David Bowie and Romanticism (Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature) 3030976211, 9783030976217

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Chapter 1: Introduction: David Bowie and Romanticism
David Bowie and Rock and Romanticism
From David Jones to David Bowie
Bowie as an Artist
David Bowie and Romanticism
Chapter Summaries
Chapter 2: David Bowie and Romantic Androgyny
Introduction
Milton as the Origin of Romantic Androgyny
David Bowie’s Sexual Canvas
Chapter 3: Negative Capability in Space: The Romantic Bowieverse
Chapter 4: Drug Use and Drug Literature from the Eighteenth Century to David Bowie
De Quincey and Coleridge’s Opium Dreams
Bowie, Drug Use, and Rock ‘n’ Roll Romantics
Conclusion
Chapter 5: Capitalist Co-optation, Romantic Resistance, and Bowie’s Allegorical Performance in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth
Bowie in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility
Finding “Jerusalem”
Revisiting Alien Sex
Chapter 6: Too Late to Be Late Again: David Bowie, the Late 1970s, and Romanticism
Chapter 7: Relics of The Future: The Melancholic Romanticism of Bowie’s Berlin Triptych
The Romantic Critique of Modernity
The Allure of Mysticism and Travel
Nostalgia for the Future
The Looming Threat of Despondency
Rekindling the Human Spirit
Romanticism’s Grand Enterprise: “Heroes”
Conclusion: Romantic Elsewhere
Chapter 8: “Rebel Rebel”: Bowie as Romantic “Type”
“David Bowie is a Joy Forever”1
“David Bowie is Resembling Himself”17
“David Bowie is the template for a new way of being a person”22
“David Bowie is the story of his times”30
“Which one was the real David Bowie? They all were”68
Chapter 9: The Goblin King, Absurdity, and Nonbinary Thinking
Chapter 10: 1. Outside as Bowie’s Gothic Technodrama: Fascism and the Irrational Near the Turn of the Millennia
Introduction: Welcome to Leon
Romanticism, Fascism, and Bowie’s Aesthetic
Appendix 1: An Account of Leon and 1. Outside
Appendix 2: Theme, Setting, Plot, Character, Diction, and Music of 1. Outside
Characters:
Chapter 11: “Blackstar”: David Bowie’s Twenty-First-Century Ars Moriendi
Introduction
The Death Arts: A Brief Discussion
Contemporary Western Engagements with Death
Bowie’s Interest in Mortality: A Brief Synopsis
“Lazarus”: David Bowie’s Ars Moriendi
Bibliography
Discography
Index

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN MUSIC AND LITERATURE

David Bowie and Romanticism Edited by James Rovira

Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature Series Editors

Paul Lumsden City Centre Campus MacEwan University Edmonton, AB, Canada Marco Katz Montiel Facultad de Letras Pontifical Catholic University of Chile Santiago, RM - Santiago, Chile

This leading-edge series joins two disciplines in an exploration of how music and literature confront each other as dissonant antagonists while also functioning as consonant companions. By establishing a critical connection between literature and music, this series highlights the interaction between what we read and hear. Investigating the influence music has on narrative through history, theory, culture, or global perspectives provides a concrete framework for a seemingly abstract arena. Titles in the series, both monographs and edited volumes, explore musical encounters in novels and poetry, considerations of the ways in which narratives appropriate musical structures, examinations of musical form and function, and studies of interactions with sound. Editorial Advisory Board Frances R. Aparicio, Northwestern University, US Timothy Brennan, University of Minnesota, US Barbara Brinson Curiel, Critical Race, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Humboldt State University, US Gary Burns, Northern Illinois University, US Peter Dayan, Word and Music Studies, University of Edinburgh, Scotland Shuhei Hosokawa, International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Japan Javier F.  León, Latin American Music Center of the Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University, US Marilyn G. Miller, Tulane University, US Robin Moore, University of Texas at Austin, US Nduka Otiono, Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, Canada Gerry Smyth, Liverpool John Moores University, England Jesús Tejada, Universitat de València, Spain Alejandro Ulloa Sanmiguel, Universidad del Valle, Colombia

James Rovira Editor

David Bowie and Romanticism

Editor James Rovira Keiser University Merritt Island, FL, USA

Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature ISBN 978-3-030-97621-7    ISBN 978-3-030-97622-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97622-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image by Rebekah Rovira Cover image concept by James Rovira This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For David Bowie freaks everywhere. So long as you have each other, you’re not alone. And for the Queen of Bowie freaks and the goddess of vinyl, Michelle “Snap” Pessaro: thank you— www.savvyvinylrecords.com

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank David Sigler, Sherry Truffin, and Chris Washington for invaluable feedback on a very early draft of the Introduction, some of which found its way into Chap. 2 and Chap. 10. Additionally, I would like to thank Sherry Truffin for comments on Chap. 10, Michelle Pessaro for providing a constant stream of Bowie vinyl, and my family for listening to more of Bowie’s music than they’d ever hoped to hear.

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Contents

1 Introduction:  David Bowie and Romanticism  1 James Rovira 2 David  Bowie and Romantic Androgyny 31 James Rovira 3 Negative  Capability in Space: The Romantic Bowieverse 53 Shawna Guenther 4 Drug  Use and Drug Literature from the Eighteenth Century to David Bowie 69 Eric Pellerin 5 Capitalist  Co-optation, Romantic Resistance, and Bowie’s Allegorical Performance in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth 87 William Levine 6 Too  Late to Be Late Again: David Bowie, the Late 1970s, and Romanticism117 Julian Knox

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7 Relics  of The Future: The Melancholic Romanticism of Bowie’s Berlin Triptych141 Paul Steven Rowe 8 “Rebel  Rebel”: Bowie as Romantic “Type”163 Samuel Lyndon Gladden 9 The  Goblin King, Absurdity, and Nonbinary Thinking185 Aglaia Maretta Venters 10 1.  Outside as Bowie’s Gothic Technodrama: Fascism and the Irrational Near the Turn of the Millennia215 James Rovira 11 “Blackstar”:  David Bowie’s Twenty-First-­Century Ars Moriendi257 Jennifer Lillian Lodine-Chaffey Bibliography277 Index

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Notes on Contributors

Samuel Lyndon Gladden  serves as Professor of English and Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Education, and Human Development at the University of New Orleans. He has published widely on key figures in nineteenth-century British literature with books on Percy Shelley (Routledge) and Oscar Wilde (Broadview) and articles on Mary Shelley, Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker, and others. This is his second chapter on David Bowie. The first, “Manner, Mood, and Message: Bowie, Morrissey, and the Complex Legacy of Frankenstein,” appeared in Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2, also edited by James Rovira. Shawna  Guenther  examines in her doctoral dissertation early modern English medical descriptions of and discussions about women’s breasts, breast milk, breastfeeding, and wet nursing. During her Ph.D. program she held an internship at The Dalhousie Review. Currently she is serving a three-year term as the presiding officer of Canadian literature for PAMLA. She has published academic articles in several journals including Analyses/Rereadings/Theories and Beyond Philology. Under her pen name Jane Arsenault she publishes creative nonfiction, most recently in ROAM, Representations of Home. Her memoir, Crazy Little Thing Called Mom, was released on Kindle in 2020. She enjoys spending time contemplating the Bowieverse.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Julian Knox  is Assistant Professor of English at Georgia College & State University where he teaches Romanticism, the eighteenth century, and Victorian literature, and where he coordinates the MA Program in Literature. He has published articles in European Romantic Review, The Wordsworth Circle, and The Coleridge Bulletin, as well as in the book collections Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms, The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, E.T.A.  Hoffmann: Transgressive Romanticism, and Transnational England: Home and Abroad, 1780–1860. His ongoing projects include a monograph on Coleridge and Time, and an essay collection (coedited with James Rovira) on Heavy Metal and Romanticism. William Levine  has focused the convergences of aesthetics and politics in the latter half of the British long eighteenth century as his primary field of scholarship. He has published articles on almost every major English poet and literary critic from Pope to Anna Barbauld and Coleridge. More recently, he has been producing a book-length study on the ways that jazz knowledge has informed the history of all major genres of music in Nashville. This project is an outgrowth of many years spent as a jazz journalist producing radio interviews and writing for urban arts weeklies. He regularly teaches courses in the literature of jazz and the blues, philosophy and literature, and the history of literary criticism at Middle Tennessee State University. Jennifer  Lillian  Lodine-Chaffey is Assistant Professor of English, Department of English, Philosophy, and Modern Languages, Montana State University Billings. She is the author of A Weak Woman in a Strong Battle: Women and Public Execution in Early Modern England (University of Alabama Press, 2022) as well as a number of peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on Christopher Marlowe’s dramas, early modern engagements with death, and capital punishment in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Eric  Pellerin  is an assistant professor and the Electronic Resources & Serials Management Librarian at Medgar Evers College, City University of New York. His research interests include genre theory, authorship in film, and Hong Kong cinema. He is the author of “The Simpsons and Television Self Reflexivity as Critique” from The Simpsons Did It! Postmodernity in Yellow, edited by Martin Tschiggerl and Thomas Walach. He is also the author of “Kung Fu Fandom: NYC B-Boys and the Grind House

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Distribution of Kung Fu Films” from The Oxford Handbook of Hip-Hop Dance Studies, Oxford University Press, edited by Mary Fogarty and Imani Kai Johnson, published May 1, 2022. James  Rovira  is most recently the author of Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2, Rock and Romanticism: Post Punk, Goth and Metal as Dark Romanticisms, and Reading as Democracy in Crisis: Interpretation, Theory, History along with poetry, articles, book chapters, reviews, and short fiction. He lives and works on Florida’s Space Coast and has been working in higher education for over twenty years. He currently teaches literature and writing at Valencia College and Keiser University. Paul Steven Rowe  is an adjunct lecturer at Endicott College, book shop sales associate, and a music writer for PopMatters. His literary criticism appears in Literary Imagination and Literary Matters. Paul holds an MA in English Literature from the University of New Hampshire and BA in English from Suffolk University. Aglaia  Maretta  Venters  is an instructor in the History Department of South Louisiana Community College. Her publications include an essay on Hegelian dialectic in Reading as Democracy in Crisis: Interpretation, Theory, History, edited by James Rovira. Her upcoming publications include essays on French Renaissance political theory and Jesuit paradigms for tensions between reason and faith. Her ongoing projects focus on the experiences of individuals whose lives and work represent ideas that mainstream society accepts only posthumously.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: David Bowie and Romanticism James Rovira

David Bowie and Rock and Romanticism David Bowie is thinking he is David Bowie David Bowie is not David Jones1 He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.2

The chapters collected3 in David Bowie and Romanticism are academic works examining Bowie’s creative output from 1969 to the end of his life, but they are also, indirectly and in their own unusual way, reception histories.4 A reception history usually has more distance from its subject than we do now, so the contributors to this collection, including myself, are engaging in self-reflection, writing our own reception histories of Bowie’s work as we have experienced it so far in our lives. In other words, we’re not only doing the work of academic analysis but are also fans whose lives have been shaped by Bowie’s music and continue to be. Toija Cinque and Sean Redmond discuss the phenomenon of academic fandom in relationship to David Bowie in The Fandom of David Bowie, defining an

J. Rovira (*) Keiser University, Merritt Island, FL, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Rovira (ed.), David Bowie and Romanticism, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97622-4_1

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academic fan as one who “is both a scholar of fandom and a fan of the star text being researched, moving in and across these spaces of critical and personal engagement.”5 They go on to quote Matt Hills’s work on academic fandom, who says that it “strives for ‘proper distance’…from all its constituencies. My rendering of ‘proper distance’ implies critical and multi-dimensional reflexivity.”6 While none of us are invested here in the direct study of academic fandom itself, these chapters do meet the other criteria as reflexive works written by fans who also attempt to maintain some critical distance. A reception history is not at all what I had in mind when I set out to collect chapters for my previous Rock and Romanticism anthologies, of course, or this one. I set out to better understand the world in which we live through its music, particularly its music analyzed using the theoretical structures and historical insights developed out of the study of Romantic-era art, literature, and music. Those books performed that work, as does David Bowie and Romanticism, bringing the historical and theoretical insights from the study of the Romantic era to the study of David Bowie. But because we’re so close to our subjects, what else could that be but a kind of reception history? David Jones has died, but David Bowie continues to release music, so the reception of that ongoing creative production continues. I should add that Cinque and Redmond describe their work as taking on a “mixed methodological and theoretical approach”7 which lends itself to a hybridity of written forms. That hybridity surfaces in some of the chapters collected here, so that our work is in part an extension of the work described by Cinque and Redmond: The emphasis on “writing the personal” (Probyn 2011) has also been central to the epistemological and political interventions of popular culture theorists and those interested in “hearing” the stories of the marginalized and politically disenfranchised. Connected to this approach is the recognition that researchers also have stories to share and in a way that democratises the empirical process—no one story is more important than the other—and through shared storytelling, experiential equivalences and thematic “clusters” emerge.8

Our stories about Bowie are important because everyone’s is: shared storytelling is an inherently democratic process. At the same time, I don’t mean to say that our analyses are primarily autobiography. Instead, as we

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explore Bowie’s creative output, we are also still living within the art and the history we seek to understand because Bowie’s work has personally and deeply affected us all. We’ve chosen the subject of our academic work, in other words, for at times deeply personal reasons. Sometimes these stories will come out, and many of us bring our professional identities and interests to bear specifically on the study of David Bowie because we have some personal investment in his creative production. Bowie disliked analytical approaches to his music from his twenties to the end of his life, saying in a 1974 interview, “If people read three hours of what you’ve done, then they’ll analyze it for seven hours and come out with seven hours of their own thinking…where if you give them thirty seconds of your own stuff they usually still come out with seven hours of their own thinking. They take hook images of what you do. And they pontificate on the hooks.”9 I suspect by “hook images” Bowie meant a point of interpretive entry to his work, some one thing that makes sense to interpreters that help them understand the entire work. His complaint here is that the act of interpretation “pontificates” on a single dimension of his work and makes it the whole. This refusal to be understood, especially in the light of a single point of entry into his work, makes it seem fitting that the last recorded song Bowie released on any album during his lifetime is titled “I Can’t Give Everything Away.”10 However, he phrased this opinion more generously at different times, leaving interpretation in the hands of his audience: “At the entrance to the exhibition [David Bowie is…], visitors were faced by this quotation from Bowie’s notes on the album 1. Outside (1995): ‘All art is unstable. Its meaning is not necessarily that implied by the author. There is no authoritative voice, there are only multiple readings.’”11 He preceded those words with the expectation that his audience wouldn’t be seeking him out for an explanation. Bowie’s mood when discussing interpretations of his work varied widely. Johan Renck, who directed the video for “Blackstar,” revealed that Bowie said during the making of the video, “The one thing I think is important is to not go into any second-guessing or analyzing what these images mean, because they’re between you and me. People are going to head over heels to try to break it down and figure it out across the spectrum, and there’s no point in even engaging that.”12 He exhibits a somewhat naïve view of interpretation here—the “real” meaning of these images are a secret kept between him and his director, while everyone else is just second guessing—but it’s not clear he believes there is a clear meaning. He’s instructing his own director not to engage in second guessing.

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Since Bowie maintained a lifelong negative opinion about analysis, one I think he shares with Keats with his distaste for “consequitive reasoning,”13 or chasing after facts and certainties, I have to wonder how he would view this collection. Inevitably negatively, I think. But we’re writing these chapters because only these approaches can yield these insights. The variety of approaches to Bowie’s work presented here helps us avoid a simplistic focus on “hook images,” and of course any act of interpretation assumes that words, images, and symbols are universally held and meaningful, that no work can be completely confined to a purely private authorial intention. Since this collection follows two other Rock and Romanticism titles,14 I have to discuss David Bowie and Romanticism in relationship to them to explain how this one extends the conversation begun there about the relationship between rock music and Romanticism. Beyond my desire to understand Bowie’s enigmatic figure, with the Rock and Romanticism books I also hoped to better understand Romanticism through a long look at its own development over the last 250 years or so. But why Romanticism at all, and why particularly David Bowie and Romanticism? While I will answer this question in more detail below, a recent interview with Marianne Faithfull reminded me how much the Romantics directly influenced rock musicians from the 1960s forward. Faithfull said she wanted “to go to Oxford and read English literature, philosophy, and comparative religion. That was my plan,” at least until she was discovered by Andrew Oldham at a party.15 Lindsay Zoladz interviewed Faithfull for The New York Times because she had just released a number of her readings of poems by English Romantics set to music. Zoladz says accurately of the Romantics, “The Romantics might not have yet lived to see rock ’n’ roll, but they certainly knew a thing or two about sex and drugs,”16 and as Rebecca Nesvet’s chapter in Women in Rock,  Women in Romanticism reveals, the itinerant guitar player had a cultural profile during that era similar to rock guitarists today. The Romantic era is the origin not only of the rock star, but of the figure of the rock guitarist, just as rock music is not just influenced by Romanticism, but a continuation of it into the twenty-first century. In the remainder of this introduction I’m going to review some familiar details of Bowie’s life and influences to the end of the 1960s to reflect on his aesthetics: how he viewed his creative work, how he saw himself in relationship to it, and how he approached his music. After that I’ll explain the work of this collection in more detail, defining Romanticism and explaining why it makes sense to speak of David Bowie as a Romantic, and

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then I’ll consider Bowie’s aesthetic commitments and his relationship to his art and creativity. Finally, I’ll summarize the chapters in this collection. The work in this introduction constitutes both groundwork for the remainder of the collection and one of my own statements about David Bowie, each section building on the last to provide an orientation to and context for the chapters that follow. A warning, though: Any kind of a history of rock, even a reception history, is plagued with the limitations of all historical studies. But these limitations are further amplified by the presence of drugs and the pursuit of celebrity, which involves the manipulation of media to raise the star’s public profile. Even worse, the star’s own media manipulation symbiotically and often dysfunctionally coexists with the desire of media to sell sensational stories about rock stars who love being sensational or outrageous. All of these tendencies, interestingly, find direct expression in Romanticism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which is the origin both of celebrity culture and of drug literature.17 It’s hard not to think about Byron’s teasing references to incest in Cain: if they’re going to gossip, let’s give them something to gossip about. Bowie is further complicated by his desire to please and entertain during interviews. Much of what he says is suspect, especially in the 1970s, when he chose his words for shock or entertainment value. Every use of every quotation and every aspect of Bowie’s art, and how it is understood, represents a tenuous negotiation among his desires to entertain, known facts about his life, and the facts of his art, a claim generally true of all textual and historical work  that are amplified in Bowie’s case. Furthermore, there’s the fact of Bowie’s death. He died a little more than five years before the start of this writing, on January 8th, 2016. I committed to publishing this collection on the day he died.18 As I write about him again now, I find I am still grieving for him. It’s a matter of painful, bitter irony for me, and many others, that he passed away the year Donald Trump won the 2016 US Presidential election, as if the world was committed to making itself even more cruel, blunt, and stupid than it already was. His death was the earliest sign of what was to come, preceding a spate of deaths that included fellow musicians Glenn Frey (the Eagles), Paul Kantner (Jefferson Airplane and some of its later iterations), Maurice White (Earth, Wind and Fire), Vanity (of Prince and Vanity 5), Keith Emerson and Greg Lake of Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Merle Haggard, Prince, Shawty Lo, Leonard Cohen, Sharon Jones, Florence Henderson, George Michael, Leon Russell, and Debbie Reynolds. While

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a number of significant public figures die every year, 2016 stood out for many people because of the sheer number of high-profile public figures who passed away. I haven’t mentioned actors, authors, and other cultural figures who died in 2016, including political figures who were very important to many of us.19 Bowie died at the start of a difficult, painful year, and he was the first, so that anyone writing about him now writes with the burden of his death and everything that followed it—Trump’s election, the coronavirus, and a massive worldwide economic downturn, all of which cast his lyrics into a new light and have become part of the ongoing reception of Bowie’s work.

From David Jones to David Bowie David Bowie is suggesting you cannot explain the flower by the fertilizer20 No bird soars too high. if he soars with his own wings.21

My first thought is that I don’t want to write about David Bowie. I’m even tempted to say that David Bowie doesn’t exist. Of course there’s no question that David Bowie existed, but there’s a great deal of question about how he existed, especially over time in relationship to his creator, David Robert Jones. I’m going to refer to them both conventionally as “Bowie” throughout for all references after late 1965, but I’m not always sure when I’m talking about David Jones or David Bowie. Sometimes I could be referring to one, or the other, or both, and sometimes David Jones himself wasn’t sure about the lines between the two. Jones described his relationship with Bowie in a 1987 interview this way: “I’m more like I was in 1967 now, say, than I was in 1977. I feel like I am, anyway.”22 He goes on to describe his mood as bright, cheerful, and optimistic rather than depressed and nihilistic, but he sounds like he’s talking about more than a mood. He goes on to explain that at one point in the early 1970s, David Jones became  (not just invented: became) David Bowie, who in turn became Ziggy Stardust: “It’s no longer an act; I am him.”23 He became the rock star, and the lifestyle almost killed him, like Lewis’s Tragedian, who in the afterlife swallowed the chain to which his real self clung. In a 1976 interview with Cameron Crowe for Playboy, Bowie said, “I honestly don’t know where the real David Jones is. It’s like playing the shell game. Except I’ve got so many shells I’ve forgotten what the pea looks like. Being

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famous helps put off the problems of discovering myself. I mean that.”24 He then describes losing himself in his Ziggy Stardust character to the point where he entertained messianic delusions but that, somehow, he woke up. The boundaries between David Jones and his creation, David Bowie, were unstable at different times in Jones’s life and complicated by the fact that Jones created and then performed different characters using Bowie as a canvas. Sometimes those characters would overshadow Jones’s own personality like Frankenstein’s Creature. How and why that matters is in part the subject of this collection. I am very interested in David Jones, however, who was born January 8th, 1947  in the London district of Brixton until his family moved to nearby Bromley when he was six. Jones continued to live in Bromley until he left home at sixteen. Outer London remained bombed out in places for years after World War II, so during his early childhood Jones often faced the wreckage of the war. The areas in which Jones grew up bore the brunt of German bombing: Documents have revealed that after double agents planted deliberate misinformation within the Luftwaffe…they [German bombs] didn’t fall on Central London and destroy England’s most hallowed historic edifices, but rather on the East End and South London, which bore the brunt of the bombing. Between October 1940 and June 1941, 1,215 bombs fell on Lambeth, an area three miles wide and seven miles long… . The ravages of that deadly attack (along with the hundreds of other bombs dropped on the Brixton area during the Second World War) were in evidence within a few miles’ radius of David’s home and would remain there well into the early fifties, when most of the houses were replaced with prefabricated reinforced concrete bungalows, known as “prefabs.”25

Brixton itself is located within the London borough of Lambeth, Bowie’s childhood home about 700 yards from a state prison that at one point housed Mick Jagger and British singer Anthony Newley, who influenced some of Bowie’s early  vocal stylings. Like his famous predecessor, the Romantic poet and painter William Blake, another former resident of Lambeth, Jones grew up in working-class neighborhoods, raised by a working-class couple. His mother was a half-Irish, half-English waitress named Peggy Jones (née Burns, d. 2001), while his father, Haywood Stenton “John” Jones (d. 1969), worked in advertising, or “promotions” as he would have called it, for the children’s charity Barnardo’s. He died when Bowie was 22, about three months before his second album but

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after the release of his first charting single, “Space Oddity.” It wasn’t played by the BBC until after Apollo 11 splashed down on July 24th, 1969, but splashdown was about two weeks before John Jones’s death, so he may have lived to hear it on the radio even though he didn’t live long enough to see it chart that autumn.26 Biographers leave the impression that Bowie had an affectionate though distant bond with his father but a strained relationship with his mother until near the end of her life. Jones was always a beautiful boy and remained so far longer than most of the rest of us do. During a 1997 call-in radio interview celebrating Bowie’s 50th birthday, Bono of U2 called in to wish Bowie a happy birthday then accused him of being Dorian Gray with a hidden painting somewhere. He looked too good at 50 years old.27 Jones demonstrated promise in music and dance even in grade school and was later introduced to art at Bromley Technical High School by Owen Frampton, father of guitarist Peter Frampton. Jones first identified as a painter, and we’ll see that he both worked as a painter and thought of himself as one all of his life. His friend Peter Frampton ascended to stardom in the 1970s with one of the biggest selling live albums of all time, Frampton Comes Alive (1976), later playing as Bowie’s guitarist for the album Never Let Me Down (1987) and its supporting Glass Spider tour.28 Frampton’s career slumped after the end of the 1970s, and Bowie hoped he could reintroduce Frampton to the world as a guitarist rather than the poster boy for 1970s’ voicebox rock, justifiably believing that Frampton was a guitarist with a talent comparable to Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, and Eric Clapton.29 Jones, surrounded by talented people unaware they were in the middle of a world-changing artistic renaissance, enjoyed an early milieu that supported his growth in the arts and his interest in rock music. His home life did as well. When Jones was still very young, his father brought home 45s by Elvis Presley (who shares Jones’s birthday), the Platters, Fats Domino, and most importantly, Little Richard, whose importance will be discussed in Chap. 2. His half-brother Terry Evans introduced him to John Coltrane and Charles Mingus, and jazz never left Bowie’s life either. His attraction to American culture and music, particularly Black culture and music, started early and continued. He immersed himself in American Black culture with the album Young Americans (1976), recruiting a band that included Apollo (NYC) house band member Carlos Alomar, who in turn brought in a then-unknown Luther Vandross and others to work with Bowie. This move resonated with parts of the African-American community for decades to come. One respondent who “self-identified as

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African-­American shared during the focus group conducted in Amsterdam what they thought David Bowie brought out powerfully in the culture and music scene of New York: I wanted to talk a little bit about how Bowie reconfigured our sense of national identity when he arrived in New York and the way he positioned himself and rejected… certain chic circles… and preferred instead to work in Harlem with African-American musicians and was deeply invested and interested in Soul and R & B and those musical histories and he made people famous… he became a New Yorker and it reshaped us and the way we felt in New York at that time. Interesting was his horror at what ‘Americanness’ meant in those days at that time was a good way for us to channel our own disappointments and aspirations.”30

Alomar performed with Bowie from about 1974 to about 1987 and then again from 1995 to 2003, over 22 years in all. On November 4th, 1975, Bowie became the second white performer to appear on Soul Train, and in 1983, he turned the tables on MTV interviewer Mark Goodman by asking him why MTV didn’t play more videos by Black artists.31 As a child, Jones embarked on learning the ukulele and tea-chest bass (a homemade one-stringed instrument) as well as the piano at an early age, playing skiffle, a blend of jazz, blues, and folk performed for dancing. Jimmy Page performed this popular genre with a band on the BBC at the age of 13.32 From a very early age, Bowie created in a variety of artforms and was by no means committed to being only a rock musician even into the late 1960s: As Ken Pitt, the manager who guided Bowie’s career from 1966 to 1970, is wont to point out, Bowie never expressed an interest in joining the league of macho journeyman rockers…“When he first came to me, I wasn’t sure what he wanted to do. Certainly, he never implied that he wanted to be a rock’n’roll star. At that time I was looking for someone who could be called an all-around entertainer. There were very few people who you could hold out much hope for and I thought in David we had found someone who could be.”33

Bowie cofounded the Beckenham Arts Lab with his then girlfriend and roommate Mary Finnigan. During this period, he lived the life of an apartment whore during a short slump of his own, but a productive one, keeping the Arts Lab going from 1969 to 1973. He performed mime during

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this time as one of a number of performers and artists creating music, visual art, poetry, street theater, dance, and puppets, and he fell in love with Hermione Farthingale, who broke his heart.34 Jones jumped from band to band through the mid-1960s, from the Kon-rads/Konrads to the King Bees to the Lower Third to the Manish Boys to the Buzz to the Hype, going by “Davy” and “Davie” Jones or Davie Jay until the Monkees rose to stardom, releasing four consecutive multiplatinum number one albums in the United States starting in 1966. Another Davy Jones had taken center stage. He joked about trying the name “Tom” Jones during an interview with Conan O’Brien,35 a story I suspect was more important for its entertainment value than its historical veracity. However, Tom Jones’s first single hit number 1 and his first album hit number 11  in the UK in 1965, right around the same time Jones was looking for a stage name, so it’s plausible. Jones finally adopted the name “David Bowie” over a year before his first album with Deram Records in 1967, an album that flopped, like his singles. Deram passed on a second album even though he had recorded a number of tracks for it. When Jones’s manager Ralph Horton contacted Ken Pitt to help with Jones’s management in 1965—who was already managing Liberace, among others—Pitt mentioned that Jones needed a new name. Jones was already attracted to Richard Widmark’s character in The Alamo, Jim Bowie, and had been attracted to that name even while he was with the Kon-rads.36 He was also drawn to the Bowie knife, named after Jim Bowie: “I was into a kind of heavy philosophy thing when I was sixteen years old, and I wanted a truism about cutting through the lies and all that.”37 Either way, by late 1965 David Jones brought David Bowie into being. “David Bowie,” at this point, was just a stage name. With the help of a number of figures, the Lower Third secured a deal with Pye records in 1965, recording their first single “Can’t Help Thinking About Me” on January 14, 1966, marking Jones’s first recording as David Bowie, who had now become a recording artist with a poorly charting single on the radio.38 Bowie’s complete biography is well covered by many other sources, so I’m only establishing groundwork here for understanding his future career: Little Richard’s gender bending influenced Bowie, as we will see, and Bowie’s work in multiple art forms make their appearances in different chapters in this collection, all of which will be interpreted through the lenses of Bowie’s Romanticism. The release of “Space Oddity” in 1969 and Bowie’s album that year is a good endpoint for this overview as it leads up to the birth and early stardom of David Bowie, which by this time

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saw the introduction of several key players into his life, most importantly Tony Visconti, although Rick Wakeman and Herbie Flowers from that album would appear on later albums. By the end of the 1960s, Bowie was a talented multi-instrumentalist, singer, and performer. Throughout his recording career, Bowie surprised musicians with how well he could sing on a single take, often surprising them again when he planned to abandon that take and rerecord his final vocals later. He would never achieve virtuosity on any instrument, and for that matter self-­ deprecatingly said in 1976, “I’ve never been a musician,”39 but well before the end of his life he could record demos in advance tracking every instrument performed on each song for his band when he chose to compose in that way, as he did for the album ★.40 He was ambitious, wanting to be a star any way that he could, and undoubtedly learned some things on that point from his father. He leveraged his combination of charm, beauty, and talent to advance himself: Some of his male lovers in the late 1960s and early 1970s were chosen at least in part to advance his career, especially Ken Pitt, with whom he lived briefly, walking around the older gentleman’s apartment in the nude. But Bowie was truly generous as well, and his charm, generosity, and good humor—his wit—weren’t merely leverage. He worked to advance the careers of Peter Frampton, Pete Townshend, Iggy Pop, Mott the Hoople, and others when they were lagging and made numerous guest appearances. These traits expressed themselves regularly, especially in his professional life, during interviews, and in collaborations that often produced works that represented peak achievements of his collaborators’ careers.

Bowie as an Artist David Bowie is a standing cinema41 Exuberance is Beauty.42

Bowie said in a 2004 interview that at the age of seventeen what he really wanted to do was write a musical, but he had no idea how to go about it, so he “took a far simpler course and kind of abbreviated the idea of a musical into a kind of concept piece for now.”43 His first album, 1967’s David Bowie, consisted in part of songs Bowie had written for an unfinished musical titled Kids on the Roof: many of the songs are “story songs” that establish character.44 During interviews at different times in

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his life he said he always wanted to be a director, and in one 1979 interview, when asked if he preferred acting to music, he said, “I want to be a writer,”45 referring to his music. At that time he viewed his music as the work of a writer, not a performer. As he went on, he started creating more and more developed characters to go along with his songs, saying at one point, “Rock ‘n’ roll is acting. All my albums are just me acting out certain poses and characters.”46 Many of the early songs recorded after his first album were character sketches, scenes that projected a persona into a situation for dramatic effect, and his albums, while never fully developed concept albums (the concept was usually  attached after the fact), started revolving around the gravitational pull of a strong central character. Bowie’s recording career, even apart from his work on stage and screen, produced many albums that were multidimensional productions in themselves, all the more so once he committed to making videos. By 1974 he believed rock concerts had to become theater: “I must have the total image of a stage show. It has to be total with me. I’m just not content writing songs, I want to make it three-dimensional… A song has to take on character, shape, body, and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices.”47 While he said later that he became less interested in theater the more interested he became in his music,48 which accounts for many of his productions from Low (1977) to 1. Outside (1995) and the fact that his later concerts were far less theatrical than his concerts in the 1970s, he had at one point planned to write an opera based on 1. Outside,49 and he lived to attend opening night of his musical Lazarus staged off Broadway in 2015, the realization of a lifelong dream. His Glass Spider tour of the late 1980s was also highly theatrical with an elaborate, large-scale set for stadium performances. So Bowie subdued but never lost his ambitions for theater. He thought of himself as an actor from his earliest days, but not only as an actor. Judith A. Peraino explains Andy Warhol’s description of his relationship to his public image this way in a way that may shed light on Bowie’s relationships with his own characters: Warhol once quipped, “if you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.” Warhol did not actually claim to be a blank canvas; rather, he claimed to be a canvas that he himself had painted. For Warhol, surface became content; mass-produced images held the key to his—or anyone’s—personhood.50

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Similarly, throughout the 1970s, David Bowie was the canvas upon which David Jones painted his characters, but in a way more complex than Warhol, who maintained the same general public image throughout his career, because Bowie’s public image shifted among “Bowie,” the canvas, and characters performed by Bowie, such as Ziggy, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke, and others. And the painterly identity that Bowie learned from Owen Frampton also guided how he thought of his music: “There are a thousand things to do… but it’s a useful way of painting… it’s my way of painting.”51 He believed his audience felt the same way, saying, “The younger people get into the lyrics in a different way; there’s much more of a tactile understanding, which is the way I prefer it… It’s there, a whole wonderhouse of strange shapes and colors, tastes, feelings.”52 The key point, I think, is that Bowie’s genius didn’t lie in being a vocalist or musician, but in being a composer first and a performer second, one who worked in multiple art forms simultaneously, each one informing the other. And he remained a committed painter his entire life, saying in a 1995 interview that “I’ve always drawn, painted and sculpted but it also seems to be linked to the advent of the Nineties… I’ve done five or six shows, nothing like Brian [Eno] who has done something like 70 installations. I’m building up to my sixth show [in New York in December] so now I’m feeling like an old hand.”53 Bowie’s first exposure to the arts was painting, and he worked in the visual arts his entire life, so he consistently thought of himself as a painter and of his work as a kind of painting. He is not of course the first musician to conceive of music in terms of painting: E.T.A. Hoffmann, for example, similar to Bowie in being both a painter and a musician, describes the Fifth Symphony in painterly language such as the “purple shimmer of romanticism,” “shining rays of light,” and in his comparison of performance on a piano as opposed to that of an orchestra: “The piano reproduces the great work as a sketch reproduces a great painting.”54 Bowie’s language of the aesthetic focused on the manipulation of surfaces with no depth, the antithesis of an aesthetic of authenticity. The surface of Bowie’s art became its content, which is why he dislikes analysis, and which signals a significant change from his sixteen-year-old self, who viewed truth as something attained only after cutting through the surfaces. Bowie’s work could also be described as that of an actor writing his own scripts, so we could say that Jones used Bowie as the canvas onto which he painted his characters. I think for these reasons it’s mistaken to call Bowie’s characters “personas”: they were all surface with no depth. Jones never became any of his characters except during a

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psychological lapse. This style of aesthetic personality is not without its precedents, however. Bowie himself looked back to the nineteenth century.

