the important factors. The feeling of proximity is conveyed

not by locating the scene in a specific city or neighborhood, but rather by being

unspecific about the location, a classic trope of urban gothic literature that

enhances the fear because such a scene could happen anywhere.

The same is true of the narrator of the song. On the one hand, he conveys

the feeling of closeness, of proximity. He is clearly no detached omniscient

narrator, but seems to be part of the scene he is describing. His sense of detail is

overwhelming and perhaps he knows too much to be a regular bystander. He is

furthermore personified through the cigarette one can clearly hear him lighting

at the beginning of the song. Likewise, he takes a hit from the cigarette at the

end. This all hints at a personal, strong connection to the scene. Iversen points

out that Hopper’s paintings often “suggest a subjective point of view which

points back to the implied presence of someone situated in the space in front of

the scene” (Iversen 424). The details this narrator provides and his attitude

towards the nightly scene clearly hint at him being present, just outside the

frame, as an onlooker. Both the anonymity of the scene and of the narrator thus

“conspire to send an anti-‐urban message away from where it was produced,

tapping into an American imagination already imbued with unruly images of

what lurks in cities at night” (Slater 143-‐44).

Just as in Night Shadows, the narrator can be both the urban guide and the

urban devil, there is no real way to tell. All we know is that he was part of the

scene and feels comfortable enough in the nightly terror of the city to light a

cigarette. Just as the mysterious man in Hopper’s painting was thus doubled

through his shadow, this narrator could be both types of urban wanderers. More

31

interestingly, however, we may wonder which scene is depicted in the song.

Whereas Hopper chose the moment of crossing, showing the divide between the

two facets of the city, Waits has clearly opted for showing what actually lurks in

the dead of night in the urban environment. In this respect, “Small Change” can

be seen as depicting what the mysterious stranger will encounter when he

crosses the shadowy divide in Night Shadows;

Rather than dividing the city along visual features, the city in “Small

change” is cut in half by sound: “the sirens tear the night in half”. They mark the

divide between the orderliness of one part of the city and the safe, comforting

part of the other side of the city. But rather than bringing actual comfort, the

policemen accompanying the sirens are seen as “surveillance of assailants”. If

Hopper shows the uncanny doubling of the city through his paintings, Waits

shows the all-‐out urban horror in “Small Change”.

What differs as well is the fact that Hopper’s paintings are often

“curiously empty” (Krutnik 95) whereas Waits peopled “Small Change” with an

amalgam of nightly wanderers. It is interesting to note that Hopper is actually

the anomaly in the history of the urban gothic, since in the city, “urban bodies

themselves multiply and oppress with their closeness” (Luck 132). “Urban

space”, Luck continues, “constricts and threatens to pull the reader into close

confines with the source of disease, or crime, or violence” (Luck 132). No

surprise then, that the Waitsian scene of urban horror is peopled with the

wretched and the downtrodden of the city. The “newsboy’s a lunatic”, the

“Gypsies” are compared to “carneys” and the “tuberculosis old men”; they are all

not directly related to the scene of murder, yet are important in emphasizing the

true nature of the city after a tumultuous night at the brake of dawn. Just as in

“The Ghosts of Saturday Night”, the twilight is the hour Waits prefers to set his

songs. Only then is it safe to take up account of the fallen of the night and spread

the stories of what happened in the dark.

The “tuberculosis old men” furthermore introduce another classic gothic

trope: the diseases in the city. The men are already contaminated, but the

whores still try to prevent disease by fishing for “drug-‐store prophylactics”.

Loman might state that “urban gothic is ambivalent” about prostitutes (99), the

32

narrator of “Small Change” is not altogether positive about the ladies of pleasure,

whom he describes in grotesque and lurid terms: “their mouths cut just like

razor blades and their eyes are like stilettos”. He zooms in on one specific woman

whose “radiator’s steaming and [whose] teeth are in a wreck”. This description is

in line with early non-‐fiction urban gothic accounts of prostitutes: “These sunken

lifeless eyes (…) These pale and hollow cheeks (…) this wasted fleshless arm (…)

this is the maid you loved!” (Qtd. in Luck 127). For the painter of urban pictures,

prostitutes prove interesting subjects to endow with ghastly features.

