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Tear into the Guts:
Whitman, Steinbeck,
Springsteen, and the
Durability of Lost Souls
on the Road
1
Brent Bellamy
Abstract: This article investigates the relationship between the concepts of
freedom and confinement and the metaphor of ‘‘the road’’ in the works of
three significant American cultural figures. A close analysis of the formal
elements of the poetry of Walt Whitman, the novels of John Steinbeck, and
the songs of Bruce Springsteen reveals a negation at the core of durability.
These narratives pit characters, readers, and listeners against the ideology
of freedom that structures road narratives and American durability.
Whitman’s version of the road is open and apparently available to all,
whereas Steinbeck’s version inverts these terms, making the road a place
of oppression and confinement. Beginning to unveil these contradictions,
Springsteen’s music grasps the weight and emptiness of the road as a
cultural signifier. Finally, the article argues that only through collective
thought and action within and against the contradictions inherent in dura-
bility can we stop simply persisting and start living.
Keywords: durability, persistence, Marxist literary criticism, American
culture, the road
Re
´sume
´:Lepre
´sent article e
´tudie la relation entre les concepts de liberte
´
et le confinement et la me
´taphore de « la route » dans les oeuvres de trois
personnalite
´s culturelles ame
´ricaines. Une analyse approfondie des e
´le
´ments
formels de la poe
´sie de Walt Whitman, des romans de John Steinbeck et
des chansons de Bruce Springsteen re
´ve
`lent une ne
´gation au coeur de la
durabilite
´. Ces narratifs dressent les personnages, les lecteurs, et les audi-
teurs contre l’ide
´ologie de la liberte
´qui forme la structure des narratifs des
routes et la durabilite
´ame
´ricaine. La version de Whitman en ce qui a trait
a
`la route est ouverte et apparemment accessible a
`tous, tandis que celle
de Steinbeck inverse ces termes, faisant de la route un endroit ou
`re
`gnent
6Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’e
´tudes ame
´ricaines 41, no. 2, 2011
doi: 10.3138/cras.41.2.223
l’oppression et le confinement. En commenc¸ant a
`de
´voiler ces contradic-
tions, la musique de Springsteen saisit le poids et le vide de la route comme
un signifiant culturel. Enfin, cet article pre
´conise que seulement par le
truchement de l’action et de la pense
´e collective dans et contre les contra-
dictions inhe
´rentes a
`la durabilite
´pouvons-nous arre
ˆter de simplement
subsister et commencer a
`vivre.
Mots cle
´s: durabilite
´, subsistance, critique litte
´raire marxiste, culture
ame
´ricaine, la route
The production of ideas, images, and knowledges is not only conducted in
common—no one really thinks alone, all thought is produced in collaboration
with the past and present thought of others—but also each new idea and image
invites and opens new collaborations.
—Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude
Whenever the concept of freedom is once more understood, it always comes as . . .
an ontological impatience in which the constraining situation itself is for the first
time perceived in the very moment in which it is refused.
—Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form
The use of the road as metaphor emerges out of the newly chartered
American frontier. Taking a step past metaphor, road narratives,
such as Walt Whitman’s ‘‘Song of the Open Road,’’ John Steinbeck’s
The Grapes of Wrath, and Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run, are narra-
tives that imply the perceived strength, unity, and lasting nature —
the durability—of the American working class. These three cultural
forms index three places where this durability is succinctly theor-
ized in relation to a single formal element: the road. These narra-
tives, the road in American culture, and durability are each divided
within themselves by the interplay of a sense of liberty and a feel-
ing of restriction. The dialectical nature of the rift between freedom
and confinement affects the social shape and durability of the
working class. In Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town,
Bruce Springsteen unveils durability, freedom, and confinement
as triangulating the American people’s struggle to find a way of
being, to provide for their families, and to support their peers. This
triangular relationship is earlier problematized by an imbalance
between freedom (Whitman, ‘‘Song of the Open Road’’) and con-
finement (Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath). The freedom expressed
by Whitman’s version of the road is more tangible and optimistic
than Steinbeck’s, even though the Joads experience the relative free-
224
Canadian Review of American Studies 41 (2011)
dom of owning an automobile. For Springsteen, the tension of this
triangular relationship drives the working-class man, or woman,
to seek refuge on the road. The problem for Springsteen is that the
respite found in the automobile is false —a problem that Steinbeck
had faced in The Grapes of Wrath, fifty years earlier. This triangular
relationship reinforces class mentality by offering ideals of liberty
and freedom that are intimately related to freedom’s opposite. In
these narratives, characters forget that such a gesture cuts both
ways; that it is, on the one hand, shoring up confinement and ideol-
ogies of freedom, while, on the other, offering a way out of the trap.
The American culture of persistence creates a double gesture that
maintains the road as a durable yet flawed American metaphor,
advocating freedom while formally suggesting confinement.