David Bowie and Romanticism David Bowie is William Blake singing Danny Kaye55 Improve[me]nt makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.56

Bowie self-identified as a Romantic in one interview while trying to explain the differences between himself and Brian Eno: “I’m actually very nineteenth-century—a born Romantic, unlike Brian, who’s terminally end-of-twentieth century.”57 When asked if he’d ever been “offered the lead in any other biographical films,” Bowie responded, “Oh, funny things—like Byron, stuff like that. I don’t know. I think Mick would do a better Byron. I’d probably be a better Shelley. [Laughs].”58 While both Byron and Shelley were womanizing aristocrats, Byron like Bowie enjoying some men along with hundreds of women, I would conjecture that Bowie seems to be working with commonplace images of a “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” Byron contrasted with a waifish and idealistic Shelley. Both these public personas were established in the nineteenth century and Bowie, significantly, thought of Romanticism as a nineteenth-­ century phenomenon. Of course Bowie knew of Wordsworth, Blake, and Coleridge, Byron’s and Shelley’s late-eighteenth-century predecessors, first-generation Romantics to their second.59 While Bowie’s formal education didn’t go past high school, which he left at age sixteen intent on becoming a star, he read widely and intensely all of his life, so his identification with second-­ generation Romantics was deliberate and informed. First-generation Romantics weren’t transgressive, wealthy aristocrats like Byron and Shelley, though Wordsworth ended his life as England’s poet laureate, and while the casting roles led to Bowie’s consideration of Byron and Shelley, working-class Keats wasn’t considered at all, even though Bowie has a great deal in common with Keats conceptually as some chapters suggest. These casting choices project Byron’s and Shelley’s personas forward onto Bowie and Jagger as much as Bowie identified himself with Shelley after the fact. Wordsworth, furthermore, was a poet of nature, which is alien to Bowie’s creative production, and while both Bryon and Shelley were also

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poets of nature, they projected more urbane and sophisticated personas than the first-generation Romantics, especially during the height of their creative production in the 1790s. But most importantly, Bowie brought up this point while discussing his mid-1990s collaboration with Brian Eno on the album 1. Outside, which in its liner notes describes itself as a “A non-linear Gothic Drama Hyper-cycle,”60 an idea I will develop later in a chapter devoted to that album. By 1995 Bowie didn’t just think of himself as a Romantic, but a specific kind of Romantic: a contemporary version of a second-generation, nineteenth-century Romantic invested in creating a Gothic work of art. Bowie’s own self-identification as a Romantic by itself suggests the theoretical structures associated with Romanticism might enable us to better understand Bowie’s creative production, but a definition of the term “Romanticism” is in order first. While the word “romance” had long been applied to medieval and early modern tales of knights and ladies, “Romanticism” began to be described as a constellation of aesthetic commitments first identified by Friedrich and August William Schlegel in the late eighteenth century. By the nineteenth century, cultural critics applied the term retroactively to numerous artists and authors across Europe. By the end of the twentieth century, the term extended to art, historiography, philosophy, theology, political science, and a number of other fields. Needless to say, the more widely the term was used, the harder it was to define, so that by the early twentieth century, A.O. Lovejoy despaired of developing a coherent definition of the term “Romanticism.” Lovejoy minimally recommended speaking of “Romanticisms” in the plural, and in so doing posed a challenge: How do we recognize a plurality of Romanticisms while still maintaining a singular conceptual core that could be discussed coherently in the plural? Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, who appear in several chapters throughout this collection, address Lovejoy’s challenge by defining Romanticism as an emotional and volitional core that expresses itself in a variety of ways which they develop into a taxonomy in Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity (2001). They define the core of Romanticism as “a critique of modernity, that is, of modern capitalist civilization, in the name of values and ideals drawn from the past,”61 which provides telling insight into Bowie’s self-identification as a nineteenth-century artist: He looked to the past for his identity. “Modernity,” as they develop their argument, is a combination of capitalism and the Enlightenment. But what should be emphasized is that Romanticism, consistent with much

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writing about it since the nineteenth century, is not a concept or an idea but an emotional core. This resistance to modernity is felt first and only theorized or reified in art after the fact, and sometimes not consciously expressed or understood at all. Since the Enlightenment, then, Romanticism only requires capitalism to flourish, so there’s no reason to limit it to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I argue in Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms that John Milton with the publication of Paradise Lost in 1667 did not just inspire English Romanticism but became “England’s first Romantic poet,” his brand of Romanticism being “modernity’s self-criticism brought on in part by the failure of the English Civil War to permanently establish a republic without a monarch.”62 Romanticism, though not so named until the late eighteenth century, was inaugurated by Paradise Lost and continues into the present, one of its most prominent forms being rock and roll. The two prior Rock and Romanticism books, Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth and Rock from Dylan to U2 (Lexington Books, 2018) and Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), between them, seem to coincide with first- and second-generation Romanticism. Very generally and of course with exceptions, first-generation Romantics seem to have the most influence on rock music from the 1960s through the early 1980s, extending to later artists still performing in older genres such as southern rock, while second-generation Romantics most coincide with artists from the late 1970s to the present, but especially through the 1990s. Just as firstand second-generation Romantics are distinguished by their historical positions before and after the onset of the French Revolution, respectively—all of the first-generation Romantics were adults at the onset of the French Revolution, while all of the second-generation Romantics were born after it had begun—rock performers in the late twentieth century were distinguished by their historical positions before and after the Vietnam War. These Rock and Romanticism books reinforced for me how much war and industrialism influence creative production both thematically and aesthetically, and both war and industrialism influenced David Bowie, who was born two years after the end of World War II and whose songwriting changed dramatically with his second album in 1969, after the Vietnam War had gained a higher cultural profile in England. I theorize the possibility of similar responses to similar historical milieus in Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2 with a brief reference to the concept of “repetition,” an idea I didn’t

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develop fully at the time.63 I initially had in mind the possibility of Kierkegaardian repetition, drawing from Kierkegaard because I believe he is our most sophisticated commentator on Romanticism as a trans-­ European movement, but Kierkegaard didn’t believe repetition could be experienced through purely historical or aesthetic experiences. At least his pseudonym, Constantin Constantius, didn’t. After attempting to experience repetition a variety of ways, such as revisiting the same city or attending the same theater, he declares, frustratedly, “The only repetition was the impossibility of a repetition.”64 Of course, aesthetic experiences are impossible to repeat. I’ve listened to Pink Floyd’s The Wall dozens of times over the course of my life, including just tonight, as I am writing these words, but I can never repeat my first experience listening to it. We can’t repeat our first kiss, first sports game, or even revisit our childhood homes again, really. We can visit the location, but it won’t be the same home. Similarly, the Romanticisms of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries shouldn’t be seen as a mere repetition of their eighteenth- and nineteenth-­century counterparts. While I was working on the Rock and Romanticism books, however, I was also working on Reading as Democracy in Crisis: Interpretation, Theory, History (Lexington Books, 2019), finishing its first draft the summer after they were completed. I argue in the introduction that each chapter reveals how different crises in democracy provoke different reading strategies in response, but I have to do so in a way that doesn’t require direct literary influence. Derrida certainly read Plato, for example, and both experienced their own respective crises in democracy, but the same can’t be argued for every figure covered in the text. So I develop a condition/response model in the Introduction to explain these repetitions, one that “registers the rise of conditions that correlate with a discreet range of responses…  A condition/response model can account for responses in contemporary texts that resonate with earlier texts even if these earlier texts were unknown to later authors.”65 This condition/response model makes both historical similarity and difference instructive: how the newer iteration of the response differs also matters; and in fact historical difference can only take on meaning if it exists alongside significant similarities. I believe that Bowie’s Romanticism can be explained in part by this condition/response model. Directly and immediately, in Sayre and Löwy’s terms, capitalism and Enlightenment alone are the necessary conditions to prompt the Romantic impulse in response. But the condition/response model also applies here when we consider how war, industrialism and, as

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we will see, a hybrid family formed from several different networks of relationships were part of Bowie’s early background. Samuel Gladden discusses Bowie in this context in “Manner, Mood, and Message: Bowie, Morrissey, and the Complex Legacy of Frankenstein” alongside second-generation Romantics in the Palgrave Rock and Romanticism anthology. He sees in “Bowie’s creation of personas and his systematic references to his own work, his explorations of time and space, and his embodiments of power and fear” a complex engagement with the text of Frankenstein, his work resembling the “assemblage of parts” that make up Shelley’s creature taking the form of a “hybrid, bricolage, or mélange.”66 Gladden isn’t alone in connecting Bowie and glam to Frankenstein’s creature, who has become a common figure in rock music: “In light of the overtly fabricated, patched together, and made-up nature of glam performance personae, it is intriguing to find a cluster of references to gothic horror in glam rock, particularly to Frankenstein.”67 Gladden even found Bowie describing himself as a kind of Dr. Frankenstein in a 1973 interview.68 His focus on Frankenstein has significant implications, especially for understanding Bowie’s early life. According to Paul Morley, Bowie was born into a cracked, unsettled family, a mother and father meeting after a series of broken relationships, an older half-brother with aggressive mind-breaking problems not particularly embraced by his stepfather, an occasionally seen half-sister who lived with his father’s ex-wife [born not to his ex-wife, but to the mistress he had while he was married to his ex-wife], and a half-sister who was nowhere to be seen [she was adopted away], and who disappeared into another life.69

Bowie’s bricolage family parallels Mary Shelley’s own as well as the family she imagined in her novel Frankenstein: Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died shortly after her birth, and her father remarried quickly, bringing two new siblings into Shelley’s life. Since her mother already had one child from a previous relationship, Mary grew up with siblings from three different families. Victor Frankenstein’s father similarly assembled his family from the daughter of a deceased friend of his, who became Victor’s mother; an adopted daughter, who grew up as Victor’s playmate and almost sister but later became Victor’s wife; and another child, Justine, taken in from another family to be a nanny but treated like Victor’s sister, plus two younger brothers. The Frankenstein family

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therefore consisted of a nucleus of four male family members combined with women from three other families, only one of which was directly related to the male family members. The Frankenstein story expresses anxieties about the modern family as bricolage when it is experienced against the background of cultural expectations of purely “natural” families, an expectation that later developed into a view of the nuclear family as ideal. These anxieties were embodied in the form of a monstrous, hybridized identity that took the form of the Creature, one that barred Victor Frankenstein from both a future family of his own and spelled the end of his own immediate family. Bowie’s own home life and creative output follows that pattern, or at least reveals similar anxieties. His repeated self-identification with Romantic figures is therefore conceptually, historically, and biographically significant, as Bowie may have faced internalized tensions similar to Mary Shelley’s that drove his artistic production, but Bowie’s Romanticism goes beyond influence, and direct influence isn’t required at all. There are social forces at play to which Bowie responded, engaged, resisted, and reflected across his total creative output, many which have been engaged in the chapters that follow.

Chapter Summaries This introduction covers Bowie right up to the end of the 1960s in order to explain how David Bowie is a Romantic, what I mean by Romanticism, and some of the thematic and conceptual commitments found in his art. The remainder of the collection, with the exception of one chapter discussing 1969’s “Space Oddity,” begins in the 1970s and ends with Bowie’s ★, but Bowie’s 1970s’ output gets the most attention. In a sense, the David Bowie of the 1970s is the Bowie we all remember; he will forever be associated with Ziggy Stardust and the lightning bolt on the cover of Aladdin Sane. Bowie here serves as a kind of case study in late twentiethand early twenty-first-century Romanticisms and what it means for the creation of our art and how we structure, or destructure, gender. It is also about how we construct the self, because Bowie’s artistic self, at least, is very much constructed. When Kierkegaard, that last Romantic and first existentialist, fully presented his view of the self, he arrived at a series of complex, inwardly experienced inner relationships. One way of summarizing Kierkegaard’s view of the self is this: “If the self is grasped by the understanding, the self is also the hand grasping and the act of grasping

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itself.”70 The self is created by our acts of self-understanding as much as by the materials we have been given by nature and culture as we attempt to escape from their influence and become the single individual: “The point is not to embrace the strange for its own sake, or simply to play, or be, an exotic character in order to try to escape from oneself. It lies in what turning towards the strange does to one’s relation to the world as we find it. The strange draws us out of that world for a moment, giving up a different perspective upon where we have found ourselves.”71 Emily Bernhard-­ Jackson considers Bowie in relationship to Byron on just this point, convincingly presenting a succession of ever-changing Byrons parallel to the ever-changing Bowies we’re already so familiar with: “Thus, Ziggy both is and is not himself; the song’s narrator both is and is not himself; David Bowie both is and is not himself. There are many possible selves in play here.”72 Once we accept that our grasp of the self helps constitute the self, we enter the realm of freedom, a kind of freedom first explored by the Romantics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and enjoyed by David Bowie. It is the work of the rest of this book to follow through on these concerns for the remainder of Bowie’s career, to get into close readings and specific details. Chapters are arranged in chronological order starting with the earliest Bowie work cited, though the chapter may go forward from there into the twenty-first century. James Rovira’s “David Bowie and Romantic Androgyny” begins the collection in order to provide fuller context for the references to Bowie’s androgyny in later chapters, examining Bowie’s androgynous characters and lifestyle during the 1970s against the backdrop of androgyny in the Western tradition from Plato to the nineteenth century. After comparing androgyny in Milton’s Paradise Lost to its Biblical origins, and then to androgyny in Plato, Ovid, and in Romantic authors such as Percy Shelley, William Blake, and Charlotte Dacre, the chapter then discusses androgyny in Bowie’s life and work, demonstrating that Bowie’s androgyny aligns with that of Milton and the Romantics as opposed to the androgyny found elsewhere in the Western tradition, so that it reflects his existence as a contemporary Romantic. This chapter negotiates some of the conflicting information about Bowie’s sexuality in the 1970s, considers “The Width of a Circle” as a homoerotic text, and also includes a discussion of the reception history of Bowie’s androgynous figures. Shawna Guenther’s “Negative Capability in Space: The Romantic Bowieverse” examines Bowie’s image of the alien, of space, and of space

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exploration over the course of his career, from 1969’s “Space Oddity” to 2013’s “Dancing Out in Space” in the light of John Keats’s concept of negative capability. She argues that Bowie’s space and alien imagery is developed “in anticipation of the deaths of self, the anthropocene, humanity, and the Earth itself,” so that Bowie’s alien and space imagery involves him both refusing the certainty of oblivion via Keatsian negative capability and asserting an extension of human experience beyond the seemingly doomed confines of earthly life. Bowie’s androgyny, drug use, and subversion of social norms all fall under the umbrella of his space alien trope. In addition to the song “Space Oddity,” she discusses songs from the albums The Man Who Sold the World, Ziggy Stardust, Young Americans, Station to Station, Scary Monsters, and The Next Day to develop her argument, setting them against Romantic-era texts such as John Keats’s letters and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Eric Pellerin considers one of the ways in which Bowie attempted to transcend ordinary human experience in “Drug Use and Literature from the Eighteenth Century to David Bowie,” performing exactly the task described in his title, surveying drug use from Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey in the late eighteenth century to David Bowie, passing through Baudelaire, Victorian pre-Raphaelites, and Aleister Crowley on the way. He begins his study with Bowie’s reference to hashish on The Man Who Sold the World in 1970 and ends with references to Bowie’s cocaine use on Station to Station in 1976. As he does so he specifically discusses the influence that Crowley and the Pre-Raphaelites had on Bowie during this period, with a special focus on Crowley and the links between drug use and occult mysticism. Pellerin argues that Bowie’s attraction to drugs followed a Romantic impulse to reenchant the world in the face of encroaching modernity and a desire to enhance creativity and achieve transcendence in a way consistent with his occult readings during this period. Bowie finally gave up in the face of diminishing returns and real danger to his own life. William Levine studies Bowie’s 1970s’ film career in the light of Romanticism in “Capitalist Co-optation, Romantic Resistance, and Bowie’s Allegorical Performance in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth.” Levine asks, “In what ways can David Bowie’s performance as Thomas Jerome Newton … be said to effect the oppositional, holistic, regenerative force of Romanticism against the fragmenting, dehumanizing, economically reductive, rationalizing, and instrumental ends of modernity?” In this film, Newton is an alien who left his home world,

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ravaged by drought and nuclear war, for Earth in order to gather resources to build a rescue ship, one that could relocate his people from his home planet, including his own wife and children. Levine posits that the film implies a Romantic home world of origin against the capitalist modernity of late twentieth-century Earth, one dominated by Newton through the use of patents for advanced technology. Over the course of the film, however, Newton ultimately abandons his plan to save his home world and begins to foster an idealized Romantic community on earth. Levine also considers what this film meant to Bowie during the 1970s, who said it was “allegorical” on a “private” scale, to illuminate Bowie’s own Romanticism and his artistic output through this period. Ultimately, the film’s complex interaction between Bowie’s musical and film personas, and the film’s engagement with Romanticism and capitalism, forces viewers to “confront the problems of reactivating Romantic resistance from a subject position deeply implicated in the regime of late modernity and the entrenched aesthetic legacy of modernism.” Paul Rowe’s “Relics of the Future: The Melancholic Romanticism of Bowie’s Berlin Triptych” argues that Bowie’s “Low, ‘Heroes,’ and Lodger are imbued with a Romantic form of melancholia expressive of both mourning and resilience.” This melancholia, per Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre’s study Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, is an expression of resistance to capitalist modernity and the alienating effects it has on the subject. Rowe traces expressions of melancholia in select tracks from Low and “Heroes,” bringing Bowie’s songs into conversation with William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, and John Keats. He demonstrates how “Low, ‘Heroes,’ and Lodger educe the alienation and transcendent aspiration of the Romantic artist to imbue even the most mundane aspects of modern life with the power of myth.” Julian Knox’s “Elegance and Decadence: Bowie, Krautrock, and Trans-­ European Romanticism” discusses Bowie’s work against the background of 1970s’ European experimental artists such as Neu!, Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Tempel, Ashra, and Manuel Göttsching. Bowie’s European predecessors are themselves examined in the light of German Romanticism in Novalis and the Schlegels as examples of “transcendental universal poesie,” which forms the background for Bowie’s own development of this tradition. As it moves forward from Bowie’s Station to Station through the Berlin albums that ended the 1970s, Bowie’s Berlin albums are considered in the light of Wordsworthian solipsism, Coleridge’s own journey of self-discovery in Berlin, and Bowie as

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Byron, particularly the Byron of Beppo and as a Romantic ironist. Knox’s chapter argues that in Bowie’s own brand of postmodernism during his late 1970s albums, “we are confronted with a Romanticism not as antithetical to or obsolete in the face of an overarching postmodernism, but rather as an essential, human, vital component of it.” Samuel Gladden’s “‘Rebel Rebel’: Bowie as Romantic ‘Type’” examines Bowie’s output from the 1982 album Let’s Dance to the end of his life against the claim that “Bowie embodies the Romantic type,” or rather, a series of Romantic types with each consecutive decade marked successively by “domination, reinvention, and authenticity, real or supposed.” The 1980s to the early 1990s were marked by commercial domination, celebrity culture, and Bowie as Tonight’s Screamin’ Lord Byron, the 1990s by reinvention, and the 2000s by authenticity, with Bowie embodying Shelleyan Romanticism, all having in common Bowie’s own version of “the Romantic figure as a disruptive cultural type.” Aglaia Venters’s “The Goblin King, Absurdity, and Non-Binary Thinking” argues that David Bowie’s 1986 film Labyrinth is paradigmatic for David Bowie’s Romanticism throughout his career in his performance of the Goblin King. Venters asserts that this performance both relies on and benefits from Bowie’s public personas prior to the making of the film, so that while watching Labyrinth viewers bring into Bowie’s performance his previous characters as well. In this film, Bowie reflects one of the primary characteristics of Romanticism, the destabilization of binary thinking, making the Goblin King, presumably the film’s antagonist, to be a potentially positive figure that ushers protagonist Sarah Williams (perf. Jennifer Connelly) into an adulthood characterized by responsibility and nuance as opposed to thinking in simple, socially determined binaries. In so doing, Bowie’s performance illustrates the role that Romanticism has played throughout its history to the 1980s. James Rovira’s “1. Outside as Bowie’s Gothic Technodrama: Fascism and the Irrational at the Turn of the Millennia” examines David Bowie’s 1. Outside as Bowie’s commentary on life in the 1990s, at the close of the millennia, but also as Bowie’s reconsideration of his artistic oeuvre and a continuation of his engagement with post-World War II fascism. It follows the development of 1. Outside from its source material in the unreleased Leon suites and then reviews plot, character, diction, and setting to organize the material in this very nonlinear drama. Using Löwy and Sayre’s discussion of “fascistic Romanticism” in Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, Rovira then explores the significance of Bowie’s combination

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of the technological and the irrational in a Gothic drama for our understanding of the forms that fascism is taking today. Jennifer Lodine-Chaffey’s “David Bowie’s 21st Century Ars Moriendi” considers David Bowie’s video “Lazarus” as a Romantic variation on the Early Modern ars moriendi tradition. This tradition both prepared the dying for an artful death and directed those left how to mourn. As a modern exemplar of this tradition, Bowie teaches us how to use “art to cultivate the type of community necessary to shape a meaningful experience of death.” Drawing from Philippe Ariès’s study of death, Lodine-Chaffey argues that the Romantic era, post-Enlightenment, recovered a variation of this tradition that valued the individual. Following attitudes toward death through the twentieth century, Lodine-Chaffey then demonstrates how Bowie’s ★ and the video for “Lazarus” recovers and reinvents the ars moriendi tradition as a contemporary Romantic artist, teaching us today how to create art out of our own deaths to leave for those around us. These chapters, I hope, come to be received as our way of loving the alien.

Notes 1. Paul Morley, The Age of Bowie: How David Bowie Made a World of Difference (New York: Gallery Books, 2016), 65. 2. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in The Early Illuminated Books: The Illuminated Books, Vol. 3, ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, Joseph Viscomi (Princton University Press, 1993), 152. 3. A brief note about the composition of these chapters: One of the limitations of working with song lyrics is that contributors can’t quote more than three lines from any one song across the entire collection without obtaining permission. That limitation restricts how often and how much we quote Bowie’s songs. Information about Bowie’s life and history recorded in multiple sources without attribution will be treated as common knowledge and not cited. 4. In a reader report for my proposal for Women in Rock, forthcoming Routledge 2022, Roger Whitson perceptively described my two previous Rock and Romanticism books as reception histories, which is how I had come to think of them by that point. 5. Toija Cinque and Sean Redmond, eds., The Fandom of David Bowie: Everyone Says “Hi” (Cham, Switerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 28. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., 2.

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8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 44–45. 10. Chris O’Leary, Ashes to Ashes: The Songs of David Bowie 1976–2016 (London: Repeater Books, 2019), 648. 11. Kathryn Johnson, “David Bowie is,” in David Bowie: Critical Perspectives, ed. Eoin Devereaux, Aileen Dillane, and Martin J.  Power (London: Routledge, 2015), 1. 12. Nicholas Pegg, The Complete David Bowie 7th ed. (London: Titan Books, 2016), 45. 13. John Keats, Letter to Benjamin Bailey (November 22nd, 1817), accessed April 14, 2021, http://keats-­poems.com/to-­benjamin-­bailey/. 14. James Rovira, Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2 (Lexington Books, 2018); James Rovira, Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 15. Lindsay Zoladz, “She’s Marianne Faithfull, Damn It. And She’s (Thankfully) Still Here,” The New  York Times, April 22, 2021, accessed April 28, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/22/arts/music/ marianne-­faithfull-­she-­walks-­in-­beauty.html?smid=em-­share. Many thanks to Joe Viscomi for directing me to this article. 16. Ibid. 17. Eric Pellerin’s chapter in this collection discusses Bowie in the context of drug literature. Regrettably, I had no contributions focused exclusively on David Bowie and Romantic celebrity, which is certainly an important avenue to explore, but Samuel Gladden’s chapter does engage studies of Romantic celebrity at points. See the work of Tom Mole and Ghislaine McDayter on Romantic celebrity and Nick Stevenson’s David Bowie: Fame, Sound and Vision (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2006) for a study of David Bowie and celebrity culture. Byron is the principal figure in Romantic studies of celebrity culture, but McDayter extends this study to Austen and Landon. 18. My initial conception of this collection was a shorter version for a peer-­ reviewed, online-only publication—I’d made contacts from mid-January to early February 2016. It was somewhat underdeveloped at the time, so rejected, and one of the contributors developed her proposal into an article published elsewhere. 19. “Celebrity Deaths in 2016: Some of the Many Famous Figures We Lost This Year.” NBC News and the Associated Press. Last updated January 1, 2017. Accessed April 9, 2021. https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/ 2016-­y ear-­i n-­r eview/look-­b ack-­a ll-­f amous-­f igur es-­w ho-­d ied­2016-­n698791. Of related interest is the collection by the brother/sister

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team Lee and Andrew Fearnside O! Relentless Death! Celebrities, Loss, and a Year of Mourning (Chimera, 2017), which gathers twenty-three relief images with text by contributors in memory of the many writers, artists, musicians, and other figures who died in 2016. 20. Morley, 63. 21. Blake, 152. 22. Dennis Johnson, David Bowie: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (London: Melville House, 2016), 106. 23. Bethany Usher and Stephanie Fremaux, “Turn Myself to Face Me: David Bowie in the 1990s and Discovery of Authentic Self,” in David Bowie: Critical Perspectives ed. Eoin Devereaux, Aileen Dillane, and Martin J. Power (London: Routledge, 2015), 58. 24. Cameron Crowe, “David Bowie—Playboy Magazine: A Candid Conversation with the Actor, Rock Singer and Sexual Switch-hitter,” September, 1976, accessed April 13, 2020 http://www.theuncool.com/ journalism/david-­bowie-­playboy-­magazine/. 25. Wendy Leigh, Bowie: The Biography (New York: Gallery Books, 2014), 15–16. 26. Simon Reynolds, Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century (New York: Dey St., 2016), 98. 27. David Bowie, “10. Interview,” 50th Birthday Broadcast: 1997 Acoustic Celebration PARA404LP Parachute Recording Company, 1997. LP. 28. As of the time of this writing, Peter Frampton’s most recent release is a collection of instrumental cover songs, one of them being a tribute to David Bowie, his cover of “Loving the Alien.” The video for this song begins with a photograph of Bowie, Peter Frampton, and Owen Frampton together, and then alternates between performance footage of the song and archival photographs with video of Frampton performing with Bowie, so that the title becomes a memorial, an expression of mourning, and a statement about Frampton’s intent for recording the song. See Peter Frampton Band, Frampton Forgets the Words, Universal Music Enterprises B0033088-01, 2021. LP. 29. Johnson, 63. 30. Cinque and Redmond, 196. 31. Renée Graham, “When David Bowie Played Soul Train,” The Boston Globe, January 11, 2016, accessed May 2, 2021, https://www.bostonglobe. com/opinion/2016/01/11/when-­d avid-­b owie-­p layed-­s oul-­t rain/ rdRpRG5GHZoinXPnhw7daN/story.html; Ben Kaye, “David Bowie Takes MTV to Task for Not Playing Black Artists in 1983,” Consequence of Sound, June 17, 2020, accessed May 2, 2021, https://consequence. net/2020/06/david-­bowie-­mtv-­black-­artists-­1983-­interview-­watch/.

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32. “A 13-year-old Jimmy Page on TV (1958, in colour),” Facebook. Accessed April 10, 2021. https://fb.watch/4O4-­IIcwvR/. 33. Johnson, 22. 34. “Beckenham Arts Lab,” David Bowie, accessed April 10, 2021. March 24, 2001. https://www.davidbowie.com/2001/2001/03/25/celebrating­david-­bowie-­and-­the-­beckenham-­arts-­lab. 35. “Live for G,” Facebook, David Bowie—Stargirl, accessed April 19, 2021. “Happy Birthday Conan O’Brien from All of Us,” https://fb. watch/4ZB_qWIvS2/. 36. Paul Trynka, David Bowie: Starman (New York: Little, Brown & Company, 2011), 59. 37. Johnson, 53. 38. Pegg, 56. 39. Crowe. 40. Ibid., 472. 41. Morley, 50. 42. Blake, 158. 43. “Extravagantly Questioning,” Facebook, David Bowie—Stargirl, accessed April 13, 2021. Interview with Kerry O’Brien for Australian TV, February 16, 2004, https://fb.watch/4RtfjPxNfb/. 44. Reynolds, 82. 45. “Isn’t She Lovely?” Facebook, David Bowie—Stargirl, accessed April 14, 2021. Interview with Valerie Singleton on BBC’s Tonight, February 12, 1979. https://fb.watch/4Tei27EfjL/. 46. “David Bowie—Playboy Magazine.” 47. Johnson, 37. 48. “Extravagantly Questioning.” 49. Pegg, 429. 50. Judith A.  Peraino, “Plumbing the Surface of Sound and Vision: David Bowie, Andy Warhol, and the Art of Posing,” Qui Parle vol. 21, no. 1 (Fall/Winter 2012): 164. 51. “Back to Earth: The Return of David Bowie,” Fred, November 14, 1977, 13. 52. Ibid., 41. 53. Paul Gorman, “David Bowie,” MBI 1995, accessed May 15, 2021, https://web.archive.org/web/20010716140714/http://www.algonet. se/~bassman/articles/95/mbi.html. 54. David Charlton, ed., E.T.A.  Hoffmann’s Musical Writings: Kreisleriana, The Poet and the Composer, Music Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1989), pp. 237, 238, 250.

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55. Morley, 50. 56. Blake, 158. 57. Pegg, 424. 58. Johnson, 101. 59. My reference to first- and second-generation Romantics reflects a now outdated view of the Romantic poets being the Big Six—a first generation of Romantic poets consisting of Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge followed by a second generation consisting of Byron, Shelley, and Keats, with Jane Austen and Mary Shelley canonized somewhat later. A pantheon rather than a canon of Romantic authors would be more appropriate to discuss, but these studies in rock and Romanticism seem to validate generational differences, as I argue here, so that the concept of first- and second-­ generation Romantics might be reevaluated in the light of a pantheon of authors. 60. David Bowie, 1. Outside—The Nathan Adler Diaries: a hyper cycle. Virgin Records, 1995. 7243 8 40711 2 7. Compact disc. 61. Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, trans. Catherine Porter (Durham: Duke UP, 2001), 17. I explain the history of the term “Romanticism” in both of the previous Rock and Romanticism collections cited above in much more detail. 62. James Rovira, ed., Rock and Romanticism: Post Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2018), 15. 63. James Rovira, ed., Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2 (London: Lexington Books, 2018), xviii. 64. Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition, ed. and trans. by Howard V.  Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton University Press, 1983), 170. 65. James Rovira, ed., Reading as Democracy in Crisis: Interpretation, Theory, History (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019), 8–9. 66. Samuel L. Gladden, “Manner, Mood, and Message: Bowie, Morrissey, and the Complex Legacy of Frankenstein” in James Rovira, ed., Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms (Cham, CH: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 146. 67. Philip Auslander, Performing Glam Rock: Gender & Theatricality in Popular Music (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2006), 63. 68. Gladden, 147. 69. Morley, 80. 70. James Rovira, Blake and Kierkegaard: Creation and Anxiety (London: Continuum, 2010), 42.

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71. Richard Fitch, “In this Age of Grand Allusion: Bowie, Nihilism, and Meaning,” in David Bowie: Critical Perspectives ed. Eoin Devereaux, Aileen Dillane, and Martin J. Power (London: Routledge, 2015), 24. 72. Emily A.  Bernhard-Jackson, “‘Sometimes I feel like the whole human race’: Lord Byron and David Bowie Consider the Question of Identity,” Byron Journal 46.2 (2018), 119. https://doi.org/10.3828/bj.2018.17.