More classic gothic imagery comes from the “blood (…) on an old linoleum

floor” and even more gruesome, the gumball machine that functions as a

headstone. Here, two very different images, respectively characteristic of the

modern city environment and of death in the old gothic tale, come together to

arouse specific uncanny emotions. It is a perfect blend of the urban and the

gothic. The song continues to ponder on the lost future of the kid who was shot

(“No more chewing gum or baseball cards or overcoats or dreams”) before it

abruptly shifts to the dull act of hosing down the sidewalk to clean it from the

blood. In the city, there is clearly no time for much compassion with fallen

inhabitants. That is also clear from the callous behavior of the bystanders who

are not only indifferent, but also loot the body of the victim. Police are telling

jokes, “newsmen start to rattle” and the “cashier (…) didn’t say a word”. Later in

the song, “someone copped [Small Change’s] watch fob, and someone got his ring

and the Newsboy got his porkpie Stetson hat”. Indeed, in the city, “no one (…) is

to be trusted” and “criminality is decentered and ubiquitous” (Loman 100).

Again, the city as a jungle in which the strong prey on the weak seems like a

fitting image.

Musically, the song stands in the strong tradition of the beatniks, who

delivered poems and prose over music. In this case, a lonely saxophone that

sounds like a “bugle lament” (Hoskyns 169) accompanies Waits’ delivery of the

song. Just as the Beats, who “blended ideas of rhythmic improvisation and

syncopation gleaned from the jazz musicians they worshipped” (Jacobs 32),

Waits delivers his song with strong emphasis on rhythm and especially the tone

of his voice. As a raconteur of nightly terrors, Waits enhances the anxiety of the

33

song with this tensed pronunciation and his hissing sounds: “And the newsmen

start to rattle and the cops are telling jokes about some whorehouse in Seattle”

(1:46). The sharp and accentuated sounds of the “s” throughout the song can be

brought in connection with the sharp stilettos of the whores and the piercing

siren that tears the night in half. We reencounter this emphasis on the “s” in the

following line: “someone’s hosing down the sidewalk and he’s only in his teens”.

As a snake sliding through the urban jungle, Waits recounts Small Change’ savage

fate.

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Chapter 2: The Overt Gothic

Rural Gothic: “Murder in the Red Barn”

At the other end of the spectrum of suitable places for the gothic genre, we find

the rural gothic. As Bernice Murphy states in her central argument of the book

The Rural Gothic, the genre emerges from “negative encounters between

individuals who have permanently settled in one place, and those who are

defined by their mobility and lack of permanent relationship with the landscape”

(Murphy Rural 10). This argument goes back to the early days of English settlers

in the New World who encountered not only a wilderness but also Native

Americans whose sense of place differed greatly from their own; the

Amerindians did not see land as something one could own, but rather passed

through it and used it as necessary. English settlers, on the other hand, built

homes and saw the land as something fixed once it had been settled. The tension

between locals, drifters and natives is also one of the driving factors in the rural

gothic of Tom Waits.

On the album Bone Machine, one of Waits’ more experimental ones due to

the influence of his wife Kathleen Brennan, the frequent use of noise, distortion

and altered sounds has inspired Christiansen to label the record as “gothic”.

According to Christiansen, “the tension between noise, music and the

recuperation of noise is a distinctive feature of Waits’ production, and makes his

music sonically monstrous” (Christiansen 73). Not only the music, however,

makes Bone Machine stand out as a prototypical example of the Waitsian gothic.

Many of the songs’ lyrics, co-‐written with Brennan, feature dark themes of decay

and transgression. In “The Earth Died Screaming”, for instance, an apocalyptic

nightmare is presented where hell takes over a dying earth. Disfigured people

roam many of the bleak spaces presented on the album and usually death is a

central theme of the songs. In “Murder in the Red Barn”, the duo transposes a

murder story that truly happened to the rural landscape of the American

countryside. How does the song convey the gothic mood and uncanny emotions,

and how does it fit in with Murphy’s conception of the rural gothic?

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The original story took place in Polstead, Suffolk, England in 1827. A

young man met with his lover in a red barn to elope with her. Later, however, it

was discovered that he had murdered her and buried the body in the barn

(Pedley 26). As one can expect from Waits, he omits many of the central aspects

of the story. Apart from the murder happening in a red barn, none of the main

protagonists or antagonists are present in the song. This is indeed, as David

Smay states, how Waits recounts a story: “You don’t get snippets of stories, you

get three-‐quarters of one story that overlaps with one-‐sixth of another story

overlaying five-‐eighths of a different story” (Smay 94). Through these snippets,

the listener gets to know the other people living in the small community who

turn out to be, as so often in Waits’ lyrical world, “the human detritus that

history overlooks and society dismisses” (Kessel xiii). It is clear that the

characters in the song are outcasts, since Reba is a “loon”, Bob is “blind”, the

people beneath the bridge are “drifters” and the falsely accused Chenoweth is a

Native American.

