“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. 2 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 3 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 4 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). 5 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 6 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

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