CHAPTER 2

David Bowie and Romantic Androgyny James Rovira

Introduction When did you hear of David Bowie’s death and how did you respond? I thought “we are screwed; the guardian angel for all freaks is gone and we are doomed.”1 Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling.2

David Bowie was an icon before I first saw him perform on Saturday Night Live on December 15, 1979, but until those performances at the onset of the 1980s he was just a voice on the radio and photos in magazines. The show opened with a skit about someone having a sex change operation. The audience laughed. When Bowie walked on stage they understood the reason for the skit. Bowie performed “The Man Who Sold the World,” “TVC15,” and “Boys Keep Swinging” in three separate segments, songs representing his music from 1970, 1976, and his most recent

J. Rovira (*) Keiser University, Merritt Island, FL, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Rovira (ed.), David Bowie and Romanticism, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97622-4_2

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album Lodger, which had just come out earlier that year, bookending 1970s’ Bowie with a stop in the middle. I was fifteen years old at the time and deeply embedded in Southern California surf culture, an extension of hippie counterculture from just over ten years before. Boys and girls often dressed alike in jeans and t-shirts and none of us cut our hair much, but the girls brushed theirs. We were either tanned or sunburned, we felt one with nature when surfing, and because of that feeling, we thought the point of life was authenticity. Our most natural selves, our authentic selves, were our real selves. The most shocking thing I’d experienced before the end of 1979 was seeing the words “LED ZEPPELIN SUCKS” spraypainted inside a concrete culvert tube by local skate punks. My mother and grandmother tried to raise me Catholic, but until then I’d never felt the thrill and disgust of blasphemy. Then came Bowie. For his performance of “The Man Who Sold the World,” Bowie dressed in a tuxedo doll costume so stiff he had to be carried into position by his two male backup singers. The plastic suit looked ceramic. His male backup singers wore skirts that went to mid-calf, one all in black and one in red. Klaus Nomi and Joey Arias,3 his backup singers, were both made up like techno geisha girls. Bowie sang “The Man Who Sold the World” robotically, reminding me in hindsight of another Bowie fan, Gary Numan, and his style of performance. An obsessive fan, actually. Numan released two albums in 1979, both of which hit number one in the UK, one with his early band Tubeway Army, the other his first solo album The Pleasure Principle. Bowie was annoyed enough to reference Numan disparagingly in a song, which is for me one of Bowie’s low points. For “TVC15” Bowie wore a purple skirt and button up jacket, gray block-heeled pumps that looked lavender in the lights, and red stockings. I don’t actually know women’s clothes that well. I had to look all of this up. For “Boys Keep Swinging” he dressed in greenscreen and had a marionette’s body projected over his own as he sang a song mocking male stereotypes while his freakishly oversized head loomed large over his backup singers. And what the heck did they do to that dog? Why is there a television in its mouth? My fifteen-year-old self couldn’t assimilate Bowie’s gender subversion: both of his appearances as a male that night were completely artificial, one kind of boy doll or another, the former’s movement completely restricted and the latter’s hyperactively unnatural. My reaction wasn’t necessarily to his implied homosexuality. Bowie seemed more natural in women’s

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clothes. At least dressed as a woman he could move naturally, seemingly more human than in his men’s costumes. What really got to me at the time was Bowie’s imposition of artifice. Viewing Bowie’s performance after being immersed in a culture of authenticity was unnerving. I can report, however, that commentators on authenticity versus artifice in rock accurately represent the details of my own lived experience. Simon Reynolds describes glam as a “complete inversion of the hairy ‘n’ heavy rock that preceded it… Glam also inverted the political and philosophical principles that underpinned late-sixties hippy-era rock… glam celebrated illusion and masks instead of truth and sincerity.”4 Philip Auslander in Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music asserts that the “counterculture’s deep investment in the idea of authenticity entailed a necessary antipathy to theatricality.”5 He records that the fluidity of hippie androgyny flowed in the direction of eliminating masculine and feminine [my female friends and I did wear similar clothing and hair] in favor of a new third term thought to transcend the dichotomy. That third term, however, was to be enacted sartorially, not sexually. As George Mosse observes, the hippies’ “clothes and appearance tended to blur [gender] distinctions, and yet they were not meant to question a basic heterosexuality.”6

Bowie’s theatrical androgyny disrupted a culture of authenticity that was already, but only to an extent, committed to eliminating masculine and feminine as categories. Bowie’s theatricality meant he stylized his female appearance too, looking more like an imitation of a woman than a woman, an impression reinforced by the fact that his heavily made-up face and short hair remained the same in all three performances, as if his bodies were interchangeable. He wasn’t just cross dressing—this wasn’t a drag show. He made no attempt from the beginning to convince mainstream television audiences that he was in fact a woman until some reveal at the end, where the performer’s wig is pulled off and his lipstick smeared. Bowie had met Berlin transvestite Romy Haag some years before and incorporated elements of Haag’s show into his own, smearing lipstick across his face, for example.7 But not tonight. He made a different kind of statement, one perhaps even beyond gender fluidity. When Bowie “disputed the ideology of authenticity,” he did so in a way that posited “gendered identities as constructed rather than natural,”8 achieving this goal through his emphasis on artifice

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that night. I couldn’t understand Bowie’s facial expressions at the time, but after watching these performances again recently on Hulu I see he was smirking the whole time. I felt like he knew just how I was feeling and he was laughing at me. At the time, from the point of view of my late hippie subculture of nature and authenticity, Bowie’s performance was unnerving, unnatural to the point of being alien, but his music still stuck with me. For others, however, Bowie represented the freedom to be anything they could imagine, and he still does. Toija Cinque and Seam Redmond in The Fandom of David Bowie record one fan’s reaction to Bowie’s appearance on Saturday Night Live as follows: My proper introduction to Bowie was, well I was born in 1966, so I was 13 years old when I saw him perform on Saturday Night Live and I loved the music but again it was also the visual presentation, so one number he was in a dress, Klaus Nomi in a dress…that ruined my 13 year-old mind—in a very good way—and I remember his puppet body was superimposed with his head and that too really blew my mind away and it was like here is this sort of authorization, permission if you will to do what you want, to be different, and that ultimately led me to… (and I grew up in rural Indiana) and I craved deeply upon adolescence and since I carved [sic] escape from that, that area.9

Cinque and Redmond assert from this and similar fan reactions that “Bowie’s body is a site of both cultural dissent and aggressive agency, and functions as the sign of his unstable gender and sexuality.”10 He provided a space, a place, or a point of identification for those unrepresented by late 1970s’ culture, especially in their sexual orientations. Even the counterculture didn’t offer members of this group a home, but Bowie did. My own personal history with Bowie is not important, of course, simply because it is mine. It’s important as just one example of how Bowie was received, when he was received, and why he was received as he was.11 I was a latecomer to this reaction in 1979; the UK cover of his 1970 album The Man Who Sold the World began these reactions to Bowie, both positive and negative, who entered and then disrupted the late 1960s heteronormative, masculinist milieu I describe above. This culture was heteronormative and masculinist regardless of one’s politics, which were often defined in relationship to the Vietnam War—both hippies and conservatives participated in that heteronormative culture, but Bowie didn’t fit in with either. He was alien to both, and many commentators conflate “Ziggy Stardust’s identity as an alien with Bowie’s putative identity as a

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bisexual man.”12 However, Bowie’s outrageousness is not without historical precedent. This chapter on Bowie’s androgyny will take a history of ideas approach to human sexuality and gender fluidity to explain the origin and development of this alienness, so I will discuss androgyny in the Western tradition in Plato, Ovid, and Milton, comparing Milton’s account of angelic sex to that of his Biblical source material and other predecessors to illustrate just how radical Milton’s ideas were. Once the characteristics of Miltonic androgyny have been sketched out, I will compare them to Romantic androgyny and then demonstrate how Bowie’s own androgyny, in his life and art, fits the Miltonic/Romantic tradition. Bowie’s sexuality was as fluid and shifting through the 1970s as his characters, a point well illustrated by his 1979 Saturday Night Live performances, and this gender fluidity was specifically Romantic in nature. Ultimately, Bowie’s assertion of the “performativity of gender and sexuality,” an assertion that began before even Ziggy Stardust, “challenged both the conventional sexuality of rock culture and the concept of a foundational sexual identity.”13 Bowie’s challenge of “the concept of a foundational sexual identity” is ultimately his most radical statement, but it’s one that has a history. Since David Bowie’s gender bending, of course, was not without its precedents in rock itself, I would like to start there. Transvestism and androgyny found expression in the earliest days of rock and roll “because it has always been predicated on the spectacular display of male bodies … tendencies that first became highly visible, perhaps, with Esquerita and Little Richard in the mid-1950s.”14 Little Richard was certainly it for David Bowie, who said about hearing Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” at the age of nine, in 1956, “I had heard God. Now I wanted to see him.”15 He did finally see his god in 1963 at the Brixton Odeon after a series of acts that included the Rolling Stones, Bo Diddley, Duane Eddy, Sam Cooke, and others before Little Richard closed the night. Bowie was sixteen and performing with his first band, the Kon-rads, who attended the concert as a group. He remembers Little Richard being “Unreal. Man, we’d never seen anything like that.”16 It’s significant that he was energized by Little Richard at such a young age because Richard was the earliest gender-­ bending marquee performer in rock and roll, almost providing a roadmap to Bowie’s future career as a flamboyant, extravagant, and professedly gay rock performer. Richard wore pancake makeup and eyeliner in concert to present a less sexually threatening figure to white audiences as a Black performer—an effeminate Black man was more acceptable than a heterosexual one who might seduce their daughters17—but he wore his mother’s makeup as a child and his father beat him for it. He was bisexual in practice

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from his teen years on and struggled with drug and sex addiction to the point of being arrested in Macon, Georgia in 1955 for sexual misconduct. Richard vacillated between a religious and a rock and roll identity from the mid-1950s through the 1980s, but during the 1980s he settled for the latter and then revived his career with the 1986 film Down and Out in Beverly Hills, a film released the same year he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s inaugural class. Little Richard’s interest in religion, sexual excess, gender bending, and film all seem to anticipate Bowie’s career on a number of points and inspired him from a very young age.

Milton as the Origin of Romantic Androgyny David Bowie is accepting if there is no struggle there is no progress18 Without Contraries is no progression.19

Extending the discussion beyond Bowie’s precedents in rock, the following consideration of gender fluidity in the Western tradition starts with Milton’s Paradise Lost, looks back to the Greek and Roman era, and then moves forward to the early nineteenth century to illustrate the different conceptions of androgyny in English Romanticism and to establish how new Milton’s conception of androgyny really was. We will see how Miltonic androgyny is consistent with conceptions of androgyny held by English Romantics and those enacted by David Bowie. This discussion will therefore extend my previous argument that Milton didn’t just influence the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English Romantics, but was himself the first English Romantic, and that David Bowie was not just influenced by Romantic poets but was himself a Romantic poet, existing as part of a continuous, unbroken Romantic tradition that began with Milton’s Paradise Lost and continues into the present.20 Bowie’s gender fluidity, in other words, is specifically an expression of his Romanticism and can be better understood using the conceptual tools and historical insights provided to us by the study of Romanticism. When Milton explains human idolatry in Book I of Paradise Lost in terms of misguided veneration for angels, he reveals they enjoy a fluidity of physical form: For Spirits when they please Can either Sex assume, or both; so soft,

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And uncompounded is thir Essence pure, Not ti’d or manacl’d with joynt or limb, Nor founded on the brittle strength of bones, Like cumbrous flesh; but in what shape they choose Dilated or condens’d, bright or obscure, Can execute thir aerie purposes, And works of love or enmity fulfill. (I.423–31)21

Milton here introduces the fluidity not only of gender but of sex through his angels, who are able to manipulate their physical form at will, from fully incorporeal to fully embodied. Because of this fluidity of physical form, from male to female, angels “Can either Sex assume, or both,” thus asserting angelic androgyny. Milton’s insistence that angels can assume “either” or “both” sexes goes beyond simply asserting that angels can take on either male or female form. The word “either,” by itself, covers that possibility. Adding the word “both” implies angels can be both male and female simultaneously. Milton follows through by extending angelic androgyny to the full range of corporeal to incorporeal sexual possibilities. In Book V, the angel Raphael visits Adam and Eve to warn them about Satan, who had been detected infiltrating the Garden of Eden by another angel. Raphael returns to visit Adam and Eve again in Book VIII, where Adam asks a number of questions, including if and how angels have sex. Raphael blushes at Adam’s childlike question, but he answers it: Whatever pure thou in the body enjoy’st (And pure thou wert created) we enjoy In eminence, and obstacle find none Of membrane, joynt, or limb, exclusive barrs: Easier then Air with Air, if Spirits embrace, Total they mix, Union of Pure with Pure Desiring; nor restrain’d conveyance need As Flesh to mix with Flesh, or Soul with Soul. (VIII.622–9)22

According to Raphael, angels do have sex, and they can do so completely, with a full spirit to spirit intermingling without any of the barriers presented by confinement to physical form. But the passage in Book I also mentions that angels can engage in “works of love” in their physical forms, implying that angelic sex need not be purely ethereal either so can be experienced as either a man or a woman or as both at once, in

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androgynous form. Furthermore, angelic unions aren’t alien to human sexuality but exist on a continuum with it. Raphael defines angelic sex as its highest expression: in his words, “Whatever pure thou [Adam] in the body enjoy’st,” so on the same continuum with human beings, but at its “eminence.” In other words, angelic intercourse is the goal to which human sexuality aspires, or as Guy-Bray puts it, “angelic sexual expression is the standard of sexual expression.”23 The idea that angels can shift back and forth from corporeal to incorporeal forms is an old one. This tradition includes the possibility of angelic sex, starting with Milton’s source material in Genesis: And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose… There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.24

Milton draws from this source material to explain the origins of both human idolatry and the tradition of Greek demigods. But the Biblical tradition in English depicts solely male angels having intercourse only with human women and even marrying them, so Milton’s version of angelic sexuality in the Biblical tradition radicalizes it, as his angels are sexually fluid, able to assume either or both sexes. Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium considers the possibility of essentially heterosexual, bisexual, or homosexual human beings, as the first humans in his account had four arms, four legs, and two sets of genitals, able to be male/male, male/female, or female/female, so that when the gods split these original human beings in half, we were left seeking our soulmates—which could be the same or differently sexed depending upon our original form. He creates the possibility of a being who is both sexes at once and is undoubtedly another one of Milton’s sources for the development of his angels. But Aristophanes speculates about fixed, unchanging orientations directly tied to the primal physical forms that human beings possessed before intervention by the gods, which essentializes human sexual nature and aligns it with the body. Slightly later, Book IX of Ovid’s Metamorphosis depicts a same-sex, long-term, loving relationship between two women, Iphis and Ianthe. Iphis is socially gendered male to

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protect her from her father’s command to kill her at birth if she were born female. Iphis and her mother both panic when Iphis is required to marry, fearing their secret’s exposure, but the gods save Iphis by transforming her into a biological male before her wedding.25 Gender is fluid in Ovid, but sex is not except through special divine intervention. On the other hand, Milton’s angels, as created, experience both sex and gender fluidity and can experience sex of any kind in any form, and in a way that an angel’s spiritual or inner nature is not tied to one specific physical sexual identity. We could say that Milton’s androgyny is still based in a binary sexual system, as he only articulates the possibilities of “male,” “female,” or “both,” but he also describes the possibility of incorporeal sex, which presumably could include the unstated possibility “neither,” and it’s possible that “both” destabilizes the binary system completely. Furthermore, Milton establishes this nature of being as an ideal for all sexual relationships, including human, as a being’s sex is then tied only to their own sexual desire regardless of the body, and this sexual desire itself is not necessarily bodily. Milton therefore established transsexuality as both norm and ideal, introducing a radical androgyny into the Western literary tradition, one in which bodily form follows spiritual sexual desire rather than bodily form dictating the norms that human desire should follow. His ideal for sexuality introduces a radical sexual nonessentialism into Western thought. There is much more to consider, but Milton’s ideas are most important to this discussion for establishing this conceptual possibility at the onset of Romanticism, one reflected in figures more commonly identified as Romantic in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For example, Christopher Z.  Hobson identifies William Blake as one English Romantic who follows Milton’s lead, saying that in Blake “the emanations ‘stand both Male & Female at the Gates of each Humanity’ ready to ‘comingle’ in various combinations.”26 Furthermore, Hobson argues convincingly that the discourse surrounding the “1772 sodomy trial of Captain Robert Jones” reveals that there is “abundant evidence for some conceptions of homosexuality as a settled preference or cast of mind,” a date much earlier than previously thought.27 Milton’s ideas carried forward into the late eighteenth-century, eventually sparking the imagination of some first-generation Romantic writers to openly advocate for free love, polyamorous relationships, and either open marriage or the end of marriage. These views were propagated in the late eighteenth century by Mary Wollstonecraft’s husband, William Godwin (they married out of

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convenience), who inspired second-generation Romantics such as Percy Shelley. Percy Shelley is a significant figure here because of his very early novel Zastrozzi, which he wrote as a teenager. As David Sigler writes in Sexual Enjoyment in British Romanticism, “Shelley goes further in Zastrozzi than he would anytime else in his career in dismantling the gender binary: more than resisting, refusing, or perverting it, with Zastrozzi he negates the very possibility of sexual identity.”28 Because Shelley was so drawn to Godwin’s ideas, he sought him out, met Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and then ran away with and eventually married her. Milton opened the door to a conception of absolute sexual freedom and disembodied sexual identity that found open advocates over 100 years later. Keeping in mind that the word “androgyny” can refer to “both male and female,” “ambiguously male or female,” or “neither male nor female,” androgyny appears often in Romantic-era literature, its first important predecessor being Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium, whose explanation of romantic love “supports a normative view of androgyny, one in which heterosexual desire itself is a pursuit of an androgynous ideal in which male and female are not de-sexed but combined in one person.”29 Diane Hoeveler asserts that the “androgynous image assumed major importance during the English Romantic period,”30 then comments on how this tradition was modified by male English Romantics: “Instead of attaining a perfect, harmonious balance between the masculine and the feminine, Romantic androgyny consisted of masculine figures ‘cannibalistically consum[ing]…female characters, shap[ing] them into ideal alter egos, and most of the time destroy[ing] them’ in a ‘cycle’ in which glorification of women gradually gave way to ‘fear, loathing, and destruction.’”31 G.A. Rosso, contrasting text and image in William Blake’s work, observes that Blake within his text has a male figure consume a female one into a new androgynous being, but in his images this new being appears female, so that Blake’s ultimate intent is to destabilize sexual identity.32 Sigler identifies further possibilities within Romantic androgyny, observing that Charlotte Dacre’s gothic novel Zofloya, or the Moor (1806), “articulates a form of sexual identity not locatable in a two-sex system” and goes on to describe androgyny in Percy Shelley as dispensing with sexual difference entirely.33 Given the available conceptions of androgyny, the Romantics align with Milton but not with any other tradition.

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David Bowie’s Sexual Canvas “David Bowie is turning us all into voyeurs”34 Once I saw a Devil in a flame of fire, who arose before an Angel that sat on a cloud. And the Devil utterd these words… Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse. not from rules. When he had so spoken: I beheld the Angel who stretched out his arms embracing the flame of fire & he was consumed and arose as Elijah.35

I’m going to begin my discussion of Bowie’s manipulation of sex and gender by retreading some ground that will be very familiar to anyone who has followed Bowie for any length of time, starting with his coming out in the early 1970s but ending with the irony implied in his way of coming out, which will then lead into a discussion of Romantic irony and its relationship to Bowie’s manipulation of gender conventions. Commentators on Bowie’s sexuality during the early to mid-1970s place him at different points along a wide continuum. During the 1970s, the gay community was divided in its opinion of Bowie: “While some gay men regarded Bowie as a tourist, others saw him as a pop-culture pathbreaker, making it easier for others to come out.”36 Some members of the early 1970s’ gay community certainly had high hopes for him; one Gay News reviewer wrote of his 1972 Royal Festival Hall performance that “One day [David Bowie will] be as popular as he deserves to be. And that’ll give gay rock a potent spokesperson.”37 Bowie ran away from being any group’s spokesperson, and it is of course possible for Bowie to have been both a tourist and a liberator at the same time, but later reception histories of Bowie’s work emphasize his effect as a liberator: “Bowie’s rebellion through the creation of his androgynous persona Ziggy Stardust can be seen to offer other artists a new way to explore their own identity, therefore bringing about a gradual but unstoppable transformation in the criteria for gender performance.”38 While Bowie’s status in the gay community was much disputed during the 1970s in part because, as we will see, he kept changing his story, the effects of Bowie’s gender fluidity and coming out are today generally seen by fans as positive. When asked in one survey, “What does David Bowie mean to you,” one respondent answered, “Oh boy, where do I begin…Everything? He taught me many things that deeply influenced the

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kind of adult I became. He taught me that weird is not always a negative quality. Bowie introduced me to gender fluidity, and helped me figure out my own sexuality.”39 Another respondent said that “If there is a single message that carries through Bowie’s life, not just his music, it’s that we aren’t by ourselves.”40 These stories could be multiplied. Darryl W.  Bullock’s David Bowie Made Me Gay credits Bowie with being the turning point between coming out as a career ending move and coming out as hardly being news at all: Brian Epstein feared disclosure enough to be a victim of blackmail, while Freddie Mercury, Elton John, and Marc Bolan came out to hardly any notice at all.41 While it’s untrue that no star suffered from coming out after Bowie—Boy George was attacked for claiming to be bisexual42—Bowie still represented a turning point despite his later retractions. It should be clear, however, that the 1970s are the seminal period for any discussion of Bowie and androgyny. Former 1970s’ Bowie backup singer and lover Cherry Vanilla described Bowie as heterosexual but experimenting, like everyone else at the time, and former MainMan employee Tony Zanetta said Bowie “was bisexual, but what he was really was a narcissist—boys or girls, it was all the same. He was attracted to the gay culture because he loved its flamboyance,”43 which fits the pattern of a hedonist aristocrat like Byron, Shelley, or Dorian Gray. Many say that Bowie was androgynous, but Paul Morley develops that point: “For him androgyny was a mental thing as much as a physical one, an expansion of perception, which is where his more literal followers and copyists missed the point, assuming it was simply about appearance, girl as boy, boy as girl. … The music and words are always refracted through an androgynous mind,”44 making Bowie sound like a later twentieth-century counterpart to Virginia Woolf. If we take this statement at face value, then we might understand that Bowie’s performance of androgyny in his characters was an aesthetic response to an inner state, a way of controlling and manipulating his varieties of sexual desire through his art. David Jones painted onto David Bowie, onto his public surfaces, his sexual identity,45 shaping and performing his varied and nonnormative sexual identities to reflect and disrupt the ways he imagined it would be received in his heteronormative culture, all of which converged on the idea that he was some kind of alien from outer space. Chad Bennett, employing Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to analyze the film Velvet Goldmine in which a thinly veiled Bowie character appears, links queer performativity to shame, but not necessarily negatively. He reads

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Bowie and Sedgwick through the lenses of Oscar Wilde to describe the transformation of “‘appalling denunciation’ into erotic confession” to lead to the conclusion that “transformational shame…is performance.”46 This performance may have been driven in part by the stigma associated with homosexual desire or in part to being a beautiful boy, so a consistent object of male as well as female desire. But this emphasis on surfaces is also due in part to the rise of pop photography, which illustrate how much Bowie’s motivations were overdetermined within his early milieu: This intensified enjoyment of one’s own image on the part of young men in the sixties—something that was regarded as “effeminate” and “poofy” by old-fashioned menfolk—owed a huge amount to the ascent of the photographer to star status. “The pop photographer … has transferred those qualities which, until the 60s, were thought of as essentially homosexual and made them available to what used to be known as ‘red-blooded males.’”47

But Bowie, most importantly, made the spaceman cool, and in the form of Ziggy Stardust, he made it a savior. Bowie himself is all over the place in his interviews throughout the 1970s, moving from a declaration of his homosexuality to the same for his bisexuality to an assertion and denial of both in the same year, 1976: In one single year, 1976, he told a British journalist that his professed bisexuality “was just a lie … I’ve never done a bisexual action in my life, on stage, on record, or anywhere else,” but also recounted his same-sex history to Playboy, which started with “some very pretty boy in class in some school or other that I took home and neatly fucked on my bed upstairs” and continued intermittently.48

In terms of observable behavior, biographers record that Bowie had four serious relationships, all with women: Hermione Farthingale in the late 1960s, who left him; then his first wife Angela Barnett, married in 1970 and divorced in 1980, with whom he had a child, Duncan Jones (b. 1971); afterwards an engagement with Melissa Hurley in 1989, ended by Bowie in 1990; and finally his marriage to Iman in 1992, which lasted until his death in 2016 and with whom he had a daughter, Alexandria Zahra Jones, in 2000. He has said at different times his marriage to Angela in 1970 was one of convenience, but at the same time, he was so distracted with her immediately after their wedding that his bandmates had to drag him away from her so that he could write lyrics for The Man Who Sold the World,

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inconsistent with his later claims to be homosexual and that his marriage was just one of convenience. To further complicate perceptions, at the time of his coming out he was married to Angela and they had a son. Bowie and Angela did however have an open marriage in which they both recruited multiple partners of both sexes for orgies: “Bowie and Angie had soon turned their home into something like a sex-and-style laboratory, picking up blokes and girls from such venues such as gay disco The Sombrero, a night spot frequented by Bowie not primarily as a pick­up joint but rather as a way to get a hit of the flamboyance of gay style and hear some disco music.”49 Additionally, Bowie’s “The Width of a Circle,” appearing on The Man Who Sold the World (1970), describes a first homosexual encounter so powerful it transforms the participants into gods: “Got laid by a young bordello / I was vaguely half asleep / For which my reputation swept back home in drag,”50 the last line reflected by the UK album cover, on which Bowie lounges on a couch wearing a dress. Other lines in the song refer to oral sex between male participants with cheeks aflame and to the venom of a snake, a possible reference to male ejaculation. The intensity and descriptiveness of these lines seem to validate Bowie’s stories about teenage homosexual experiences. All the while there was Bowie’s interest in media manipulation at work.51 Coming out as gay certainly helped Bowie’s career in the UK: “It was Melody Maker that made me … that piece by Mick Watts,” Bowie recalled in the middle of 1973. “It all exploded.” Yet the funny thing about the Shock Revelation is that the quotation was immediately followed by a hint of doubt: “There’s a sly jollity about how he says it, a secret smile at the corners of his mouth,” Watts observed.52

This description of the UK reaction to Bowie’s coming out should be tempered by the fact that he believed it worked against him in the United States, which may account for his changing his story for different venues. But there it is. The smile. The grin. The smirk. It’s significant that Bowie’s tuxedo doll suit worn for his 1979 SNL performance of “The Man Who Sold the World” was Dadaist inspired: The continued evidence of Dadaism is evident in sketch designs by Bowie for an extraordinary black and white geometric outfit worn on the set of Saturday Night Live in 1979. Like the Diamond Dogs set, the final costume was realized by Mark Ravitz. Bowie sent a sketch to Ravitz accompanied by

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images of two seminal pieces of Dadaist theatre: Hugo Ball at the Cabaret Voltaire, in a similarly restrictive tubular costume, and a scene from Tristan Tzara’s 1929 play Le Coeur à gaz [The Gas Heart].53

His gender bending on SNL was Dadaist rather than an authentic expression of inner sexual desire. He sought to destabilize. And the smirk indicates a comic intention as well, as the tuxedo doll costume is Pierrot, the French clown.54 Bowie would later say of this period, in the 1980s, that he just didn’t know who he was, and by that time, and for the rest of his life, he settled into heterosexuality, at least in any publicly observable way, but sexual androgyny does show up again in the mid-1990s in “Hallo Spaceboy,” again associated with space alien imagery. Bowie’s smirk takes on importance as an ironic gesture, one that seems consistent with the use of irony by German Romantics. I’m going to use Kierkegaard as a commentator on Romantic irony in a way that we will see extends to David Bowie, partly because Kierkegaard is an insightful commentator on European Romanticism, and partly because Bowie scholarship has already established links between Kierkegaard’s thought and Bowie’s. Tara Isabella Burton identifies significant similarities between Kierkegaard’s use of pseudonyms and Bowie’s various personas in “From Vigilius Haufniensis to Ziggy Stardust: Pseudonyms, Irony, and Truth in Kierkegaard and Bowie,” where she names Kierkegaard as one of Bowie’s “philosophical antecedents.”55 One of her most important points of comparison is on the use of pseudonyms: “Kierkegaard used pseudonymous authorship, and a multiplicity of identities, to both highlight the toxicity inherent in extreme artificiality—the self that creates itself—and expand the notion of truth beyond the merely referential … Truth … was, for Kierkegaard, more than about factual propositional content. It was about the relationship between the teller and the listener.”56 Burton develops a number of insights in the space of a very short chapter; I would develop her insights into the social context of truth telling to add that Kierkegaard locates the birth of subjectivity in irony because the individual uses it to gain distance from social expectations. In German Romantic irony, “[The ironic subject] is free from the constraint in which the given actuality holds the subject, but he is negatively free and as such is suspended, because there is nothing that holds him”…This suspension in possibility is a state of refusal to decide. Through irony the aesthetic—the Romantic—individual imagines numerous possibilities for the self while negating all possibilities as

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actualities to be chosen, but an unchosen self still remains lurking behind these possibilities, considering them.57

Romantic irony, as opposed to ethical or Socratic irony in Kierkegaard’s argument, is the movement to be free from the constraint of influence, to choose to make and unmake and then remake the self at will—like one of Milton’s angels—hiding one’s true self even from oneself but especially from external eyes, diverting the gaze that would finally understand you and, in doing so, define you. A Romantic ironist is perfectly capable and would even enjoy, for example, the opportunity to give conflicting answers about his sexual identity in two different interviews in the same year. But the Romantic ironist could only do so if there was nothing really at stake. This pattern is remarkably similar to Richard Fitch’s argument in “In this Age of Grand Allusion,” which also references Kierkegaard, and in which he wonderfully and unexpectedly argues that What is disputed is the power of the claim that Bowie’s chief intellectual significance lies in the conscious transformation of self. Rather it lies, according to the argument of this chapter, in his artful manipulation of social norms, and his sensitivity as to how the disintegration of these norms can affect us.58

I would encourage us to accept Fitch’s comment as a description of Bowie’s evolution as an artist, however, and not a statement on his entire career, so that he evolved from “conscious transformation of self” to “artful manipulation of social norms.” It is perhaps best to say both were occurring simultaneously throughout the 1970s. But in 1972 Bowie was more focused on the transformation of self, and by the 1979 SNL performance Bowie was more interested in emphasizing the manipulation of social norms. Bowie therefore presents a very intense, long-term study in identity formation, reformation, self-presentation, and reinvention, especially in relationship to sex and gender, contributing to an understanding of and relationship to the self that has evolved over the course of a long and complex history. Kierkegaard argues in On the Concept of Irony that through the use of irony Socrates created the single individual, a person whose identity stood apart from his or her social milieu. Others argue that Shakespeare invented the human, who certainly exhibited the belief that human identity can be manipulated by social forces in a number of plays.

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I believe the Romantic era represented a moment in which humanity fully accepted that lesson and the possibility of complete freedom it entailed. Cinque and Redmond suggest that David Bowie performed “emotion work…which is work requiring the artist to perform the ‘right’ feeling and ultimately even ‘feel’ the right feeling according to the rules of the setting and often in the service of commerce… [which] operates via the conviction that social relationships are considered to be ‘authentic’ or ‘real’ mainly by virtue of their commitment to the ‘inner psychological concerns of each person.’”59 What makes Bowie such a special case is that he both performed as an emotion worker in this sense while simultaneously disrupting conventions and even the notion of authenticity at the same time. To be authentic would be to denounce, but Bowie “does not denounce, as is usually the case in punk and folk, but he renders absurd [like a Romantic ironist—JR], often by creating an absurd, otherworldly reflection of the world.”60 Emily Bernhard-Jackson negotiates the concepts of persona, performance, and posing in relationship to David Bowie and Lord Byron in this way: “This open suggestion that surface is all the depth there is, this public blurring of posing and performance, in its turn suggests that performance, even the performance of everyday life, is really nothing but posing.”61 I appreciate Bernhard-Jackson’s insights, but I don’t know that I accept the “nothing but” reduction of Bowie’s posing or of our own: I think Jones’s performances were an active way of aesthetically crafting his self upon the surfaces of his creation, David Bowie, and in so doing he attempted to control social reactions to his interior self. The complexities of these interrelationships both reinforce the fact that Romantic-era study can lend insights into this current figure and illustrate how Bowie extended Romantic conceptions of identity to his own sexuality. I think the most important question I have about Bowie’s sexuality, and its performance, I’ve already asked: “What the heck did they do to that dog?” Bowie’s 1979 appearance on Saturday Night Live didn’t shift between male or female but destabilized both by creating the impression of artificial bodies: Three different bodies rotated around underneath the same head, two of them artificially male and one organically male but gendered female. His costume choice may have been a commentary on masculinity as he perceived it, at least at the time: constraining, artificial, and externally manipulated, but he didn’t commit to being female either. As a true Romantic poet, he most closely fits the pattern of nineteenth-­century Romantic androgyny by disposing of sexual difference altogether. Perry Meisel’s The Cowboy and the Dandy observes that when confronted with a

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dialectic, Romantic authors choose neither one side, nor the other, nor a synthesis: “In Romantic rock and roll, American expansionism is a Wildean sham grounded not in freedom but in a flight from influence. … The African-American reversal of the Romantic paradigm makes clear what is at work within the Romantic paradigm all along: the undoing of its own presumptions to truth, the denaturing of all assumption…”62 Given two choices, the Romantic picks a third, given three, a fourth, because only by creating new possibilities do we escape the confines and self-­ defining nature of influence. Bowie, when confronted with socially constructed influence to be either male or female in predefined ways, chose both in a way that radically destabilized them through his aesthetic of techno irrationality: he put a television in a dog’s mouth. He made himself out to be an alien. This form of androgyny is uniquely consistent with Milton’s and that of the Romantics. 1970s’ Bowie escaped from influence in order to create, and in doing so transformed himself into one of Milton’s angels, or in his own mythos, an alien,63 one completely free to follow his desire regardless of his bodily or socially defined identity. This movement from the body and from the social to the individual exactly replicates existential growth in Kierkegaard: from the aesthetic, bodily-oriented individual through the ethical, socially oriented individual to the religious sphere of pure spirit, like Milton’s angels. I should add that in Kierkegaard this movement towards realization of the self as the single individual begins with romantic love.64 What Bowie also represents, however, is the very definition of Queer identity: By creating a persona based on the unknown, he was able to experiment with gender and sexuality, particularly in terms of performing gender and sexuality outside of heteronormative culture … Bowie performed queerness, implying that there are multiple sexual identities and behaviors.65

In so doing, he modeled for uncounted numbers of people the freedom to be themselves. But by positioning him in the context of this brief history of ideas, Bowie also allows us to see in Milton the birth of Queer identity as an integral part of the Romanticism that he inaugurated, one that continues into the present.66

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Notes 1. Toija Cinque and Sean Redmond, eds., The Fandom of David Bowie: Everyone Says “Hi” (Cham, Switerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 204. 2. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in The Early Illuminated Books: The Illuminated Books, Vol. 3 ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N.  Essick, Joseph Viscomi (Princeton University Press, 1993), 148. 3. “David Bowie on Saturday Night Live in 1979,” accessed April 20, 2021, https://www.thinwhiteduke.net/602/david-­b owie-­p erformances/ david-­bowie-­saturday-­night-­live-­1979/. 4. Simon Reynolds, Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century (New York: Dey St., 2016), 5. 5. Philip Auslander, Performing Glam Rock: Gender & Theatricality in Popular Music (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2006), 10. 6. Ibid., 31. 7. Alina Mae, “Romy Haag: Queen of the Underground,” Exberliner, May 29, 2014, accessed May 3, 2021, https://www.exberliner.com/features/ people/queen-­of-­the-­underground/. 8. Auslander, 40. 9. Cinque and Redmond, 58–59. 10. Ibid., 58. 11. See my discussion of academic fandom in the first two pages of the introduction to this collection. 12. Auslander, 134. 13. Ibid., 106. 14. Ibid., 33. 15. David Buckley, Strange Fascination: David Bowie, the Definitive Story (London: Virgin Books, 2005), 16. 16. Dennis Johnson, David Bowie: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (London: Melville House, 2016), 83. 17. Janelle Okwodu, “Little Richard Changed the Course of Fashion History Too,” Vogue, May 11, 2020, accessed May 2, 2021, https://www.vogue. com/slideshow/little-­richard-­rock-­n-­roll-­fashion-­impact. 18. Paul Morley, The Age of Bowie: How David Bowie Made a World of Difference (New York: Gallery Books, 2016), 135. 19. Blake, 144. 20. James Rovira, ed., Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 14–16. See the Introduction to David Bowie and Romanticism for further discussion of Bowie as a modern-day Romantic.