The rural setting – illustrated by cows, farms, a barn and trees -‐ in which

these characters are portrayed plays an important role in conveying the uncanny

emotions that haunt the song. Here, the woods are foregrounded. The image of

the “trees (…) bending over” is a classic trope of gothic stories, as found in

Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown. For instance: “The traveler knows not who

may be concealed by the innumerable trunks and thick boughs overhead, so that,

with lonely footsteps, he may yet be passing through an unseen multitude”

(Hawthorne 25). In the song, the woods furthermore function as the setting

where the evidence is hidden and are presented as a macabre accomplice to the

murder. They conceal the “crying” and clothes of the culprit and, as they are

personified, “will never tell what sleeps beneath the trees or what’s buried ‘neath

a rock or hiding in the leaves”. The woods are thus a mysterious entity where the

dark secrets of the committed horror are kept away from the scrutiny of society.

The uncanny feelings are evoked by their closeness to the community and

ostensible familiarity, but in fact they are accomplices to the murder and hide

grave secrets.

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Someone who is also hiding secrets is Cal, the actual perpetrator of the

murder; “No one’s asking [him] about the scar upon his face ‘cause there’s

nothing strange about an axe with bloodstains in the barn, there’s always some

killing you got to do around the farm”. In him not being accused of the murder,

we encounter the central tensions in the rural gothic deduced by Murphy: “those

who stay in one place are threatened by those that don’t, and vice versa”

(Murphy Rural 10). The local community sticks together and rather than accuse

one of their own, there is talk of “pin[ning] it on a drifter, they sleep beneath the

bridge”. Drifters are indeed not part of the community and can be easily blamed

for crimes. In the end, however, it is not the drifter who is actually accused, as

Corinne Kessel falsely states: “police blame a suspicious murder on a drifter

picked randomly from a group of gypsy wanderers” (72). The suspicion is part of

a conversation between the watchman and Reba the Loon, who are merely

discussing potential culprits. The locals opt for another scapegoat, Chenoweth, a

Native American. Even possessing a house in the village is not enough for

actually being part of the community. His ancestry is enough for the townspeople

to “surround[…] the house, smoke[…] him out and [take] him off in chains”.

Again, Young Goodman Brown is instructive for the reading of the song, for there

as well, Indians are regarded as suspicious in the rural environment: “there may

be a devilish Indian behind every tree!” (Hawthorne 25).

The “devilish Indian” is one of the factors that contribute to the uncanny

feelings in the song. After his arrest and subsequent removal from the

community (either through incarceration or execution), “the sky turned black

and bruised and we had months of heavy rain”. The changing weather is clearly

associated with Chenoweth and this reinforces the uncanny reading of an ancient

and repressed belief in Indian magical powers that recurs suddenly. It indeed

seems to act here as “the flickering sense (but not conviction) of something

supernatural” (Royle 1).

Musically, the uncanny is also heightened by the ‘bridge’ of the song.

Rather than an actual bridge, however, it is a verse that does not entirely seem to

fit the rest of the song. The first part of the song is used to describe the general

environment. The setting is outlined and we get details regarding the

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surroundings and the local people, followed by the chorus “there was a murder

in the red barn, murder in the red barn”. Hereafter, the story continues to unfold

in the verse as we would expect; some details here and there and the

introduction of a new degenerate, Slam the Crank from Wheezer, followed again

by the chorus. Then, however, rather than continuing the song with another

verse elaborating the story we encounter this verse:

Now thou shalt not covet thy neighbors house

Or covet they neighbors wife

But for some

Murder is the only door through which they enter life

The lyrics have nothing to do with the unfolding story, even if Waits’ peculiar

way of telling stories (see above) is taken in regard. Musically, the lyrics are not

part of the verse, for after these lines, an ‘awkward’ vocal silence clearly sets the

verse apart from the rest of the song. Thereafter, the song and story unfold as

expected. What does this mean? It could be a reflection on the fame or notoriety

of William Corder, the actual murderer in the true story, received after being

caught. His execution was witnessed by thousands of people and his body was

put up for display afterwards. Indeed, it is through the murder committed that

his name has entered (relative) eternity. The uncanny can inspire another

reading. We enter life in the womb of a woman and in earlier times, many

women died during childbirth. If murder is the only door through which some

enter life, it might mean that some people, by being born, have killed their

mother. In this respect, killing other people might be an admission to the death-‐

drive, an extreme nostalgia and the subsequent longing for the return to an

inorganic state as in the womb of the mother. Repressed trauma thus resurfaces

in the compulsive urge to kill. Hence also the strong focus on all kinds of death in

the song; there is all the “killing [one] got to do around the farm”, but also the

road kill and “Slam the Crank from Wheezer” who “slept outside (…) and froze”.