In this article, I analyse American durability, freedom, and confine-
ment as they pertain to the formative nature of road narratives
within American culture. In order to do so, I read these narratives
with special attention to the manner in which they portray charac-
ters on the road in relation to their dreams of freedom and fears
of confinement. I begin with Whitman’s depiction of the ‘‘rela-
tionality of strangers’’
2
to show that collectivity is implicated as an
expression of liberty, whereas, later, it becomes connected to con-
finement. Next I read Steinbeck’s version of the frontier in The
Grapes of Wrath, which engages an iteration of durability based on
confinement. I read Steinbeck in two sections. The first is through
Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, which argues that the
frontier and the possibility of expansion west fuel American con-
sciousness. Second, I read the novel alongside Mark Seltzer’s Bodies
and Machines. Here, Steinbeck’s characters take on a mechanized
character akin to Springsteen’s version of durability. The Grapes of
Wrath as a road narrative represents the road’s deceptive nature,
and as an American novel with a sustained popularity, it indexes
ongoing working-class struggles. Moving on to Springsteen, I argue
that, despite his initial romantic notion of the automobile and free-
dom, he guts both the car and the metaphor of the road by display-
ing his speaker’s gradual loss of freedom as we have known it,
on the level of content, in Whitman and Steinbeck. So finally, in
a dialectical twist, by the time Tom Joad is returned to narrative
by Springsteen in 1995’s The Ghost of Tom Joad, the road has been
completely dismantled as a symbol of pure freedom and instead
represents formal confinement, leaving the working-class charac-
ters, who are typically associated with durability, in a state of lack.
225
Revue canadienne d’e
´tudes ame
´ricaines 41 (2011)
Whitman’s depiction of the relationality of strangers as an
expression of freedom
Whitman’s ‘‘Song of the Open Road’’ articulates Michael Warner’s
‘‘stranger relationality’’ through the road as a space capable of
shaping its travellers. According to Whitman, not only does a life
on the road lead anywhere but, living on the road, one can forge
connections with other travellers, the past, and the future. Without
the road, we would travel not in unity but separately. Inevitably,
the road unites strangers, and its travellers embody their own
form of durability in the metaphoric weight everyone must carry
through life and in the release of that weight through their joining
others on the open road.
The burden of weight juxtaposes itself with the freedom offered by
the road. Whitman concedes that life on the road does not erase the
past or uncover the future:
(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens;
I carry them, men and women—I carry them with me wherever
I go;
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them;
I am fill’d with them, and I will fill them in return.) (11–4)
Line 11 has a terribly sad tone and quality that echoes in line 13,
which is characterized by a pragmatic and defiant sorrow. Whitman’s
admission of this burden at the beginning of his celebration of the
road should not be read as a lament but as a statement of reality.
His romanticization of the road as a liminal space would not be
attractive to those who don’t bear the burden he describes. The
road allows its travellers to move forward literally and figuratively,
as we witness an imagined collective shouldering of an intangible
weight. For Whitman, the road is a place of healing where, if some-
one cannot move through and beyond his ‘‘old delicious burdens,’’
he can move perpetually forward.
Whitman rejects reason and rationality in order to adopt the strong
stance of a hearty outdoor constitution:
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms
Strong and content I travel the open road. (5 –7)
The speaker sets aside his occupation to become part of a larger
group: travellers on the road. This choice highlights two functions
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Canadian Review of American Studies 41 (2011)
of the road: it is a source of escape from ‘‘querulous criticisms’’ and
a harbour of belonging. As the landscape is charted, the road laid,
and the earth mapped and parcelled the road becomes a place
where those tired of their burdens can find release.
In ‘‘Song of the Open Road,’’ the speaker observes the latent traces
of the experience of other travellers, which have been recorded in
objects along the road:
From all that has been near you, I believe you have imparted to
yourselves, and now would impart the same secretly to me;
From the living and the dead I think you have peopled your
impassive surfaces, and the spirits thereof would be evident and
amicable with me. (37–8)
Whitman depicts the ‘‘doors,’’ ‘‘windows,’’ ‘‘arches,’’ and ‘‘steps’’
(34) as porous containers that soak up both ambient and tangible
memory from the travellers that pass. These objects become durable
touchstones. In the act of passing, a trace of the passer-by is inscribed.
These imprints transmit previous experiences to the next travellers
who pass—inscribing and re-inscribing their stories as durable traces
of the adventurous and road-weary. Whitman acknowledges that,
although we are drawn to treat the speaker’s wonder at witnessing
these objects as a private visceral experience, the fact that this
wonder ‘‘would impart the same secretly to me’’ implies that we
should consider it a sharing of past traveller’s ‘‘old delicious burdens.’’
Whitman’s expression of freedom is densely woven temporally and
spatially, filling each moment on the road with impressions of the
past and the future. Here, ideas of freedom and confinement must
be articulated together: Whitman’s poem is an expression of free-
dom replete with connections forward and backwards. The poet
shows that connection does not need to equate with confinement—
freedom can be found through collective experience. With a dialec-
tical tick and swing of the pendulum of contradiction, freedom and
confinement dance and jostle, landing harshly askew on Steinbeck’s
new Western frontier.
Turner and the construction of the new frontier
Turner’s frontier thesis, The Significance of the Frontier in American
History, articulates American expansion and the freedom of the
West. Before the road, the American land was metaphorically de-
picted as a rough and wild frontier to be charted and contained —
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Revue canadienne d’e
´tudes ame
´ricaines 41 (2011)
usually by white, European men.
3
Most succinctly, Turner describes
the frontier as ‘‘the line of the most rapid and effective Americaniza-
tion’’ (3–4). He links the social and cultural development of America
to its own geographic expansion:
American development has exhibited not merely advance along a
single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually
advancing frontier line, and a new development for this area.
American social development has been continually beginning
over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of
American life, this expansion westward with its new opportuni-
ties, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society,
furnish the forces dominating American character. (3)
In many ways, Turner’s thesis is dated. Although, his use of
‘‘primitive’’ to describe Native Americans is more objectionable
than are his suspicions about a distinctly ‘‘American character.’’