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21. John Milton, Paradise Lost, in The Complete Poetry of John Milton, ed. John Shawcross (New York: Doubleday, 1971), 262. 22. Ibid., 419. 23. Stephen Guy-Bray, “‘Fellowships of Joy’: Angelic Union in Paradise Lost,” in Early Modern Culture vol. 10, Queer Milton (2014): 20. 24. Genesis 6:1–4, The Authorized (King James Version), Biblegateway, accessed April 26, 2021, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/? search=Genesis%206&version=AKJV. 25. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. David Raeburn (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 374–379. 26. Christopher Z. Hobson, “Normalizing Perversity: Blake and Homosexuality in 2013,” in Sexy Blake, ed. Helen P.  Bruder and Tristanne Connolly (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 230. 27. Ibid., 225; 227. 28. David Sigler, Sexual Enjoyment in British Romanticism: Gender and Psychoanalysis 1753–1935 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), 181. 29. James Rovira, “Silly Love Songs, Gender, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Avengers: Age of Ultron,” in Assembling the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Essays on the Social, Cultural and Geopolitical Domains ed. Julian C. Chambliss, William L. Svitavsky, and Daniel Fandino (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2018), 105. 30. Diane Hoeveler, Romantic Androgyny: The Women Within (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), 4. 31. Sherry Truffin, “‘Crying like a woman ‘cause I’m mad like a man’: Chrissie Hynde, Gender, and Romantic Irony,” in Rock and Romanticism: Post Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms ed. James Rovira (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 71. 32. G.A. Rosso, The Religion of Empire: Political Theology in Blake’s Prophetic Symbolism (Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press), 155–6. 33. Sigler, 151, 181. 34. Morley, 53. 35. Blake, 186. 36. Simon Reynolds, “How David Bowie Came Out as Gay, (and What He Meant by It),” October 2016, accessed April 27, 2021, https://longreads. com/2017/02/22/how-­d avid-­b owie-­c ame-­o ut-­a s-­g ay-­a nd-­w hat-­ he-­meant-­by-­it/. 37. Auslander, 134. 38. Peri Bradley and James Page, “David Bowie—The Trans Who Fell to Earth: Cultural Regulation, Bowie and Gender Fluidity,” Continuum 31(4) (2017): 586. 39. Cinque and Redmond, 35.

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40. Ibid., 47. 41. Darryl W. Bullock, David Bowie Made Me Gay: 100 Years of LGBT Music (New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2017), 11–12. 42. Ibid., 296–7. 43. Reynolds, “How David Bowie Came Out.” 44. Morley, 225. 45. See Chap. 1 of David Bowie and Romanticism for a development of the idea of David Jones as a painter and David Bowie as his canvas. 46. Chad Bennett, “Flaming the Fans: Shame and the Aesthetics of Queer Fandom in Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine,” in Cinema Journal vol. 49, no. 2 (Winter 2010): 23. 47. Reynolds, Shock and Awe, 85–6. 48. Reynolds, “How David Bowie Came Out.” 49. Buckley, 80. 50. David Bowie, “The Width of a Circle,” in The Man Who Sold the World, RCA LSP-4816, 1972. LP.  Originally released in the United States on Mercury Records in 1970. 51. See Chap. 10 in this collection for a discussion of Bowie’s interest in “media manipulation.” 52. Reynolds, “How David Bowie Came Out.” 53. Kathryn Johnson, “David Bowie is,” in David Bowie: Critical Perspectives ed. Eoin Devereaux, Aileen Dillane, and Martin J.  Power (London: Routledge, 2015), 13. 54. Aileen Dillane, Eoin Devereux, and Martin J. Power, “Culminating Sounds and (En)visions: Ashes to Ashes and the Case for Pierrot,” in David Bowie: Critical Perspectives ed. Eoin Devereaux, Aileen Dillane, and Martin J. Power (London: Routledge, 2015), 35. 55. Tara Isabella Burton, “From Vigilius Haufniensis to Ziggy Stardust: Pseudonyms, Irony, and Truth in Kierkegaard and Bowie,” in Masks: Bowie & Artists of Artifice, ed. James Curcio (Bristol, UK: Intellect Ltd., 2020), 123. 56. Ibid., 124. 57. James Rovira, Blake and Kierkegaard: Creation and Anxiety (London: Continuum, 2010), 118. 58. Richard Fitch, “In this Age of Grand Allusion: Bowie, Nihilism, and Meaning,” in David Bowie: Critical Perspectives ed. Eoin Devereaux, Aileen Dillane, and Martin J. Power (London: Routledge, 2015), 23. 59. Cinque and Redmond, 119. 60. Fitch, 24. 61. Emily A.  Bernhard-Jackson, “‘Sometimes I feel like the whole human race’: Lord Byron and David Bowie Consider the Question of Identity,” Byron Journal 46.2 (2018), 120. https://doi.org/10.3828/bj.2018.17.

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62. Perry Meisel, The Cowboy and the Dandy: Crossing Over from Romanticism to Rock and Roll (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 10. 63. See Ken McLeod, “Aliens, Futurism and Meaning in Popular Music,” Popular Music vol. 22, no. 3 (Oct. 2003): 337–355 for an excellent, brief overview of the figures of outer space and the alien in rock music, which even before Bowie’s first invocation of this trope represented a “general sense of alienation, and accompany a quest for higher or alternate states of being” (338). In many ways Bowie’s use of the alien fits completely within this trope. 64. See Rovira, Blake and Kierkegaard, chapter 3. 65. Julie Lobalzo Wright, qtd. in Cinque and Redmond, 52. 66. For an extension of this discussion of glam to 1990s’ indie rock, see Sara Cohen, “Popular Music, Gender and Sexuality” in Simon Frith, Will Straw, and John Street, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 226–242.

CHAPTER 3

Negative Capability in Space: The Romantic Bowieverse Shawna Guenther

Even without their musical accompaniments and ostentatious theatrical presentations, David Bowie’s lyrics must be examined as significant literary works for their creative and social powers. Furthermore, Bowie’s response to and interaction with Romanticism is pivotal to understanding how Bowie’s poetic voice works. The coincidentia oppositorum1 of Romanticism allows the functionality of art as social agency demanded by Bowie himself: “Art can be a political reference, a sexual force, any force you want, but it should be useable.”2 In this chapter, I assert that Bowie’s space/ alien lyrics express Keatsean negative capability3 in the often paradoxical— both egotistical and humble—visions of alternatives in anticipation of the deaths of self, the anthropocene, humanity, and the Earth itself. Bowie’s expressions of identity multiply into representations of complex, vast, and sublime escapism and the ability to rise—sometimes literally4—above intellectual, cultural, and social controversies that voice his negative

S. Guenther (*) Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Rovira (ed.), David Bowie and Romanticism, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97622-4_3

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capability. Bowie’s canon is overflowing with songs, albums, and personae about or related to outer space, aliens, and/or stars5 temporally associated with the Space Age and the ensuing popularity of science fiction, space technologies, and computerized human interactions. Like the Romantics, Bowie extends human experience beyond earthly imprisonment, envisioning extraordinary celestial heights out of a fear of losing self, society, and the planet. Bowie’s contribution to Romantic cultural representation of the potential to escape the world and self in imaginary extraterrestrial exploration is expansive and diverse. His innovative visions are both enhanced and inhibited by his cocaine psychosis, akin to the opiate-driven creativity of the Romantic poets themselves. The personal and social uncertainties Bowie locates in his space/alien lyrics are artistically beautiful but also terrifying, hopeful but hopeless, imaginable but unimaginable. Bowie’s space/alien lyrics, therefore, not only respond to Romanticism, but illuminate their importance in twentieth- and twenty-first-century cultural expression, iconoclastic power, and social voice. This analysis, then, provides insight into what Bowie has to teach us about the function of Romanticism beyond its own originary temporal and cultural spaces. Michael Löwy and Robert Sayer affirm that, in its essence, Romanticism is “revolutionary and counterrevolutionary,” “realist and fantastic,” “rebellious and melancholic,” and “mystical and sensual.”6 This is the Bowieverse. Famously, John Keats coined the term “negative capability” in an 1817 letter to his brothers. He wrote, “what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”7 Keats’s meaning may initially seem, to a twenty-first century reader familiar with new creative and imaginative technologies, a simple demand for the poetic mind to wander freely into creative realms that extend beyond what is realistically possible. Unpacking his more complex meaning is challenging. We must consider how negative capability functions for Keats, Romanticism, scholars, and contemporary artistic production that is so well represented by Bowie’s space/alien music. Löwy and Sayer’s definition of Keatsean negative capability as a paradoxical creative expression of internal experiential conflict provides an overall description of what the term encompasses. In creating his space/alien music, Bowie employs these aspects of negative capability not only to artistic benefit, but to engage culturally and socially with the rapidly changing world and several generations of listeners/readers.

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However, the various conclusions put forth by scholars in differing terminology and nuances can provide several core principles of negative capability that are important to contemporary literary criticism in general and to Bowie’s space/alien lyrics in particular. Ou Li contends that negative capability is the artist’s ability “to be open to the complexity of experience” but insists that that life experience must be “emotionally and imaginatively intense.”8 Further, Tim Milnes asserts that intense creativity privileges instinct and rapid recollection of past experience over active cognition.9 Not coincidentally, Bowie’s creative obsession with bodily experience associated with the differential materiality resultant of the antigravity of space centralizes his lyrical expression of negative capability. However, the experiential bodily knowledge central to artistic creativity comes with what Milnes has labeled an “emotional paradox.”10 Li explains that the poetic self “embraces human experience to the point of eliciting the paradoxical soul-making power from pains and troubles, and by doing so, transcends the ‘egotistical sublime’ of one’s own suffering.”11 Keats, Hasted argues, “invokes these associations to heighten the sense of hopeless longing in the poem, to complicate the divide between the mortal and the celestial, and to underscore his insecurities.”12 In turn, Bowie’s presentation of the poetic self within the space music frequently acknowledges (self-imposed) loneliness, a fear of corporeal loss, and the spuriousness of its own construction. From the beginning of his musical space explorations, Bowie recognizes the embodied experience in antigravity as symbolic of the fear of the death of self, a central principle of negative capability.13 The absence of gravity in space, for Bowie, reflects what Jack G. Voller defines as the sublime absence, “what might be called an absence of self, the suspension of most cognitive, emotional, and sensory faculties.”14 Leaving the scientifically created earth-like safety of his spacecraft in the first of Bowie’s space songs, “Space Oddity,” Major Tom reports, “I’m floating in the most peculiar way.”15 Whether this strange—and, to most, unimaginable— physical experience positively or negatively affects Major Tom is not revealed. The feeling is just different, just as the beginning of the Space Age marks the beginning of earthly cultural difference as well as the beginning of artistic difference for Bowie. The sublime experience of space travel and space living, imagined or real, becomes, in the 1960s and 1970s, the greatest representation of society’s imagination, and, as has been repeatedly made obvious in the following decades by Bowie and others— including musicians, writers, and filmmakers—is a paradoxically positive

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and negative experience through which “the mind operates in an emotional and aesthetic realm”16 regardless of the practical logic required to achieve space travel. Voller’s commentary refers specifically to the historical period of Romanticism, but his analytical position is valid for the creative production during the Space Age which, like the works of the Romantic poets, “increasingly came to be characterized by absence and negation.”17 The absences and negations of Bowie’s creative space output become weightlessness—beyond Earth’s gravity; peculiar bodily experiences—the reaction of the physical body to outer space; and the emotional (traumatic?) experience of being outside the Earth and its orbit—alone and in a precarious position. These physical and emotional experiences culminate in the sublime intimacy of viewing and existing in the eerie magnificence of space. Space becomes for Bowie’s characters the ultimate physical escape. Although Voller argues that negative capability necessitates a “slipping the shackles of self”18 to achieve sublime experience, Stuart A. Ende suggests that such slippage is, ultimately, “emotionally unfulfilling,”19 a terrifying recognition of eternity, mortality, and one’s own inadequacy. Stated another way, Gavriel Reisner contends that “the romantic paradox of Keats’s creative identity consists of its being simultaneously nothing and everything … the imagination born from the death of the self.”20 This “nothing and everything” becomes apparent when Bowie’s narrators lament the totality of their nihilistic visions from space while celebrating the totality of freedom. In Bowie’s “Loving the Alien,” the space traveling narrator describes the relentless tortures to his body and mind and the realization that prayers projected up to the sky are futile. Bowie satirizes earthly religious manipulation, persecution, and war as humans worship “the alien” god who does not exist. In “Hallo Spaceboy,” the confused Spaceboy repeatedly claims, “This chaos is killing me,”21 chaos seemingly being some social force preventing his mental and/or physical freedom. Countering the Spaceboy’s bid for freedom, the Other murmurs that moondust—perhaps a reference to the ashes covering the body at burial— will settle over the Spaceboy, keeping him stationary but, perhaps, releasing him into the freedom of oblivion. Continuing the downward spiral of earthly constraints on human bodies and spirits, the space traveler of “Dancing Out in Space” describes to his lover the physical experience of space life as “Something like a drowning”22—like the physical death of self that allows complete physical and mental freedom. Bowie repeatedly dramatizes the negative physical and emotional experiences of space along

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with its ability to free the body and mind from constraint throughout his space canon. In addition to such reactions of the body and mind, Bowie indicates that man cannot extricate himself from his own problems or those of the human race despite leaving the confines of society and Earth’s gravity. Louise Z.  Smith claims that our dreams—our creativity—are “not an escape from the jostling world, but an intense perception of beauty and truth in that world.”23 However, various Bowie narrators witness not the beauty of the blue planet, but “the saddest view” of Earth.24 Further, Li argues that creativity can express “a more truthful view of the world which is necessarily more disturbing or even agonizing for the self.”25 Bowie shows this from space. In the second half of Major Tom’s space adventure revealed in “Ashes to Ashes,” the disembodied self located in the abyss of space seems to be terrified. Reflecting on the isolation and silence of space, Major Tom cries, “The shrieking of nothing is killing me.”26 Robert Pattison correlates the narrator’s fears to those of the creator’s, stating, “The Romantic martyr is separated from his rock counterpart by the vulgar details of the rocker’s self-extinction.”27 But Bowie, as creator, performer, and creation, has no intention of expiring. While reaching toward his own (and his personaes’) extra-humanness, Bowie announces mankind’s annihilation in “Five Years,” within which he ironically and melodramatically announces and mourns the nearing global apocalypse. Bowie’s narrator represents Homo sapiens’ society reverting not to the emotional or bodily self, but to intellectual anxiety. He moans, “I had to cram so many things / To store everything in there.”28 Here, the fear of oblivion is deflected in the storage of memory—consider the idea of one’s life extended through the memories of others—which in the age of technology becomes not human memory but digital memory, anticipating the fears of posthumanism and artificial intelligence.29 Going further, Bowie mocks the self-created uselessness of Homo sapiens, predicting its extinction in “Oh! You Pretty Things” and signaling the arrival of “Homo superior” represented by future generations who may more successfully negotiate life through bodily experience and free creativity without destroying themselves or the planet. As James E. Perone states, Bowie is “describing the generational changeovers and the desire of each generation that life will be better for the next.”30 Further, Bowie suggests in “Loving the Alien” that time will collapse into simultaneous “Tomorrows and the yesterdays”31 when maximum creativity is achieved, with or without alien intervention.

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To attenuate the abject terror experienced in space by many of his narrators, Bowie frequently introduces messianism through characters that are nonhuman alien constructions and potential parodies of modern religions’ humanoid yet otherworldly gods. The most (in)famous of these is Ziggy Stardust.32 Tobias Rüther describes Bowie’s performative persona as “the king of fancy dress [who] cons his way to the top like no other pop musician before him, to the very top, to the end of the universe even, his ‘Ziggy Stardust’ represent[s] an androgynous Martian of Rock.”33 Ziggy is, as Reisner states above, “nothing and everything.”34 But drug-addled Ziggy becomes entirely self-absorbed in his own created self, performing “Like a leper messiah”35 until his extreme alienation becomes part of the human artistic experience and fails to sustain its aloof, otherworldly distance. He becomes normalized. Consequently, Ziggy’s extreme otherness loses its power as symbol of extreme creativity. On the same album, Bowie presents another space traveler who has the knowledge to succour mankind, but who understands that the separations of mind and body, the intellectual and the emotional, the logical and the creative have not yet equipped humankind to understand anything beyond its own experience. The character, known simply as Starman, seems to grasp the mysteries of existence, but even though his existence is observed by the narrator through extraterrestrial radio waves he will not make contact because “he thinks he’d blow our minds”36: humans have not given in to the full creative potential of their minds. The Starman’s message of escape, however, may be possible only for future generations, as he advises, “Let all the children boogie.”37 Ziggy’s otherworldly divinity is echoed in Bowie’s 1985 song “Loving the Alien” in which the audience is led (by Bowie? by the narrator? by the alien? by full access to creativity?) to believe “the strangest things”38 are both real and realistic. In “Oh! You Pretty Things,” Bowie again refers to a messianic alien—or at least the hand of one—that appears in the sky and promises some sort of renewal or return to a golden age “Where the books were found by the golden ones.”39 Löwy and Sayre contend that, for the Romantics, “the past is the period in which the various modern alienations did not exist.”40 Similarly, the real past, for Bowie, is one in which the alienation of space travel and intrusive, threatening technologies did not exist. Nevertheless, Bowie’s creative imagining of the past is not linear. His past is newly created by superior alien species who can rectify the mistakes of mere humans. This longing for superhuman power corresponds to Voller’s explanation of the Romantics’ desire for “the potential of human

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artistic and imaginative reach, the aesthetically represented spiritual longing for contact with the transcendent.”41 Through real and imaginary space travel and encounters with aliens (or being alien oneself), a type of sci-fi transcendence is accomplished. Generally, the possibility of alien messiahs exists beyond the self— except in the case of Ziggy Stardust—from some imagined other. However, in his Ziggy persona, as well as in many others, the distinction between Bowie as creator and Bowie as created is blurred to the point of near erasure. Indeed, Bowie frequently presents himself “as a work of art.”42 Bowie (the writer, performer, and artistic creation) successfully becomes the multiplicitous and confusing Other (male/female, sane/insane, earthling/alien, rebel/conformist, human/deity, creator/destroyer, and so on), an odd assemblage of cultural appropriations not unlike the bodily piecemeal that is Frankenstein’s creature—if the creature was sexually ambiguous and part alien. Voller suggests that such “visionary poetics” comprise the “Keatsean sublime.”43 Further, Ende proposes that “negative capability comes to mean, not the absence of identity, but the more moving situation of a partial surrender of identity to the power of otherness.”44 Bowie’s “voyeuristically offering himself up as an object,”45 then, takes Keats into the Space Age. In addition, Reisner explains that negative capability “establishes a creative emptiness, a receptive space in the self and the poem where the identity dissolves allowing the imagination to realize itself in object form.”46 Bowie accomplishes negative capability through his diverse personae and the blurring of that line between creator and created. This blurring, Löwy and Sayre assert, creates anxiety because the poet is in “a state of perpetual becoming.”47 Further, Gary Kelly explains that with the creation of several narrative and performative personae there comes an “increased anxiety over change; enhanced risk and trust; greater individual and local reliance on abstract systems…and the resulting usefulness of adaptable self-reflexive personal identity.”48 But Bowie does not fear the change, because everything is part of the totality. Bowie’s personae all have a place in the Bowieverse: “Bowie has turned time and time again to depicting various social outcasts who fit in only within their own subculture.”49 Bowie can imagine belonging everywhere, even in space. He transcends his own otherness. Despite the ubiquitous presence of the Bowie personae, Bowie’s Romantic vision respects the need for escapism, the “symbolic use to represent the human potential to harness the natural world and to free humanity from the chains of the past.”50 However, Bowie demands a

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solution, not based on “values and ideals driven from the past”51 as the Romantics would, but on the cultural production of functional art that builds on its predecessors. At the same time, Bowie employs the vastness of space and the excitement of the unknown to his creative advantage: space is the place of escape in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Bowie’s obsession with the extraterrestrial seeks to transform the artistic/ lived experience into one of ecstatic, confused escapism: sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. When asked how he explains his contradictions and paradoxes, Bowie, playing the character of “Bowie” during the interview, replies, “I lie… I can’t keep track of everything I say. Nothing matters except what I’m doing at the moment.”52 Just as the Romantics, Löwy and Sayre contend, complain that “modernity has eliminated the qualities such as beauty, imagination, and the colorful aspects of the material life of individuals, by reducing everything to a sullen, wearying, and uniform routine,”53 so Bowie emphatically asserts that rock “is depressing and sterile, and, yes, ultimately evil. Everything that contributes to stagnation is evil. When it has familiarity, it’s no longer rock ‘n’ roll.”54 Indeed, Bowie’s narrator in “I Took a Trip on a Gemini Spaceship” complains that everything is “The same old dream.”55 And as the Romantics use their contempt to “enable them to entertain alternative experiences and sensations and imagine things to be otherwise,”56 so Bowie recreates rock ‘n’ roll on his own terms, introducing sexual, gender, and identity confusion and the enigmatic mysteries of space. Bowie literalizes what Hasted contends is a central characteristic of Romantic negative capability, “that which cannot be easily observed, by what occurred behind the optical illusion of a fixed and calm starlit dome or firmament encasing the earth.”57 The Bowieverse becomes what Perone calls the “theatre for escape.”58 Despite any notion that the human body and mind can create or intuit the sublime experience, however, drug usage is rampant in the sphere of creativity. As part of the transcendent experience comes the supposedly liberating creativity of drug usage59—opium for the Romantics, cocaine for the rockers. Indeed, Pattison suggests that “Drugs are a natural part of any romantic regimen because they alter self in ways conducive to a nearer rapport with the infinite.”60 Bowie acknowledges drug usage as creative stimulant, making some of his poetic characters junkies: Ziggy “came on so loaded man”61 and Major Tom is “Strung out in heaven’s high.”62 However, as Pattison affirms, drugs can also “obliterate consciousness” and can function as “a means of accomplishing this rite of self-annihilation.”63 Drug use can negate the creative impulse, become addicting, and ultimately result in overdose.

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The other part of the equation (recall the formula of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll) is sex—sexual identity, sexual orientation, sexual action, and gender performance. Warren Stevenson argues that poetic androgyny is part of negative capability as a type of “half-knowledge.”64 The “ambiguity of sexual identity”65 described by Perone may be part of the “half-­ knowledge” that Stevenson describes. However, for the contemporary era, rock, according to Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie, “operates both as a form of sexual experimentation and as a form of sexual control.”66 In his personae and narrators, Bowie “ably captures the key contradictions in which masculinity is trapped: on the one hand, the artistic mindset, the work ethic and the behind-the-scenes stamp of an auteur…and, on the other, the apparently natural, effortless and emotionally inexpressive qualities that are likewise associated with masculinity.”67 In addition, Stan Hawkins asserts that Bowie’s “space-alien creature provided recourse to experimentation through the male performer extracting himself from a range of norms.”68 Philip Auslander extends the ability of rock’s experimentation to the glam rock of Bowie’s early years: “Glam rock was…a performance practice through which alternative realities could be enacted and tested.”69 In fact, Reebee Garofalo insists that “Glam, or glitter rock, challenged traditional notions of masculinity and femininity as no other music did.”70 Andrew Branch suggests that the appeal of glam resides “in its rejection of a traditional code of masculine attire, in favour of a more camp visual androgyny,”71 again, a significant part of Bowie’s self-­conscious performance strategy. So threatening was Bowie’s rejection of traditional masculinity, especially for a rock icon, that he became, in his own words, “a dangerous statement.”72 In openly challenging sex and gender norms musically and theatrically, Bowie glams onto another of the useful and transferrable principles of Romanticism: critical but artistic subversion. Löwy and Sayre contend that the Romantics disapproved of “the rapid and correlated development of science and technology”73 in the form of electricity and steam power. As a “dangerous statement,” Bowie times the release of “Space Oddity” to correspond with NASA’s Apollo 11 mission.74 Besides taking advantage of widespread interest in the space program to boost the popularity of his song, Bowie tapped into the creative potential people across the globe felt as space began to reveal its secrets to humans. However, early space exploration responded to and provided more than human achievement and innovation based on hopefulness and Romanticized experience. Space exploration was, in part, resultant of and enabled by capitalism and

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conflicting ideologies, illuminating another layer of Romanticism that infuses this subsection of the Bowie oeuvre. Bowie’s space is built on fantastic creativity rather than capitalism, nation building, and the assembling of weapon technologies in the Space Race.75 If, as Löwy and Sayre assert, Romanticism is a mode of reaction against capitalistic society and a critique of a “last stage of the ‘advanced society,’”76 twentieth-century development of orbiting satellites carrying nuclear weapons provides the ultimate threat to a technically advanced civilization that demands criticism and, for Bowie, extreme creative production. The onset of advanced technology also signified, for the Romantics, “the dehumanization of human life, the transforming of human relations into relations among things, inert objects” resulting in “a deep hostility to everything mechanical, artificial, or constructed.”77 Yet emerging technologies enabled the paradoxical experience that negative capability seeks. Paul Gilmore contends that “electricity could serve to describe aesthetic experience as linking individuals to the universe and to a universal humanity while also emphasizing both its power and its potential to disconnect them from the world.”78 For Bowie, developing technologies represent new ways of communicating in every form imaginable, providing changes in the ways humans experience life, particularly music, and how experience, especially art, can be created. However, the new technologies available to creators and their audiences also make available the erasure of the creator when music and other forms of art can be downloaded without acknowledgment of, permission from, or compensation to the creator. Frank W. Hoffmann correctly asserts that poetry and music are “Capable of communicating profound aesthetic and socio-political themes.”79 Löwy and Sayre assert that “Romanticism represents the revolt of repressed, channeled, and deformed subjectivity and affectivity” to ensure “a more favorable evaluation of madness, as the individual’s ultimate break with socially instituted reason.”80 This is particularly true of rock music which, since its inception in the 1950s, has “represented as a site of opposition to dominant cultural formations.”81 Ironically, Bowie presents his personae as “brazenly artificial,”82 openly displaying the madness of affectivity and idolization. The Bowieverse sustains a paradox in which Bowie exposes the cult of celebrity and artistic production within capitalist society to re-­ aestheticized aesthetics. Norma Coates asks, “What is at stake if rock [is] no longer conceived as a purveyor of dominant, hegemonic meanings and ideological control?”83 Bowie not only asks the same question, but answers it as he “heaps scorn on those who set out to form a

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counterculture to be fashionable.”84 For example, “Resurrecting androgyny and transvestitism through intellectual stylishness, Bowie not only rejected heteronormative constraints, but also heaped scorn on the machismo that typified the rock music of the day.”85 The ultimate expression of Bowie’s scorn is “Fame.” Bowie’s answer is that everything is at stake, particularly artistic creativity. In “Life on Mars?”, Bowie attacks the very commercially successful American symbol of Mickey Mouse and the reduction of John Lennon’s creativity to mere capitalistic production. Further, Bowie laments the adage that there are no new stories, an adage that succinctly states the erosion of human creativity and the decline of humanity. Bowie’s narrator sings, “the film is a saddening bore / ‘Cause I wrote it ten times or more.”86 When subculture becomes normalized, it is no longer subculture. Thus, as Voller suggests, Bowie exemplifies “the need for infinity inscribed into aesthetic theory a privileging of the boundless, the ungraspable, the indeterminate.”87 Bowie invokes the Starman’s “hazy cosmic jive”88 to express that mysterious voice that can only be appreciated by those expressing their own embodied creativity. In his numerous personae, Bowie89 (the writer, performer, and artistic creation) successfully becomes the multiplicitous and confusing Other (male/female, sane/insane, earthling/alien, rebel/conformist, human/ deity, creator/destroyer, and so on) as well as extra-human, alien, and space traveler. In addition, Bowie, following what Smith identifies as one of Keats’s main techniques for expressing negative capability,90 juxtaposes the negative, terrifying aspects of space with this desire for the boundless to create an ongoing narrative of the real technological threats to humans and humanity that were developing in the twentieth century and continue into the twenty-first. Bowie’s space song narrators personally experience time, space, and reality beyond earthly imprisonment, in extraordinary celestial heights, yet still experience fear of losing self, society, and indeed, the earth. The worst scenario for Bowie, enabled by a lack of knowledge or level of naivety that is exacerbated in the fast-moving, technological Space Age, is the failure to achieve the sublime experience of negative capability: the mysteries are in danger of eluding human creative imagination. Bowie sees that Wellsian extraterrestrial colonization looms large as the planet faces death, that metanarratives fail to provide collective succour, and that capitalism and technology can be reduced to mere fallacy. As his final imperative, then, Bowie insists that art is all that remains for humanity.

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Notes 1. Michael Löwy and Robert Sayer, Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity, trans. Catherine A.  Porter (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001), 1. 2. Cameron Crowe, “David Bowie,” in Playboy (September 2005). Reprinted in The Pop, Rock, and Soul Reader: Histories and Debates, ed. David Brackett (New York: Oxford, 2005), 281. 3. Meegan Hasted writes, “In fact, Keats’s poetry reveals a familiarity with, not only, ‘the modern astronomy, but with a general feeling of anxiety attached to the implications of the Romantic cosmology within popular culture” (Bright Star: John Keats and Romantic Astronomy, Ph.D. Diss U of Sydney, 2014), 57. 4. Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded his version of “Space Oddity” at the International Space Station in 2013 as a tribute to David Bowie. The video can be viewed on Hadfield’s website. “Space Oddity,” 2019, www. christhadfield.ca. 5. Consider the potential usage of the term “star” to represent celebrity status and actual celestial stars. 6. Löwy and Sayre, 1. 7. John Keats, Letters. 2019 [2009]. “On Negative Capability: Letter to George and John Keats, 21, 1827 December 1817.” “Essay on Poetic Theory,” 2019 [2009], Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org. 8. Ou Li, Keats and Negative Capability (London and New  York: Bloomsbury, 2009). 9. Tim Milnes, “Literature and Philosophy,” in The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism, ed. David Duff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 604. 10. Ibid., 604. 11. Li. 12. Hasted, Bright Star, 58. 13. Tobias Rüther, Heroes: David Bowie and Berlin, trans. A.  Mathews (London: Reaktion, 2004), 17. 14. Jack G.  Voller, The Supernatural Sublime: The Metaphysics of Terror in Anglo-American Romanticism (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1994), 11. 15. David Bowie, “Space Oddity,” recorded June 1969, Mercury Side A, 7 inch vinyl single. 16. Voller, 10. 17. Ibid., 10. 18. Ibid., 197.

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19. Stuart A. Ende, Keats and the Sublime (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 71. 20. Gavriel Reisner, 2003, The Death-ego and the Vital Self: Romances of Desire in Literature and Psychoanalysis (Madison NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), 76. 21. David Bowie, “Hallo Spaceboy,” by David Bowie and Brian Eno, recorded January–February 1995, BGM track 6 Outside, CD. 22. David Bowie, “Dancing Out In Space,” recorded 2013, on The Next Day, Spotify track 10 Digital. 23. Louise Z. Smith, “The Material Sublime: Keats and ‘Isabella,’” Studies in Romanticism 13. no. 4 (1974): 301. https://doi.org/10.2307/25599944. 24. David Bowie, “Loving the Alien,” recorded May 1984, on Tonight, EMI side 1 track 1 CD. 25. Li. 26. David Bowie, “Ashes to Ashes,” recorded April 1980, on Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), RCA side 1 track 4 Vinyl LP. 27. Robert Pattison, The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 124. 28. David Bowie, “Five Years,” recorded November 1971, on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, RCA side 1, track 1 Vinyl LP. 29. Löwy and Sayre affirm, “The Romantics were also haunted by the terrifying prospect that human beings themselves could be mechanized” (38). 30. James E. Perone, “David Bowie: Hunky Dory (1971),” in The Album: A Guide to Pop Music’s Most Provocative, Influential and Important Creations, Vol. 2 The Golden Age of the Singer Songwriter, 1970–1973, ed. Perone (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2000), 89. 31. Bowie, “Loving the Alien.” 32. Bowie presents Ziggy Stardust as rock messiah, alien, and androgynous. Ziggy’s Martian experience provides the overarching theme of an entire album. On its own, however, the character takes on its own life, fooling everyone that Ziggy is real—Bowie is Ziggy and Ziggy is Bowie. Even Bowie himself begins to believe the illusion, stating in an interview, “I became convinced I was a messiah” (Crowe, “David Bowie,” 280). 33. Rüther, 11. 34. Reisner, 76. 35. David Bowie, “Ziggy Stardust,” recorded November 1971, on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, RCA side 2, track 4 Vinyl LP. 36. David Bowie, “Starman,” recorded February 1972, on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, RCA side 1, track 4 Vinyl LP. 37. Ibid.