The music of the song evokes many feelings one associates with a rural

surrounding. It is a bluesy country song with an appealing ‘pots-‐and-‐pans’

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rhythm, ostensibly played on material one can find around a farm. The guitar

sounds like a banjo, typically associated with country music. The song starts with

a tweaking and screeching rhythmic sound. Two possible explanations come to

mind; either it is the rocking of a chair on the porch of the farm, with the farmer

resting and overseeing his hard work of the day. Another, more sinister reading

is that it reminds one of a body swinging from a rope, a reference to the eventual

fate of the murderer, or rather, of the people that do not fit in the tightly-‐woven

social construction of the rural community.

Suburban Gothic: “What’s he Building?”

In many ways, the origin of the suburban gothic in the twentieth century is

reminiscent of the emergence of its metropolitan counterpart in the nineteenth

century. Violent histories and changing demographic patterns played a role in a

renewed interest in the gothic and simultaneously provided the genre with a

new setting. After World War II the gothic changed fundamentally. The war had

clearly shown that it was not fictional monsters one should be afraid of, but man

himself. “No fictional of filmic fiend could ever top the evils perpetrated by

humans themselves”, states Murphy (Suburban 16). Indeed, “post war stories

increasingly show horror arising from aspects of life normally associated with

security and stability” (Skal 201). This already hints at a strong Freudian sense of

the uncanny, in its meaning of “das unheimliche” or the unhomely; the suburbs

are inherently homely and minor deviations are easily perceived as unhomely.

The suburb as the epitome of safety, security and stability, would

therefore prove highly fertile ground for the creator of gothic fiction. Although

the concept of mass-‐constructed housing in between the inner city and the

countryside was already known before, the rise of Suburbia took dramatic

proportions after the Second World War. This was due to returning soldiers who

were promised homes, a steeply increased marriage rate and a subsequent rise

in child birth. New technologies such as cheap mass-‐produced cars also

contributed to the comfort and stability in the suburbs. All of these demographic

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and technological evolutions -‐ kicked off after WWII and continuing for the

following decades -‐ took place for the most part in the newly erected suburbs.

Although the novel housing facilities were proof of economic progress and

upward mobility, the “seismic shift” that was mass-‐immigration also attracted

much criticism (Murphy Suburban 6).

The usual commentary denounced the way of living in the suburbs that

stimulated the dulling conformity, the loss of identity through sameness and

blandness, the daily grind of conventionality. Others, more interestingly, phrased

their criticism in terms evocative of the language of gothic, as Murphy points out.

She quotes the non-‐fiction writer John Keats, who described the suburbs as

“fresh-‐air slums” or as “Identical boxes spreading like gangrene” (Qtd. in Murphy

Suburban 7). Gothic language indeed, but as we have seen above, slums and

diseases are more specifically linked to the subgenre of the urban gothic. In this

respect, we already notice a shift of the by then well-‐established tropes of the

urban gothic onto Suburbia. To be sure, the gothic fit the suburban environment

perfectly and after the initial criticism in journalism and non-‐fiction, fiction

writers soon followed. To explain the particular attraction of gothic fiction to the

suburbs, Murphy points at the suburb being an “in-‐between space by definition”,

located not entirely in the city or in the countryside. Accordingly, the gothic also

“arises from the gaps between what something is and what it is not” (Murphy 4)

and therefore the two are an ideal match.

Yet, lacking all but completely from Murphy’s study of the suburban

gothic is the uncanny that, with its general meaning of the “strange within the

familiar”, seems a more than adequate explanation for the omnipresence of

gothic terror in the suburbs. After all, what is more familiar and normal than the

suburb? It is here that people live the perfect “homely” life; they are surrounded

exclusively with like-‐minded people, all ideally consisting of a stay-‐at-‐home

mom, a commuting father and two or three lovely children. Thus, if everything is

the same, familiar and conforms to the conventions, the most minor deviation

from normality causes highly uncanny feelings, and opens the suburbs up to the

unhomely. The inherent uncanniness of the suburbs thus points at an inversely

proportional relationship between the normality of the suburb and the

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strangeness of the gothic. Applying this train of thought to the urban

environment, one immediately sees the difference. In the city, nothing is familiar

and therefore the homely feelings are diminished. Many strange sensations and

experiences await the city-‐dweller every day (or night). All sorts of people live

together in the city and if abnormality or the unhomely becomes the norm, a

transgression or strange happening hardly evokes uncanny feelings. This is not

to say that there is no form of gothic in the city – there obviously is; yet many

aspects of the uncanny come to full fruition in the context of Suburbia.

