A man that looks at himself in a glass and finds

It is the man in the glass that lives, not he.

He is the image, the second, the unreal,

The abstraction.

—WALLACE STEVENS, “AMERICANA”

 

I check my look in the mirror

I wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face.

—“DANCING IN THE DARK”

 

 

6

 

MULTIPLE SELVES

 

 

Springsteen’s career has always been about fulfilling “possibilities” in the face of “realities.” His later career is also about making the most of new realities, including possibilities fulfilled. Success and fame changed the music irreversibly, but with accompanying artistic compensations. One of the remarkable things about his creation of character as his career has progressed has been his willingness to write from female as well as male viewpoints and diverse perspectives in terms of age, ethnicity, and experience. Such attempts may not always convince, but they at least champion human plurality and show an openness to creative risk. We project multiple selves even while, as Tolstoy reminds us, it’s easy to assume that the inner lives of other people are less complex than our own.1 It’s a rare and sensitive person who can consistently empathize with other people and embrace multiplicity with verve. But to write convincingly from other mind-sets takes time and dedication. Springsteen barely attempts this early in his career. Decades later, it appears to be second nature. “I chose fiction,” writes Australian novelist Patrick White, “as a means of introducing to a disbelieving audience the cast of contradictory characters of which I am composed.”2 Springsteen has presented his cast of selves by writing songs. How he’s done so reveals another way in which his work has matured.

To step outside one’s own perspective and explore wider contexts and competing viewpoints is a political act. The political is nothing without the personal. Springsteen’s path into engagement was perhaps inevitable. Refusing to accept the troubled lives of those whom, in economic terms, he’d left behind, he turned back to observe. His observations led to reflection, wider reading, wider awareness, and ultimately to knowledge of context. As he became more politically savvy, his art deepened and nuanced. His career, however, contains a distinct break. It takes place around the time of Born in the U.S.A., the period when many of his earlier fans, not least his home-state following, felt they’d lost him to the wider public. Once you’re a celebrity on that scale, you can’t undo the fact, though you can defy expectations. Springsteen began to rethink his purpose and, in time, used his writing in the service of this vision of multiplicity, with all its personal and political connotations. While neither abrupt nor unanticipated, Born in the U.S.A. both brings Springsteen to a wider audience and, with 1984 barely buried, sees him try to step down from that pedestal.3 It’s Springsteen’s “Borges and I” moment. When he signed with Columbia Records, Adele asked her son what he’d changed his name to.4 He didn’t change it, but nor did it remain the same. By 1984 Bruce Springsteen had become “Bruce Springsteen.” In the public eye, he was a postmodernist rock star with no actual heartbeat or voiding of the bowels: a cartoonish figure, epitomized by the lip-synced “Dancing in the Dark” video, the Action Man pose on the album’s inside cover, and—for an example of mass-media by-products—the sepia-tinted, garish cover of the bio-catalogue Bruce Springsteen: Blinded by the Light (1985), where our hero, in superimposed, photo-brushed Technicolor, gazes askance a tequila sunglow and resembles a 1950s B-movie pirate matinee idol.5 Viewing this cuckoo self, destined to live on in multimedia images and sounds beyond the mortal being, how easily the man might have reflected something similar to Borges’s sentiments. The relationship between the public and private self is tangential. The artist, being mortal, must accede his art to the public realm. Therefore what matters, to reprise the title of Marge Piercy’s poem, is “to be of use.”