4
He intellectualizes the frontier as a dominant structure in forming
American behaviour and thus creates a model —one that analyses
and depicts the human drive to explore the unknown —that can be
adapted to the study of American literature; specifically, the call of
the road exhibited in road narratives.
Despite these shortcomings, Turner provides a space to ground a
literary reading of the frontier. Turner theorizes the West:
The West, at bottom, is a form of society, rather than an area. It is
the term applied to the region whose social conditions result from
the application of older institutions and ideas to the transforming
influences of free land. By this application, a new environment is
suddenly entered, freedom of opportunity is opened, the cake
of custom is broken, and new activities, new lines of growth,
new institutions and new ideas, are brought into existence. The
wilderness disappears, the ‘‘West’’ proper passes on to a new
frontier, and in the former area, a new society has emerged from
its contact with the backwoods. (205)
To Turner, the frontier is a liminal membrane that separates
America from the wild, and the East from the West. The West in
The Grapes of Wrath holds the same promise as the frontier had
done for previous generations, but, unlike the frontier in a previous
iteration of American consciousness, the West does not live up
to the hopes of the Joads and other Oklahoman families. Turner
argues that in the West the ‘‘freedom of opportunity is opened.’’
228
Canadian Review of American Studies 41 (2011)
Steinbeck engages the damaging potential of this myth in The
Grapes of Wrath, where the West is depicted as a land of potential,
hopes, and dreams but, instead, offers only exploitative work and
an alienated way of life.
Steinbeck’s novel critiques the promised-land myths and ideologies
of American exceptionalism by destroying the Joads’ firmly rooted
dream of relaxation and plenty. They do not realize the toll the
journey will take on them nor the bleak situation that awaits their
arrival in California as they travel along Route 66:
Highway 66 is the main migrant road. 66—the long concrete path
across the country, waving gently up and down on the map, from
Mississippi to Bakersfield—over the red lands and the gray lands,
twisting up into the mountains, crossing the divide and down into
the bright and terrible desert, and across the desert to the moun-
tains again, and into the rich Californian valleys. (Steinbeck 118)
The sublimity of the American landscape acts as a force against the
road and an obstacle for the Joads. Steinbeck formally contradicts
the images of freedom and confinement by placing ‘‘waving gently’’
against ‘‘concrete path. ‘‘This dichotomy of images points to the
futility of the Joads’ journey. The juxtaposition between experienced
reality—‘‘bright and terrible desert’’—and fantasized existence —
‘‘rich Californian valleys’’—for Steinbeck, is the nature of ideology.
The Joads live by the logic that, if it is this bad here, it must be
better somewhere else: ‘‘The loss of home became one loss, and the
golden time in the West was one dream’’ (193). In this way, Route
66 takes on the role of an illusionary horizon directing people to
someplace better than here: ‘‘People in flight along 66. And the
concrete road shone like a mirror under the sun, and in the distance
the heat made it seem that there were pools of water in the road’’
(122). The road takes on a kind of agency here; its travellers impart
a will to the road through their struggles and desires. But this is an
illusion. They map their ideologies onto the task of travelling the
road. The mirages of water are a simple trick of the eye; for the
freedom they seek is a lie told by Californian capitalists looking to
take advantage of their need.
Alongside a critique of frontier ideology, Grapes imagines alienation
through a figurative connection between men and machines. The
highway takes its toll on the Joads and on their personified vehicles
in a way that binds them to their machines.
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´tudes ame
´ricaines 41 (2011)
Listen to the motor. Listen to the wheels. Listen with your ears
and with your hands on the steering wheel; listen with the palm
of your hand on the gear-shift lever; listen with your feet on the
floor boards. Listen to the pounding old jalopy with all your
senses; for a change of tone, a variation of rhythm. (119)
The connection of the Joads to their car is forged over their journey.
The body functions as the faculties of the automobile. Car and man
work together: car to enhance man’s mobility, man to care for car.
This connection starts before they leave the farm: ‘‘When the motor
of a tractor stops, it is as dead as the ore it came from. The heat
goes out of it like the living heat that leaves a corpse’’ (115). Here
the machine is personified in grisly detail. The imagery speaks to
the Okies’ loss of livelihood that necessitates their journey.
Steinbeck and Seltzer: The manufacturing of Springsteen
Steinbeck covers the changing nature of capitalism in the Midwest
from small family farms to large corporate outfits. The tractor
might be dead, but the automobile is alive. Steinbeck writes, ‘‘The
family met at the most important place, near the truck. The house
was dead, and the fields were dead; but this truck was the active
thing, the living principle’’ (99). In Bodies and Machines, Seltzer
theorizes the connection between man and machine; he traces
how cultural forms—road narratives—‘‘couple the body and the
machine’’ (4). He details the connection of the oppositional relation-
ship between nature and machinery, categorizing them as ‘‘modes
of production and means of production’’ (3), conjecturing that there
are three distinct, though not entirely compatible, ways of reading
the body as machine: that ‘‘machines replace bodies,’’ ‘‘that persons
are already machines,’’ and ‘‘that technologies make bodies and
persons’’ (12; original emphases). For Seltzer, what is of importance
is not the body’s subversion by the machine but the interrelation
and correlation of both (13). Steinbeck writes this correlation, inte-
grating man and machine. He describes, ‘‘[c]ars limping along 66
like wounded things, panting and struggling. Too hot, loose con-
nections, loose bearings, rattling bodies’’ (122). Car and man are
tied together in the struggle for survival during the exodus along
the road under capitalism’s new form.