Set in Suburbia and evoking highly uncanny feelings, the song “What’s He

Building?” of Waits’ acclaimed 1999 album Mule Variations presents a man or

woman (the observer) spying on his neighbor and describing the strange

activities – according to the former – that the latter indulges in. The setting is

clearly a suburb somewhere in the United States. Indeed, just as the slums in the

urban gothic were “readily abstracted (…) from any specific modern city”

(Loman 100), the suburbs in their “sheer ubiquity” often resist geographical

classification and rather function as “suburban every-‐towns able to represent

communities anywhere in the United States” (Murphy Suburban 11). Thus the

song features all the commonplace aspects of the suburbs such as happy families

consisting of husband and wife with a couple of children and a dog running

about. Of course the lawns are well trimmed and friends regularly visit. Apart

from the lyrics, the music also subtly hints at the song being set in the suburbs.

Many of the weird sounds have clearly electronic sources or are constructed to

imitate electronics. The weird cracks, hisses and phonographic talking refer to

the fact that in the suburbs, people could for the first time buy electronic

household equipment such as vacuum cleaners, telephones and televisions.

These new gadgets are inherently linked to the suburbs, since the middle class

who could afford the new homes, could also afford the electronic equipment.

Thus the song links the fascination for these new devices with suburban

paranoia.

However, the person who is observed fails to meet the requirements for

being part of the suburban community in many ways. He has an “ex-‐wife”, he has

“no children of his own” and “no dog”. Furthermore, he “has no friends and his

41

lawn is dying”. Indeed, rather than being part of the local community, he “never

waves when he goes by” and “he’s all to himself”. It is clear that in the suburbs,

these deviations from normality are enough reason to suspect one’s neighbor of

being a criminal mastermind.

Being suspicious of his neighbor, the observer keeps an eye on him at all

times. But closer scrutiny reveals that the activities the observer lists as being

suspicious are in fact pretty ordinary. He has “subscriptions to those magazines”

and he sends a lot of “packages”. Furthermore, there is “a blue light of a TV show”

and he is “pounding nails into a hardwood floor”. Watching television and doing

chores around the house are in fact part of everyone’s life. Yet, because the

neighbor under observation does not belong to the community, these activities

and his persona suddenly become the talk of the suburb. Gossip abounds in the

suburb, as we “won’t believe what Mr. Sticha5 saw”: “poison underneath the

sink”. Furthermore, most of the information is presented as heard through the

grapevine. The observer “heard” many things from the other members of his

community and other suspicions are stated either in questions or as

presumptions (“I’ll bet he spent a little time in jail”). Thus it becomes clear that

there is not one observer, but that the whole suburban community is suspicious

of one neighbor. At two times, plural pronouns are used that strengthen this

reading: “He’s hiding something from the rest of us” and the sinister utterance

“We have a right to know”. Whereas initially the person is viewed with suspicion,

it becomes clearer throughout the song that the observers are in fact the

originators of the suburban terror, not the neighbor.

There are thus multiple sources of uncanny feelings in the song. There is

for instance the secret that is never revealed. What is the neighbor actually

5 Tom Waits: “Mr. Sticha was my neighbor when I was a kid. He didn’t like kids and he didn’t like noise. All the kids would go past his house yellin’ and making noise, and you would see his fist out the window and he’d threaten to call the cops. His wife used to say, ‘You’re gonna give him a heart attack if you keep this up.’ And he finally had a heart attack and he died, and his wife told us that it was our fault, that we had killed him as a group. We all had to distribute that guilt and live with it, and it was upsetting: ‘Sticha died and we killed him.’ We might just as well have plotted his murder” (Maher 273-‐4).

42

building in his house, if anything? Throughout the song, the suspicion rises and

tension builds, but we never get to the absolute truth. The fact that the narrator

states “I think I know why” with respect to the neighbor keeping all to himself,

only increases the sense of mystery, since he never actually reveals what he

knows. In this respect, it is a reverse application of Freud’s description of the

uncanny: something that “ought to have remained secret and hidden but has

come to light” (Freud 623). Here, the secret never comes to light and the tension

is thus never resolved. Indeed, the possibility of a secret summons enough

tension for highly uncanny feelings. Nevertheless, what has to remain hidden

eventually remains hidden and therefore, the uncanniness equally stems from

another source. The maniacal perseverance of the observers to intrude on the

privacy of their neighbor thus functions as a double layer in the creation of

uncanny feelings. Not only are they continually spying on their neighbor, they

feel like they “have a right to know” everything about his life.

