Marginalisation and Utopia in Paul Auster, Jim Jarmusch and Tom Waits

The Other America

Adriano Tedde, Adriano A. Tedde

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032117140
• eBook ISBN: 9781000566338
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores how three contemporary American artists through the mediums of film, literature and popular music have contributed to the tradition of American progressivism, and provides an invaluable companion to the understanding of complex issues such as inequality and social and economic decline that are apparent in America today.

Connecting the works of these artists through a fictional country – the 'Other America' – the book shows how they have refuted middle-class values and goals of success, money and social affirmation to unveil the less celebrated, dark side of contemporary America, which, despite the troubles currently faced, never loses hope for a better future. This utopic vision in the face of adversity is explored through the plots, characters and mis-en-scène of Auster and Jarmusch's work and Waits's lyrics and sound. This vision challenges the dominant narratives of America as the land of opportunity and values democracy, civic engagement, communitarianism and egalitarianism.

Offering an important new perspective to literature on contemporary American culture, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of American studies, film studies, popular music, postmodern literature, cultural studies and sociology.

Part OneThe Other America

1The democratic dreamA traditional social critique in America

DOI: 10.4324/9781003221173-3

Tom Waits received his first music award in 1986 at a songwriter festival called “Premio Tenco,” held in Sanremo, Italy. The official prize motive read: “To Tom Waits for giving voice and form of song to a romantic America, poor and marginalised […] alcoholic and ragged, made of wanderers and losers, poetically deluded that life, like in a Frank Capra movie, is always wonderful.”¹ Waits’s performance at the festival was televised (late at night) under the title “Tom Waits, the Other America” (Tom Waits, l’altra America).² An enthusiastic review of the concert appeared the day after in the national press explaining that the singer’s Other America was what “the optimism of the Reagan era hides, removes, completely ignores.”³ Waits was greeted as the balladeer of a forgotten reality that did not belong to the mainstream image his country projected abroad.

The expression “Other America” has been used on different occasions to portray aspects of the United States of America that somehow contradict a general idea of America as a powerful, confident, and wealthy nation.⁴ In the following study this expression will describe an America that emerges not only from the songs of Tom Waits, but also from the films of Jim Jarmusch and the novels of Paul Auster. Exploring thematic connections between these artists and with American thinkers of the past, this book will investigate how texts of popular culture allow an understanding of the social and political reality of a country. Auster, Jarmusch and Waits are three renowned American artists, born between the end of the 1940s and the early 1950s, in different regions of the United States. They gained international acclaim in the 1980s, when, all living in New York, they produced a series of works that defined their artistic personalities. Auster published The Invention of Solitude (1982) and The New York Trilogy (1987), books that have left a lasting impression on his subsequent literature; Jarmusch filmed Permanent Vacation (1980) and Stranger Than Paradise (1984), which contained all the central elements he would later develop with his bigger productions; Waits, who already was a well-established recording artist, released Swordfishtrombones (1983) and Rain Dogs (1985), the albums that radically transformed his music into one of the most distinctive productions of American song-writing. Growing up in the post-war baby-boom era, these three men witnessed America at its economic and political peak in their childhood and adolescence during the 1950s and 1960s. Raised in the ease of white middle-class families, at some point in their youth they all understood that they were not going to follow a path made of certitudes and economic security through a steady job and observance of marketplace rules. They have instead dedicated their lives to artistic creativity, becoming storytellers of a marginal America, its people and its unconventional lives. Despite being products of distinct career paths, the works of these three men have pictured America with striking similarities, which will be examined in the ensuing chapters. This fictional Other America of the works of Auster, Jarmusch and Waits finds its deep roots in a certain stream of American culture that belongs to those who express discontent and disapproval of their country while upholding the democratic ideals of social justice and equality upon which the country was founded. The Other America contains an idea of America that is alternative to that of a perennial victory narrative. It looks at society from the bottom up, celebrates the common man and does not hide its failures.

To provide a visual analogy, if this America were to be exemplified by a human being, it would have the face of cult anti-star and character actor Harry Dean Stanton, the personification of the eternal struggling outsider.⁵ After a long series of small roles, Stanton came into prominence in his late fifties with the leading roles in Paris, Texas (1984, dir. Wim Wenders) and Repo Man (1984, dir. Alex Cox). His final, semi-autobiographical film Lucky (2017, dir. John Carroll Lynch) was routinely compared to Jim Jarmusch’s cinema.⁶ The character played by Stanton, a solitary stubborn old man, whose life revolves around a repeated daily routine, could easily be one of Paul Auster’s “wounded men” out of novels like Oracle Night (2003), Travels in the Scriptorium (2006) or Man In The Dark (2008). In Lucky, Stanton also performs an a-cappella rendition of a classic Mexican popular song, “Volver, Volver,” which reminds much of the immediacy and simplicity of some of Tom Waits’s works.

The Other America imagined through different media by Auster, Jarmusch and Waits offered a response to the dominant worldview of the Reaganite 1980s. This literary America, however, engages with a much longer tradition of American artistic production and political thought. The fundamental text to catch the spirit of the Other America is the essay Democratic Vistas (1871) written by Walt Whitman, which is a literary precursor of an alternative idea of America. The poet was hopeful that his country could form a true democracy, fulfilling the task of modern history to put into practice the “long deffer’d […] theory of development and perfection by voluntary standards, and self-reliance.”⁷ Notwithstanding his vision for a glorious future, Whitman had no delusion that this historical task had not yet been accomplished with the first century of the Republican experience and that indeed the New World was up until that point in time “an almost complete failure in its social aspects, and in really grand religious, moral, literary, and esthetic results.”⁸ In order to accomplish its democratic destiny, the essay insisted, America had to solve three cardinal matters: limit its greed, bring its people together, and develop an autochthonous literature. These main issues advanced by Whitman – criticism of American materialism, tribute to common people and production of original ideas and culture – persist as the foundational points of the country depicted in the fiction of the three artists under examination in this study.