The automobile figuratively represents the people in the hardship
they face on their journey and in the loss of their homes. The cars
are a seminal part of this equation; for, without them, there would
230
Canadian Review of American Studies 41 (2011)
be no promise of survival and no West to reach. Their offered
mobility is what allows the Joads to hope for a future of plenty.
Seltzer argues, ‘‘On the one side . . . we find the insistence on the
materiality or physicality of persons, representations, and actions
in naturalist discourse; on the other, the insistent abstraction of
persons, bodies, and motions to models, numbers, maps, charts,
and diagrammatic representations’’ (14; original emphases). The
interface between man and machine runs two ways: humans mech-
anize just as the car becomes personified. In a sense, they trade
durable qualities even as they combine to become one durable
entity. Steinbeck’s abstraction of the body becomes more apparent
over the course of the journey, a process captured in the otherwise
rather cliche
´phrase, ‘‘He had become the soul of the car’’ (123). The
Okies’ body–machine connection personifies the automobile and
attaches a similar urgency to the car and to the Joads’ journey. In
this contradiction, the body–machine connection forges a mecha-
nized durability.
In the use of an automobile, lending one’s sense to a machine and
extending one’s mobility are not the only factors uniting man and
machine. The lived experience of the road also works on this new
durability. Seltzer locates the body at the core of mobility as he
theorizes how railways put ‘‘stilled bodies in motion’’ (18). He
writes, ‘‘[W]hat these mobile technologies make possible, in differ-
ent forms, are the thrill and panic of agency at once extended and
suspended’’ (18). The ‘‘thrill and panic of agency’’ are easily trans-
posed to the automobile but quickly turn to apocalyptic vision
as mortality becomes the reality of flight: ‘‘The people in flight
from the terror behind—strange things happen to them, some
bitterly cruel and some so beautiful that the faith is refired forever’’
(Steinbeck 122). The experience of travel is just as important as the
physical, sensual connection of man to machine. The ‘‘thrill and
panic’’ affect driver and rider, making road travel an experience of
something far greater than oneself. The collective experience of
travelling along the road binds man to machine, forging a new
form of American durability.
5
With this new form comes a new re-
sponsibility, and many responsibilities not even considered here.
6
The durability of the American working class, here the Okies as
farm-hands, used to originate from a tie with the land. Now, as
their mode of production becomes reliant on certain technologies,
the link of durability is between man and machine —the Fordist
subject, in Steinbeck, is (still)born outside of the factory.
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´tudes ame
´ricaines 41 (2011)
Steinbeck separates man from machine at the close of the novel,
ending on a chilling note when Rose of Sharon’s baby is still-born,
signalling the ultimate failure of the Joads’ movement forwards.
Without procreation, they have no hope for the future. However,
Rose, like Tom, makes the decision to help people regardless of
their connection to her life:
For a minute Rose of Sharon sat still in the whispering barn. Then
she hoisted her tired body up and drew the comfort about her.
She moved slowly to the corner and stood looking down at the
wasted face, in the wide, frightened eyes. Rose of Sharon loosened
one side of the blanket and bared her breast. ‘‘You got to,’’ she
said. ‘‘There.’’ She squirmed closer and pulled his head close.
‘‘There!’’ she said. ‘‘There.’’ Her hand moved behind his head and
supported it. Her fingers moved gently in his hair. She looked
up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled
mysteriously. (455)
This passage is replete with religious imagery: Rose is imagined as
the Virgin Mother Mary; in a barn, she nurses and nurtures a dying
man. Hers is a symbolic act; there is no doubt the man will die. In
this way, Rose of Sharon becomes the embodiment of durability.
Here, the imagery shifts from that of the machine to that of the
pastoral. Woman, as fertile, is disconnected from the automobile.
The only technology in the passage is the personified ‘‘whispering
barn.’’ Steinbeck builds on this mysterious image by confusing the
reader with Rose of Sharon’s contradictory fertility. Rose has a still-
birth in the barn and nurses a dying man she finds there with
mother’s milk, indexing her ability and inability to create and
sustain life and the failure of the Joads to transition from a barely
mechanized mode of production to a fully mechanized one. This
mixed closing leaves the future as uncertain for the Joads as it is
for the Okies.
Steinbeck’s subjects of the road are able to travel farther and faster
than Whitman’s speaker, in his meandering way, but they are
confined in a way Whitman’s speaker is not. Seltzer’s theorizing
shows us that Steinbeck’s characters are tied to their vehicles in a
connection that is not entirely positive: ‘‘Eyes watched the tires,
ears listened to the clattering motors, and minds struggled with
oil, gasoline, with the thinning rubber between air and road’’ (196).
The mobility granted by the automobile also delivers stress, and
with greater freedom and mobility comes increased constraint—
232
Canadian Review of American Studies 41 (2011)
the same paradox faces Springsteen’s characters. Steinbeck’s road
leads to Springsteen’s, but where Steinbeck dismantles his charac-
ters one piece at a time, Springsteen allows them to self-destruct,
revealing the contradictions structuring durability and persistence.
Springsteen’s consumption and strange durability
By engaging the road—as an idea—through any of its various
forms, we become a subject of it. By watching John Ford’s The
Grapes of Wrath, reading ‘‘Song of the Open Road,’’ or listening to
‘‘Born to Run,’’ we experience historically indexed versions of the
road. Some versions are alienating; others are entirely enjoyable.