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38. Bowie, “Loving the Alien.” 39. David Bowie, “Oh! You Pretty Things,” recorded summer 1971, on Hunky Dory, RCA side 1, track 2 Vinyl LP. 40. Löwy and Sayre, 22. 41. Voller, 187. 42. Stan Hawkins, The British Pop Dandy: Masculinity, Popular Music and Culture (Surrey, United Kingdom: Ashgate, 2009), 5. 43. Voller, 185. 44. Ende, 103. 45. Hawkins, 4. 46. Reinser, 73. 47. Löwy and Sayre, 22. 48. Gary Kelly, “The Spectrum of Fiction,” in The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism, ed. David Duff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 188. 49. Perone, 96. 50. Paul Gilmore, Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 6. 51. Löwy and Sayer, 17. 52. Crowe, 278. 53. Löwy and Sayre, 36. 54. Crowe, 280. 55. Bowie, “I Took a Trip on a Gemini Spaceship,” by Norman Carl Odam, recorded October 2000–January 2002, on Heathen, ISO and Columbia track 8 CD. 56. Kelly, “Spectrum,” 193. 57. Hasted, Bright Star, 50–51. 58. Perone, “David Bowie,” 90. 59. Sharon Ruston, “‘High’ Romanticism: Literature and Drugs,” in The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism, ed. David Duff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 341. 60. Pattison, Triumph, 120. 61. Bowie, “Ziggy Stardust.” 62. Bowie, “Ashes to Ashes.” 63. Pattison, Triumph, 121, 122. 64. Warren Stevenson, Romanticism and the Androgynous (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), 117. 65. Perone, “David Bowie,” 88. 66. Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie, “Rock and Sexuality,” in Pop and the Written Word, ed. Frith and Andrew Goodwin (New York: Routledge, 1990), 372.

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67. Jason Lee Oakes, “‘I’m a man’: Masculinities in Popular Music,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology, ed. Derek B Scott. (Surrey United Kingdom: Ashgate, 2009), 229. 68. Hawkins, British Pop, 101. 69. Philip Auslander, “Musical Persona: The Physical Performance of Popular Music,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology, ed. D B Scott (Surrey, United Kingdom: Ashgate, 2009), 307. 70. Reebee Garofalo, Rockin’ Out: Popular Music in the USA. 2nd Ed. (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson, 2002), 246. 71. Andrew Branch, “All the Young Dudes: Educational Capital, Masculinity and the Uses of Popular Music,” Popular Music 31 (January 2012): 32. DOI: 10.1017/S0261143011000444. 2012 72. Crowe, “David Bowie,” 278. 73. Löwy and Sayre, Romanticism, 19. 74. David R. Williams explains that NASA’s Apollo program brought six crews of astronauts to the moon and back between 1969 and 1972. The first lunar landing occurred on 20 July 1969 when Apollo 11 landed on the Sea of Tranquility. “The Apollo Program (1963–1972),” 2013, www.nssdc. gsfc.nasa.gov. 75. Michael Kernan avers that the space race between the Americans and Soviets during the Cold War began in the 1950s with the development of nuclear weapons. In association with the development of intercontinental missile technology, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik II, transporting a live dog and a live nuclear warhead into space. The Soviets were also ahead of the Americans in obtaining pictures of the moon from probes and in attempting the first spacewalk. The Space Race, therefore, was a precursor to the Arms Race as advancements in technology and computers enhanced life on Earth, provided hope for live beyond Earth, and threatened to destroy the Earth (“The Space Race,” Smithsonian Magazine (August 1997). www.smithsonianmag.ca.) 76. Löwy and Sayre, Romanticism, 18. 77. Ibid., 20, 38. 78. Gilmore, Aesthetic Materialism, 6. 79. Frank W. Hoffmann, Chronology of American Popular Music, 1900–2000 (New York: Routledge, 2008), 254. 80. Löwy and Sayre, 25, 41. 81. Norma Coates, “(R)evolution Now? Rock and the Political Potential of Gender,” in Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender, ed. Sheila Whiteley (London: Routledge, 2005), 57. 82. Garofalo, Rockin’ Out, 246. 83. Coates, “(R)evolution,” 57. 84. Hawkins, British Pop, 159.

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85. Ibid., 18. 86. Bowie, “Life on Mars?” recorded June–August 1971, on Hunky Dory, RCA side 1, track 4 Vinyl LP. 87. Voller, Supernatural, 9. 88. Bowie, “Starman.” 89. Pattison calls him a “romantic martyr” (Triumph, 124). 90. Smith, “The Material Sublime,” 303.

CHAPTER 4

Drug Use and Drug Literature from the Eighteenth Century to David Bowie Eric Pellerin

In 1967, on June 1st, the same day the Beatles released their landmark album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, David Bowie released his debut album David Bowie.1 Among the crowd of notable people on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is Aleister Crowley, second from the left in the top left-hand corner. Crowley enjoys the company of authors like Edgar Allan Poe, Lewis Carroll, and Oscar Wilde along with the other famous actors, philosophers, and gurus that the Beatles had chosen as their heroes for the crowd of dignitaries on the album cover.2 Crowley’s presence here is his first high-profile reference on a pop music record. He was probably chosen by the Beatles to be on the cover because of his reputation as an experimenter with drugs and sex, something that was happening in the United Kingdom and America in the mid-1960s, and Crowley was looked at during this time as an early example of countercultural values.3 Crowley does not figure on Bowie’s debut LP, but by the time of Man Who Sold the World (1970) and Hunky Dory (1971), he would be an

E. Pellerin (*) Medgar Evers College, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Rovira (ed.), David Bowie and Romanticism, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97622-4_4

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influence directly on Bowie’s lyrics and continued to influence Bowie’s lyrics, ideas, and philosophies through the 1970s. Of particular interest to this chapter are Crowley’s experiments with drugs and his ideas about how drug use is related to creativity and religious experience, two ideas that Bowie also pursued in his work. Crowley had written and published works about drug use, most notably his roman à clef novel Diary of a Drug Fiend (1922). This novel mentions Thomas De Quincey’s and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s relationship with opium and their writing when describing the effects of heroin use. David Bowie has mentioned that he held a Romantic ideal of drug use on several occasions, and De Quincey and Coleridge are the two Romantic authors who have had the most significant impact on the Romantic idea of drug taking through works that were about drug use or were directly inspired by the authors’ drug use. This chapter seeks to understand David Bowie’s drug use in relation to Romanticism and drug literature of the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. I look at authors of Romantic drug literature like Coleridge, Baudelaire, and Thomas De Quincey to examine how this drug literature informed David Bowie’s own drug use and his ideas about drug intake in both his songs and life as a rock star. Bowie has said about drug use, “I think we are led to believe the mythology of drugs that, if we take them, we shall be in touch with the secrets of the cosmos.”4 He then told the interviewer that because he used drugs to such an excess any insights were probably lost, although he almost experienced the same feeling he got on drugs while meditating in the late 1960s. He said, “It’s just harder work, and drugs are the quick passport to nirvana.”5 This connecting of drug use to a state of higher consciousness is related to Crowley’s drug use and to his wanting to gain secret knowledge through occult practices. Crowley’s magical practices were informed by a Romantic conception of the past, of secret knowledge that had been lost in modern times but could be recovered through work in societies like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, who counted W.B.  Yeats among its members. Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey’s drug use informed their writing with a Romantic quality as well, for both looked back to non-Western societies with a Romantic longing. David Boocker noted in his essay on the Beatles and Wordsworth in Rock and Romanticism that Sayre and Löwy consider this nostalgia “Restitutionist Romanticism,” which is “a recovery of ‘what has been lost’ from the past.”6 Bowie used similar imagery, like the PreRaphaelite UK album cover for The Man Who Sold the World, an album

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which contains reverie-like lyrics that are related to the writings of De Quincey and Coleridge and authors who were influenced by them.

De Quincey and Coleridge’s Opium Dreams Romanticism for Sayre and Löwy is a reaction against modern society. They explain their concept of the Romantic movement as such: “Romanticism represents a critique of modernity, that is, of modern capitalist civilization, in the names and values and ideals drawn from the past (the precapitalist, premodern past).”7 One of the ways that the Romantics sought to use these ideals from the past was to “reenchant the world” that had been rationally explained by science. Sayre and Löwy note that one of the strategies to reenchant the world was reference to myths. Romantics like Coleridge and De Quincey would reference ancient and Oriental myths in their work, which give them an exotic feeling as well as serving to reenchant to the modern world.8 David Bowie’s third album, The Man Who Sold the World (1970), is where we first see an explicit use of Romantic themes by Bowie, starting with the UK cover. In the United States, the record company had used a cartoon illustration for the cover, but the UK version features Bowie reclining on a blue silk chaise lounge in a Max Fish “man dress” in his home at the time, the Victorian mansion Haddon Hall, in front of a William Morris screen and other objet d’art. It has the look of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, but it also evokes images of Victorian orientalism and opium use. Christopher Breward describes Bowie on the cover as wearing a “Mr. Fish ‘man-dress’ of cream velvet with a Beardleyesque print,” saying, “In his other hand he elegantly holds a single playing card above the pack of cards that has been strewn across the floor of a studio whose red curtains and exotic accessories mimic the fittings of a Victorian opium den.”9 The use of Pre-Raphaelite and Victorian era signifiers on the album cover connects it to the Romantic movement. Graham Hough in his book The Last Romantics explains the connection as being directly related to the art critic John Ruskin, as he explains, “Historically speaking, pre-Raphaelitism is a late flowering of the major romantic movement, induced by the new excitement about visual art for which Ruskin was responsible.”10 Ruskin’s influence would continue through to William Morris, who carried the Romantic ideas into the twentieth century.11 Bowie would still hold a Romantic orientalist idea of opium use a decade later when he told a music journalist in 1980, “I still have a pipe dream that when I am an old chap (the ‘p’ deliberately over-stressed) I shall go off

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to the Far East and smoke opium and go out in a sort of euphoric, cloudy bliss.”12 This Romantic ideal of opium use is something that has taken hold in the imagination of many artists and writers, and the two main Romantic authors most responsible for disseminating the Romantic idea of drug use are Thomas De Quincey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Both of these authors are linked by their close association with William Wordsworth, the Lake District, and their own opium use. Robert Morrison examines this relationship in his introduction to Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, where he states, “Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s public persona was by 1821 closely associated with opium dependence, unfulfilled potential, Gothic imaginings, the Lake District, the poetry of William Wordsworth, and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.”13 Morrison then explains that De Quincey “seizes on these circumstances, modifies them to suit his own experience, and then markets them in the Confessions with a savvy that Coleridge could not match.”14 De Quincey first published his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in the London Magazine in 1821 in two installments. De Quincey’s confessional memoir details his opium use and its effect on his imagination and dreams. What makes De Quincey different from Coleridge, one his main influences, is that he openly admitted to being an opium user and discussed taking the drug in detail, something that Coleridge never wanted to talk about publicly.15 Despite not wanting to discuss his opium use in public, Coleridge acknowledged that the main inspiration for one of his most well-known poems, “Kubla Khan,” was a reverie brought on by opium use in 1797.16 The poem’s first lines, “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-­ dome decree: / Where ALPH, the sacred river, ran / Through caverns measurless to man / Down to a sunless sea,”17 have become iconic in depicting a Romantic vision of an Eastern world. In the 1816 preface to “Kubla Khan,” which was published with two other poems, “Christabel,” and “The Pains of Sleep,” Coleridge explains that the poem had come to him in a waking dream under the influence of opium after reading a sentence from Purchas his Pilgrimage (1613) about Khan Kubla and his palace, but out of two to three hundred lines that he envisioned, he could only remember a small fragment after being interrupted while writing them down.18 It is this admission by Coleridge that has captured the imagination and led to the notion that opium use can lead to similar visions and inspiration. The orientalism of the poem’s imagery was an influence on De Quincey and his own descriptions of opium dreams in Confessions,19 which

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became the most famous account of an author’s drug use that inspired generations after to attain the same experiences by using opium or other drugs.20 Before De Quincey and Coleridge, opium use had been written about in the eighteenth century, but usually from the standpoint of its medicinal qualities. Robert Morrison outlines some key eighteenth-century medical texts on opium in his introduction to Confessions. He includes in his list A Treatise on Opium (1753) by George Young, Reflexions sur l’usage de l’opium (1726) by Phillippe Hecquet, Practical Hints on Opium Considered as a Poison (1790) by Robert Hamilton, and An Inquiry into the Nature and Properties of Opium (1793) by Samuel Crumpe.21 Morrison singles out Crumpe’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Properties of Opium as giving a good description of opium’s effects on users. Crumpe described feelings of increased cheerfulness and being alert followed by pleasurable relaxation, drowsiness, and inertia after he took large doses of opium.22 Alethea Hayter also notes that Doctor Crumpe’s work was “the most balanced summary of late eighteenth-century medical opinion on opium.”23 Crumpe took opium himself to understand how it worked, but he did not become an addict and was aware of the addictive element of the drug as well as its side effects.24 De Quincey made his own observations about opium and its effects on the imagination in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: It will only draw out revelations and dreams in those who are already predisposed to creativity and imaginative thinking.25 Those who are not inclined in this direction will not receive the same experiences as someone like Coleridge or De Quincey. Bowie said something very similar to Cameron Crowe in 1976. He felt that his own imagination was already better than anything drugs could produce, so his drug use was just building on his own substantial imagination and intellect.26 Bowie told Crowe that The Man Who Sold the World was his most drug-influenced album to date, saying, “Well, The Man Who Sold the World is actually the most drug-oriented album I’ve made. That was when I was the most fucked up… The Man is when I was waiving some sort of flag for hashish.”27 Hashish can produce waking reveries and hallucinations and has been linked with opium use in the works of Baudelaire and the more obscure The Hasheesh Eater: Being Passages from the Life of a Pythagorean (1857) by Fitz Hugh Ludlow. Both of these authors were heavily influenced by De Quincey, and the linking of hashish with opium use goes back much further to the time of Marco Polo and Purchas (who had inspired Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”). Hayter explains

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that hashish was the drug from an Arabic legend of Aloadine and the Old Man of the Mountains who gave his warriors hash to reach rapturous states, but the story got combined with opium use when it came to Europe from accounts like those of Purchas and Marco Polo.28

Bowie, Drug Use, and Rock ‘n’ Roll Romantics When discussing The Man Who Sold the World (1970) with Cameron Crowe in 1976, Bowie told Crowe that the cover was meant to be a parody of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Gabriel Rossetti.29 As I discussed previously, this image of Bowie reclining on a silk chaise longue recalls images of Victorian opium dens. This evocation of an earlier time, associated with orientalism and allusions to Romantic drug use, fits in perfectly with Romanticism as defined by Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre in Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity (2001). Löwy and Sayre believe that Romanticism is a reaction against capitalist modernity, arguing that “The Romantic critique is bound up with an experience of loss. The Romantic vision is characterized by the painful and melancholic conviction that in modern reality something precious has been lost.”30 They then explain that Romantics try to regain what has been lost by looking to the past, and as they put it, “The soul ardently desires to go home again, to return to its homeland, in the spiritual sense, and this nostalgia is at the heart of the Romantic attitude.”31 The Man Who Sold the World has been seen as Bowie’s first cohesive album,32 and the UK cover artwork echoes the drug reverie inspired lyrics and dark themes present in the songs. Bowie’s use of hashish and its influence on the album’s lyrics can be linked to Thomas De Quincey and his Romantic ideas about opium, which also relate to Löwy and Sayre’s idea that Romanticism is a reaction against modernity. In De Quincey’s sequel to Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Suspiria De Profundis, he felt that opium, as Robert Morrison put it, “offers great spiritual consolations to a population struggling to cope with the ‘colossal pace’ of industrialization and urbanization.”33 De Quincey believed that opium could assist in an individual’s dreaming and solitude as a way to escape from the modern world and reflect on their own intellect.34 Bowie’s use of hash and its influence on The Man Who Sold the World serve the same purpose. Bowie is able to escape the modern world of the late 1960s and early 1970s and create reverie-like lyrics that deal with mysticism, magic, and philosophy.

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The first track, “The Width of a Circle,” has striking similarities to Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and some early poetry of Aleister Crowley. In this epic track, which runs eight minutes seven seconds, Bowie narrates a mystical experience and a sexual encounter with what could be God and/ or the devil. Bowie tells us that after God hit the ground, a cavern appeared into which they both fell. In describing the sexual encounter after this fall, he sings, “Breathe, breathe, breathe deeply / And I was seething, breathing deeply / Spitting sentry, horned and tailed.”35 In “Kubla Khan,” Colridge describes a “romantic chasm” as “A savage place! As holy and inchanted / As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted / By a woman wailing for her demon lover! / And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething / As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing.”36 Aleister Crowley’s first published poem, “Aceldama: A Place to Bury Strangers In” (1898), also describes a sexual encounter with God. Gary Lachman tells us that Crowley’s poet ascends into heaven, where he discovers “God dwelling / Strong immaculate / He knew me and he loved! / His lips anoint / My lips with love.”37 Coleridge and Crowley’s poems evoke a space other than the modern world in which they were writing. Bowie’s “Width of a Circle” also accomplishes the same thing, a mystical and religious encounter, which serves to “reenchant” the world. Romanticism sought to reenchant the world as a reaction against modernity, according to Löwy and Sayre. Drawing on Max Weber, they explain that “One of the principal Romantic modalities for reechnating the world is the return to religious traditions, sometimes with mystical elements.”38 Bowie’s use of hashish enabled him to reflect on his dreams or reveries brought on by the drug and impart them in his lyrics. Other tracks on The Man Who Sold the World like “After All” and “The Supermen” also feature dream-like lyrics and allusions to Nietzsche and Crowley. How much of Crowley’s philosophy Bowie knew in 1970 is not known for certain, but he was reading his biography around this time. He told Steve Sutherland, a music journalist, in 1993 when asked about name checking Crowley in “Quicksand” on Hunky Dory (1971), “That’s when I had his biography in my raincoat so the title showed. That was reading on the tube.”39 Bowie’s interest at this time was casual, and Paul Trynka noted that “Whether David was a true adept of the philosophies he name-­ dropped is doubtful,” and, “describing his philosophical investigations of the time as mainly consisting of ‘keeping a book in my pocket, with the title showing.”40 Bowie would explore this subject in much greater depth

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in a few years, and read many more books related to Crowley and the occult by the time of Station to Station (1976). Even though Bowie was only skimming the surface of Crowley at this time, his use of hashish to induce mystical experiences was practiced by Crowley himself. Crowley had begun to experiment with drugs early on in his examination of the occult and Eastern religious practices like yoga. He had decided to dedicate himself to the occult and magic, and his first poem “Aceldama” (1898) hinted at themes that he would try to work out in actual practice throughout his life. As Gary Lachman has noted about Crowley in 1898, “Yet on a more immediate level, Crowley the literalist wanted something to do … Crowley’s decision to get a ‘manual of practical technical instruction’ and devote himself to ‘black magic’ was surely rooted in his taste for the ‘impossible.’”41 This search led him to join the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1898, the most well-known occult organization of the nineteenth century, whose members included William Butler Yeats and A.E. Waite. One of the Golden Dawn members, Alan Bennett, was already using multiple drugs like opium and cocaine to try to cope with asthma, and Crowley would begin his experimentation with these drugs around 1899 with Bennett.42 Bennett would also teach Crowley yoga, which he would combine with his magical studies.43 Crowley would compare mental states he achieved through yoga with those he attained through drug use. Crowley wrote an essay in 1908 under a pseudonym for his journal The Equinox in which he compared his own altered states from hashish use to states that could be achieved with yoga.44 Maro Pasi in his chapter “Varieties of Magical Experience” in Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism elucidates Crowley’s experiments with drugs and the link to spiritual practices: “It is clear that Crowley used these substances consistently in order to alter his consciousness and that he perceived this alteration to offer meaningful spiritual insights.”45 Crowley believed that a state like Samadhi in yoga enabled him to, as he said in his Confessions, “tap the energy of the universe.”46 Taking this further, Crowley felt that because he experienced similar states of mind while using drugs, they could be used to create this state of mind with drugs alone. In the same section of his Confessions, he states, “Why then should we not be able to devise some sort of pharmaceutical, electrical or surgical method of inducing Samadhi; create genius as we do other forms of specific excitement?”47 Of course this method is only a temporary shortcut, something that both Crowley and Bowie found out the hard way by indulging in drugs to excess.

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Bowie’s next album, Hunky Dory (1971), would show more interest in the idea of the aesthete and preoccupations with Aleiester Crowley and Nietzsche. In the song “Quicksand,” Bowie talks about being close to the Golden Dawn and being “immersed” in Crowley’s imagery. I think this is what attracted Bowie and other rock artists to Crowley, the idea of magical symbols and the practice of magic in the modern age. This is another strategy for “reenchanting” the world, and by choosing to practice magic in the literal sense, Crowley had become the occult’s most well-known figure by the late 1960s and early 1970s and was looked upon as a Romantic figure by some rock stars. Crowley himself would fit Löwy and Sayre’s definition of a Romantic, and they point out that religion was not the only way Romantics sought reenchantment: “They also turned to magic, the esoteric arts, sorcery, alchemy, and astrology.”48 Crowley devoted his whole life to these pursuits, and rock ‘n’ roll artists were drawn to them as a way to “reenchant” the world in the modern age. Hunky Dory also had Bowie beginning to show the influence that the Velvet Underground and Lou Reed had on his songwriting on record. “Queen Bitch” was a Velvet Underground pastiche and tribute, and Bowie had been a fan of Velvet Underground and Lou Reed since he was given a promo white label copy of their debut LP in 1967 by his then manager Ken Pitt.49 Lou Reed had written many songs relating directly to heroin use, among which “Waiting for the Man” Bowie covered in 1968.50 It could be Bowie’s love for the Velvet’s debut album and its frank tales of heroin use that led him to try heroin briefly in 1968. Bowie said to Cameron Crowe in 1976 about his drug use, “I haven’t gotten involved in anything heavy since ’68. I had a silly flirtation with smack then, but it was only for the mystery and enigma of trying it.”51 We can see that Bowie had a Romantic view of heroin use at this time and still had a related one when he talked about retiring to the Far East to smoke opium into bliss in 1980. Despite this Romantic fascination, he did not like heroin. He told Crowe that he liked fast drugs but did not like drugs that slowed him down or that stopped him from working productively.52 Bowie created a bricolage style based on his many influences, and this approach is first shown on Hunky Dory, as well as the idea of reinvention as a template for his whole career with the lyrics to the song “Changes.” He would continue to draw upon many different sources of inspiration, including his admiration of Iggy Pop, another rock ‘n’ roll heroin addict that Bowie would model his Ziggy Stardust character on in part for his next album Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972).53 Even

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though Bowie was fascinated by Lou Reed and Iggy Pop and their life of hedonistic drug use, Bowie himself did not use any drugs to any serious degree at the time of Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust. Drugs would only begin to be used by him on a regular basis once he became a superstar himself after the success of Ziggy Stardust.54 Bowie was not the only British rock ‘n’ roll artist to use depictions of an earlier time in British history that revealed nostalgia for a Romantic ideal of the past. The Beatles are the most well-known example of this use of nostalgia on the groundbreaking Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), with its Edwardian military costumes on the LP sleeve and lyrics that evoked earlier eras like the Victorian worlds of the circus and surrealist imagery of Lewis Carroll.55 Other British rock ‘n’ roll stars, like Jimmy Page, would dress like a British aesthete of the past, with crushed velvet suits and flowing ruffled shirts starting with his tenure in the Yardbirds from 1966 until 1968. Stephen Davis wrote of Page during this period, “But Jimmy was still fresh and enjoying every minute of his stardom, playing the costumed pre-Raphaelite dandy, in long hair, love beads, crushed velvet bell-bottoms, frilled lace shirts…”56 Page continued this look when he formed Led Zeppelin in 1968 through to 1969. Davis describes him as “dressed in his usual Regency look—the rose-colored velvet jacket, scarlet crushed velvet bell-bottoms, buckled boots of patent wine-dark leather.”57 Page’s band would continue to use a Romantic conception of the past with songs like “Stairway to Heaven” (1971) that harkened back to medieval British myths and traditions. Page was the one British rock star contemporary of Bowie’s that would share his interest in the Pre-Raphaelites, drug use, Romanticism, and the work of Aleister Crowley, and he would become central to the story of Bowie’s drug use and interest in the occult. Page and Bowie had actually known each other from when Page was one of the top session musicians in London and had worked on one of his earlier singles for the Manish Boys in 1965. Page even gave Bowie a riff that showed up on “The Supermen” from The Man Who Sold the World.58 Both Bowie and Page more than any other rock stars of the time could be considered Romantics in the same manner as Coleridge and De Quincey. They had both been to art school and were lovers of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. An early example of their rivalry in the 1970s was when Page outbid Bowie to buy William Burges’s former home, The Tower House, from actor Richard Harris in 1972, which Page owns to this day.59 The Tower House is masterpiece of medieval

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revival Pre-Raphaelite architecture and is just as ornate as Burges’s Cardiff Castle in Wales.60 Page, like Coleridge, never wanted to discuss his drug addiction in public. Bowie, like De Quincey, did not shy away from talking about drug use, especially during his Playboy interview with Cameron Crowe in 1976 where he discussed his drug use frankly. Page’s drug of choice became heroin some time in 1975–1976,61 with the addiction beginning to affect his live playing noticeably in 1977. It was only in 2012 that Page finally provided some clues to his drug addiction in an interview that he gave with Rolling Stone. Page, like Bowie, held a Romantic notion of drug use, which could be partially explained by his admiration of Crowley, who had written extensively about heroin use in Diary of a Drug Fiend (1922). When asked by David Fricke of Rolling Stone in 2012 about his drug use while in Zeppelin and after, Page said, “There were decades of decadence, then not quite-decades of sobriety. As far as things that I could see were seriously dangerous, I flirted with them. There was an intoxication, and that was it. It was a romance that passed.”62 The language that Page uses to describe his drug addiction reveals that he still holds an idealized vision of it. In the same interview, he explains his lifestyle during the 1960s and 1970s. When asked about his excessive drinking, Page said, “I was enjoying myself. I was determined not to be miserable. I wanted to take it all on board—this lifestyle and the party aspect that went with it.”63 This reasoning, living the life of a rock star to the fullest, is one of the reasons that Bowie began using cocaine more and more starting in 1974, and his use would come to a head in 1976. Bowie’s drug use, apart from his hash period while making The Man Who Sold the World, was very little compared to his contemporaries. He told Cameron Crowe in 1976 that he had only tried acid three times: “I did it three times. It was very colorful, but I thought my own imagination was already richer. Naturally. And more meaningful to me.”64 He also told Crowe that he first tried cocaine in the 1960s with some merchant seamen who had brought it back from the docks.65 Even though he had tried cocaine in the 1960s, he did not become a regular user until around 1974, after the success of Ziggy Stardust (1972) and Aladdin Sane (1973). Marc Spitz felt that part of the reason Bowie started using cocaine is that it enabled him to enjoy his success and feel like he had finally made it, despite the fact that he didn’t have much money to show for it at the time.66 Spitz notes that Bowie may have also taken cocaine to boost his confidence: “Sigmund Freud, another celebrated user, wrote of ingesting ‘a little

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cocaine, to untie my tongue,’ and this was likely a bonus for David, who at heart was a painfully shy, suburban kid.”67 Bowie at the time did not think that cocaine was a serious drug; he told Crowe that when he tried heroin in 1968, that was the last time he tried anything heavy, not realizing that his current cocaine use was just as dangerous.68 In the 1970s, the full dangers of cocaine were still not understood. It was still thought to be nonaddictive, and those within Bowie’s circle, like Tony Zanetta, said, “We thought it helped us be smarter and more creative”69 These assumptions about cocaine can be traced back to Sigmund Freud and his essays on cocaine like “Uber Coca” (1884) and “On the General Effect of Cocaine” (1885). Freud experimented on himself with cocaine and noted the euphoric effect the drug had on him. He felt physically stronger while on cocaine and noted its properties as a stimulant, but he did not recognize its addictive qualities.70 In Emperor of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century (2000), Mike Jay points out that about the only example of a cocaine addict from the 1890s was Aleister Crowley. Jay notes that Crowley and Allan Bennett had revived the use of drugs in magic, and “According to Crowley’s later confessions, he and Bennett graduated from morphine to cocaine in 1898, and took it for a few weeks until they started to ‘see things,’ and calmed themselves down by switching to chloroform.”71 Bowie’s cocaine use quickly moved from casual to abusive in a relatively short time. Tony Zanetta recalled this transition: “It was like one day he had to drink a glass of wine, and the next day he was a terrible cocaine addict.”72 Cocaine fit Bowie’s preference for fast drugs, and once he started he found himself doing more and more. Bowie’s increasing cocaine use also coincided with a serious investigation of the occult, something that he had only name checked in the past. Bowie’s interest in the occult involved another rivalry with Jimmy Page. After being outbid by Page for Burges’s Tower House in 1972, their paths crossed again, and Bowie’s interest in the occult was magnified by an encounter with Page in 1975. According to Paul Trynka in Starman, Page met with Bowie in February 1975 at his home with his girlfriend Ava Cherry. Page then spilled some wine and tried to blame it on Ava, and Bowie told Page that he should leave by jumping through the window.73 Instead of leaving, Page just sat there, staring at Bowie. Ava Cherry said that Bowie “wanted to show Jimmy that his will was stronger. Then all of a sudden, after that night, David has all of these books around and is reading them.”74

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Bowie would have known of Page’s deep interest in Aleister Crowley, and as Trynka notes, Page had gone so far as to buy Crowley’s former magical home, Boleskine House, in 1971.75 Bowie was now determined to compete with Page, and to do so he began to study Crowley and other occult authors in a much deeper manner than just reading Crowley’s biography. His heavy use of cocaine during this period meant that he rarely slept, and he occupied his time by reading about the occult. When Bowie moved to Los Angeles he stayed with Deep Purple’s bassist Glenn Hughes. Marc Spitz said of this time, “While planning the follow-up to Young Americans, Bowie would sit in the house with a pile of high-quality cocaine atop the glass coffee table, a sketch pad and a stack of books.”76 Like Crowley and Bennett, he began seeing things. Bowie said about this period, “My psyche went through the roof, it just fractured into pieces. I was hallucinating twenty-four hours a day.”77 Bowie provided a sense of what he was reading at this time in 1993, remembering that “All my reading in that particular time were people like Ishmael [Israel] Regarde [Regardie], Waite and Mavers and Manley and all of these warlocks.”78 He then goes on to provide a motive for why he was reading these authors: “And, y’know it was all the secrets of the cabbalistic practices and all that, an intense period of trying to relate myself to this search for some true spirit. And I thought I was going to find it through reading all of this material.”79 What this reading ended up providing, in addition to any personal insights, was source material for the follow up to Young Americans (1975), the album Station to Station (1976). The title track is another epic song, like “Width of a Circle” from The Man Who Sold the World. “Station to Station” is, as Hugo Wilcken noted, the longest song Bowie ever wrote, with a total running time of ten minutes and eleven seconds.80 Wilcken provides a good examination and analysis of the references Bowie makes on “Station to Station”: “The first half dozen lines pack in a bewildering array of allusions to Gnosticism, black magic and the kabbla (a medieval school of Jewish mysticism).”81 He also explains that the references Bowie makes to “throwing darts in lovers eyes” and “white stains” are obscure allusions to Crowley’s life and poetry.82 Wilcken notes that Bowie’s mention of a magical movement “from kether to melkuth” is referring to the Tree of Life in the Kabbala, with kether representing the top or “Godhead” and melkuth the bottom or “physical world.”83 Bowie said later on that he meant “Station to Station” to be a “step-by-step interpretation of the kabbala, although absolutely no one realized that at the time, of course.”84

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Wilcken feels that Bowie is slightly exaggerating, but the references he makes in the song work poetically.85 “Station to Station” mentions cocaine in the lyrics, and the making of this album was Bowie’s high point of drug use. Bowie realized shortly after making this album that drugs were taking a serious toll, and that he could not sustain such a lifestyle. He recalled that he overdosed two to three times during the Station to Station period and could not believe that the first overdose was not the one to get him to stop.86 When asked if he had anything positive come out of his heavy drug use, he was cautious, but mentioned that he might have had “these quick insights.”87 He said that the feeling he got while doing cocaine was “so totally focused into the moment that you felt you had a godlike insight into what was going on.”88 He then stated, “But I also remembered there were times when I occasionally got near that when I was doing meditation back in the late ‘60s. It is just harder work and the drugs are the quick passport to nirvana.”89 Bowie realized that the risks outweighed the positives, and like the Romantic drug users Coleridge and De Quincey, there would be diminishing returns if he continued to abuse drugs. He was able to gain some insights and poetic inspiration from his drug use, something that Coleridge and De Quincey and other Romantic drug users, including Crowley, also took from their drug use. Bowie still held a Romantic view of drug use even after he had stopped using drugs himself, but he realized that for his own well-being he had to quit. Later, he would only muse about retiring to smoke opium in a euphoric bliss, an idea that can be traced back directly to the writings of Coleridge and De Quincey.