Rethinking was a necessity if Springsteen was to retain artistic integrity rather than be consumed by the public image he had colluded in creating. If the “super-duper stardom” (Jim Farber’s term) had “trivialized” him (Springsteen’s word), he knew he’d desired this to happen.6 He wrote the pop songs, agreed to the album cover, wore the bandana, and bulked up his muscles. “We all have multiple selves,” he half-jokes on the VH1 Storytellers DVD, before telling a story about fans accosting him outside a strip club. He was merely the singer’s alter ego, he explained to them. “Bruce does not even know I am missing. He is at home right now doing good deeds” (TAD 303). Fame, one would think, makes the multiplicity of selves we each inhabit and project all the more obvious. As Borges notes, there’s the physical, mortal being, and there’s the artistic persona, and it’s easy to confuse the two. “I get tired of being Elvis Presley” evidently became a refrain of the King. In his posthumously published The Life and Death of émile Ajar, French author Romain Gary, who had secretly used the pseudonym “émile Ajar,” explained that he’d grown weary of being “the famous Romain Gary,” and quoted Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz: “there comes a day when a writer is held prisoner by ‘la gueule qu’on lui a fait’ (‘the mug which the critics have given him’)—an appearance which has nothing to do with his work or himself.”7 Eduardo Galeano writes of how Argentina’s greatest soccer player, Diego Maradona, felt “the burden of being Maradona” and became “overwhelmed by the weight of his own personality.” Galeano uses Maradona’s actual spinal problems to make of his body a metaphor. “Maradona carried a burden named Maradona that bent his back out of shape.” That sense of selves, complicated further by celebrity, and by performance (“I used to do a lot of jumping,” Springsteen evidently once told a doctor), is something the singer has commented on periodically and not least in terms of the Born in the U.S.A. era.8

One of the most poignant stories in Born to Run, in this regard, is the tale of how Springsteen and Steve Van Zandt got thrown out of Disneyland for wearing bandanas. They’d planned this visit to the Magic Kingdom with mounting excitement. How, asks Springsteen of Van Zandt, does he feel about having being “thrown out of ‘the happiest place on earth’”? Is it that they “do not deserve that degree of happiness” (BTR 329)? Of course, stardom on the scale of 1984–85 might look from the outside like precisely that place. But it didn’t feel like that. “I had no way of knowing if this was going to be my life, my whole life,” he writes. “Everywhere I’d go, day after day, country after country, bed after bed, in a Groundhog Day of stultifying, inane attention, brought on by my own sacred ambitions crossed by the normal human longing for life and love.” He smashes a Takamine guitar against a wall in Gothenburg, plays the first song he learned, “Twist and Shout,” with such fury, as he tells it, that the frenzied response cracks “the concrete foundation” of the Ullevi stadium (BTR 336–37). Somehow, this is not happiness. Look in the mirror and what do you see? The mirror has cracked and blackened. The reflection is unrecognizable.

In other words, it seems likely that Springsteen shared with William James the experience of coming to terms with the complicated nature of what we call “self.” James’s revelation, in John J. McDermott’s words, about “the diaphanous and utterly fragile character of the classically alleged, rock-bottom personal self” occurred in his twenties, and shaped his subsequent thought. He experienced a “vastation” (to use “mystic-philosopher” Emanuel Swedenborg’s term for “the projecting of an inner self outward”) in the late 1860s.9 Suffering from, in James’s words, “philosophic pessimism and general depression of spirits” about his prospects, he recalled an epileptic patient he’d seen in an asylum, “a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them.” In a low mood and confronted with this image, James pondered whether his sense of a coherent self and of superiority to this being were really illusions. “That shape I am, I felt, potentially,” he admits. Thereafter, writes McDermott, he came to “doubt the existence of the traditional ‘soul’” and opted “for a more free-flowing movement between the focus of one’s own self and the fringe that we visit.” Such visits to the “fringe” or, as Erin McKenna and Scott Pratt put it of Springsteen, to “the darkness at the edge,” revealed “radically different versions” of James’s sense of self. “For, it turns out,” McDermott states, “we are actually multiple selves.”10

“There is a crack in everything,” writes Leonard Cohen in “Anthem.” “That’s how the light gets in.” But, although intimations of it can be found earlier, only in the 1990s did Springsteen come to terms with this identity crisis and articulate his motivation for presenting multiple selves through his art. Even before the insight offered in the autobiography, one could second-guess from the music and interviews that the crisis came to a head in the 1980s before Springsteen literally “faced up” to and began to make use of the insight. On one hand, there’s the public image he came to be saddled with. Where James was at a low point because of his apparent lack of prospects, Springsteen had achieved all he once hoped for, but seems to have experienced it as his own kind of nadir. The heights of rock stardom took him to rock bottom. Fame on such a level seemed to entrap rather than free him. “I think every fan creates an image of you in his or her head,” he said in 1995, “that may not be totally accurate” (TAD 176). Fascination with celebrities, he told Walker Percy’s nephew, Will, in 1998, becomes “a problem if a certain part of your life as a writer—your ‘celebrity,’ or whatever you want to call it—can blur and obscure the story that you’re interested in telling” (TAD 228). On the other hand, there’s his recognition, akin to James’s, of the minimal distance between success and failure, between being able to assert an identity and being seen as social detritus. “I’ve had an enormous amount of luck and fortune and have worked hard,” he said, again in 1995, “but that other thing, I don’t know, it never feels that far away, and I think it’s as far away as the guy next to you” (TAD 186–87).

