Reading the Boss: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Works of Bruce Springsteen (review)

Call it what you will—hyperbolic, hagiographic, hilarious—but Roxanne Harde and Irwin Streight, editors of Reading the Boss, liken their subject to a modern-day Shakespeare. Their introduction, "The Bard of Asbury Park," adumbrates some of the literary traits the two share; beyond a 2009 cover photo from Rolling Stone and its resemblance to the famous Chandos portrait of the Bard, there's Springsteen's abiding interest in loco-descriptive histories, or stories involving a particular place (i.e. Nebraska, Thunder Road, E Street), class struggle, song cycles and the fact that both the Boss and the Bard "offer a profound insight into the hungry human heart—and Springsteen, arguably, with more breadth and depth than any other current American singer-songwriter" (6).

Filling a void in theoretical readings of the more than 260 songs that comprise Springsteen's catalogue, the first section attends to his influences, from the obvious (Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan) to the surprising (Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy). The first of four, Section 1: "Reading Influence," provides not just the etymology of the musician's Dutch name—it means, literally, "springstone" or a stone from which a spring runs—but the novelists whose works Springsteen's songs flow beside and intersect: first, Walker Percy (1916-1990), the Southern writer who shares his attention to the disenfranchised in American culture, and second, O'Connor, another Southerner interested in violence and spiritual alienation. Two essays, by June Skinner Sawyers (editor of 2004's Racing in the Street: The Bruce Springsteen Reader) and Michael Kobre, align Percy's and Springsteen's appreciation of history, heritage, and the lonesome seekers (ex-cons, bank robbers, and Mexican migrants) who populate their works. Springsteen himself acknowledged his debt to Flannery O'Connor in an interview with Rolling Stone in 1984, and according to Irwin Streight, they share, as storytellers, a sensitivity toward the "meanness in this world" as O'Connor herself termed it, particularly meanness as it conflicts with a Catholic worldview (58). Streight reads two of the songwriter's solo albums—Nebraska (1982) and the Steinbeck-inspired The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995)—as "song narratives" in which he lets "his violence-driven characters speak for themselves, his own voice, as he intends, disappearing into their voices in a series of what are mostly musical dramatic monologues" (64).

The pair of essays forming the book's second section, "Reading Place," deepens the collection's awareness of landscape in Springsteen's songs as both real and metaphoric. Thus to be a "nowhere man" represents a terrifying state of displacement. But the collection really deepens its engagement with Springsteen, in Section 3: "Reading Gender," with "'Who's That Girl?': Nostalgia, Gender, and Springsteen," and a consideration of nostalgia, that ardent clinging to one's "glory days." This essay, by Kenneth Womack, is one of the most sophisticated, theoretically speaking, in the collection. By linking music and psychology, Womack contends that, for the male narrators of Springsteen's love songs, women function especially as conduits to past emotional states: "She's Candy, Rosalita, and Terry. She's Bobby Jean. Although she comes in many guises, she's the female face at the heart of the sociocultural nostalgia that structures Springsteen's sense of pastness throughout his work" (121). Womack evokes Levinasian alterity, but he could have pushed the point further. He comes close when he identifies nostalgia as an encounter with the otherness of the past, an alterity that must be reshaped in accordance with the present, but he stops short of exposing the masculine, heterosexual ego as another fiction. (De Beauvoir or Butler would have bolstered here.) What happens to the heteronormative machismo we associate with Springsteen's iconicity—what Cadó and Abbruzzese call Springsteen's "tough image and burly appearance"—once the "dream woman" of his imaginary past becomes nothing more than a narcissistic projection (115)?

"Growin' Up to Be a Nothing Man: Masculinity, Community, and the Outsider in Bruce...