American avarice

Against the greediness that he saw around him, Whitman developed his harshest critique of America. He detected a “hollowness at heart,” corruption and hypocrisy in American society:

In business (this all-devouring modern word, business), the sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain. The magician’s serpent in the fable ate up all the other serpents; and money-making is our magician’s serpent, remaining to-day sole master of the field.⁹

Whereas the author declared that he was not against the material success of his country and actually believed that accumulation of wealth was important for “amelioration and progress,” the appetite for money was America’s greatest soul corruption.¹⁰ A blinding desire for riches is the main obstacle to the development of a spiritual dimension; and in the worst cases, it is the source of great suffering. Only fourteen years before the publication of Democratic Vistas, another important intellectual of the nineteenth century, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, pronounced these words in a public address on slavery:

[T]wenty thousand lives are annually sacrificed on the plantations of the South. Such a sight should send a thrill of horror through the nerves of civilization and impel the heart of humanity to lofty deeds. So it might, if men had not found out a fearful alchemy by which this blood can be transformed into gold. Instead of listening to the cry of agony, they listen to the ring of dollars and stoop down to pick up the coin.¹¹

Accumulation of material fortunes has the power to deprive humanity of a basic respect for human life. A century later, Richard Wright, tracing the character of African-American people, reminded how the traffic and trade of humans was a perfectly accepted activity in the eighteenth century for the sole reason that it generated revenues like no other business had ever done before. Slave traders were the “captains of industry” and “tycoons of finance” of a pre-industrialised world and the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes banners on the masts of soldiers symbolised the protection of a free trade in human bodies.¹²

A clash between norms and goals of economic growth and needs of spiritual and emotive spheres is present in the Other America created in the artworks of Auster, Jarmusch and Waits. Their stories, films, and music are decidedly at odds with the “greed is good” ethic of the Reagan era, as prospects of material gain usually corrupt the characters’ inner serenity. A point in common between their works and the ideas of Whitman is that accumulation of wealth is not only the cause of a desensitised conscience in front of people’s suffering; it also provides a manipulation of personal aspirations of free individuals. If on the one hand, the chase for great gains can harm humans, slavery being one extreme example of such harm, on the other, the diffuse necessity of money-making can impose social conformity to a whole nation. Unquestioned dogmas of economic growth and expansion turn masses into alienated workers who never wonder whether a life spent in accumulating money is a worthy endeavour. Auster, Jarmusch and Waits are not the first American artists to reflect on such issues. In 1922 Nobel laureate Sinclair Lewis immortalised this type of individual with his novel Babbitt, which appeared at the same time as the establishing of consumer culture in America, offering a portrayal of the average American man. The title of the book became a neologism, as a synonym for the middle-class conformist consumerist, he who “without hesitation […] considers it God’s purpose that man should work, increase his income, and enjoy modern improvements.”¹³ This character became in turn the “square” of 1940s and 1950s jazz and Beat culture. The figure of the square is that of a man who has limited ability to appreciate the cultural variety around him. Musicologist Phil Ford defines the square as a man who “has absorbed the American ethic of conformity, authority, and consumerism so thoroughly that he can no longer function without being told what to do, what to like, and what to believe.”¹⁴ Bob Dylan popularised this figure with his Mr. Jones, the central character of “Ballad of a Thin Man” (1965), whose restricted consciousness does not allow him to understand the world around him. Possibly a worthy member of society, Mr. Jones is oblivious to the weirdness of the world outside his habits and customs,¹⁵ while the amused singer repeats at the end of every verse that something is happening but he doesn’t get it, does he?¹⁶ The dulled perceptions of the Mr. Joneses of America and the numbing of their consciousness and conscience derive from the materialism that bothered Whitman. In the 1850s Whitman and Henry David Thoreau¹⁷ both believed that limiting this materialism is a necessary measure to avoid the weakening and dilution of a national culture into conformity. Restraining greed is also indispensable to stop the division of society between free buyers – masters of the past, and the wealthy of the present – and powerless subjects – slaves of the past, and the poor of the present. For Whitman, control over materialistic impulsions was an essential step to release the democratic potential of a nation in a subject called the “People.”

Absolute soul

Only by controlling its thirst for wealth, America could direct attention to its spiritual dimension and proceed to the realisation of an anti-feudal state and society founded on the principle of egalitarianism. Walt Whitman believed in the presence of an “absolute soul” that makes all human beings equal to one another. Democracy for the author is the recognition of this fundamental equality and the practice of one great word: “Solidarity”. After all,

of all dangers to a nation, […] there can be no greater one than having certain portions of the people set off from the rest by a line drawn – they not privileged as others, but degraded, humiliated, made of no account.¹⁸

Hence, equality “is for Whitman the self-evident truth of democracy.”¹⁹ T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One The Other America
• Part Two The American Dream
• Part Three The democratic hero
• Part Four The enemy of conventional society
• AppendixMain works by Paul Auster, Jim Jarmusch and Tom Waits
• Bibliography
• Index