Whether pleasant or terrifying, our position, as audience, on the
road is an ideological representation of a false reality. Superficially,
the road serves as a guide or as an example of the power of choice
and free will, though it simultaneously serves as a symbol of deter-
minism. The road is a structure that only leads in certain directions.
Though it seems to offer multiple destinations and futures, the
destinies that the road enables are remarkably similar to the ones
that these characters are trying to escape in the first place.
The shift in American story-telling from the frontier as a central
image to the road inscribes a radical ideological limit on American
subjects. Springsteen’s writing depicts the physical trace left on his
characters by the road’s confining nature. The stress and drama
of living in the figurative ‘‘Badlands’’ (1978) is played out on the
bodies of his characters. The speaker in ‘‘Badlands’’ has a ‘‘head on
collision / smashin’ in [his] guts man.’’ Cars now crash inside of the
speaker; Springsteen’s characters internalize the connections among
bodies, machines, freedom, and confinement. The metaphor itself is
trapped within the speaker’s gut, just as the speaker is ‘‘caught in a
crossfire / that [he] doesn’t understand.’’ Springsteen’s lyrics raise
questions about agency and the ability of listeners to conduct their
lives deliberately in the rapidly changing conditions of modernity,
when they can have little understanding of the consequences
of their actions. The haze of uncertainty and lack of knowledge
emerge as new elements of the road in this musical iteration.
In order to grasp the shift in the use of the road as metaphor from
key to the universe to death-trap, it is productive to return to
Springsteen’s records of the early 1970s. 1975’s seminal Born to
Run features characters and themes that play into the old road
as pathway to freedom. In ‘‘Thunder Road,’’ Springsteen further
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´tudes ame
´ricaines 41 (2011)
develops ideas about freedom first seen in 1973’s ‘‘Growin’ Up.’’ He
takes us from a glimpse of freedom (‘‘And I swear I found the key
to the universe in the engine of an old parked car’’; ‘‘Growin’ Up’’)
to the path of freedom (‘‘It’s a town full of losers / And I’m pulling
out of here to win’’; ’’Thunder Road’’). This idea of ‘‘pulling out’’ is
a reiteration of the promise of America. This is an ideological sense
of freedom, the same one that did not hold true for the Joads or for
many Oklahoma families forced to migrate.
7
Springsteen plays
with this idea of mobility in his records.
Springsteen characterizes the American hometown in ‘‘Thunder
Road’’ as ‘‘a town full of losers.’’ His character leaves by choice,
bound for a Promised Land, unlike the Joads, who leave by force.
In each situation, flight is equally important, though the need to
break free from the town in ‘‘Thunder Road’’ takes the form of
melodrama. The opening lyrics are not a song, they are a screen-
play:
The screen door slams
Mary’s dress waves
Like a vision she dances across the porch
As the radio plays
Roy Orbison singing for the lonely.
This visual is recognizable and poignant. The speaker comments,
‘‘Hey that’s me and I want you only,’’ as if in anticipation of an
audience reaction or to engage the listener. This whimsical style,
continued in the musical coda, works like a dramatic moment in
film. The protagonists pull free of the trap of the small town and
head off into the sunset. But there are hidden risks to busting free:
‘‘And the ghosts of the eyes of all those boys you sent away / They
haunt this dusty beach road in the skeleton frames of burned out
Chevrolets.’’ Unlike Whitman’s ‘‘relationality of strangers,’’ here
Springsteen’s road is populated by the live devils and the ghosts
you know. The song’s protagonists begin by dreaming of busting
free of town, something Tom Joad’s brother, Al, also desires, but
they fail. They do not get the girl, and they do not secure their
freedom.
Springsteen builds on the motif of the road from the concept of
the American frontier and the desire to break into new territory.
For Springsteen, the road is a mixed metaphor. As articulated
234
Canadian Review of American Studies 41 (2011)
above, the road is a structure designed to be followed. In Springs-
teen, we find Christian images of salvation replaced with concrete
manifestations:
Well the night’s busting open
These two lanes will take us anywhere
We got one last chance to make it real
To trade in these wings on some wheels
Climb in back
Heaven’s waiting on down the tracks.
There is a falsity in his second line: those ‘‘two lanes’’ are fixed in
place and can only lead where they have been laid. The desire to
‘‘make it real’’ is where we turn away from heavenly promises and
find a concrete solution: the automobile. We can ‘‘trade in these
wings on some wheels,’’ but this sentiment reverses ‘‘heaven’s
waiting on down the tracks.’’ This line of thought is a road in
itself and leads to a crucial realization: the figurative road simply
replaces an early myth of freedom and the Promised Land with
one that is just as imagined and, ultimately, just as false. The
figures central to the content are as trapped as the listener is
formally by the hooks and melodies of the pop song. But Springs-
teen alters the content, shifting it creatively with relation to the
form.
Springsteen explores total disillusionment in Darkness on the Edge
of Town. His characters have busted out frontier-bound only to
find that they are now trapped. This is negatively characterized by
Jim Cullen in his book Born in the USA: Bruce Springsteen and the
American Tradition as the realization of a white, lower-class kid
who discovers that the world is not his oyster. The characters of
Darkness on the Edge of Town have been stranded as a result of their
collective beliefs. They have traded in their angelic wings for
wheels, and now the only mobility they are afforded is to drive
aimlessly, searching for salvation in the middle of bad-lands and
at the end of the deceitful road. The road, as durable metaphor,
has survived, but its meaning has changed. Its new, strange dura-
bility needs to be parsed.