Of course, James and Springsteen belong to different eras and different personal circumstances. Had James been alive to review Born to Run, he’d no doubt have written much as John Lahr does, of himself as “a preppy, a person Bruce would have sneered at as a Rah-Rah—a clean-cut, college-bound kid full of an optimism born of abundance, who never threw a punch in his life.” Springsteen’s career has also coincided with the deindustrialization of many western countries, the United States included, and in the view of many commentators, notably Dale Maharidge, “the political failure” of our representatives “to stem this tide” or to steer the economy “in a direction that might serve the majority.” In Someplace like America, which revisits some of the victims of deindustrialized communities recorded in Journey to Nowhere, he writes, “a babbling man with missing teeth sat in a village of shacks in sight of the skyscrapers of Houston.” “Amid gibberish,” this man tells Maharidge and photographer Michael Wilson how he was once “a trucker who hauled steel in Youngstown.” Maharidge admits that if they’d met this man during the previous project “he would have been an example of the newly homeless.” But “now he was among the wasted old guard,” someone they “would have ignored back in 1983,” when they sought out only those “who were more sympathetic,” avoiding the old guard “in large part because of public enmity toward the homeless.” What Maharidge came to understand in the meantime was how little “separated this man from the workers of the Warren steel mill.” In a matter of a few years “the cackling man” had illustrated “the arc of descent a human being can travel.”11 This is what James meant by “that shape I am,” updated to an age of globalization and what Steve Fraser calls “auto-cannibalism,” during which the financial sector, under the guise of “rescue missions” that turned out to be “sophisticated forms of looting,” have laid waste to industrial heartlands. The resultant precariat of “free-floating working people,” in Fraser’s view, have been kept periodically contented through consumerism, or had been until (subsequent to the publication of his book, The Age of Acquiescence) they acquiesced no more.12 Offered scapegoats and simplistic slogans, in Britain they voted to abandon the European Union and “take back control,” and, in the States, to “make America great again.”

On one hand, there is considerable irony here for Springsteen. Many Trump supporters would have been Springsteen fans. In Fraser’s terms, his output, as part of popular culture, would at least superficially exemplify “salvation through repeated momentary sensations of personal well-being,” delivering something that “is inherently fleeting: otherwise it wouldn’t work commercially.” On the other hand, he’s had to deal with this before, notably in the Born in the U.S.A. era, and his work contains responses to it, not only in that “ironic anthem” itself, but in much of Tom Joad and in songs like “I Mow Your Lawn” on Wrecking Ball. The precariat have always been his people. Fraser refers to Melville’s “deeply angry, often inscrutable workingmen, burning with rage and stubborn impassivity,” people, of course, not unlike Doug Springsteen.13 In political terms, the recent embrace of populist politicians would seem very much to be versions of Bartleby the Scrivener’s stubborn phrase when asked to take a reasonable course of action: “I prefer not to.” For many Springsteen listeners, the point is that the results are not “inherently fleeting.” As Daniel Cavicchi shows, while Springsteen concerts, in one fan’s words, are “a sure pick-me-up,” for many “the artist has touched them where they live and they are better for this,” perhaps because, in the long run, “he is more like a folk singer than a pop star.” But many others might well have been the consumers Fraser refers to, finding momentary escapism from a deteriorating economic situation. Much of this, his songs suggest, was on Springsteen’s mind in the 1980s when, facing huge success while depicting terrible hardship, this crisis of self came to a head.14