Conclusion The work of Coleridge and De Quincey described fantastic worlds and other spaces like orientalist dream worlds. For them and other Romantic writers, drugs could unlock these dreams and helped the writers to reenchant the world. Drug use was therefore one of the ways that Romantics reacted against modernism in a modern industrial age. Bowie and other rock stars of the 1960s and 1970s used drugs recreationally, but they also used them to expand their minds. Bowie was aware of the power that drugs had to mimic a state of higher consciousness. Through his investigations into the occult and the works of Crowley, Bowie would have read that Crowley explored the same idea, that drugs could be used to create an artificial state similar to samadhi or nirvana. Bowie did achieve similar

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experiences himself due to his drug use such as God-like feelings and hallucinations. Furthermore, Bowie used this intense period to explore the occult texts he was reading and expressed these ideas poetically on “Station to Station.” His earlier album, The Man Who Sold the World, was based on hash reveries and poetic expressions of these dream-like states. Like Coleridge and De Quincey, because he already had a substantial imagination, Bowie was able to translate his drug experiences into his work. Bowie realized that his excessive drug use could not go on forever, so he decided to quit cocaine by going to live spartanly in Berlin, away from the temptations of rock stardom. Bowie still held an idealized view of drug use later on in life even after going through intense addiction and withdrawals. These attitudes could be attributed in part to a belief in the Romantic conception of an artist, and that drug use could lead to greater creativity. Bowie believed in the Romantic vision of art as a way to reenchant the world and brought that sensibility to his persona as a rock star.

Notes 1. Geoffrey Marsh, “Astronaut of Inner Spaces: Sundridge Park, Soho, London…Mars,” in Davis Bowie Is The Subject, eds. Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh (London: V & A Publishing, 2013), 32. 2. Barry Miles, Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997), 335–336. 3. Gary Lachman, Aleister Crowley: Magick, Rock and Roll, and the Wickedest Man in the World (New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2014), 325–326. 4. Sean Egan, ed., Bowie on Bowie (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2015), 220. 5. Ibid., 220. 6. David Boocker, “The Inner Revolution(s) of Wordsworth and the Beatles,” in Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2, ed. James Rovira, 83–93. (New York: Lexington Books, 2018), 84. 7. Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, trans. Catherine Porter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 17. 8. Ibid., 30–32. 9. Christopher Breward, “For ‘We Are the Goon Squad’: Bowie, Style and the Power of the LP Cover, 1967–1983,” in David Bowie is the Subject, eds. Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh (London: V & A Publishing, 2013), 194.

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10. Graham Hough, The Last Romantics (London: Metheun, 1947), 41. 11. Löwy and Sayre, 130. 12. Egan, 135. 13. Thomas De Quincey and Robert Morrison, ed., Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), xviii. 14. Ibid., xviii. 15. Alethea Hayter, Opium and the Romantic Imagination (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), 194–197. 16. Norman Fruman, Coleridge the Damaged Archangel (New York: George Brazillier, 1971), 338. 17. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christabel, Kubla Khan, The Pains of Sleep (London: John Murray, 1816), 55. 18. Frances Wilson, Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 218–219. 19. De Quincey and Morrison, xviii. 20. Hayter, 35. 21. De Quincey and Morrison, xiii. 22. Ibid., xiii. 23. Hayter, 29. 24. Ibid., 29. 25. De Quincey and Morrison, 6–7. 26. Cameron Crowe, “Playboy Interview: David Bowie,” Playboy, September 1976, 62. 27. Ibid. 28. Hayter, 21. 29. Cameron Crowe, 58. 30. Löwy and Sayre, 21. 31. Ibid., 22. 32. Paul Trynka, Starman: David Bowie, The Definitive Biography (London: Sphere, 2011), 398. 33. De Quincey and Morrison, xxii. 34. Ibid., 82. 35. David Bowie, “The Width of a Circle,” in David Bowie, The Man Who Sold the World, Parlophone DB69732, 2016, 33 1/3 rpm. Originally released in 1970. 36. Coleridge, 56. 37. Lachman, 46. 38. Lowy and Sayre, 30. 39. Egan, 218. 40. Trynka, 121. 41. Lachman, Aleister Crowley, 50–51.

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42. Ibid., 71. 43. Ibid., 88. 44. Matthew D.  Rogers, “Frenzies of the Beast,” in Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism, eds. Henrik Bogdan and Martin P. Starr (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 213. 45. Marco Pasi, “Varities of Magical Experience,” in Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism, eds. Henrik Bogdan and Martin P. Starr (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 55. 46. Ibid., 61. 47. Ibid. 48. Löwy and Sayer, 30–31. 49. Trynka, 72. 50. Ibid., 73. 51. Crowe, 60. 52. Ibid. 53. Trynka, 151. 54. Ibid., 205. 55. Boocker, 88. 56. Stephen Davis, Hammer of the Gods (New York: Ballantine Books, 1990), 33–34. 57. Ibid., 96. 58. Trynka, 46. 59. Rebecca Hardy, “Jimmy Page Reveals Treasures ‘Robie Williams is Putting at Risk,’” Daily Mail, June 15, 2018, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ news/article-­5 849983/Jimmy-­P age-­r eveals-­t reasures-­w orks-­a rt-­s ays-­ Robbie-­Williams-­putting-­risk.html. 60. Annalisa Barbieri, “Stairway to Heaven: Jimmy Page’s Castle is his Home,” The Guardian, July 8, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/jul/08/stairway-­to-­heaven-­jimmy-­page-­castle-­is-­his-­home-­ led-­zeppelin. 61. Keith Shadwick, Led Zeppelin: The Story of a Band and Their Music, 1968–1980 (San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 2005), 244–245. 62. David Fricke, “Jimmy Page: The Rolling Stone Interview,” Rolling Stone, December 6, 2012, 42. 63. Ibid., 41. 64. Crowe, 62. 65. Ibid. 66. Marc Spitz, Bowie (New York: Crown Publishers, 2009), 227. 67. Ibid. 68. Crowe, 60. 69. Trynka, 204–205.

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70. Mike Jay, Emperor of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century (Sawty, England: Daedulus, 2000), 157–159. 71. Ibid., 179–180. 72. Spitz, 227. 73. Trynka, 231. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid., 231–232. 76. Spitz, 259. 77. Ibid. 78. Egan, 218. 79. Ibid. 80. Hugo Wilcken, Low (New York: Continuum, 2005), 5. 81. Ibid., 7. 82. Ibid. 83. Ibid., 8. 84. Ibid. 85. Ibid. 86. Egan, 219. 87. Ibid., 220. 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid.

CHAPTER 5

Capitalist Co-optation, Romantic Resistance, and Bowie’s Allegorical Performance in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth William Levine

[The mission of the poet] is the higher priesthood that proclaims the inner meaning of all spiritual secrets and speaks from the kingdom of God. Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion1

In what ways can David Bowie’s performance as Thomas Jerome Newton, the title character of Nicolas Roeg’s film The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) and, more generally, the style of the film, be said to effect the oppositional, holistic, regenerative force of Romanticism against the fragmenting, dehumanizing, economically reductive, rationalizing, and instrumental ends of modernity? Löwy and Sayre’s overarching definition of Romanticism as a “reaction against industrial capital and bourgeois society” may prove to be only a starting point for examining a character who infiltrates and then controls the sector of the American economy

W. Levine (*) Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, TN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Rovira (ed.), David Bowie and Romanticism, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97622-4_5

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typically dominated by a few oligarchical capitalist industries. He conquers the domain of industrial capital in order to resettle a community that has nearly been exterminated by the onslaught of advanced modernity, including the devastation wrought by nuclear warfare and ecological disaster. Newton’s mission clearly suggests a Romantic “return to origins,” specifically the pastoral origins of a lost homeland, so as to redirect his profits toward reviving a dying community that will presumably be founded on use rather than exchange values for his alien race and earthly allies.2 This restorative vision also would allow the fulfillment of a Romantic selfhood, a full realization of an inner life and agency that would no longer be divided by economic subjectivation. At the same time, however, he must remain committed to the means, if not the deep-seated ends, of modernity in order to facilitate his mission. While he profits from his manipulation of capitalism, progressive technology, and bourgeois consumerist impulses for the sake of his interplanetary resettlement mission, Newton straddles the two worlds, which Löwy and Sayre define as two antagonistic “systems of values”3: one defined by the utilitarian “calculating spirit” of modernity and the other by markedly Romantic urges to effect holistic selfhood, reenchantment of a fragmented world, and a regenerated community that stand outside the economically quantitative reductions of life under modernity. How can the domination of a bourgeois-capitalist order still offer a pathway toward a Romantic world that is fueled by, but ultimately free of, the worst alienating effects of this domain? The predominantly nostalgic definition of a Romantic totality that reacts against modernity offered by Löwy and Sayre does not accommodate a cognitively estranged but no less Romantic account of an alien agent who has mastered its regime while directing its resources against its seemingly relentless tide. In two separate interviews given four years apart, David Bowie offered widely varying interpretations of his role that, taken together, allow for a more complex, layered understanding of its Romanticism. Near the time the film was released in England, Bowie remarked that his character’s arc simply adheres to the most straightforward plot line of the often obscure “arthouse” science fiction film. Newton, a space alien who disguises himself as a human, visits Earth in order to implement a covert plan to peacefully resettle the inhabitants of his drought-stricken planet Anthea. Newton’s initial “purist idea” becomes “corrupt as it is carried out.”4 Like Wordsworth’s Michael or Shelley’s portrait of Keats in Adonais, his mission has been derailed by the worst tendencies of human society and

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debilitated by a set of mostly greedy, envious, and opportunistic human antagonists. In this view, he is a tragic Romantic innocent whose redemptive quest is thwarted. By the close of the film he has all but surrendered his initial hope of relocating his fellow Antheans to a habitable natural environment in order to escape the depopulation and environmental catastrophes wrought by an advanced modernity. Four years later, however, Bowie disputed his earlier, more commonly held notion of his character’s fate. On this occasion, following the release of Scary Monsters and Super Creeps, he points to Newton’s “ruthlessness,” denying that the character is a “pure spirit” whom people on Earth “fuck up.” Far more critical of Newton’s character, Bowie remarks, “when he first comes down, he doesn’t give a shit about anybody…[and] discards people and their values all the time…[yet maintains a] false illusion of purity.”5 While his comments in 1980 may tend toward unsubstantiated hyperbole and be aligned with his most recent album’s harsh retrospective view of his career and his earlier “spaceman” personae in such songs as “Ashes to Ashes,” Bowie still identifies a discernibly Romantic turn in the character arc. Over the course of the plot, he notes, Newton has “actually found some sort of real emotional drive; he knows what it is to relate to people.”6 In this interpretation, which disregards Newton’s ultimate Romantic goal of founding a new community for the humanized Antheans, Bowie sees his character first as an agent of modernity who relies on his home planet’s advanced technological knowledge to infiltrate and master America’s capitalist system. He exploits human society for his instrumental ends. Newton arrives on Earth with nine basic patents for new products and manufacturing processes that, according to his lawyer Oliver Farnsworth (played by Buck Henry), could put General Motors, DuPont, General Electric, Kodak, and other leading industrial powers out of business. By profiting from these patents, Newton commands the regime of modernity even more decisively than its major corporations. Bowie, however, recognizes his character’s gradually blossoming realization of a fundamental condition for a community between his alien self and a small circle of intimate human associates founded on Romantic interpersonal bonds and not the calculating relationships of modernity. In other words, the “real emotional drive” can derive only from a relationship not ultimately defined by economic or opportunistic motives. Further, Bowie’s “correction” of his first interview remarks hints at a larger-scale hermeneutical relationship between the two interpretations of

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his character. What is at first a simple, surface account of an innocent Romantic quest doomed by external antagonists deceptively envelops a more complex core meaning that probes the subjectivity of his character. The potential to facilitate a Romantic community transforms his character from his alienated state as the dominant agent and product of modernity. Newton’s inner growth is built on reciprocal feeling for a select few alienated humans whose existence also is conditioned mostly by material and instrumental determinants. Bowie’s observations on his character present a layered hermeneutical relationship whereby Newton appropriates and refines the technological mechanisms of modernity only for his own alien race beneath the mask of an ostensibly Romantic, but essentially false, persona of innocence. Yet his slowly evolving “real emotional drive” toward human connectedness paves the way for his manifestations of genuine Romanticism. Newton’s multilayered evolutionary path is characteristically Romantic insofar as Bowie’s “corrective” interview remarks imply a self divided by the demands of modernity that paradoxically foster an impulse toward Romantic autonomy and its inner subjectivity.7 Under the guise of an illusory Romanticism and through the means of modernity, Newton crosses the threshold into an authentically Romantic community, even if this communal ideal between an alien and a select group of humans essentially mirrors the relocation plot for his fellow Antheans that he has held all along. A case for allegorizing Bowie’s role in the film as not just emblematic of a quest for essential Romanticism but also a gloss on his career at the time should not rest solely on its plot or a limited character analysis. If his interview remarks were applicable only to these two elements, they would do no more than simplify the ultimately tragic vision of Romanticism against the tide of modernity that Roeg and screenwriter Paul Mayersberg depict. In the analysis that follows, the film will best be understood as a collaborative intertextual construction, incorporating the 1963 science fiction novel of the same title by Walter Tevis Jr.; its rather free adaptation in the screenplay; its allusive construction and elusive presentation by director Roeg; and, perhaps most importantly for this chapter, its appropriations of “Bowie” and all he signifies in the character of Newton. Because Bowie also stated that the role is “allegorical, on a very private scale,” he affirms that it held a more personal meaning than what a film audience may superficially recognize as yet another familiar tale of defeated, reclusive tycoons in America, like Jay Gatsby or Howard Hughes.8 At the same time, what Bowie declares to be a private meaning is open to public conjecture by the

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mere pronouncements of a “Romantic” celebrity whose life and art are taken to divulge some part of his interior self. The Man Who Fell to Earth presents a mass media star delivering layered messages of Romantic redemption within and against the constraints of a totalizing modernity. He is cast in a film that attempts to resist easy consumerist sci-fi digestibility, an anti-science fiction film that refuses to celebrate the realm of modernity while nonetheless being implicated in its technology and markets. In its broadest outlines, the role of Newton dramatizes, consolidates, and extends the implications of conflicts that had been expressed in Bowie’s songs and self-created characters. Those songs in his oeuvre that reflect on or allegorize rock stardom through sci-fi plots are especially apropos. At least as far back as The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust (1972), the tragic arc of a “Martian messiah” who descends to earth is analogous to the meteoric success of an alien figure who draws the envy of his earthbound allies and surrenders his auratic selfhood to others who consume and finally destroy it. These conflicts, modified by Bowie’s ever-changing personae, persisted even during his biggest commercial breakthrough in the mid-1970s, the “plastic soul” album Young Americans (1975), which yielded his first number-one hit in America, “Fame,” while the film was in production. The song theatricalizes a seemingly intimate expression of disgust with the singer’s celebrity life. Taken as a holistic performance, however, “Fame” simultaneously renounces, revels in, and invites gossipy speculation about the destructive private lifestyle of a rock star. According to one allegorical interpretation of the title song from the same album, the lyrics express the love– hate relationship the star had with America.9 Its vignettes and commentary reflect an attraction to the dreams of a new land alongside disenchantment with the dissolution of its ideals and its history of recurrent violence and injustice. As with any “celebrity allegory” that is not a transparent roman à clef, the analogies between Bowie’s and Newton’s biographical arcs as outsiders who dominate American markets and audiences cannot be pursued at the most particular level of one-to-one correspondence. The broadest basis for allegorizing Newton as Bowie, however, would acknowledge that, after “conquering” a large swath of America with their auratic gifts, both the star and the fictional space traveler had “fallen to Earth.” Newton and Bowie convincingly reveal their mystique to the nation that could best validate and reward their otherworldly “stardom.” Their ambitions are propelled by the machinery of modernity, and they may both be seen as

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“pioneers,” to use Farnsworth’s term for Newton’s corporation, forging new creations in a new land. In an ideal scenario, the fulfillment of their ambitions would enable the Romantic triumph of humanity (or the alien-­ as-­ human) over “the machine” through their connections with other alienated beings. Yet they both suffer in their temporarily adopted American environment. Besides allegorizing Bowie’s career in America, the film also catalyzes its next set of redirections.10 Like his film character, Bowie was defeated by his own success in America, particularly by the demands of his celebrity life while he resided in Los Angeles. As detailed in the 1975 BBC documentary Cracked Actor, Bowie needed to “kill” his all-consuming creation Ziggy Stardust onstage in London in July 1973 and later abandon his subsequent two “glam” variations of this character, Aladdin Sane and Halloween Jack, even though the first was a product of a dark vision of America that emerged from an earlier national tour. He eventually adopted his new “plastic soul” singer persona, first toward the end of his American tour for Diamond Dogs and eventually for Young Americans.11 But the documentary’s expedient narrative resolution of Bowie’s tribulations is premature. As the punning title of his 1977 album implies, Bowie had been brought “low” by the downward pull of the celebrity lifestyle of his newly adopted culture, with related problems of drug use and conflicts with his management company. Brian Eno, his collaborator on Low (1977), the first of the so-called Berlin trilogy albums, observed that Bowie was “trying to duck the momentum of a successful career”12 when he abandoned America and relocated to Europe. In this phase of his career, he adopted a far quieter, remote, privately alienated persona that derived from his film role, and he even subordinated his vocal presence and lyrics to predominantly instrumental experimentation and atmospheric electronica associated with space travel. One track on Low, “Subterraneans,” has been clearly traced to Bowie’s aborted compositions for a soundtrack to the film, and he presented a gift copy of this album to the director as the film soundtrack he would have written.13 Perhaps all films that cast music stars as their lead, even for strictly dramatic, non-singing roles, necessarily rely on character traits that correspond to the artist’s persona. The Man Who Fell to Earth, however, is an exceptional case of a film that incorporates references from its star’s career into the character’s arc and never lets the audience forget that it is watching “Bowie” as an intertextual, intermedial, highly manufactured signifier of otherness even when he is not performing as “Bowie” per se. Despite

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his claims to the contrary, Bowie is always playing a version of “David Bowie.” The director sought to profit from the commercial buzz of casting an established rock star, apparently after being unable to finance the cost of Peter O’Toole and other major stars in principal roles. He also did not capitulate to Paramount Studios when it conditioned its support on the casting of Robert Redford as Newton.14 Whether it was a result of his inability or unwillingness to fully accommodate his work to the demands of mainstream commercial cinema, Roeg produced a conspicuously marked arthouse film that resists easy narrative consumption and doesn’t exploit its star in predictable ways. Bowie is not cast in a singing role, nor is the film a straightforward vehicle for any of his self-invented characters. There is no doubt that Bowie is the main attraction and inhabits a role that is consonant with his earlier musical and performance personae,15 yet, at the same time, the director defamiliarizes the star’s celebrity presence, just as he did with Mick Jagger in Performance and would repeat with Art Garfunkel in Bad Timing.16 For instance, the film interpolates a television commercial for World Enterprises, Newton’s corporation, in which he promotes his products but also signals his presence to his Anthean wife, and one of his former allies purchases The Visitor, a record album of coded sounds, also intended for his alien family, in the same store that advertises Young Americans. Besides thematically reinforcing the film’s motif of a Romantic hermeneutical core that is penetrated by co-opting the exchange values of modernism, these self-aware reflections on commercialism both enact and parody the common practice of product placement in marketable films, with Bowie as the “deconstructed” celebrity commodity. As for the “intertextual citations” of “Bowie,” who was almost unanimously praised by critics as a perfect fit for the role,17 the adaptations of his space-traveling rock figures range from the hauntingly literal to the most estranged forms. One critical scene in the film almost fully replicates a segment of Cracked Actor, in which Bowie, addicted to cocaine and breaking down under the pressure of his celebrity, undergoes a psychotic episode in the back of his limousine. The director even makes use of the same car and chauffeur, with both Newton and Bowie preferring this mode of long-­ distance transportation in America. Only a small portion of the film’s viewers may have recognized the reenactment of a scene from the documentary, but the situation of the rock star who is entrapped and psychologically scarred by the burdens of his success while still producing

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consumable drama out of such personal crises is of a piece with songs like “Fame” and other treatments of celebrity in Bowie’s musical output. More typically, the audience observes subdued variations of Major Tom, Ziggy, and other space travelers or inhabitants of post-apocalyptic landscapes like Halloween Jack that followed in their wake. The film divorces Bowie’s personae from what tend to be oblique rock song fantasy scenarios and their sometimes elliptical, “cut-up” or randomly arranged lyrics. It projects these manifestations of a redeeming “Bowie” figure onto a larger screen insofar as Newton is charged with saving a civilization in a fully plotted mode of sci-fi narrative realism. In the process, the character briefly succeeds in “reenchanting” the lives of his three closest confederates, who represent the corporate world, science, and the working classes. Thus, he carries the potential to erase the damages that modernity and its Weberian disenchantments have wreaked on two planets. On another level, Bowie undertakes an artistically serious enterprise in his anti-­ commercial film role. By all accounts, he completely submitted to the vision and bidding of his director, who apparently had little trouble convincing him that the arthouse style of the film was compatible with his own artistic inclinations and past characters. Bowie later mentioned that he chose a film role in which he wouldn’t play “Bowie,” meaning a clear-­ cut extension of his earlier singing and concert personae, but admits that he ended up becoming Newton instead.18 As ever-changing as his performance identity had been over his entire career, the role catalyzed one of the most significant turns in this process and gradually led to his “low” profile. Besides describing his personae’s turns toward a more isolated, emotionally distant, and alienated presentation, the latter phrase could literally refer to the Low album cover’s photograph, one of several repurposed stills from the film that Bowie appropriated for this album and its predecessor, Station to Station (1976), which occasioned his “Aryan Romantic” Thin White Duke character. Regardless of whether Bowie would soon absorb components of Newton’s character to briefly flirt with a theatricalized version of misguided Romantic fascism, the potential of the film and its star to absorb and reactivate any significant dimension of an ongoing historical Romantic totality like the one that Löwy and Sayre taxonomize is troubled. Two immediate concerns are the intervention of contemporary Romanticism within the mechanisms of a prevailing modernity and the viability of this Romanticism well after its first social formations have been eclipsed by later history. It is far too limiting to accept the ongoing manifestations of

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Romanticism as the haunting, admonitory double of modernity that is “coextensive with capitalism itself.” It is historically naïve to construct a persistent Romantic totality simply as a set of selective “themes—and certain forms of nostalgia—[that] exercise a diffuse social influence going well beyond the classes or categories with which they were once primarily associated,” presumably in a proportional response to the progressively expansive and destructive scale of “capitalist-industrial civilization.”19 While Löwy and Sayre do not offer much further insight into the causes and efficacy of later Romantic persistence, any effort to arrive at a more fully satisfying explanation may also be troubled. Suppose, for instance, that a dialectical model of successive historical periods, one that could readily explain the absorption and redirection of Enlightenment ideology in the evolution of Romanticism, is not tenable once the inheritance of both eras has been co-opted by the instrumental ends of modernity. A teleological path of a dialectical history absorbs and redirects the ideologies of earlier periods in the sublations of succeeding eras, but if the Romantic past has long been unmoored from its oppositional grounding against modernity, it becomes all the more difficult to recover with the same force, direction, and values.20 Instead, Arthur Danto’s formulations on the “end of art history” may be a more fitting model to understand the historical borrowings and collage-like designs of Roeg and Bowie. It proceeds from a Hegelian dialectical premise in which an increasingly pluralistic cultural history arrives at a final state of self-knowledge over time that, at its terminus, eliminates the need for any further dialectical schemata. At the “end of history,” it envisions an ongoing present in which “there can [only] be change without development, where the engines of artistic production can only combine and recombine known forms, though external pressures may favor this or that combination.”21 The end of dialectical cultural history would allow for the categorization of Bowie as a “singing Andy Warhol” and Roeg as a creator of visual pastiches. Both the performer and director combine and recirculate past forms, long emptied of their original ideological and political resonance, mainly for the circumstantial demands of their respective media.22 Whatever “external pressures” of the mid-1970s may have “favored” a potent artistic collaboration between Roeg and Bowie, the film’s most effective assertions of an attenuated Romantic resistance unfold in a process of ambiguous or indeterminate allegorical layering. Its Romanticism amounts to a latent force intertwined with but unable to be fully extricated from modernity.23 How successfully, then, does the film facilitate

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active rather than inert, or true rather than false, manifestations of Romantic resistance? As the section that follows will elaborate, the director’s film style itself enacts various forms of alienation even in the process of subjecting Newton and by implication Bowie to processes of self-alienation. Roeg offers a proliferation of disorienting subgenres; breaks narrative continuity with seemingly unmotivated montages; omits key matters of exposition; unabashedly flouts the cinematic “rule” of furnishing chronological information; furnishes commentary on the main plot by inserting ironically distant, often esoteric, or otherwise mystifying allusive interpolated footage from other films; saturates his scenes with excessive imagery and other visual information; and casts “real people” alongside actors, often with clashing effects.24 Although his style may be indebted to the Brechtian “alienation effects” of modernist drama, these destabilizing film techniques are also Romantic insofar as they deviate from and resist the market demands of popular cinema. By contrast, the first installment of the Star Wars trilogy and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, blockbusters that reinvigorated and upgraded the production quality of earlier mass market sci-fi film formulae, were both released in 1977, right on the heels of The Man Who Fell to Earth. Roeg’s film undermines the market logic and commodification of art dictated by modernity while inevitably belonging to and competing within the “arthouse” niche of commercial film production. As but one sign of such pervasively commodifying pressure, segments from Roeg’s film were cut by its American distributors in response to test-marketing, and the audience was provided with cards that summarized the plot.25 The film and its star’s performance occupy a precarious position between absorption within and resistance to capitalist subject-­ formation, a dilemma of modernity that remains insufficiently formulated in Löwy and Sayre’s understanding of Romanticism.

Bowie in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility It may be far-fetched to consider either Newton or Bowie as comparable figures to Walter Benjamin’s hypothetical case of a self-alienating actor who loses his ritualistic aesthetic aura in a progressive historical transition from theater to film. In Benjamin’s classic yet idiosyncratic essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,”26 film best

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facilitates the potential of technology to maximize the “exhibition value” of art among its mass audiences and remove all traces of Romantic art’s “cult value.” The new medium intensifies audience self-awareness as a social class and enlarges or indeed transforms their field of visual perception. Marked as it is by the author’s times and commitment to a Marxist “politicizing [of] art” (42) that aims to defeat the co-optation of cinema by both fascist and capitalist interests, the essay remains one of the most formative statements on the presumptive destruction or liquidation of Romantic aesthetics en route to an emancipatory version of modernity. Underlying its enthusiasm for the revolutionary new technology and its potential for propelling class struggle, however, is a certain doubtfulness and even fear of what happens when the medium of film falls into the hands of authoritarian and repressive powers. The author’s reservations constitute the Romantic subtext of the essay and, allowing for a closer application to Roeg’s film, provide an allegorical cautionary tale within what might first appear to be a heroic celebration of modernity and the death of a retrograde Romantic ideology. The essay criticizes not only the exclusions and hierarchical distancing of auratic Romantic art traditions but also what Benjamin refers to as the “manipulation” of “creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery” by the powers that would commodify film technology or rely on it to propagate the self-glorifying cultic aura of fascism (20). He steadily directs his criticism toward a false, ideologically regressive appropriation of Romanticism, meant to delude mass audiences or resist class progress. Where Benjamin might be said to best retain more than a trace of authentic “Romanticism against the tide of modernity,” however, is the essay’s express fear of human liquidation. His conclusion bitterly identifies a new way of abolishing the human aura, a sacred core of existence that subsumes an aesthetic aura, through gas warfare. Against the fascist conjunction of Futurist aesthetics and sublimely destructive machinery, Benjamin’s faith in modernity gives way to a Romantic-georgic observation that contemporary wartime technology is out of balance with the natural world such mechanical force could otherwise cultivate, as it demands “human material” instead (42). What had earlier been celebrated as the self-alienation of a stage actor who surrenders his ritualistic aura to the technology of film production becomes a monstrously imbalanced force when societal self-alienation leads to human annihilation. In the author’s most optimistic view, the masses fill the cinemas in order to witness and celebrate the actor’s triumph over “the apparatus”; that is,

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the technological means of production that continually test the aptitude of the masses and subjectivate them. Benjamin asserts that film performance represents the most comprehensive, transformative version of the vocational tests that workers undergo, mainly because of its exhibition value, and gradually empowers audience members to become judges of the actors as well as participants in social realist films. For the audience, he insists, the actor’s success represents a victory of the human over the machine and, not at all contradicting his polemic against auratic traditions, points the way toward a future-oriented Romanticism. In their predominantly nostalgic positioning of Romantic social formations as a weapon against modernity, Löwy and Sayre do not admit such reconciliations of the two historical totalities as Benjamin’s. For instance, they narrowly label the technotopia envisioned in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward as “anti-­ capitalist modernity” without acknowledging that equitable redistribution of property and the means of production signify a Romantic triumph of the human over the machine and its most oppressive socio-economic stratifications.27 However much Benjamin construes the struggles of the newly self-­ alienated actor as a step toward liberating the working classes, the film actor still undergoes a process of disidentification with his role. The new medium fragments the actor’s performance in the process of shooting discrete scenes at various times and locations and continuously subjects him to “testing” by the director and production team that may even verge on exploitation (e.g., the director firing a gun behind him, unannounced, to produce a startled reaction). If this section of Benjamin’s essay ostensibly celebrates the actor’s self-alienating sacrifice, does it not also offer an undercurrent of Romantic resistance to the exploitation of humanity by technology and modernity, including the pervasive tactics of surveillance and subjectivation? For this section of “The Work of Art” to serve as a touchpoint for Bowie and Newton, they can be taken as agents of the essay’s reluctantly Romantic subtext. Neither Bowie nor Newton can ever be said to have made the transition, like Benjamin’s hypothetical figure, from auratic stage acting to reproducible mass exhibition via film technology. Nonetheless, the character in the film invites yet another allegorical analogy with Bowie’s career at this point. Like the rock star whose greatest claims for quasi-­ religious devotion depend on his live, theatrical concert performances that bring “alien” characters to life, Newton lands on Earth with a distinct, if not exactly cultic or ritualistic, aura that is tied to his distance, mystery,

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and prime agency in a Romantic quest as he reenchants the lives of his three closest human allies while in effect “acting” human.28 The more Newton is invested in the technology of modernity and its market domination, however, the more his success is publicized, and the more his “otherness,” his private, hidden alien self, along with his auratic presence, is made vulnerable. It is this dimension of Newton’s character arc that Bowie appropriates and repurposes as he moves away from his ethereal glam rock mystique and “plastic soul” R&B co-optation. At the same time, he moves away from America, both literally and metaphorically, as he completes Station to Station and advances toward his “solipsistic,” “withdrawn and autistic” character turn in the Berlin trilogy.29 Like the self-alienating stage actor who surrenders his aura when submitting to the process of film production, Newton, arguably a proxy for Bowie in his first starring film role, is displaced from his customary auratic medium. He is instead subjected to various tests that only confirm the skepticism Benjamin directs toward the most destructive consequences of modernity. Once the Syndicate, a shadowy convergence of corporate and government interests, ruthlessly holds Newton in captivity, disables the corporation he has founded, and co-opts his powers, he is subjected to sinister, tortuous biomedical examinations that classify and categorize him, essentially to preserve and thwart disruption of the capitalist status quo. His ultimate fate is not to be a self-alienating vessel for the progressive enlightenment of the masses, but rather a fully alienated figure, tragically “humanized” and sacrificed on the altar of oligarchical capitalism and the government that sustains it. After the contact lenses that conceal his alien appearance are fused to his eyes in one of the more invasive tests to which Newton is subjected, his antagonists have literally removed his aura, bound him to his human disguise, and disempowered his unique “vision,” which was also concretized in a few brief scenes that display his powers of second sight. But he is less formally tested, too, throughout the film by his closest allies, as will be discussed in the final section of the chapter. Does Bowie, belonging like Warhol (the subject of an early song tribute) to a late postmodernist stage of the mechanical reproducibility of art, somehow elude Benjamin’s indictment of the substitute aura manufactured through the “putrid magic” of the Hollywood star system and its masscultural derivatives? (33) If anything, his art film star turn as Newton allegorizes the ways his rock star aura can also be “tested” and reduced to a mere commodity that loses any Romantically oppositional force once it is co-opted by the all-encompassing engines of capitalism. The

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anti-­consumerist style of the film, which openly reveals the seams behind what Benjamin labeled the “swift, unified sequence” (32) that combines a series of discrete performances into a montage, makes only too evident the fragmentation and discontinuities inherent in the process of cinematic “testing” that alienate the stage actor’s aura. Does Bowie’s “chameleon” process of self-reinvention, derivative and fabricated as his “magpie tendencies” are, furnish a viable alternative to what Benjamin identifies as an illusory substitute for an authentic aura, a mass distraction and mere reflection of the capitalist interests that underlie Western cinema? Do Bowie’s ongoing cycles of “inhabitation, imitation, perfection, and destruction” of his personae offer some form of autonomy and Romantic resistance, given that he, like Newton, has infiltrated the workings of modernity?30 Limited in scope as it is, the remainder of this chapter can suggest only that the film provided Bowie with an opportunity to dramatize a Romantic quest, mostly congruent with the anti-modernity subtext of Benjamin’s essay. The film role extends his career path from the predominantly mass cultural, if dubiously “cultic,” “exhibition value” of a rock star toward experimentation in the cultural niche of art cinema, however much this niche too is complicit with the technologies of the market. By submitting to Roeg’s vision and entering a new medium, Bowie travels in an alien environment and, as an ever-morphing performer who has always placed the sincerity of his expression in question, must confront further challenges to his authenticity. Roeg claims to have cast Bowie because he is a “performer” who, unlike conventionally trained actors, offers an “odd” but “extraordinary gift of projection and personality” that generates infectious mass-cultural devotion. But the director is just as capable of undermining the same traits that brought his star to stardom, to make his earlier star incarnations fall to earth along with his film character.31

Finding “Jerusalem” A scene in which Newton is invited to the church that his companion and soon-to-be mistress, the hotel maid Mary-Lou (played by Candy Clark), regularly attends may appear to offer the most earnest, fully embraced instance of Romanticism in the film. At Mary-Lou’s request, the small-­ town New Mexico congregation has prepared a hymnal version of William Blake’s “And did those feet…” which Löwy and Sayre recognize as “a quest for the lost object,” a return to the innocence of England’s “green & pleasant land” in which “recollection of the past serves as a weapon in