‘‘Something in the Night’’: Springsteen’s man-machine
complex
Like ‘‘Darkness on the Edge of Town,’’ ‘‘Something in the Night’’
(1978) subverts everything that Born to Run fights for on the level
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of content and form. The urgency of the musical introduction is
subverted by Springsteen’s moaning, the sparse lead guitar, and
the slow build of the drum roll. ‘‘Something in the Night’’ is essen-
tially a song about emptiness; a man drives around aimlessly and,
instead of finding comfort, finds misery. Trapped by his dream of
freedom, he searches out the myth of the road: ‘‘Turn the radio
up loud so I don’t have to think.’’ The car is no longer a vehicle
of freedom or romanticism: ‘‘I take her to the floor looking for
a moment when the world seems right.’’ Driving the strip leads
nowhere and is evidence of the fall of automobile as salvation. The
ideological function of the road is dramatically reconfigured and
now it serves as self-confining, banal escapism. These characters
can beg for pity, but they are lost, aimlessly searching for truths on
the same road all across America, a place where, the Joads showed
us, truth can no longer be found.
Springsteen’s writing has changed from Born to Run. There is a new
attitude towards the road, but there is also a new, active violence in
the lyrics, a violence that seems to draw on the connection between
body and machine proposed by Seltzer. The imagery that is used in
‘‘Something in the Night’’ (‘‘And I tear into the guts of something
in the night’’) brutally cuts away the old idealistic dream of free-
dom and echoes ‘‘Badlands’’ (‘‘Got a head-on collision, / Smashin’
in my guts, man’’). The play of pain through the body is a sign
that things are not right in these characters’ lives. As we become
familiar with the speaker’s feeling of loss and lack of belonging, we
become aware that the others in the narrative are similarly affected:
You can ride this road ‘till dawn,
without another human being in sight,
Just kids wasted on
something in the night. (‘‘Something in the Night’’)
This verse recalls ‘‘Thunder Road’’:
And in the lonely cool before dawn
You hear their engines roaring on
But when you get to the porch they’re gone.
Even the absent presence of the ‘‘boys she sent away’’ in ‘‘Thunder
Road’’ is more gratifying than the ‘‘wasted [kids]’’ in ‘‘Something in
the Night.’’ Individualism and the road do not lead to salvation.
We see this played out on the bodies of Springsteen’s characters.
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The speaker cannot escape this self-replicating mess as ‘‘Something
in the Night’’ works back over itself. In the end, the feeling of
emptiness is turned on the narrator. This version of the road is
marked by a greater individualism, in contrast to the community
gestured to by Whitman and Steinbeck.
‘‘Something in the Night’’ rejects similar scenes from Born to Run,
thereby completely subverting the 1975 album’s hope and romanti-
cism, replacing it with violence and destruction:
But they caught us at the state line,
And burned our cars in one last fight,
And left us running burned and blind,
Chasing something in the night.
The music of the outro drowns out Springsteen’s wailing vocals,
and the speaker is left devoid of emotion. His false individualistic
connection to the road and his car has physically and emotionally
drained him and left him ‘‘running burned and blind, chasing
something in the night.’’ The absolute refusal to live together in
Darkness on the Edge of Town replaces the romantic escapism of
Born to Run. A harsh, beat-down truth rises out of this violence:
the characters of Darkness on the Edge of Town do not need to suffer
for ideals because they suffer enough as it is. Importantly, as
Springsteen learns from Steinbeck, these characters suffer because
they are alone.
Violence and The Ghost of Tom Joad
Steinbeck and Springsteen both note that violence is a threat to
durability: it breaks the relationship of freedom and confinement.
8
In The Grapes of Wrath, violence is negative and must be avoided to
yield positive results. The Joads are stopped on their way to the
government camp, where Ma Joad cautions Tom to not lose his
cool and a violent encounter is avoided (279 –80). At the dance, the
rumour that the Californians will try to start a riot is heeded and
again a violent situation is avoided (343 –5). In neither case is
violence is a means of escape, and people work together in order
to overcome obstacles. This community embraces a sustainable
durability.
Before the novel begins, Tom’s violent reaction to having a knife
stuck in his side lands him in jail (25). The violence at one of the
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roadside camps causes a woman to be shot and Casy to depart
from the Joads’ company. Finally, Tom’s revenge of Casy’s murder
leads to the final destruction of the Joad family and the conclusion
of the narrative, yielding Tom’s concluding speech:
Then I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be ever’where —wherever
you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be
there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. If Casy
knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad
an’—I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they
know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise
an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there . . . (419)
Tom describes a powerful durability; he describes hope for the
future and symbolically offers himself to the people, the collective
‘‘we.’’ Tom’s presence seems to be predicated on his being a pro-
tector and a provider for the people. His idea of unity prevails
against violence.