To the extent that Springsteen was acutely aware that “lack of work creates a loss of self” (TAD 415), and given his perennial fear of “disappearing” (TAD 254), it seems fair to assume that his version of James’s revelation that potentially “that shape I am” arose from these two simultaneous recognitions: the awareness of the superficiality of the celebrity persona and of the fragility of the accompanying success. The character of “the classically alleged, rock-bottom personal self,” to reprise McDermott’s explanation in relation to James, came to seem “diaphanous and utterly fragile.” Springsteen became all the more aware that he could be that other person. The self he believed himself to be and the self he projected or that was projected onto him illustrated the precarious nature of identity. This would prove scary. He’d started out wanting to be like his heroes, whether the actors on the drive-in screen or the musicians on stage. Yet “to walk like the heroes we thought we had to be” was one thing, to find yourself being that supposed hero quite another. “You’re a bit of a figment of a lot of other people’s imaginations,” he said in 1992. “And that always takes some sorting out. But it’s even worse when you see yourself as a figment of your own imagination.” In youth, he continued, “I had this idea of playing out my life like it was some movie, writing the script and making all the pieces fit. And I really did that for a long time. But you can get enslaved by your own myth or your own image” (TAD 156). Like Julien in The Red and the Black, and most ambitious young people, he was “moved like a playwright by his own story.”15 As he put it with reference to Walker Percy’s essay, “The Man on the Train,” that’s fine on screen but problematic in reality. “Our mythic hero,” Gary Cooper, “looks like he’s walking over that abyss of anxiety, and he won’t fail. Whereas the moviegoer, the person watching the movie, is not capable of that. There’s no real abyss under Gary Cooper, but there is one under the guy watching the film!” (TAD 229).

James’s vastation, according to McDermott, marks a beginning of his pragmatist philosophy. In turn, Springsteen’s 1980s mega-fame brings a crisis that, once resolved, leads to his mature period from Tom Joad to the present. After his vastation, James thinks of the self as being not something deep and fundamental within us but something that we can adapt, experiment with, and above all present to ourselves and to the world through language and action. He believes we can attain ironic distance from the urge to invent narratives while at the same time recognizing the value and power of this self-conscious awareness of constructed selves. It’s on reading philosopher Charles Renouvier’s definition of free will, “the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts,” that James states that his “first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.” From there, he notes that “only when habits of order are formed can we advance to really interesting fields of action.” This allows him to build a basic tenet of pragmatist philosophy, which has to do with what McDermott calls “a pluralistic approach to inquiry” that’s “distinctly American in that it allows everyone to have his or her say.”16 Without forcing too close a link between this and Springsteen’s 1980s watershed, a general sense of one feels valid. “What happens is when you have a lot of success your complexity tends to be whittled down into a very simple presentation,” he’s said (TAD 313). To see oneself from the outside, in terms of the “borderline of caricatures” that he and the band came to be presented as, would seem to have had a fundamental effect on his approach to the notion of self (BTR 326). He became “‘Bruced’ out.”17 Thereafter, crisis time or not, he married in haste, broke up the band, and escaped the “Bruce Springsteen” he had become. When he “returned to form,” as it were, his personal life more settled, and with Human Touch and Lucky Town behind him, he pointedly presented different personas and dramatized diverse selves.

A run through the idea of the self from his earliest to his latest albums illustrates the way these ideas develop, with key songs marking subtle transitions. As time passes, and with Tunnel of Love pivotal, Springsteen becomes more daring and experimental with regard to identities. With the exception of Human Touch, Lucky Town, and the later Working on a Dream—each of which are akin, in this sense only, to the early work—the shift is from a self-focus or external commentary on others to a willingness to render their voices and inner lives. It’s this, as much as active intervention beyond art, that makes Springsteen’s career an act of “citizenship” of the kind that Wendell Berry refers to with regard to William Carlos Williams, epitomizing the pragmatist belief in community-oriented art of use to practitioners and recipients alike. Only from 1984 does Springsteen express, and with increasing consistency, his desire for his music to be useful, and see his career in terms of such citizenship. “I wanted to be good at doing something that was useful to other people, and to myself,” he told Roger Scott and Patrick Humphries that year. “You play some role in people’s lives, whether it’s just a night out, a dance, a good time, or maybe you make someone think a little bit different about themselves, or about the way they live, which is what rock ’n’ roll music did for me. The interaction with the community is the real reward” (TAD 134). Subsequently, that idea of “usefulness” has often surfaced, from “becoming part of people’s lives” (TAD 172) to providing “some service” (SOS 297). Springsteen became comfortable, in maturity, with this notion of multiple selves, intimately tied, as it is in his work, with art as an act of “citizenship.”