The observers are thus doubled, for their spying on the neighbor reflects

equally on them. It is not the neighbor who turns out suspicious but the

observers. The combination of the spy and the person spied upon thus functions

as “a doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self” (Freud 630). The observer

and the neighbor are interchanged as qualities that are initially seen as part of

one person, turn out to be present in the other(s) as well. At first the neighbor is

perceived as the “type and genius of deep crime”, whereas it is actually the

observers who cross boundaries in finding out everything there is to be known

about their neighbor and therefore are themselves indulging in “deep crime”

(Poe 221).

Especially in the context of the suburbs, this doubling becomes more

meaningful and powerful. Critics have stressed the nefarious aspects of

conformity, of similarity, of losing one’s own identity and blending in the masses

by living in the suburbs. Thus, to evoke strong uncanny feelings, the song

features both the inherent quality of suburban conformity and the doubling that

inevitably comes with it. Also, there is the sense of a terrible secret that has to

remain hidden. Initially, one regards the neighbor through the eyes of the

observers and with the same suspicion. One equally wonders what the neighbor

43

is doing and what he has to hide. Thus, the secret lurking behind the facade of

the home of the next-‐door resident is the initial source of uncanniness in the

song. It is only after it becomes clear to the listener that in fact the suspicions are

based on circumstantial evidence at best, that there is probably nothing wrong

with the neighbor but rather with the observers. Thus, the suspicion shifts form

the former to the latter, which increases the sense of doubling, thereby

increasing the overall uncanny feeling of the song.

As such, two of the most effective mechanisms of suburban gothic in the

song have been uncovered. Although doubling and a terrible secret are part and

parcel of many gothic tales, Edgar Allan Poe’s “Man of the Crowd” proves

especially adept in combining the two as well as illuminating other aspects of

(sub)urban gothic also present in “What’s he Building?” The main connection

between the two “stories” is the interest of one member of society in another

member. Both men being watched are simply going about their own business,

ostensibly behaving more or less normally. Yet, the observers are attracted to

them and indulge in further scrutiny. Indeed, Bran Nicol points out that the

narrator of Poe’s story “has been compelled to tell his story [because] there is

something criminal about the man of the crowd which cannot be revealed”

(469). This premise is perfectly applicable to “What’s he Building?” where the

neighbor also seems to be perceived as the “type and genius of deep crime” (Poe

221), who “does not permit itself to be read” (Poe 215). Furthermore, in Poe’s

story the doubling enhances the uncanny quality of the story. An “equally

perverse” narrator follows another individual (Lloyd-‐Smith 48), only to raise

suspicion on himself by doing so. Thus in both stories, “what appears to be an

external mystery is somehow thrillingly and disturbingly personal” (Nicol 478).

Nicol further mentions the unreliability of Poe’s narrator, who is “unstable

enough at least to make the impulsive pursuit of a stranger for around twenty-‐

four hours more likely than it may seem” (Nicol 480). The same goes for the

narrator in Waits’ song, who not only indulges in presumption and gossip, but

also sees no problem in spying upon his neighbor day and night. All in all,

Patricia Merivale provides an adequate summary of Poe’s tale which can be

equally read with Waits’ song in mind:

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It becomes apparent that the narrator has projected his sense of his

own (literally) un-‐utterable wickedness upon the Man of the Crowd,

who, for any evidence we are given about him, may be no more than

the quite innocent and wholly terrified victim of the narrator’s

sinisterly silent, masked, seemingly motiveless pursuit. (Merivale 106-‐

7)

Yet most interesting is the role of isolation with regard to the

commonplace social structures in both instances. In this respect, the difference

between the suburban and urban gothic is to be especially highlighted. In “The

Man of the Crowd”, the man who is followed “refuses to be alone” (Poe 221). He

wanders through the city, “always seeking to be one of the throng” and in the

early hours he is “desperately seeking company among the few remaining night

wanderers and is visibly relieved by the return of the urban mob in the morning”

(Lloyd-‐Smith 49). Although Chad Luck states that “urban isolation” (128) is the

source of the man’s “deep crime”, it is clear from Poe’s text that his “refus[ing] to

be alone” and him being “the man of the crowd” are in fact indicators of “deep

crime” (Poe 221). Yet Nicol also notes that he is “unlike the other people, those

who belong to identifiable social types” (Nicol 469). In “What’s he Building?” we

encounter the reversed situation; the neighbor lives in the suburbs and thus

clearly belongs to a certain social class. But what sets him apart from the rest of

his community is the fact that rather than communicating with his peers, he

keeps to himself. Thus while in the city, not belonging to a social class but all the

while intermingling with the regular mob is the source of suspicion, in the

suburbs, it is he who belongs to the suburban social context yet keeps to himself

that is the object of scrutiny of one’s peers.