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the struggle for the future.”32 Blake’s lyric is the antithesis of the poem that most conspicuously frames the film narrative, the distinctly modernist Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” an anti-Romantic expression of the disjunction between the tragic heroism of the suffering Icarus and the indifference of the everyday world to his plight. Counteracting the film’s earlier interpolation of Auden’s poem and the Brueghel painting it evokes through ekphrasis, the hymnal adaptation of Blake’s poem as “Jerusalem” introduces a parallel between Newton’s redemptive interplanetary mission and the poem’s final restorative vision of a holy pastoral homeland. At this point in the film, though, the analogy is far more applicable to the salvation of the Antheans than to the human characters. It is not evident at all to his companion Mary-Lou, even as Newton has begun to “reenchant” her otherwise mundane life. She and the rest of the congregation pray to a deity in the undetected presence of an otherworldly visitor whose role as the savior of his civilization they know nothing of. If her lack of understanding could simply be resolved through each main character’s eventual recognition of dramatic ironies, scenes like this would still communicate an unequivocal wish for a return to a Romanticized home. If anything, however, this scene foreshadows what will become the mounting, irreconcilable disparities between conventional agents of religious deliverance and Newton. By necessity, the alien visitor must keep his true mission secret from a distrusting human society, even among the close circle of allies whom he entreats to have faith in him. He will become neither the angelic redeeming figure of Blake’s poem nor a figure analogous to its secular, humanized equivalent, the hierophantic poet described by Schleiermacher in the headnote, who can decode the intimations of heaven on earth. A pervasively corrosive, unresolved set of ironies undermines the apparent Romanticism of this hymn-singing scene. Recognizing the elusive modernist style of the film and the full context of this early episode, any alert viewer must note that the scene resists easy acceptance as an early stage of a linear romantic love story. Nothing up to this point in the film confirms whether Newton has found what Bowie referred to as his character’s “real emotional drive.” In fact, the scene that immediately precedes the hymn-singing hints that Mary-Lou’s drunken testimony to religious faith and love is vacuous and that Newton’s relationship with her while he devises his Anthean relocation plan is akin to the opportunistic diversions of a “passenger between flights.”33 Remaining disguised as a human, Newton may simply have chosen to attend the service as a courteous ruse in order to continue using Mary-Lou as his personal caretaker who will

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acclimate him to the corner of New Mexico where he will soon build the compound for his return flight to Anthea. Another dissonant effect is the real-life congregation’s implausible short-term preparation of the hymn, which has routinely been adopted by churches in the United Kingdom, supposedly at Mary-Lou’s request on the morning of the services as a surprise to welcome Newton. While Mary-Lou beams at Newton, the viewer learns that, for all his advance preparation to convincingly assume a human identity, he cannot sing in sync with the congregation. Perhaps his fumbling of the lyrics is the director’s private joke in a film role that Bowie has accepted in order to expand his repertoire as a serious artist, but it also functions reflexively to signal Bowie’s estrangement in a new medium that takes him out of his habitual element. The effect of this intentional, comic gaffe is to accentuate, through Newton, Bowie’s “alienation.” On the whole, however, it is the style of the film rather than its plotting per se that creates the most dissonance. The minister and his authentic New Mexico congregation are shot in midrange documentary style, whereas Bowie and co-star Candy Clark receive a conventional romantic Hollywood closeup of a couple’s early mutual attraction. Paradoxically, the juxtaposition of the two film styles and genres is less integrated than a scene that would have relied on extras or professional actors to play the background roles of churchgoers. As but one instance of an alienation effect, perhaps the most enduring legacy of anti-capitalist modernist aesthetics, this sequence calls attention to the director’s film as a self-­ consciously fabricated product that arguably lacks the reconstitutive, holistic thrust of Romantic irony.34 Critic Michael Ferber suggests in response to Löwy and Sayre that “only…the [now familiar] alienationeffects of modernism” can “rescue” the “revolutionary sincerity of romanticism” [sic; author’s italics], but the disorienting manner of a director like Roeg is just as likely to undermine the seemingly earnest manifestations of Romanticism in his films.35 Mediated by such typically unsettling cinematic devices, whatever Romanticism the film actualizes may not at all depend on sympathetic identification with the protagonists. Instead, the viewer may be forced to confront the problems of reactivating Romantic resistance from a subject position deeply implicated in the regime of late modernity and the entrenched aesthetic legacy of modernism. The return to a “green & pleasant land,” however limited it may be to a small, esoteric circle of Antheans and human allies, can be effected only through the alien visitor’s hyperstimulation of consumer need for more-­ efficiently manufactured products and processes, whether in photography,

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energy, plastics, or other industries. To allegorize this paradoxical story premise and understand it as more than just a cognitively estranging science fiction device, one must regard Newton as a Romanticized extension of Bowie’s “leper messiah,” Ziggy Stardust. When the film character uses his superior knowledge to outflank America’s dominant industries, a cabal of business and government interests needs to control his disruptive effects, which produce “fear of the alien or unknown as it is enshrined in a capitalist system.”36 The film imagines the infiltration, disruption, and reappropriation of America’s business oligarchy for the sake of restoring a humanized alien community to a pastoral environment and a mode of production guided by use value. This revolutionary act of Romanticism, led by a prophetic figure from a technologically advanced but ruined alt-­ Earth civilization, propels the temporary overthrow of capitalist hegemony and an attempted restoration of ecological balance through such means as recyclable film and the less wasteful, more efficient use of energy and material resources. What could be rapprochement with or opposition to the realm of modernity, however, is defeated by this regime’s power to absorb and co-opt even the most thoroughgoing infiltration and seizure of its economic base.

Revisiting Alien Sex If the film’s demonization of a conspiratorial government-capitalist Syndicate is so prone to caricature as to be subjected to occasional self-­ parody, the struggle between Romanticism and modernity in the foregrounded relationship between Newton and Mary-Lou is not. In fact, closer attention to this principal couple can supplement what is too often underdeveloped in examinations of Romantic ideology and community, the role of domestic and otherwise intimate romantic relationships as the building block that fortifies resistance against the tide of modernity. In the most conventional view, Romanticism embraces marriage for love rather than money, power, or class status. In its most radically oppositional form, however, Romantic love unites companionable partners from significantly different orders. It overcomes the rigid social class, racial, and gender divisions of modernity, along with its other more interpersonally based stratifications, such as marriage, family, and compulsory heteronormativity, all of which can lead to internal self-divisions affecting subjectivity and identity. One need not agree with Gerard Loughlin’s position that the film subsumes the original novel’s explicitly messianic characterization of

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Newton in the sexual to see that its depiction of romantic love offers the potential for transcending the alienating subjectivations of modernity.37 Here, it is Bowie’s androgyny, literally enacted through the “alien being” of his character, that is tested. His relationship with his partner presents a limited case of idealized romantic love as the union of otherwise segregated orders. The alien Newton and his human kindred spirit Mary-­ Lou stand as a touchstone for parallels and contrasts with other relationships, mostly among the principal characters, that transgress the codes of heteronormativity and acceptable exogamy.38 The coupling of bodies that are otherwise alien to each other falls on a spectrum between the generous, freely reciprocating intimacy of Romanticism and the exchange value to which modernity reduces the most intimate human transactions. The couples are never Romanticized just because their relationships are verboten; in fact, these apparently Romantic and transgressive relationships may amount to nothing more than an unreliable index of the characters’ alignment with the forces of modernity. The divorced college chemistry professor Bryce (played by Rip Torn), the father of a college-age daughter, aggressively seeks multiple sexual partners among his female students, each of whom looks under the bedsheet at his penis in a fast-paced early montage to joke that he is nothing like their fathers, as though they are risking an incestuous relationship. In a later voiceover, he states that his sexual drive has been sublimated by his efforts to join Newton’s secretive corporation World Enterprises and escape his frustration as a self-proclaimed cynical scientist working in a stultifying university atmosphere. In yet another of the film’s assaults on a straw version of modernity, Bryce argues with his Dean that he’s forced to teach outdated matter in a conformist environment that reduces human intelligence, youth, and creativity to the meaningless computer printouts of his classes’ test scores. Yet his “Romanticizing” of World Enterprises as a site of freedom from institutionalized modernity, a realm of ongoing disruptive innovation that exemplifies the triumph of human creativity over the machine, allows his most selfish impulses to dominate. Like the other antagonists, his character is drawn from the Socially Darwinist pages of literary naturalism, another natural antithesis of Romanticism. As if to foreshadow his ultimate betrayal of Newton when he later joins the Syndicate, for example, he idly pulls the legs off a grasshopper while awaiting his work orders at the World Enterprises compound. By contrast, Newton’s closest business ally Farnsworth and his valet Trevor are involved in a closeted homoerotic relationship that parallels the

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patent lawyer’s trust in his mysterious, reclusive client, whom he convinces himself to accept as an authentic “gift horse” beyond the terms of their economically defined connection. Unlike the more explicit physical intimacy of the other relationships, the love between Farnsworth and Trevor is only hinted in a few lines of dialogue and one flashback tableau of the two holding hands immediately before they meet their deaths, literally “falling to Earth” after being thrown out their Manhattan townhouse window. Farnsworth’s early expository voiceover declares that since meeting Newton, he has learned to place faith in another, presumably greater individual with a vision larger than his own. Newton facilitates a gift economy that warrants his complete faith and willing surrender of his prior autonomy as a self-employed patent lawyer for corporate America. Though the scene leading to his death by the Syndicate is played comically, and Farnsworth falls back on impulses of self-preservation before he is tossed out the window, it is he who has taken the biggest risk in remaining loyal to Newton and World Enterprises. Reinforcing the tenor of an earlier scene in which Newton’s “second sight” allows him to exchange glances with a party of nineteenth-century Western settlers as he explores his compound site, Farnsworth insists that World Enterprises must remain true to its vision as a “pioneer” in resisting an earlier civil bid by the Syndicate to absorb the company. Thus, a prime agent of modernity, one of the top patent lawyers in the nation, fully realizes his Romantic core self through the agency of the alien leader he serves, someone whom his partner labels a “freak.” Besides the film’s principal couple, their closeted homoerotic relationship is the only sustained test of faith in “otherness,” and Farnsworth’s loyalties triangulate, however tragically, between Newton and Trevor. A minor character, but no less formidable a foil of Newton’s, Peters, is played by the muscular ex-NFL receiver Bernie Casey, who, according to screenwriter Mayersberg is a “policemen of the economy.”39 As shown in a brief flash-forward scene, Peters, the foremost agent of the Syndicate, is rewarded with a role of military leadership for undermining Newton and World Enterprises. In one of the most visually arresting sequences in the film, he dives nude into the pool at his mansion immediately after the audience sees Trevor and Farnsworth falling out their apartment window. He then emerges to embrace his also nude wife, whose metallic-red hair color, pallid skin, and gaunt body uncannily resemble Newton’s. This graphically depicted scene of an affectionate interracial couple exceeds its most obvious plot motivation, to show Peters’s success, his rise to

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preeminence over time while others have fallen because of his deeds. The scene functions aesthetically, too, as an obverse image of the two principal characters’ romantic love. Here the union of opposites is a skewed version of the American dream of upward mobility in which the beneficiary lacks any immediate moral scruples when he seizes upon another’s material success for his instrumental ends. Otherwise a member of an “alien” race in the wider landscape of American life, Peters assimilates to a social order that, thanks to his clandestine, opportunistic service for the Syndicate, normalizes what in other regimes of modernity would have been a racial and social transgression. Far more openly Romantic than its foils, the relationship between Newton and Mary-Lou is continually framed, if not without large measures of destabilizing irony, modernist narrative disruption, and fatalistic overtones, as the film’s most consequential meeting of kindred spirits from different orders. This is visually reinforced by Roeg’s recurrent “borrowing” of Ingmar Bergman’s motif in Persona of a facially similar couple’s heads slowly turning toward each other,40 as well as by his casting of Candy Clark as both Mary-Lou and Newton’s Anthean wife in several flashback sequences. Once Newton takes her as his mistress to live in the home he has built on his compound, she enters into an elegant yet also pastoral environment while assuming the privileges of a higher social class. She thus inhabits a far better world than anything she had ever known as a chambermaid and returns to a more redeeming “home” of sorts for her as well. Her voiceover backstory reveals that Newton has given her agency and purpose for the first time in her life: just like a character in a story, she remarks unironically. As with the others in Newton’s inner circle, he has instilled Romantic faith in an otherwise disenchanted life. On the other hand, the moment of this couple’s greatest intimacy as well as their most severe points of alienation from each other takes place at the end of a rapid montage depicting their unspecified period of cohabitation. Like so much else in the film, the montage is made up of discordant segments couched in ever-shifting genres that do not readily explain the motivation for an apparent plot reversal. The turn from domestic bliss to discord races from the idyllic, innocently romantic bliss of “honeymoon” scenes, including greater intimacy with each other’s bodies (albeit with Newton remaining in his human disguise), to moments of ecological-­ scientific harmony when Mary-Lou learns to “see” parts of the universe like Newton through a microscope and telescope. The montage, however,

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soon descends into household farce by way of arguments over Newton’s drinking habits, wardrobe, and musical preferences. As if seeking isolation in the commander’s seat of a space capsule or mission control room, Newton retreats from their discord by viewing a wall of televisions, the medium by which he had attempted to learn about American society before he departed from Anthea. When Newton tosses a tray of cookies that Mary-Lou has baked into the air, the camera closes in on the disks as if they are planets orbiting in slow motion. By morphing from household drama into a stylized, possibly parodic, sci-fi motif that evokes Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), this sequence depicts the mounting tensions in Newton’s life. He is caught between remaining on earth in a domestic arrangement increasingly governed by Mary-Lou’s calculations or intensifying his efforts to return to his Anthean mission. He returns to his initial purpose, however, only after she rejects his subsequent offer of undisguised “alien sex.” Newton’s decision not to continue living his earthbound life with Mary-Lou in disguise and instead to reveal his full alien self, metonymically through his undisguised body, is a step toward a fully Romantic relationship not constrained by stratified domestic roles and their economic profitability. In his true alien form, he has cat-like greenish eyes, slick reptilian skin, no hair, no ears, and no penis or nipples. After overcoming her initial shock, Mary-Lou tries to accept Newton’s overtures and reciprocate his offer of sexual love. But this move is thwarted once she begins to discover, without being able to accept, the alien mapping of his erogenous zones and their processes. Presenting himself to her in a supine position, as if completely abandoning his aura and its otherwise “sacred” distance, Newton appears to be offering her a first chance for a genuine interpersonal connection. His gesture represents an escape from the normative, upper-class form of monogamous domestic cohabitation that Mary-Lou has entered, but she is clearly not prepared to dispense with her newfound status, however illusory it may be, in order to pursue the full implications of “alien sex.” As far-reaching as the analogy may be, the precarious status of romantic love as an allegory of relationships among alien orders caught between private and public identities is best contextualized through a brief comparison with Keats’s Lamia,41 especially insofar as the poem incorporates the subgenre of “scientific romance.” While the poem’s tone toward Lamia and its treatment of her otherworldly status are ambiguous, her moment of greatest vulnerability, like Newton’s, hinges on her

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abandonment of her “disguise” and surrender of her aura, in this case, her ever-­morphing, arguably “Bowie-like” performances as an idealized goddess-woman in order to seduce and continually captivate her romantic interest Lycius. The poem openly laments the dissolution of a newly enchanted world and its privately shared romance by the presence of Lycius’s mentor Apollonius, a philosopher of “modernity” who would “Conquer all mysteries by rule and line” and “Unweave a rainbow”: his position is not far removed from that of the skeptical Bryce, who secretly takes an X-ray of Newton to confirm that he is not human. When Lycius awakes to the sound of the outside world after a postcoital slumber and seeks to publicly display Lamia as his bride for his personal glorification, he too allies himself with the realm of modernity by making her into a widely displayed commodity once her “empery / Of [private] joys” has proven insufficient. Their “Love in a palace” cannot be sustained under the pressures of Lycius’s will to dominate her. His desire for power needs to be mediated through a Corinthian economy grounded in public sites for the exchange of pleasure and conferring of status. As easy as it may be to indict an empirically reductive “philosophy” and commodified “publicity” for the demise of Lamia and her romance with Lycius, she too is implicated in the technologies of modernity through her control of Lycius’s field of vision and manufacturing of multisensory spectacles that stimulate his desire for her alone as long as she can ensure his belief in her private “romance” and secure its boundaries. It is only when she submits to her romantic “other” and reluctantly exposes her tactics of manufacturing romance to the regime of public desire, which includes those like Apollonius who would “test” her powers in order to classify, limit, and subjectivate it, that she is fatally disempowered. Her aura, which, like Newton’s, was enveloped in the tactics of modernity, is stripped from her.42 In the bedroom scene’s characteristically fractured, genre-bending cinematic style, Roeg also explores the ways that the most revealing moments of romantic intimacy are enmeshed in a field of representation conditioned by ends of modernity. The sequence that begins with Newton’s removal of his human disguise and ends with Mary-Lou leaving the bedroom in revulsion oscillates between lyrical Romantic tenderness and familiar but alienating modes of cinematic voyeurism and exploitation. Like an ironic inversion of a script from a 1950s’ sci-fi B-movie,43 the alien unthreateningly reveals his true form to the woman in love with him, but she first screams and urinates in fright before attempting to sexually respond to the passive Newton. Subdued “mood” lighting and palpitating electric bass

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grooves accompany Mary-Lou’s entrance into the bedroom as the camera aims its increasingly intensive focus on the principals’ erogenous zones. These devices allude to the conventions of soft-core pornography, even as the couple briefly in bed together undermine the usual male-female roles. As Pauline Kael colorfully but not quite accurately notes, Bowie, in the role of a “leering…lesbian-Christ,” may be “the first movie hero to have had his crotch airbrushed.”44 Her irreverent comments implicitly acknowledge the elements of the scene that undermine Romantic seriousness and dramatize the debasement of cinematic art. The episode is surrounded by the trappings of commercialized voyeuristic film genres, and these dissonant styles affect even the presumably sincere professions of faith, love, and trust between the two principals, which come off as deadeningly melodramatic or exposed to the possibility of double entendres. At best, the director visually represents the principal couple’s potential for “love in a palace” only by turning the focus away from the bedroom and interpolating what, according to screenwriter Paul Mayersberg, is either a flashback of Newton’s to a memory of sex with his Anthean wife or an imagined “honeymoon in space” with Mary-Lou.45 The highly stylized interpolation of a minimally backlit acrobatic alien couple slowly splashing each other in the dark while fully immersed in a twinkling, splotchy viscous fluid eludes clear recognition without access to an interview with the screenwriter. He indicates that this scene represents otherworldly sex, which takes place in an atmosphere completely saturated with sperm, vaginal fluids, and other biological products of sexual stimulation. With the motivation for this interpolated vision of Newton left ambiguous—is it a memory of his Anthean wife that stimulates his immediate urge for Mary-Lou or a transcendent desire for “taking” her in space?—it allows for the convergence of nostalgic and futuristic Romantic utopias. What unites both possibilities is freedom from the bonds of monogamy or, in its cognitively estranged form, from endogamy within an alien order. While the vision originates in Newton’s equally estranging androgynous-­ masculine sexual drive, it nonetheless amounts to a wish for completely honest acceptance and reciprocation between alien and human bodies, or a literalization of polymorphous perversity, the state of freedom before the development of firm sexual binaries. Just like the distribution of his surplus wealth among his human allies, Newton’s visualization may signify a “gift” economy of sex, free of “gravity,” that renounces gender-specific properties and heteronormative domination. Instead, the virtual Milky Way of starlit sexual fluids suggests the free sharing and exchange of these

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substances. The scene obliquely externalizes and literalizes the notion of a common reproductive pool. The artfully disjointed bedroom scene comes to an abrupt end, however, once Mary-Lou cannot continue to engage in “alien sex.” She cannot be brought to accept Newton’s biological otherness, but not necessarily because she finds it physically revolting. After all, she overcomes her initial fright and decides to erotically explore Newton’s body. Her screams and micturition upon first witnessing his undisguised form may amount to nothing more than the scripted, conditioned performance of horror at extreme “otherness.” Mary-Lou herself had been “othered” by the class and gender stratifications by which the realm of modernity subjected her. Having had a relationship with only a semblance of a human being up to this point, she is prepared to overcome culturally imposed aesthetic tastes and reroute her biological drives once again toward Newton’s body. It is only after arousing him to the point where he ejaculates a bodily fluid from one of his pectorals that she flees from him, retreating to the kitchen, previously the site of her strongest efforts to contain and domesticate Newton, where she then crouches and weeps. To be sure, the pectoral muscle is an unexpected site for a male orgasm, even in a sci-fi film defamiliarization of an alien body that derives from Bowie’s androgyny. Critic Joseph Lanza contextualizes this moment as yet another manifestation of the pessimistic vision Roeg delivers in his films: All romantic relationships proceed from “coitus” to “carnage” or the inevitable subjugation and destruction of one partner by the other after their first intimacy. In this instance, Lanza sees the abandoned Newton as engaged in an act of self-preservation analogous to male masturbation, a choice between inhabiting a “narcissistic universe” or falling into a “mating rut.”46 While the final moment in the bedroom may present this solitary post-ejaculatory moment as the most decisive testing point of Newton’s isolation and ultimate alienation from the human race, it is Mary-Lou who has stimulated him and whom he had urged to “believe” in him before they engaged in “alien sex.” By rerouting Newton’s ejaculation to a part of the body through which women lactate, the film deliberately confuses heteronormative sexual roles and conflates nurturing or “gift-giving” with unbounded erotic satisfaction. As a sign of humiliation and defeat, his chest ejaculation also points to the gaps between the earthbound relationship and the utopian “honeymoon in space” described above. By a strange metaphoric logic, then, this rejection of Newton’s alternate bio-erotic mapping is also a rejection of his “vision.”

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Whether his “vision” fails because of the same tragic incompatibility that Bowie ascribes to Ziggy Stardust’s aura and its “hazy cosmic jive” is debatable. What does it mean for an extraterrestrial being who wants to connect with those whom he may most inspire and liberate but is “afraid he’d blow [their] minds”? The phrase implies both the excitement and dangers lurking at the extremes of recreational drug use and sexual arousal, a kind of forbidden sublimity of the otherworldly that, the lyrics insist, must keep its distance. It may thrive only in the contemplation and not the actualization of full communion between transformative and banal orders. It is a testimony to Bowie’s cultural force, however, that Paul Mayersberg claims to have had song lyrics such as this in his mind before he even knew who would be cast as the film’s star.47 How effectively did his Bowie’s starring role extend his utopian significations and present a critical framework for envisioning a Romantic return to a pastoral world that is nonetheless facilitated through the knowledge and tactics of late modernity? This is yet another debatable question, given the film’s self-awareness of its limited agency in a niche of a late-capitalist industry. As if to confirm this limitation, Mayersberg depicts the Syndicate as an overwhelming force of capitalist co-optation that reduces the starman’s unsettling libidinal powers to a purely economic problem, his “overstimulation” of the economy. In one of the film’s most iconic and oft-cited scenes, Newton himself is made susceptible to the manufacturing of consumerist appetites and reduced to illusory overstimulation while viewing a wall of television programs immediately after his first domestic spat with Mary-Lou. The film and media images initially suggest freedom and regeneration but end in carnage, destruction, violence, and the ruin of innocence. What at first seems to renew his faith in humanity ends up only consuming him in his own tragically fated story, prompting him to scream, “Get out of my mind, all of you!” But he has no agency in escaping the totalizing effects of media oversaturation. This sequence is another instance of the tension between Romantic utopianism and its constraining mediation by an all-consuming modernity. The image of Newton staring at the wall of TVs is routinely abstracted from its immediate context and has been taken as an allegory of Bowie’s oversaturation in “glutinous” American popular culture; a self-reflective tableau that presents the “magpie” rock star absorbing his extensive range of ever-changing, media-savvy images; a virtual clinic of allusions to the myriad of other films and media images that self-referentially frame the plot; and the director’s own commentary on his visually excessive filmmaking style along with the viewer’s

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ensuing disorientation.48 It has been the aim of this chapter simply to ground all such allegorizations of the film in the testing of Bowie’s significance as agent of Romantic deliverance within and against the media of modernity that make his valence as a star, even an alienated fallen star, possible.

Notes 1. Qtd. in Keren Gorodeisky, “19th Century Romantic Aesthetics,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N.  Zalta, Stanford University, 1996–, revised article published in Fall 2016 ed. https://plato. stanford.edu/archives/fall2016/entries/aesthetics-­19th-­romantic/. 2. The Man Who Fell to Earth, directed by Nicolas Roeg. 1976. 40th anniversary collector’s ed. London, UK: Studiocanal, 2016. DVD; Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, trans. Catherine Porter (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), EbscoHost (107398), 21ff. 3. Löwy and Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, 6. 4. Bowie on Bowie: Interviews and Encounters with David Bowie, ed. Sean Egan (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2017), 59. Interview with Robert Hilburn for Melody Maker, Feb. 28, 1976. 5. Bowie on Bowie, 112. Interview with Angus McKinnon for New Music Express, Sept. 13, 1980. 6. Ibid., 112. 7. Löwy and Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, 25; Tom Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 26. 8. Bowie on Bowie, 58. 9. Nicholas Pegg, The Complete David Bowie (London: Titan Books, 2018), 211. 10. Peter Gillman and Leni Gillman, Alias David Bowie: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 1987), 414; Hugo Wilcken, Low (New York: Continuum, 2005), 16–22; for a model of a meteoric Romantic-Satanic “fallen star” that complements the film’s analogies between Newton and Icarus, see Clara Tuite, Lord Byron and Scandalous Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 1–16, https://doi.org/10.1017/ CBO9781316009666. 11. [Cracked Actor] “BBC A Film by Bowie Cracked Actor 1975,” directed by Alan Yentob, Internet Archive video, 53:24, originally televised on BBC1, January 26, 1975, added November 7, 2017, https://archive.org/ details/BBC_A_Film_By_Bowie_Cracked_Actor_1975. For examples of

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how Bowie was packaged for a mainstream audience during his residence in Los Angeles, see his eccentric duet pop hits medley as a guest on Cher’s variety TV show, an odd twist on the formula Donnie and Mary Osmond had made popular at the time: “Cher & David Bowie—Young Americans Medley (Live on the Cher Show, [November 23,] 1975),” YouTube video, 6:29, performance televised by CBS, posted by CHER Fan Club, October 22, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPlN8RBP-­Ws. For what seems to be a highly scripted attempt to present Bowie as a chummy heteronormative male with artistic and intellectual proclivities who can exchange banter with the widely popular star of the TV series Happy Days, Henry “The Fonz” Winkler, on the Dinah Shore talk show, see “David Bowie—Dinah Shore—[March 3,] 1976—Full Show,” YouTube video, 38.47, from televised episode of Dinah!, 2.117, syndicated program distributed by 20th Century Fox Television, posted by “sveinbeard,” February 20, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRudpIxXZ8I. 12. Quoted in Wilcken, Low, 73. 13. Ibid., 16; Susan Compo, Earthbound: David Bowie and the Man Who Fell to Earth (London: Jawbone Press, 2017), 165–66. I am grateful for the help Susan Compo provided in locating various people involved in the film and those who knew them. 14. Compo, Earthbound, 49, 177. 15. Mayersberg, Interview, Disc 3, The Man Who Fell to Earth DVD. 16. David Jenkins, “Notes on Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth,” companion booklet to The Man Who Fell From Earth DVD, 4. 17. Pauline Kael, “From ‘Notes on Evolving Heroes, Morals, Audiences— Jaws, Dog Day Afternoon, The Man Who Fell to Earth,’” in For Keeps, 691–97 (New York: Dutton, 1994), edited version of review article first published in the New Yorker, November 8, 1976; Jonathan Rosenbaum, “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” Monthly Film Bulletin 43 (January 1976): 86–87, ProQuest (1305831307). 18. Wilcken, Low, 19–20; Nicolas Roeg, The World is Ever Changing, Enhanced Edition (London: Faber and Faber, 2013), Kindle edition, location 1086. 19. Löwy and Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, 87. 20. Michael Ferber, “Romantic Anticapitalism: A Response to Sayre and Lowy,” in Spirits of Fire: English Romantic Writers and Contemporary Historical Methods, ed. G.A.  Rosso and Daniel P.  Watkins, (Rutherford, N.J: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990), 69–84. 21. Arthur C.  Danto, “The End of Art” (1984), repr. in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 85; see also Randall E.  Auxier, “Warm Impermanence,” in Theodore G. Ammon, ed., David Bowie and Philosophy: Rebel, Rebel. Vol. 103, Popular

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Culture and Philosophy (Chicago: Open Court, 2016), 31–44, EBSCOhost eBook Collection (1346254). 22. Sir Christopher Freyling, Philip Hoare, and Mark Kermode, “David Bowie Then… David Bowie Now….,” in David Bowie is the Subject, ed. Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh (London: New  York: V & A Publishing, 2013), 282–301. 23. William F.  Van Werten, “Film as Science-Friction: Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth,” Western Humanities Review 33, no. 2 (1979): 141, ProQuest (1291780561). 24. Paul Mayersberg, “The Story So Far: The Man Who Fell to Earth,” Monthly Film Bulletin 44, no. 4 (1975): 225–26, 231, H.W.  Wilson Humanities & Social Sciences Index Retrospective: 1907–1984 (520835482) and Interview, Man Who Fell to Earth DVD; Robert Phillip Kolker, “The Open Texts of Nicolas Roeg,” Monthly Film Bulletin 46, no. 2 (April 1, 1977): 82, ProQuest (1305510364); Neil Sinyard, The Films of Nicolas Roeg (London: Letts, 1991), 61. 25. Compo, Earthbound, 179–95; Mel Gussow, “Roeg: The Man behind The Man Who Fell to Earth,” New York Times, August 22, 1976, https://www. nytimes.com/1976/08/22/archives/roeg-­the-­man-­behind-­the-­man-­ who-­fell-­to-­earth.html?searchResultPosition=1. 26. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version” (1935–36), in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, translated by Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 19–55. Page numbers hereafter cited parenthetically in text. 27. Löwy and Sayre, Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity, 28. 28. Roeg, The World is Ever Changing, location 1098. 29. Wilcken, Low, 75. 30. Simon Critchley, Bowie (New York: OR Books, 2014), 115, https://doi. org/10.2307/j.ctv62hdz5. 31. Anneliese Cooper, “David Bowie’s Sincerity,” in Ammon, David Bowie and Philosophy, 139–48; Critchley, Bowie, 39–41; Roeg, The World is Ever Changing, location 1104. 32. Löwy and Sayre, Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity, 24; William Blake, “Jerusalem” [‘And did those feet in ancient time’] (1810), Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54684/ jerusalem-­and-­did-­those-­feet-­in-­ancient-­time. 33. The quoted phrase that justifies romantic affairs is spoken by the actor Gary Cooper to his co-star Audrey Hepburn in the film that plays on television during this scene, Love in the Afternoon. See Tom Milne, “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” Monthly Film Bulletin 45, no. 3 (1976): 146,

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H.W.  Wilson: Humanities & Social Sciences Index Retrospective: 1907–1984 (520706438). 34. Kolker, “The Open Texts of Nicholas Roeg,” 113; Anne K. Mellor, English Romantic Irony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980), 14. 35. Ferber, “Romantic Anticapitalism,” 81. 36. James Leach, “‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’: Adaptation by Omission,” Literature Film Quarterly 6, no. 4 (1978): 378, EBSCOhost (1978108249). 37. Gerard Loughlin, Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004). 235; Walter S. Tevis [Jr.], The Man Who Fell to Earth (1963; repr. Boston: Gregg Press, 1978). 38. Loughlin, 243. 39. Mayersberg, “The Story So Far” and Interview, Man Who Fell to Earth DVD. 40. Tom Milne, “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” 146. 41. John Keats, Lamia (1820), in Selected Poems and Letters (London: HarperCollins, 2014). Literature Online, ProQuest (2407291424). 42. Paul Endo, “Seeing Romantically in ‘Lamia,’” ELH 66, no. 1 (1999): 111–28, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30032064. 43. Joseph Lanza, Fragile Geometry: The Films, Philosophy, and Misadventures of Nicolas Roeg (New York: PAJ, 1989), 145. 44. Kael, “From ‘Notes on Evolving Heroes,’” 693. 45. Mayersberg, Interview, Man Who Fell to Earth DVD. 46. Lanza, Fragile Geometry, 109. 47. Mayersberg, Interview, Man Who Fell to Earth DVD. 48. Cooper, “David Bowie’s Sincerity,” 145; Freyling, Hoare, and Kermode, “David Bowie Then…David Bowie Now…,” 284–85; Leach, “‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’: Adaptation by Omission,” 374–75; Kolker, “The Open Texts of Nicolas Roeg,” 113; Sinyard, The Films of Nicolas Roeg, 61.