 

An account of the evolution is inevitably schematized, but Springsteen’s depiction of selves in early albums differs markedly from his depiction of selves in later albums. The lyrics on Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., mostly dramatize the perspective of a young man who is a version of Springsteen as he saw or presented himself at the time. They deal with immediate, personal experience. Often he’s the observer on the edge of things, as in “Lost in the Flood.” In other songs he’s the center of the action. In “Blinded by the Light,” it may as well be Springsteen who looks “into the sights of the sun.” In “Mary Queen of Arkansas” he’s “a lonely acrobat” with “the live wire” as his trade. The early self-satire, “Growin’ Up,” with the literary staple of ironic distance from the younger self, anticipates Springsteen’s mature expression of the dangers of the artist taking himself as seriously as he takes his art, but it merely intimates changes to come. As Clarence Clemons notes in Big Man, the young Springsteen is more into spinning stories the sounds and words of which are the subject matter. “I sometimes thought of cloudbursts,” writes Clemons. “An impossible amount of rain crammed into too little time.” “It had that Chuck Berry syncopation, using vowels and consonants like musical notes,” but he had no idea “what any of it meant.”18

The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle often uses what will become another familiar mode of storytelling. The authorial voice speaks to a third party about personal dreams. “Rosalita” is about a young artist making his way. “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” does introduce further characteristics of Springsteen’s writing, such as his rendering of ambience and mood, from the “cheap seaside bars” to the “dusty arcade,” and his eye for apt detail. When, for example, the protagonist gets his shirt caught on the Tilt-a-Whirl, his sense that he might never escape the fairground ride is implicitly a fear that he’ll be trapped in the cycle of this “carnival life.” While not as dramatic as Buzz on the Rebel without a Cause chicken run, catching his sleeve in the car-door handle and plunging over the cliff, it’s a death all the same, just slower. But the song is again one in which the protagonist speaks to a friend or partner of their hopes and dreams, mutual or otherwise. As such it belongs with “Incident on 57th Street” and “Rosalita” as a forerunner of “Born to Run” and “Backstreets,” and as a form of self-expression Springsteen will reprise in “No Surrender” and “Bobby Jean” and later songs of mature love, such as “This Life” and “Kingdom of Days.”

Years will pass before the possibility of projecting multiple selves fully manifests itself, but the process begins on Born to Run with the one-time anomaly, “Meeting Across the River.” It’s the earliest song told from a first-person viewpoint clearly distinct from Springsteen’s own (and no song of this period on Tracks counters this observation). The structure and rendition of voice is notably sophisticated. Inspired by film noir, it begins and ends with the request for a ride, hinting at a tragic or tragicomic denouement. What is unsaid intensifies the drama. All that Springsteen includes is “the supremely necessary” that, in William Styron’s words to a would-be writer, amounts to “the secret of art.” The monologue, as Styron also counsels, is “action,” and “kept at a fever pitch of narrative excitement.”19 The small-time crook dominates his silent accomplice. He’s leading the unfortunate Eddie further astray. “You gotta promise to not say anything” also suggests that Eddie is not wholly reliable. Nor can he get out of it. The speaker is a bully. They won’t be looking for just him this time. The most innovative moment is when he hands Eddie something resembling a gun and advises him conversationally to change his shirt. In a few lines we get to know two ne’er-do-wells, one dominating the other, about to act out an impromptu heist in a criminal underworld they’re ill equipped to encounter.

The other narrators on Born to Run, as with Darkness, seem at most a fraction removed from Springsteen’s recognizable persona. Alan Rauch points out that “Born to Run” “is in every sense a dramatic monologue” and that Springsteen’s “use of the monologue transforms the audience into active rather than passive listeners,” but while he may be ahead of the escapist whose dream is to “walk in the sun,” or who feels he’s abandoning “a town full of losers” to “win,” “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” in the “Rosalita” mode, is about the determination to form a band and succeed, and it’s essentially Springsteen intending to “find one face that ain’t looking through” him, and believing in “The Promised Land.”20 Where distinctions appear, they’re of small degree, as in “Night,” about a factory worker, and “Racing in the Street,” about a fate Springsteen rejects, even if the metaphor might broaden to mean any restless activity, making loud noises included. The same is essentially true of the songs on The Promise.