Springsteen appropriates this narrative for The Ghost of Tom Joad
(1995), embracing Steinbeck’s and Ford’s vision of community
over the individual. Gavin Cologne-Brookes discusses this transi-
tion in Springsteen’s writing, arguing that Springsteen takes a posi-
tion by tying his writing to the historical moment and also that,
within this historical position, Springsteen represents his characters
in relation to each other and their environment. Here, Springsteen
echoes Steinbeck in ‘‘arguing for collective responsibility rather
than individual isolation’’ (Cologne-Brookes 36). For Cologne-
Brookes, and rightly so, this turn marks Springsteen’s maturation
‘‘away from individual desire to escape, to an awareness not only
of his immediate environment—something evident in previous
albums—but also that this story is part of American history and
culture’’ (37). He points to songs like ‘‘Sinaloa Cowboys’’ and ‘‘The
Line’’ as songs about ‘‘friendship and community’’ (38). For us,
‘‘The Ghost of Tom Joad,’’ specifically, picks up on the narratives
of Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, but where Darkness
on the Edge of Town struggles with the road, The Ghost of Tom Joad is
overcome by it.
Springsteen shares Steinbeck’s politics in his representation of
Tom’s monologue. Springsteen’s use of the passage in the title track
of The Ghost of Tom Joad is as striking as the original:
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Now Tom said ‘‘Mom, wherever there’s a cop beatin’ a guy
Wherever a hungry newborn baby cries
Where there’s a fight ’gainst the blood and hatred in the air
Look for me Mom I’ll be there
Wherever there’s somebody fightin’ for a place to stand
Or decent job or a helpin’ hand
Wherever somebody’s strugglin’ to be free
Look in their eyes Mom you’ll see me.’’
Springsteen rewrites Steinbeck’s passage but does not lose its
passionate intensity, ethical decisiveness, or quiet reassurance. The
intimacy of Tom’s address is, perhaps, the most important aspect
of it. Tom’s affective appeal and political message should not be
separated. It is only by accepting the affect of pain as a signal of
the economic plight of the poor and acting upon that signal that
we can truly legitimize the cultural practice of community and
utilize Tom’s words beyond the affirming sense of purpose they
provide. Tom becomes a symbol of American unity stronger than
any flag or any national anthem. Here, one man becomes represen-
tative of a common sentiment felt by all; Tom is an embodiment of
the individual as a microcosm of the collective. He claims the glory
of knowing the elated and terrifying scenes he describes for himself
and for the people. Tom’s, Springsteen’s, and Steinbeck’s message
is a simple one: equality over greed, unity over singularity, and co-
operation over violence.
Springsteen’s rap about violence, homelessness, and need in ‘‘The
Ghost of Tom Joad’’ shows where his characters from Darkness on
the Edge of Town ended up:
Men walkin’ ‘long the railroad tracks
Goin’ someplace there’s no goin’ back
Highway patrol choppers comin’ up over the ridge
Hot soup on a campfire under the bridge
Shelter line stretchin’ round the corner
Welcome to the new world order
Families sleepin’ in their cars in the southwest
No home no job no peace no rest.
These opening lines describe a scene where, like The Grapes of
Wrath, there is a stark stratification of class that plays itself out
through mobility, freedom, and materiality. The harsh contrast
between the stagnant shelter line and the ultimate mobility of the
highway-patrol choppers exposes a deep inequality. Cars, here,
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become homes instead of a means to gain a living or find a more
suitable place to live, let alone have the freedom to chase dreams
down the highway at 90 miles per hour. The implied, and later
explicit violence by police in the highway chopper is a symptom
of a much larger problem. Lack of community is only part of the
problem in Springsteen’s terrifying verse.
Springsteen has no illusions about the way to the Promised Land. It
is, ironically, the version of the road from ‘‘The Ghost of Tom Joad’’
that leads there:
Waitin’ for when the last shall be first and the first shall be last
In a cardboard box ‘neath the underpass
Got a one-way ticket to the Promised Land
You got a hole in your belly and gun in your hand.
The road will be the death of the characters in this song. The under-
pass, an image pointing to the American highway system —of
potential use for travel and flight—displays another contradiction.
The road as a structure is durable, as a metaphor is corrupted, and
as a means to better one’s station is inaccessible.
9
By the concluding chorus of ‘‘The Ghost of Tom Joad,’’ Springsteen
has cycled through ‘‘[s]earchin’ . . .’’ and ‘‘[w]aitin’ . . .’’ until finally
the speaker is ‘‘[w]ith the ghost of ol’ Tom Joad.’’ Springsteen
signals the places these left-over characters will occupy by inviting
and alluding to the apparition of Tom Joad. These fragments of
characters will become, like Whitman’s trace of the other along the
road, a forgotten memory. Springsteen’s imagery brutally cuts
away the old idealism—the dream of freedom. The liminal space
between freedom and confinement creates a disappointing but
productive non-closure. It is disappointing because the typified
characters of The Ghost of Tom Joad become nothing more than a
physical trace—durable to a terrifying end. They are left unfulfilled
by the dream of freedom. Yet, the dream’s own strange durability is
the image of the people left running scared, the remnants of ‘‘the
road,’’ with no place to go.
The revolution against violence is furthered by the embrace of
community. Steinbeck’s insistence, throughout the novel, that by
banding together the people will be stronger is evidenced by the
growing unity of collectives along the road. ‘‘In the evening a
strange thing happened: the twenty families became one family,
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the children were the children of all’’ (193). The unity of the way-
farers, partially a response to the arduous journey and partially
human nature, is centred around the figure of the troubadour. ‘‘A
guitar unwrapped from a blanket and tuned —and the songs,
which were all of the people, were sung in the nights. Men sang
the words, and women hummed the tunes’’ (194). Steinbeck reveals
unity as the saving grace of the migration. These families survive
the journey because they work in unison. Collective action is an
answer to the myth of the road and to the problem of durability.