The dark, eerie soundscape that accompanies the lyrics is another major

inducer of uncanny feelings. No recognizable instruments are used and the effect

of all the noise, ticking, weird screeches and feedback is an ominous and eerie

track that fits the lyrics perfectly. Although the rambling at first seems to be

linked to the title of the track and to strengthen the sense of someone building

45

something, the soundscape evolves to encompass the different activities that the

neighbor keeps himself busy with, rendered through the mind of the observer.

While some noises seem random and their source cannot be identified, others

are clearly linked to the lyrics and come from recognizable sources. Interestingly,

those linked to the lyrics and thus to the spying of the neighbors, are difficult to

hear and appear muffled and unclear. On the one hand, this could mean that the

eavesdropping neighbors try to listen to their neighbor but cannot hear

everything as clear as they would want to. On the other hand, the fact that those

sounds are relegated to the background, could hint at the neighbors’ deliberately

or unconsciously ignoring certain aspects of their neighbor’s life.

The track opens with a cracking noise and a chiming bell, accompanied by

some sort of drum taped in echo and reverb. Indeed, these sounds are

reminiscent of someone fiddling with electronics or dragging heavy things

through the house. Immediately after the first lyrics “what’s he building in there”,

we hear something repeatedly ticking on glass, reminding one of hitting a nail

into something. Although the sounds do resemble someone fabricating

something, they are quite off. It is clear that it is no regular hammer “pounding

nails into a hardwood floor”. The uncanny is thus enhanced by familiar acts with

recognizable sounds, mirrored by peculiar, weird, unrecognizable sounds.

The recognizable sounds are in fact placed in the background, where they

are not emphasized but contribute to and even enhance the strangely familiar

soundtrack. When the narrator states his neighbor “has no dog” (0:46), a barking

dog is audible in the background of the track. But rather than foreground this

familiar sound, the strange rhythmic ticking is emphasized. This opens the song

up to different readings. Either we trust the narrator, follow his logic and also see

the neighbor in a strange light – the dog could be someone else’s on the block -‐ or

we could read the barking dog as indicative of the selective blindness (deafness,

rather) of the unreliable narrator. The narrator thus only focuses on what is

bizarre rather than on what is familiar; he only sees and hears what he wants to

see and hear in order to incriminate his neighbor.

Another highly discomforting combination of sound and lyrics is the

chiming of the bell (1:10) and the (alleged) fact that the neighbor “is not building

46

a playhouse for the children”. The chiming of the bell in itself can be associated

with gothic tropes of the dead of night or an assembly of haunting creatures. On a

more mundane level, a church can be associated with the burial of the dead.

Although the narrator spreads rumors and gossip throughout the song, his

utterance “I’ll tell you one thing, he’s not building a playhouse for the children”

seems oddly assured, almost as if building a playhouse would be futile for the

lack of children in the town. The trauma of having lost all children could

furthermore clarify the paranoia of the suburbanites vis-‐a-‐vis their neighbor; to

prevent another trauma from happening they have to be careful all the time.

Although the interpretation of the song as a childless suburb through some kind

of disaster would be far-‐fetched, the certainty of the narrator combined with the

chiming does evoke strong uncanny and haunted feelings in the mind of listeners

through the connection of children and death – a combination one would rather

not think about, yet that is put in one’s head in a very subtle manner.

In the same vein, the “blue light of a TV-‐show” is accompanied by a subtle,

melodic tune of two notes (1:37), also mixed in the background as if heard

through a closed door. Furthermore, one can hear muffled talking, as if someone

is speaking through a distorted phone. This coincides with the statement that the

neighbor had a “consultation business in Indonesia” and “has no friends” (2:15).

Again, the talking could be phone calls to his clients in Indonesia or to his friends,

which he does have and the narrator could thus be labeled as unreliable. The

talking could also come from the TV-‐show that he is still watching. Last but not

least, the song ends with the “tune he’s always whistling” (2:58). The whistling

sounds like an eerie gothic soundtrack played through broken boxes and is

completed by the classic high-‐pitched trembling noise that is so characteristic of

the arrival of ghosts.

With regard to the voice of the narrator, Kessel’s statement that “Waits

uses his voice as a tool to communicate his stories, rather than using it as a

means to showcase himself as a singer” (Kessel 53) proves correct. Waits is not

singing at all, yet his raw, distorted and grinding voice contributes greatly to the

story. The structure of the song, furthermore, is highly reminiscent of his earlier

work that focused on spoken-‐word narratives backed by minimal

47

instrumentation. “What’s he Building?” can thus be seen as an uncanny

continuation of the standard jazz and beat songs Waits was known for in his

early days; the song is more directed at mood than at actual song structure. The

lyrics in this respect are more important than the instrumentation, and the

instrumentation is furthermore used to increase what is in this respect the eerie

sense of the lyrics. “What’s he Building?” is therefore the true uncanny

incarnation of Waits’ earlier work; the familiar aspects are still present, yet the

result is a highly unfamiliar and uncanny form.