It’s worth noting, however, one other place where this willingness to imagine beyond the unitary self emerges, and that’s in the androgyny of “Backstreets.” Rosalie Fanshel’s “Beyond Blood Brothers: Queer Bruce Springsteen” may overstretch the case, but it’s valid to argue for Springsteen’s “career-long, systematic blurring of the rigid boundaries by which we regulate society.” Primarily through glam rock but in ways that go back to “Esquerita and Little Richard in the mid-1950s,” argues Auslander, rock has celebrated “the freedom to explore and construct one’s identity,” not least “in terms of gender and sexuality.” The possibilities for the female in the male and the male in the female have always been part of the artist’s repertoire as a dramatizer of multiple selves. (Shakespeare’s comedies feature female characters, Portia, Nerissa, and Viola for instance, disguising themselves as boys. Given that originally boys would have performed the parts, those actors would have been boys playing women playing boys.) Faced with the singer reminding Terry of “all the movies” they’ve seen and of trying to “walk like the heroes we thought we had to be,” it’s hard to sustain a reading of Terry as female. Whether they just realize they’re not cut out to be “heroes” or, more than that, fail to fit the model of manhood portrayed on the screen, is open to interpretation. “What makes their lives so forbidden that they must hide on the backstreets?” asks Fanshel. Why is their “love so hard and filled with defeat”? In asking such questions she at least makes a case for the song being about “erotic brotherhood” and for Springsteen’s career as containing a complex portrayal of male selves.21

Whether or not androgyny has always been part of Springsteen’s artistic world­view, The River sees a development in the portrayal of multiple selves. The narrative mode of “Meeting Across the River” becomes the norm, with “song-stories” told from the perspectives of diverse individuals (S 100). McKenna and Pratt note that the title song, by his “own report, represented a transitional moment in his work in which he recognized the value of narrative detail.”22 It distinguishes between authorial self and first-person character. It depicts, moreover, not merely a moment but a story that takes place over time.23 Rendering others’ viewpoints in first or third person, Springsteen’s powers of empathy are also more marked. “Independence Day” (written during the time of Darkness but not included due to a surfeit of “slow songs”) is especially moving for its acknowledgment of the parental viewpoint.24 Compare it with Cat Stevens’s
“Father and Son,” and it’s obvious that, despite supposed dialogue, Stevens’s song skews wholly toward the son’s viewpoint. The father is portrayed as condescending and uncomprehending. The youth is in no mood to ponder why. The father in “Independence Day” doesn’t need to speak. From the tender opening, telling the father to “go to bed” because nothing they say will “change anything now,” to the son’s plea that he “never meant to take those things away,” the son honors his viewpoint. In Springsteen’s words, reflecting on the song in the Ties that Bind documentary, we’re eavesdropping on “a very late night intimate conversation between two people,” and “it’s a song quite without bitterness.” What it does contain, however, is a poignancy all the more painful if the fact that the son is “leaving in the morning from Saint Mary’s Gate” means that he’s bound for Vietnam.25

The first-person voices Springsteen dramatizes in Nebraska and Born in the
U.S.A. are often non-autobiographical. Beyond the tracks that Springsteen tells us “came directly out of” his experience with his family, including “Mansion on the Hill,” “Used Cars,” and “My Father’s House” (S 138), these individuals aren’t musicians and don’t have art as an avenue toward redemption. In the final song, “Reason to Believe,” the singer observes ordinary folk from outside. But prior to this the speakers include petty criminals, murderers, the unemployed, and those whose jobs put them in difficult situations. By this stage, Springsteen is identifying with people however aberrant their behavior or different their life. Born in the U.S.A. continues this pattern, with the voices of, for instance, a Vietnam veteran, a possible statutory rapist, a convict, and a father talking to a son. On the songs of that era on Tracks, too, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find (Pittsburgh)” is told from the viewpoint of a war widow with a young daughter, “Car Wash” from a girl’s perspective, and “Lover Man” by a narrator of unspecified gender. Other Born in the U.S.A. songs contain autobiographical elements, but, as with Nebraska, we’re a long way from the story-of-a-band autobiographies. In “Glory Days” the speaker’s encounter with a high-school hero stuck on “boring stories of glory days” shows just how far he’s come. “Some day we’ll look back on this,” we recall from “Rosalita,” and here he is, doing just that. In the interplay of words and music the masterstroke, emphasized by Springsteen on record, is the echo of “boring” and “glory.” That ironic juxtaposition is the heart of the song.

