“THE SIREN TEARS the NIGHT in HALF” Tom Waits, the Uncanny and the American Gothic

“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

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.

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

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

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).

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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).

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

“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

“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

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

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 18

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. 19

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

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

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

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

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). 24

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

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

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

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

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 29

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

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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’

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 38

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

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

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).

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

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:

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

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

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

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).

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

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.

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