All in all, the song emphasizes paranoia in the suburbs through the focus

on one lonely individual that is juxtaposed to the rest of the community. It also

subtly critiques the newly emergent technologies in the fifties, in relation to

which the observers clearly feel not at ease. In the mind of the observing

community, all mundane aspects of the suburb are perceived in haunted,

uncanny and strange imagery, highly increased through the eerie soundscape,

which further emphasizes the strangeness of the song and the fact that the

narrator puts all the bizarre aspects in the foreground while ignoring the more

mundane and familiar. In the vein of many of Poe’s classic gothic texts, this song

strongly exhibits the “external correlatives for internal divisions of the mind” in

the observers (Lloyd-‐Smith 77).

48

Conclusion

Clearly, the attempt of this thesis to identify the gothic and the uncanny in the

music of Tom Waits has been fruitful. As expected, the second part of his career

featured more overt references to gothic tropes and, especially the song “What’s

he Building?” carried highly uncanny feelings. Thus, can we underwrite Harold

Bloom’s statement about the authentic uncanny always reaching canonical

status? Another quote of the scholar allows us to elaborate; what makes a work

canonical, according to Bloom, is a

strangeness, a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or

that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange (…). When you

read a canonical work for the first time you encounter a stranger, an

uncanny startlement rather than a fulfillment of expectations (Bloom 3)

Waits music is often quite strange – his singing voice is remarkably unusual and

he uses many bizarre instruments – and therefore highly original. Some people

will experience his music as eccentric and will not enjoy it. The strangeness is too

foregrounded and explicit for their personal taste. Yet others will appreciate

Waits’ original take on music grounded in those typically American genres of

blues, jazz and folk and they will “cease to see it as strange”. However, a strong

degree of Waits’ attraction also emerges from his unpredictability. On every

album, he switches voices, uses different instruments and provides the listener

with yet another view on how music is supposed to be made and perceived. Thus,

even avid Waits fans will “encounter a stranger” each time they listen to a new

album of the artist they thought they knew, and indeed “rather than a fulfillment

of expectations”, the process of assimilation has to start over again. Therefore, it

is safe to say that one of the reasons for Tom Waits reaching canonical status is

the overt use of the uncanny and the gothic in the second half of his career.

Throughout this thesis we have identified many instances of the gothic

and the uncanny. To repeat all of them here would be superfluous. Yet, in the light

of the uncanny gothic, the songs clearly opened up for analysis. Many aspects of

49

the “stories” Waits tells, are grounded in the uncanny. It is worthwhile to retake

Vidler’s quote from the introduction; the uncanny indeed opens up “problems of

identity around the self, the other, the body and its absence” (Vidler x). Both

“Murder in the Red Barn” and “What’s he Building?” revolved around perceived

outsiders of the community and troubled the notion of identity. “Thence its force

in interpreting the relations between the psyche and the dwelling, the body and

the house, the individual and the metropolis” (Vidler x). While “What’s he

Building?” strongly focused on the “psyche and the dwelling” (“external

correlatives [found in the suburb] for internal divisions of the mind” (cf. supra)),

the bond between “the individual and the metropolis” was foregrounded in

“Small Change”. Arguably, “Murder in the Red Barn” can be ascribed to “the body

and the house”; Chenoweth’s house was burned and his body swinging from the

rope. Thus through the focus on the unhomely instead of the homely, Waits songs

acquire more profound readings.

The last aim of this thesis was to show how the uncanny and the gothic in

Waits’ music did not emerge form a vacuum or were solely introduced by

Kathleen Brennan. It has been adequately argued that the gothic and the uncanny

are heavily present in two of Waits’ most important influences, Jack Kerouac and

Edward Hopper. To be sure, being influenced by them does not guarantee an

uncanny or gothic presence in the early Waits. Yet, many songs of the early Waits

feature the dark side of the city, just as Hopper’s paintings, or indulge in

nostalgia, just as Kerouac. Both the dark underbelly of the city and nostalgia are

adequate conveyers of uncanny emotions, and these have also to a certain degree

been identified in some songs of Waits. “Small Change”, then, proved to be the

urban gothic song that can stand tall in between Hopper’s Nighthawks and the

Beat poetry of Kerouac. Surely, if the uncanny allowed Waits to enter the musical

canon, he had already been practicing it for a while – be it consciously in the

gothic of “Small Change” or unconsciously through the influence of Hopper and

Kerouac.

50

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