Then comes an accelerated development toward greater emphasis on multiple selves by way of Tunnel of Love. “The writing was not painful, and though some thought so, not literally autobiographical,” writes Springsteen. But it did uncover “unresolved feelings” that he’d carried within him “for a long time.” “I was thirty-seven years old; I didn’t see myself with suitcase in hand, guitar at my side, on the tour bus for the rest of my life. I assumed my audience was moving on, as I was” (S 190). Certainly some songs sound personal given what we know of his life at the time: “Ain’t Got You,” “Tougher Than the Rest,” “Cautious Man,” “Tunnel of Love,” “One Step Up.” But as for Springsteen’s portrayal of selves, the key songs are “Two Faces” and “Brilliant Disguise.” As so often in his work, allusions to musical lineage provide the basis for complexity that goes beyond the influence. The refrain “two faces have I” pays homage to Lou Christie’s 1963 hit, “Two Faces Have I.” Equally, Christie’s hit of the previous year, “The Gypsy Cried,” is echoed in the lines from “Brilliant Disguise,” “The gypsy swore our future was right / But come the wee wee hours / Well maybe, baby, the gypsy lied.” (Who knows, perhaps this Christie song drew his attention to the possibility of bringing Madam Marie into his lyrical universe.) But “two faces” merely hints at the layers involved. Springsteen presents the idea of split personalities as a fact to endure and apologize for rather than to celebrate. In his swings from elation to depression, warmth to hostility, the speaker feels that he really has two selves. By halfway through the song it’s clear that he identifies with his better self. His other self becomes “he,” a Hyde to his Jekyll. His ideal self is a decent, spiritual, open man. He prays that his love for the girl will “make that other man go away,” yet he knows that in reality he’s stuck with his twin. As he kisses the girl, the other man tells him their life is “a lie.”

This doppelgänger motif sees Springsteen edge into the grim corridors frequented by Dostoevsky, Poe, and Conrad. In Crime and Punishment the murderer, Raskolnikov, has not merely a split personality (his name suggests “schism”) but multiple personalities that seem echoed in characters as disparate as his friend Razhumkin (suggesting “reason”), the drunkard Marmaladov, and Porfiry, the perverse examining magistrate who cajoles and terrorizes him into confessing. In turn, in “Brilliant Disguise,” Springsteen extends the notion of multiple selves to cover not only the wars between internal selves but the masks people wear in relationships. He wants to know “if it’s you I don’t trust / ’Cause I damn sure don’t trust myself.” She plays “the loving woman,” while he plays “the faithful man,” but this is just the first level of disguise. “Is that you, baby / Or just a brilliant disguise” is rendered without a question mark. The speaker knows not only that it is a disguise but that he himself “doubts what he’s sure of,” within and without. “If there are two people in a room there’s a play of some sort going on,” Springsteen will say of the song in 2006. “That’s human interaction.” To talk about it “is a way of dispelling some of the myths that build up around you and which tend to box you in.” Hence, “the song is asking, ‘Is it me or a brilliant disguise?’ And the answer is it’s almost always both.” Even ten years later, his hesitation in expressing the theme reveals the complexity of his feelings about art and identity. “You know, you’ve gotta put out an enormous amount of your real self for it to feel real. You can’t . . . it’s not something . . . for it to feel real, it has to be real,” he says. “At least, that’s the way that I operate. But it doesn’t have to be all, it’s not all, you know?” (TAD 313). What’s also true, though, is that as Springsteen has come to accept the notion of multiple selves so too his tone has changed from angst to ironic humor. Only in these later years, after the watershed of divorce, remarriage, and parenthood, has he joked publically about multiple selves. It’s in that same interview, for instance, that he mock-wishes that he, too, could be the “Bruce” people think he is (TAD 318). That tone is not evident in Tunnel of Love.