The confidence of Whitman’s speaker in embracing the ‘‘long
brown path’’ shows us that freedom can be found through collec-
tive experience. The positive action, despite the difficulties faced
by Steinbeck’s characters, is enabling for the working class. These
two articulations of durability and the road, along with the ques-
tions that Springsteen poses through his multiple, fractured arti-
culations of the road, lead to a simple conclusion: the strongest
expression of humanity, in these road narratives, is an expression
of community:
If you who own the things people must have could understand
this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate the causes
from the results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson,
Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But you
cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into
‘‘I,’’ and cuts you off forever from the ‘‘we.’’ (Steinbeck 152)
Notes
1 This collection was a long time coming, and I am ever so pleased to be
a part of it. Thank you to the Canadian Association for American
Studies (CAAS), who accepted the conference paper on which the
present article is based and to the Canadian Review of American Studies
for the opportunity to publish it. I would like to thank Michael Epp for
his encouragement of me and this project and for putting this special
issue together. Our conversations have proved ever helpful in shaping
the arguments and analysis you find here. I would also like to express
thanks for the tireless attention of Katelynn Schoop and Alexandra
Carruthers. You have both helped me to clarify, clarify, clarify. I
appreciate the support and could not have asked for better friends.
Thank you.
2 According to Warner in Publics and Counterpublics (2005), ‘‘The most
private, inward, intimate act of reading can be converted by the
category of the public into a form of stranger relationality’’ (84).
Relationality is contingent on our not knowing one another and on our
experience of the text, which through multiple discreet acts of reading is
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public forming. Warner gestures to the Marxist concept that reality
structures consciousness. Here, the act of reading folds back into the
individual and opens out through and into strangers, who now share
the experience of an object, whether that object is Whitman’s poetry or
Springsteen’s music.
3 Replicated in these American tales are narratives of the frontier and the
highway. The frontier is built upon American creation myths about
the single man—rugged against a sprawling landscape—alone in the
wild. This version of the frontier is most often associated with Wild
Bill’s Circus, Louis l’Amour serials, and later, John Wayne flicks. In
Steinbeck’s Grapes, the frontier myth is closely tied to myths of the
Promised Land, where the journey from the known, Oklahoma, leads
to the unknown Promised Land, California.
4 Turner’s ‘‘American character’’ is based on his version of a supposedly
American, rugged durability.
5 For a more in-depth discussion of ‘‘affect,’’ see Hardt and Negri, who
offer this definition: ‘‘[U]nlike emotions, which are mental phenomena,
affects refer equally to body and mind. In fact, affects, such as joy and
sadness, reveal the present state of life in the entire organism, express-
ing a certain state of the body along with a certain mode of thinking’’
(108). And, see Ann Cvetkovich’s An Archive of Feelings, where she
theorizes affective archives and trauma.
6 The ecological impact of road travel is never a concern here; only the
wear on man and machine are visible.
7 Writing around the American dream is a difficult endeavour. It is too
large to address fully, as it is due to be addressed, in the space of this
article. But I do recognize the increasing importance of writing the
American dream into this project in the future.
8 For example, notice in Springsteen’s ‘‘Born in the USA,’’ that violence
to American durability is the one thing the speaker cannot talk about;
‘‘Killing the Yellow Man’’ is (ironically) acceptable, but the loss of his
brother causes the speaker to become mute.
9 One important thing left out from this discussion of American dura-
bility and the metaphor of the road is its material, economic dimen-
sion, namely that substance that enables modern roadways and cars
and so much else in the first place: oil. For a precise account of ‘oil
capitalism’ from a cultural studies perspective, see Szeman.
Works cited
Cologne-Brookes, Gavin. ‘‘The Ghost of Tom Joad: Steinbeck’s Legacy
in the Songs of Bruce Springsteen. ‘‘Beyond Boundaries: Rereading John
Steinbeck.34–46. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2002.
Cullen, Jim. Born in the USA: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition.
Wesleyan UP, 2005.
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Canadian Review of American Studies 41 (2011)
Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian
Public Cultures. Durham: Duke UP, 2003.
The Grapes of Wrath. Dir. John Ford. Perf. Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, John
Carradine. Twentieth Century Fox, 1940.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude. New York: Penguin, 2004.
Jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1971.
Seltzer, Mark. Bodies and Machines. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Springsteen, Bruce. ‘‘Badlands.’’ Darkness.
—— . Born to Run. Columbia, 1975.
—— .Born in the USA. Columbia, 1984.
—— . ‘‘Born in the USA.’’ Born in the USA.
—— .Darkness on the Edge of Town. Columbia, 1978.
—— .The Ghost of Tom Joad. Columbia, 1995.
—— . ‘‘The Ghost of Tom Joad.’’ Ghost.
—— . ‘‘Killing the Yellow Man.’’ Born in the USA.
—— . ‘‘Growin’ Up.’’ Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ. Columbia, 1973.
—— . ‘‘Something in the Night.’’ Darkness.
—— . ‘‘Thunder Road.’’ Born to Run.
Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Penguin, 2006.
Szeman, Imre. ‘‘System Failure: Oil, Futurity and the Anticipation of
Disaster.’’ South Atlantic Quarterly 106.4 (2007): 805–23.
Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Significance of the Frontier in American
History. New York: Penguin, 2008.
Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone, 2005.
Whitman, Walt. ‘‘Song of the Open Road.’’ Leaves of Grass. New York:
Bantam, 1983.
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