Where Tunnel of Love is introspective, Human Touch and Lucky Town are largely celebratory of Springsteen’s personal arrival at domestic stability. Their reputation is patchy. Human Touch began, he writes, as “an exercise” to return to “writing and recording” (S 216). But it also led to the more spontaneous Lucky Town. “Once I had written ‘Living Proof,’” Springsteen explains, “I wrote and recorded an entirely new record. It was a release from the long process of making Human Touch” (S 218). In song after song, many of them based on marriage and new parenthood, Springsteen celebrates what Anna Sergeyevna in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons describes as “the best thing on earth” (and what Greil Marcus sees as Huck Finn’s goal): peace of mind.26 Complications remain, of course. There’s fear mingled with love, and always the possibility of “The Big Muddy.” As for “a stable life” driving him to “write more outwardly,” as he told Will Percy (TAD 223), it’s notable that the penultimate song of Lucky Town, “Souls of the Departed,” in Springsteen’s words, opens with “scenes from the Persian Gulf War and gang warfare in Los Angeles.” Springsteen’s comment on this is also revealing. The song, he writes, “wrestles with” the family man’s “own hypocrisies about the choices he has made for his family in contrast to his beliefs” (S 219).

Springsteen refers to one final song in this gloss on the album, and that’s “My Beautiful Reward” and its ambiguous ending, where the man, “searching for something unnameable,” and “slipping between life and death, transforms into a bird flying over gray fields” with the cold wind at his back (S 219). The sentiment seems clear. “My Beautiful Reward” is an ironic phrase. Unlike the end of a romantic movie, there’s no final place to “walk in the sun,” only renewed commitment to one’s beliefs, whatever they may be. But the overall tone of Lucky Town is captured in “Living Proof,” which he describes as being “about the common strength it takes to constitute a family.” To view children as “the ‘living proof’ of our belief in one another” is to side implicitly with James against Russell (S 218): an emotion can yield tangible results. Belief can result in fact. The song vindicates the pragmatic romanticism of Born to Run and affirms love as “real.” For the love here is very different from the “wild” love that also features in that song, the intoxicating “romantic” love that always spends its force. It’s an enduring love that relates to loyalty and mutual commitment, where there’s no need any longer for disguise, or at least there’s recognition that the existence of multiple selves needn’t involve deceit.

By this time the conviction of art’s usefulness has become a dominant aspect of Springsteen’s thinking. Personal life remains a topic, especially on Working on a Dream, with songs celebrating ordinary life, such as “Queen of the Supermarket,” and the longevity of domesticity and friendship amid the lengthening shadows of mortality (“Tomorrow Never Knows”). As Dickinson has it: “Presentiment—is that long Shadow—on the lawn— / Indicative that Suns go down— / The notice to the startled Grass / That Darkness is about to pass—” (Poem 764). Or as Oblonsky says in Anna Karenina, one can feel that things grow “even brighter toward the end!”27 Accepting the aging process, and enjoying a domestic plateau, Springsteen now took that originally troubling idea of multiple selves and viewed its positive side. Urgency in the face of galloping time now replaces the urgency of romantic escape. The singular self, at the center of its own world, gives way in emotional maturity to an embracing of selves, and a looking out toward our common experience. Instead of “losers” whom we must abandon to “win,” we discover, in words from a Lynyrd Skynyrd song, that “we ain’t much different at all.” Like William James, the recognition that potentially “that shape I am” could lead, Springsteen realized, to a whole new worldview of possibility and productivity. Thus we have his resurgence in songs that imagine the perspectives of all kinds of individuals, whether in non-album songs such as “Streets of Philadelphia” or “Dead Man Walkin’” or through Tom Joad, The Rising, Devils & Dust, Magic, Wrecking Ball, and High Hopes. These albums show an artist at ease with multiple selves, willing to risk dramatizing the minds of individuals in all sorts of situations, from an AIDS patient to an illegal immigrant, a mother to a hustler, a soldier to a terrorist, a perpetrator to a victim, and—to collapse such language-based categories—all kinds of identities in between.