CHAPTER 6

Too Late to Be Late Again: David Bowie, the Late 1970s, and Romanticism Julian Knox

From the open window of a bungalow on Fountain Avenue in West Hollywood issues the pulsing hiss of a stream-train in motion, although it might also be a jet plane flying low overhead. Through curls of smoke and noise, a wailing guitar neither warming up nor soloing but somewhere in between, ever en route, is joined by contrapuntal bass and piano lines. Just before the groove kicks in and the whole thing becomes recognizable as a rock song, a passing pedestrian (or the ghost of a pedestrian, considering this is LA) might hear something else come through that window: the voice of a young man exuberantly proclaiming, “This is the sound of postmodernism.” It is the spring of 2003, midway through my first year in graduate school, and my friend Nathan has earlier that day acquired a used vinyl copy of David Bowie’s Station to Station from Amoeba Music.1 Some months later, we are driving down Sunset Boulevard listening to the song “Negativland” from Neu!’s 1972 debut album.2 Again, an ominous quasiindustrial noise, something like a jackhammer, leads off the track. Again, a J. Knox (*) Georgia College & State University, Milledgeville, GA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Rovira (ed.), David Bowie and Romanticism, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97622-4_6

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muffled guitar squeals in the background, defiantly on its own trip as Michael Rother’s plodding bassline and Klaus Dinger’s motorik-­beat propel the song forward. Again I exclaim, “This is the sound of postmodernism,” the awkward realization that I’m repeating myself tempered by the connective strands starting to form now between this song and Bowie’s and the boulevards outside the window, each and all always on the verge of unraveling into chaos, and exulting in that possibility, channeling it into strange and beautiful landscapes. Maybe speaking these words was a way of negotiating conditions for existence in this asphalt city without a center, a city in which the films of David Lynch had suddenly become relatable, the sun reflecting off the cars and billboards just as oblivious to my mixed feelings as the moon over Mulholland Drive, neither orb more than scenic lighting for mysterious and monstrous dramas playing out behind mansion gates from the hills to the coast. On a scouting trip a year earlier, having decided to check out what I thought was the “city center,” I board a bus heading from the westside to downtown, the driver befuddled by this odd tourist who has endured a two-hour ride through heavy traffic only to step off into precisely nowhere—wide, suddenly empty streets interspersed with office high-rises. A few exit ramps and overpasses away, although I don’t know it yet, is the Westin Bonaventure, four residential towers clad in reflective glass surrounding a vast atrium that, from the inside, is all concrete and air, a monumental negative space that feels empty even in its busiest hours. In its inversions of center and circumference, core and periphery, the hotel is synecdochic for LA itself3—the architectural double of the iconic giant rooftop donut not too far from LAX.4 And yet this structure, as Fredric Jameson observes, “does not wish to be a part of the city” surrounding it, “but rather its equivalent and its replacement or substitute.”5 Its entrances are narrow, unwelcoming, and easy-to-miss. Storefronts line its inner walls like domiciles in an ancient cavern city, or docking bays on some interstellar cruise ship. One does not need to leave the hotel because it offers everything, much like if the Internet were a physical building, a “hyperspace”6 forever furnishing us with new worlds as the hills of another world burn in the distance. In 1976, Bowie would play on screen the role of a visitor to just such a place, an alien from a parched and war-torn planet who lands on Earth in search of water, only to descend headlong into substance-fueled rock and roll oblivion. As Bowie would say of his lead performance in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, “My one snapshot memory of that film

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is not having to act. Just being me as I was was perfectly adequate for the role.”7 Being “me as I was” for Bowie in mid-seventies Los Angeles meant experiencing a breakdown in the ability to distinguish precisely between the performer and the performance, between the rock and roll star and the artist for whom “rock looked like a good vehicle.”8 This difficulty was exacerbated both by Bowie’s prodigious cocaine intake and by the fact that he had by now achieved the reputation of a chameleon and had begun to market himself as such, titling his first greatest hits album, released that same year, CHANGESONEBOWIE. The interlocking puns of this album title also suggest a dialectic, “CHANGES” put forward as a thesis that immediately encounters an antithetical “ONE,” these binaries or polarities finding synthesis only in “BOWIE,” who alone, Christ-like and Prospero-­ like, conjures unity from multiplicity, stability from flux, nouns from verbs, and vice-versa. When fans, music journalists, critics, and professional explainers drop the “postmodern” into a conversation about Bowie, they invariably refer to some variant of Bowie’s meticulously curated changeling-­ image. Chances are high that terms like “performativity” or “performed identity” will drop nearby, maybe even with an invocation of Andy Warhol and his gleeful dismantling of the boundaries between “high” art and commercial images. Some might even insist on Bowie’s “wholesale theft of ideas, melodies, and voices” as a hallmark not just of a postmodernism that sees everything as performance and pastiche, but also of a knowing cynicism that regards values like authenticity and genius as simply “not possible under current market conditions,” as a recent writer on Bowie has put it.9 Although this latter view is predicated on so complete a conflation of artist and copyist that it puts Bowie into the same echelon as Milli Vanilli—and which his material of the late 1970s and early 1980s, as I argue here, qualifies and resists in significant ways—there can still be no doubt as to the myriad ways in which Bowie fulfills the general tendencies of postmodernism. But can a postmodernism so reductively and prescriptively understood finally capture the David Bowie whose music populates our record shelves and our playlists? And what about that specific variety of postmodernity that Bowie experienced for two years in Los Angeles, the variety that operates spatially and environmentally, and that shapes and contorts and demands things of our bodies and minds—the variety that, as Ed Soja says both of the Westin Bonaventure and of Los Angeles itself, initially seems “divertingly open” only to finally “bewilder coordination and encourage submission instead”?10

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I was going round and round the hotel garage Must have been touching close to 94.11

“Always Crashing in the Same Car,” which appears on side one of Bowie’s 1977 album Low, refers to an event that transpired the previous year, and while it is doubtful that the hotel in question was the Westin Bonaventure (which had just opened its doors) or that this even happened in LA,12 the lyrics emblematize cocaine addiction as (literal) speed addiction, combined with the circular, senseless feeling of navigating a space that thwarts navigability. Much like its counterpart on 1979’s Lodger, “Move On,” “Always Crashing in the Same Car” is a song about movement: “Every chance that I take / I take it on the road.”13 Where the later song pictures Bowie globetrotting from Kenya to Japan to Cyprus, driven on by the faith that “Somewhere there’s an ocean / innocent and wild,”14 the earlier one finds him hitting the road only to return over and over to the same spot, change manifesting only sameness, departure discovering only deeper doldrums. Regardless of where the hotel-garage incident took place, or if it even took place at all, this is a song about Los Angeles and the existential impasse that Bowie had reached there. As he would tell Allan Jones of Melody Maker shortly after leaving the city for Europe, “I look back on some things in total horror … And, anyway, I began to realize that the environment of Los Angeles, of America, was by this time detrimental to my writing and work. It was no longer an inspiration to be caught in that environment.”15 Bowie’s language of being “caught,” of possibility and speed and movement giving way to repetition, enclosure, and futility, is the same that Soja ascribes to the space of the Bonaventure and the Los Angeles that it emblematizes. To be fair, part of Bowie’s feeling of entrapment was surely a very real symptom of a spiraling cocaine addiction. As Hugo Wilcken reminds us, “Essentially, Bowie was suffering from severe bouts of cocaine psychosis, a condition very similar to schizophrenia, with its highly distorted perceptions of reality, hallucinations, affectlessness and a marked tendency towards magical thinking.”16 Without discounting “the side effects of the cocaine,”17 we might enquire whether the proportions this habit had taken on circa 1976 were themselves the side effects of a more pervasive unease rooted in environment—as Bowie says in 1977, “Whether it’s fortunate or not I don’t know, but I’m absolutely and totally vulnerable to suggestion by environment, and environment and circumstances affect my writing tremendously. To the point of absurdity sometimes.”18 On the one hand, here is once again the curated

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image of Bowie-as-chameleon, ever merging with his surroundings. And yet something else peeps through the foliage as well: a self that desires not just to blend in, to adopt, to mix and remix, a self striving not just to be fashionable but to fashion, to write, to create, and to disclose itself. According to Tobias Rüther, Bowie would say of Los Angeles that it is “the least suitable place on Earth for a person to go in search of identity and stability.”19 The fact that such things as “identity and stability” would even be concerns for the ultra-postmodern, shapeshifting, gloriously inauthentic Warholian alien that constitutes the “symbolic complex”20 of David Bowie might be a bridge too far for some critics and commenters, and yet when we look closely at Bowie’s musical output of the late 1970s and the creative network that shapes and is shaped by it, we hear an artist singing more earnestly than ever about solitude and solipsism with his most diverse array of collaborators yet, we see self-reflection and self-­ mythologizing assume a prominence on stage alongside mythological personae such as Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust, and The Thin White Duke, and we are given access to sweeping, wordless sonic landscapes that mediate the frenetic play of voices and personae on the other side of the record—in short, we are confronted with a Romanticism not as antithetical to or obsolete in the face of an overarching postmodernism, but rather as an essential, human, vital component of it.21 In a reappraisal of Lodger published for Pitchfork after Bowie’s death in 2016, Mike Powell writes that “for as many people who saw their idealized selves in Ziggy Stardust or Aladdin Sane, Lodger was the first time Bowie really seemed accessible—a character with flaws and frailties, petty thoughts and grocery lists; someone who doesn’t just dabble in reality but lives in it.”22 Much the same, however, might be said of Low. David Buckley discerns in Low’s lyrics a sense of “isolation and harm,” of Bowie as “damaged goods” in the aftermath of Los Angeles, and that “Heroes” (1977) and Lodger are by comparison “less autobiographical works.”23 Charles Shaar Murray explains penning his infamously hostile review of Low for New Musical Express precisely because the album registered personally and struck an as-yet raw nerve: “I’d basically just crawled out of a deep hole, a mini breakdown caused by several years of acute amphetamine addiction, and Low reminded me of everything I’d just crawled out of. And when I interviewed Bowie the following year, I told him that Low appeared to be an actual sonic incarnation of post-speed addiction breakdown, and he said that’s exactly what it was.”24 Ultimately, it is just as difficult to discern which of Bowie’s “Berlin Trilogy”25 recordings is most “personal” or

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“autobiographical” as it is to demarcate the sonic qualities that distinguish those three albums from those that immediately surround them. The engagement with the European artistic canon is proclaimed on the title track of Station to Station, and the propulsive steam train guitar that opens that track more closely resembles the German rock avant-garde—and specifically Neu!’s debut album—than most of the music Bowie recorded in Berlin. Likewise, the jagged, metallic guitar tone that Robert Fripp lays down on “Heroes”—according to Eno in a matter of just six hours, straight off a plane from New York and jetlagged,26 but according to Fripp himself over several days27—reappears on Scary Monsters… And Super Creeps (1980), this time as a foundational musical element, and alongside Bowie’s vocal performance (ranging from the anguished to the detached—all moods he had explored over the previous four records) the marquee feature of the album. All things considered, it might be more accurate to refer to these recordings as a “pentaptych” rather than as a “trilogy” or “triptych” sandwiched by transitional albums. If, as I have been suggesting, what unites this “pentaptych” is a latent Romanticism that provides Bowie a language and a paradigm with which to respond to the dislocations of fame, addiction, and commodified performativity in the quintessential postmodern metropolis, then it is a Romanticism that resists colloquial associations with dime-novel sentimentality, “back in the day” nostalgia, or righteous political idealism. Bowie has not suddenly reverted to strumming an acoustic guitar. He has not taken up with Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and the ghosts of Bob Dylans past in some Hudson Valley hamlet. While Bowie himself would admit during press interviews for “Heroes” that “There’s a lot more heart and emotion in ‘Low’ and, especially, the new album,”28 such “heart and emotion” is dispersed, processed, synthesized, indulged, ironized, and refracted through narrative personae on these records in such a way that witnesses both the chameleon shifting his colors and also a distinctive spirit unfolding and disclosing itself through these permutations. Such a philosophy of artistic creation as self-disclosure, not through purportedly unfiltered, unmediated “sincerity,” but rather through permutation and flux, is nothing new. In fact, it lies at the heart of a major strand of Romantic aesthetics, articulated by Coleridge in his appraisal of Shakespeare-as-Proteus: “to become by power of Imagination another thing—Proteus, a river, a lion, yet still the God felt to be there.”29 When Coleridge formulates this idea in his 1808 Lectures on the Principles of Poetry at the Royal Institution in London, he is intent on recalibrating the

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parameters by which we appreciate Shakespeare’s poetic achievement and, accordingly, poetic genius itself in its fundamental, “fixed” principles.30 The image of Shakespeare that had predominantly carried over from the eighteenth century was that of a prolific but “irregular” genius whose work presented a mixed bag of “beauties” and “blemishes” stemming from the bard’s disregard of the classical dramatic unities—an error for which Samuel Johnson concedes Shakespeare cannot entirely be blamed, as he lived in an age “struggling to emerge from barbarity.”31 Coleridge, on the contrary, gives us a Shakespeare who knows exactly what he is doing, for whom poetic principles are not a prefabricated checklist of rules, but instead the coordinated movements of an imagination that is always at work transforming, unifying, and idealizing, and through the space of the poetic work resonating with other imaginations that it summons or calls into action. This is also the basis for Coleridge’s desynonimization of copy and imitation, which he first develops in the same lecture series. For Coleridge, a copy is at best a product of the criteria he later articulates as those correspondent to fancy: The artist who merely “copies” works only with “fixities and definites,”32 or with images recalled from memory without any willful mediation apart from a general rearrangement of an original sequence of images. An imitation, on the other hand, and as Fred Burwick elucidates, “reveals the conscious artistry involved”— “conscious” in that it exceeds the mere re-ordering of sequential memory by effecting a willful “imaginative transformation” that expresses a difference from (and not a sameness of) reality.33 Shakespeare, in turn, rather than merely “copying” from nature—and without requisite judgment as to what to include and exclude (as the eighteenth-century critics would have it)—emphatically recreates nature anew from the alchemic crucible of his imagination. Everything, as it turns out, is in its right place in Coleridge’s Shakespeare. Coleridge is relevant to Bowie in myriad ways: both suffer for substantial stretches from mammoth substance addictions, both discover in the artistic traditions of Europe and specifically Germany inspiration and impetus for their own work, and both are accused of lifting ideas wholesale from this tradition and thus of not actually owning their work. In Bowie’s case, Eno offers one way to parse such charges of artistic borrowing: “Some people say Bowie is all surface style and second-hand ideas, but that sounds like a definition of pop to me.”34 Considering the ubiquity if not centrality of sampling, remixing, and mashing-up to (post)modern popular music, Eno’s statement is difficult to dispute, as is its suggestion

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that Bowie, through his pioneering use of the aforementioned techniques,35 is foremost among those who have defined “pop” in the way we know it today. The by-now accepted and uncontroversial idea that Bowie defines pop is an altogether different proposition, however, from the unfortunately just-as-common notion that pop defines Bowie. From the vantage point of the casual consumer of mass media, the latter truism is understandable: The Bowie who wrote the song “Fashion,” who makes cameos in films like Zoolander, and who married the supermodel Iman, has (of his own volition) become synonymous with the fashionable and the popular. And it is understandable from an academic-theoretical vantage point as well, considering that critics like Jameson define the postmodern as a pop phenomenon: What distinguishes the Westin Bonaventure from the architecture of “high modernism,” after all, is that it forbears inserting “a different, distinct, an elevated, a new utopian language into the tawdry and commercial sign-system of the surrounding city, but on the contrary, seek[s] to speak that very language, using its lexicon and syntax.”36 Structurally and experientially, the Bonaventure is a pastiche of the mini-malls, non-Euclidian street plans, and vast expanses of gray concrete that surround it. As a performer working in the “second-hand” and “surface”-oriented medium of pop music, the David Bowie who plays with personae, with gender, with the “cut-up” technique of writing lyrics, and with other artists’ sonic innovations, is in turn the postmodern pastiche artist par excellence, who repurposes the “tawdry” and quotidian language of whichever space and time he occupies as high art, or at least all that we have left of art now that “stylistic innovation is no longer possible” and in its place only the devastating but liberating hard truth of “the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic.”37 And again, Bowie gives us plenty of ammunition with which to strike at such a conclusion: Witness the title pun of “Art Decade” on side two of Low, or the declaration that “I am bored from the event” on the opening and closing tracks of Scary Monsters, or even the sum total of what Wilcken calls “his uninspiring ‘regular guy’ schtick of the 1980s.”38 If we allow these interlocking concepts of pop and postmodernism to define Bowie, however, then we must also rest content with their consequences, which range from chalking up anything that looks like authenticity or genius as just another performance or phase—an “enduring fiction” that persists as a mythology because we turn “deaf ears” to the artifice of its construction39—to declaring that such things are simply “not possible” in the commercial milieu of late capitalism,40 to bidding farewell to the artist altogether à la what Jane Stabler

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appositely calls “the poststructuralist dream of everything dissolving into pure text.”41 It was largely on account of my subscription to such a view of Bowie as postmodernism’s pop-music poster-boy that I grew disenchanted with his records less than halfway through my time in Los Angeles. The kicker, the moment that marked the nadir of my enthusiasm for Bowie and his circle came when I saw a flyer for Brian Eno “in conversation” at the Skirball Cultural Center in 2005. It bore the title “An Evening in the Company of Genius.”42 I was incensed. Over the previous several years, my record collection had taken shape around an expanding nucleus of 1970s German progressive and experimental rock, variously known as krautrock or “Kosmische Musik.” Germany was where the most rigorous, uncompromising rock experimentation of the late 1960s and early 1970s was happening—as Julian Cope puts it in Krautrocksampler, the first book-length study of this music written in English, krautrock was “transcendental Cosmic Fuck-rock played by Superfit amphetamine Visionary Poet-­ druids” and it “created a blaze of white lightning in the early ‘70s when all around us was the artless drywank of ELP, the spiritual airbrushing of Yes and, by far worst of all, the formica-mantras of Dark Side of the Moon-­ period Pink Floyd.”43 Shielded from the enormous commercial pressures of the US- and UK-based recording industries, idolizing Stockhausen and avant-garde composers as much if not more than the blues and R & B forefathers of their English-speaking contemporaries, and giving voice to a “whole Youth-nation working out their blues”44 yet determined to “not sink under the weight of imported foreign culture”45 (which once rained down bombs but now saturated the landscape with military bases, Coca-­ Cola, and blue jeans), bands such as Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel, and Kraftwerk—and offshoots of these bands like Neu! and Klaus Schulze—developed long-form instrumental brain-melts that often took up entire record sides and formed the template for what later became known as “ambient” and “New Age” music. Eno knew krautrock well, and in addition to his collaborations with members of Cluster and Neu!, its influence is increasingly audible over the span of his 1970s solo albums. Even though Eno probably had little knowledge of the flyer on the UCLA campus promoting his “genius,” my chagrin would not be tempered. Here was a British musician who had appropriated and popularized a German innovation, who got labeled a genius while much of Manuel Göttsching’s46 discography remained out-of-print, along with countless other forerunners of said genius that one had to be lucky (and shrewd)

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enough to find used on vinyl. This was that frightful juncture in the early 2000s when young people hearing Kraftwerk’s “Computer Love” for the first time thought that they were listening to a Coldplay song.47 To my righteously indignant, obsessively Germanophilic mind, Eno was taking credit where very little was due—and Bowie was an even bigger culprit, using Eno’s already-borrowed aesthetic to add avant-garde panache to his own records. In response, I dug ever deeper into the “psychedelic underground”48 searching for veins of the singular, the weird, and the unpopular—a journey that soon branched off into the teeming underworld of black metal, whose venomous assault spoke truth to my inglorious navigation of postgraduate life and the ebbing waters of the post-recession academic job market. In my room and in my car, though, I would still steal listens to side one of Low, or side two of “Heroes,” or select tracks off of Lodger and Eno’s Another Green World (1975) and Before and After Science (1977). New details and textures continued to emerge with each listen, and with them new pleasures and new ways of thinking about things that countered my suspicions of artistic dishonesty before they could calcify into a disgruntled loathing. These recordings had managed to outlast the intellectual posturing of my early years in Los Angeles as well as the alternatingly furious and numb disaffection of my final months there before moving back home, broke and jobless—and they spoke to me through that period too, through the awkwardness of once again living with my parents and through the indignities of a first job that I had no desire to accept and no choice not to. On each one of Low’s songs to feature vocals, Bowie sings of retreating into himself: “So deep in your room / You never leave your room”49; “Drifting into my solitude”50; “Sometimes you get so lonely / Sometimes you get nowhere.”51 If this inward, solipsistic, “low” Bowie captures for some listeners the sound of “post-speed addiction breakdown,”52 it also conveys a sense of possibility and freedom in the aftermath of crisis and catastrophe. We hear this in the music (and read it in the title) of “A New Career in a New Town,” which alternates between a contemplative, placid section that recalls Radio-Activity-era Kraftwerk53 and a giddy full-band section punctuated by harmonica; the song is a microcosm of the bifurcated structure of Low as a whole, as well as a wordless, purely sonic manifestation of what Bowie had called for on the album’s leadoff single: “I will sit right down / Waiting for the gift of sound and vision.”54 This calm confidence in the imminent arrival of a sacred gift, this waiting for inspiration and revelation, is one version of

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what the German Romantics would call Sehnsucht, a term with no exact English equivalent. Bowie gives us another version of Sehnsucht on the preceding track, “What in the World,” when he sings of a “something deep inside of me / Yearning deep inside of me”55—which also establishes a context and frame of reference for his invocations of solitude and seclusion on “Sound and Vision” and elsewhere on the album. Bowie might be in retreat from Los Angeles and the demons that plagued him there, but he is also fulfilling the summoning of the “European canon” that he had announced on “Station to Station” by relocating to continental Europe, where the ritualistic journey “from Kether to Malkuth” is transfigured into a Romantic journey inwards. The Kabbalistic Tree of Life referenced on “Station to Station” is now “something awful” drawn on a carpet on the second track of Low, “Breaking Glass,” the act of looking downward onto the floor or onto a mirror of cocaine broken off and replaced by a gaze directed at once “deep inside” himself and outward to Berlin and Germany. As two recent commenters on Bowie and the historical-­ geographical space of Berlin have put it, “the move to Berlin was a nostalgic expression of returning home” that “offered him the opportunity to covertly rediscover his inspirational roots.”56 The journey outward that is doubly a journey homeward to an inner truth that has been there all along, waiting for conditions requisite to its disclosure, is a defining feature of the German Romantic Bildungsroman, or novel of development/education, from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–1796) through Ludwig Tieck’s Franz Sternbald’s Journeys (1798) and Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802), up to its twentieth-century incarnations in Hermann Hesse’s Peter Camenzind (1904) and Demian (1919). In the hands of the Romantics and their inheritors, picaresque narratives of ultimately redemptive misadventure such as Don Quixote (1605) and Joseph Andrews (1742) are transmuted into a symbolic apparatus for the coming-to-know-itself of the soul, for the unfolding of the seeming accidents of existence into a grander concept of Being. Novalis’s The Novices of Sais, like Ofterdingen unfinished and published posthumously in 1802, reads like a further distillation of that already philosophic-poetic novel by largely dispensing with the trappings of plot and action in favor of a series of reflections on this mutual unfolding of soul and cosmos that constitutes Bildung or education in its most expansive sense:

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I scarcely dare admit it to myself, but so fervent grows the faith in me that here I shall some day find the thing that I long for everlastingly; that it is present. When with this faith I look around me here, everything converges into a higher image, a new design; and all my companions are moving towards one place. Then everything becomes so familiar, so dear to me; and what before seemed strange and foreign, becomes all at once like a household utensil.57

Novalis’s narrator, like the living generation of poets and thinkers whose insights he and his fellow-apprentices invoke and put into conversation, is waiting for the gift of sound and vision. Inwardness and what he calls “creative contemplation”58 are no mere indulgences or postures, but as corollaries of Sehnsucht or a “Yearning deep inside,” they occasion “a new revelation of the genius of love, a new bond between the Thou and the I.”59 In the context of Low and the Romantic aesthetics with which it overtly and thoughtfully engages, songs like “Be My Wife” take on the aspect of ecstatic longing for a transcendent union, even as the song—as Bowie himself would state—is “genuinely anguished.”60 For the Bowie of Low, the quotidian contains the cosmic (like Blake’s grain of sand), and the downtrodden, depressive, and “low” affective state is at one and the same time the state of imagination, creation, and love. No wonder, then, that Low would be so influential for young bands who used synthesized keyboards and drums to explore emotional registers equal parts melancholic and ecstatic, and that one such subset of bands would come to be known as “the New Romantics.” As keyboardist Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran puts it, “An entire generation of groups who formed in the late ’70s or early ’80s only happened because of David… There was decadence about him that was appealing, something dark, something German, but something very exciting.”61 For bands like Joy Division, who eschewed the glitzy decadence of the New Romantics in favor of full immersion into what Jean-Pierre Turmel calls “the worlds of half-light and the intensity of ecstasy,”62 late-70s Bowie was no less influential. Drummer Stephen Morris recalls that “When it came out, I thought Low was the sound of the future.”63 Morris’s fascination with Low’s drum sound is evident throughout his work with Joy Division and New Order, but it is Joy Division and singer Ian Curtis in particular who returns us to the lonely bedrooms of Low—“In a room with no window in the corner I found truth”64—and who summons those strains of dark Romanticism associated with Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets (1784–1800) and

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Coleridge’s poetry of nightmare and despair, as well as with the German Romantics Karoline von Günderrode and Heinrich von Kleist, who both die by their own hands. Turmel quotes Günderrode and Kleist in his essay included with the Atmosphere/Dead Souls 7”, released in March 1980. Two months later, Curtis commits suicide by hanging, apparently while Iggy Pop’s The Idiot (1977) was spinning on his turntable—an album produced and largely composed by Bowie shortly before he recorded Low. When Curtis sings “I’ve got the spirit / But lose the feeling”65 on the opening track of Joy Division’s first LP, Unknown Pleasures (1979), he is nodding to the visionary-catastrophic Romanticism of Low, with its introspective lyrics of yearning and agony complemented by its structural conceit of frenetic energy turning (over) to uneasy tranquility. Curtis’s lyrics also invoke the Coleridge of “Dejection: An Ode,” who in gazing at the “excellently fair” features of the night sky finds to his horror that they have effected no change, no requisite response on the level of feeling: “I can see, not feel how beautiful they are!”66 Coleridge fears that this failure of feeling, this affective emptiness, is the omen or portent of an even worse failure or suspension of his “shaping spirit of Imagination,”67 and yet the oft-noted irony of all this is that in writing the poem, feeling and imagination have quietly proven themselves intact. In its title, in the way it conceives poetic “vision” and creation, and in its expressions of desire for such vision, Coleridge’s “Dejection” is an ancestor of Bowie’s Low and a progenitor of the “tortured artist”68 trope that Bowie plays with on that record, as well as on the records that succeed it—witness the quotation marks around “Heroes,” the contorted, bandaged Bowie on the cover of Lodger, and the pensive clown Pierrot on the sleeve of Scary Monsters and in the video for “Ashes to Ashes.” Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief All kill their inspiration and sing about their grief.69

Also written at Hansa Studios by the (now-defunct) Berlin Wall, and also with Eno involved in its production,70 U2’s “The Fly” explores the same overlap of the postmodern and the Romantic that Bowie had sounded out just over a decade earlier on Low and the albums that succeeded it. Its lyrics a series of aphorisms delivered “like a crank call from Hell,”71 “The Fly” resembles Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” in the way it gleefully ironizes received wisdom72 and in turn leaves the audience uncertain of its footing. It reserves special buzzing gadfly attention for the Romantic

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“tortured artist,” whose genius it declares stolen and whose eloquent sorrow it deems a product of self-sabotage. Tongue-in-cheek but maybe not entirely, introspective and emotive but also sleazy and trite, Bono’s stage persona of “The Fly”—clad in a leather jumpsuit and wraparound sunglasses—is someone who has it both ways, calling the George H.W. Bush White House onstage from the Zoo TV tour one moment, and launching into a wrenching rendition of “One” or “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” the next. As an adolescent whose first exposure to something like Romanticism had happened via my father’s cassette of The Unforgettable Fire (1984)—all Wordsworthian lyrics of the self and the landscape sung through the dreamlike haze of Eno’s washed-out production—I had no idea what to make of “The Fly” or of Achtung Baby upon its release in 1991. What was “serious” and what was “performance”? Where did the alter-egos and posturing end and the Bono (I thought) I had known and loved begin? Or was everything just posturing? Was the earnest Romanticism with which I had so thoroughly identified just a phase, something to be moved on from and retrospectively mocked? A similar set of questions seems to haunt how we think about late-70s’ Bowie and what I have been suggesting is the Romanticism of the work he produced in that period. Nor am I alone in identifying that Romanticism as such: Wilcken notices in Bowie’s Thin White Duke-persona “the morbid self-absorption of a nineteenth-century German Romantic”73 and characterizes the sadness and “nostalgia for a future that never happened” of the second sides of Low and “Heroes” as “very much a form of Romanticism.”74 Even so, Wilcken sees in the “rejection of narrative” for “textural sound” on those same record sides the implicit “rejection of a certain Romantic tradition.”75 Wilcken’s book on Low is surely among the most thoughtful and illuminating appreciations of any Bowie album, but it too falls into the unfortunately common trap of treating Bowie’s postmodernism as an overarching zero-sum game in which Romanticism is just another set of signs and gestures indulged only to be discarded, a style worn for a period before ever-deeper burial in the closet. Bono as “The Fly” offers us another way to conceptualize the matter, however, insofar as this persona—signifying “the rock star” but just as easily “the author” or “the artist” in the eyes of the public—conveys Romantic inwardness and earnestness while ironizing it at the same moment in the space of the same work. As Bono says of Bowie, “we were all such students and fans of his”—how appropriate, then, that of all people to drop into the studio as the band was finalizing this song, it would be Bowie himself.76

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The Romantic period itself, of course—whether we define it narrowly as the juncture between the storming of the Bastille in 1789 and the first Reform Bill of 1832, or more broadly as a trans-European, transatlantic phenomenon that spans the nineteenth century and even bleeds into the twentieth—already offers ways for conceiving and incorporating such representational elements as decenteredness, interruption, role-playing, borrowing/recycling, and all-consuming irony that we associate with postmodernism generally and with figures like Bowie (and “The Fly”) specifically. Lord Byron is one such figure. Recognizing that postmodernism has been defined in manifold ways ranging from the “cynical” and nihilistic to the “playfully courageous,” and from the economic and political to the purely aesthetic, Stabler suggests that in broad terms it is nonetheless a response to developments in “the rise of print culture” and how that contributes to “an increasingly self-reflexive vein in literature.”77 For all the ways in which Byron consciously curates his celebrity and, in works like Don Juan (to quote Lou Reed), “combines the absurd with the vulgar,”78 what for Stabler distinguishes Byron’s postmodernism from “the mixture of trash and high art evident in other varieties of twentieth- and twenty-first century postmodern culture” is that Byron’s poetry has “pools of commitment” even as it “dances along an ever-varying line”79 of performativity and irony. As an androgynous celebrity equally fluent in the tongues of high art and the carnivalesque, whose work actively resists being pinned down to any single genre or style and which inspires devotion and consternation in nearly equal measure, Bowie is as close to complete an incarnation of Lord Byron as rock and roll—that culture teeming with would-be Byrons—can offer. When it comes to the casual, matter-of-fact assignation of “wholesale theft”80 and unoriginality to postmodern Bowie—charges to which I subscribed for even longer than I care to admit—it is not Byron but rather Coleridge who furnishes a critical lens by which we can bring Bowie the artist into focus over and against the caricaturizing funhouse mirror by which he is all or nothing, either a cowering imposter or a towering original genius. Perhaps my consternation at the flyer for Eno’s talk in 2005 had less to do with any innate characteristics of his or Bowie’s music than with the concept of genius to which I had uncritically subscribed. This is the sense of genius that, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, has been in common usage since the eighteenth century, that is doubtless accompanied in our minds by a picture of Beethoven or Einstein, and whose primary characteristic has been perhaps most succinctly defined by

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the English essayist William Jackson of Exeter as “invention, a creation of something not before existing; to which talents make no pretence.”81 On the one hand, Coleridge believes in and values originality and invention in the sense used by Jackson: as he puts it in the preface to “Christabel” whilst defending himself from charges of plagiarism, For there is among us a set of critics, who seem to hold, that every possible thought and image is traditional; who have no notion that there are such things as fountains in the world, small as well as great; and who would therefore charitably derive every rill, they behold flowing, from a perforation made in some other man’s tank.82

It is almost as if the critics that Coleridge so colorfully describes are postmodernists without knowing it, for whom nothing is new and (to quote Lindsey Buckingham) “everything you do has been done.”83 When we look closely at Coleridge’s actual definition of “genius,” however, the distinguishing characteristic of this faculty begins to come into focus precisely with what Buckingham is so acidly telling Stevie Nicks: everything has, in fact, been done. For Coleridge, this is no grounds for despair or resignation in the face of inevitable inauthenticity; on the contrary, it is where genius begins its work. As he puts it in the 1818 Friend, For whatever is within them, whatever is deep within them, must be as old as the first dawn of human reason. But to find no contradiction in the union of old and new, to contemplate the ancient of days with feelings as fresh, as if they then sprang forth at his own fiat—this characterizes the minds that feel the riddle of the world, and may help to unravel it! To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood, to combine the child’s sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for perhaps forty years has rendered familiar—this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish genius from talent. And so to represent familiar objects as to awaken the minds of others to a like freshness of sensation concerning them…this is the prime merit of genius, and its most unequivocal mode of manifestation. Who has not, a thousand times, seen it snow upon the water? Who has not seen it with a new feeling, since he has read Burn’s comparison of sensual pleasure, To snow that falls upon a river, A moment white—then gone forever!84

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When the Bowie of Low is searching for “something deep inside of me” he knows, like Coleridge, that there is nothing “new” there at all, just as he knows—and is open about the fact—that the sonic textures and arrangements of his collaborations with Eno are krautrock innovations, world music innovations, and avant-garde classical innovations. But why should that stop him from expressing it through his voice, a voice like no other, just as Burns’ couplet conveys a sense of newness and rejuvenation despite (or indeed because of) the mundanity of his subject? As Coleridge puts it in Chapter XIII of the Biographia Literaria, the imagination operates by a process of dissolving, diffusing, and dissipating “in order to re-create.”85 If imagination is the faculty that brings art into the world, then all art is “secondary” and, by definition, late. Rather than devaluing art, this is on the contrary Coleridge telling us that art is what constantly and perpetually re-values life by virtue of reenacting creation. When Bowie announces on “Station to Station” that “It’s too late to be late again,”86 he is not just heralding the appearance of a European Romantic canon on his creative horizon, but is through characteristic paradox and irony insisting on the sense of newness that he will fashion out of that late arrival.

Notes 1. Before the vinyl renaissance of the early twenty-first century (before big retail chains began stocking LPs again), and before digital music players were ubiquitous accessories, Nathan had figured out that used LPs in this former capital of the recording industry were a fraction of the price of new CDs, and with superior sound. I soon bought a cheap turntable—a fully automatic plastic affair meant to be packaged with a mini-system—from the same electronics store downtown where Nathan had bought his, inaugurating a hobby that kept life bearable in the same city that a frayed and strung-­out Bowie had evacuated a quarter of a century earlier following the Station to Station sessions. 2. This had recently been reissued on CD and yet sounded more rigorous, more informed, more coolly detached, indeed “newer” than any current bands in this heyday of mass-produced thrift-store t-shirts and winking, “knowing” irony as a default aesthetic stance. 3. Ed Soja definitively asserts what is largely implied in Frederic Jameson’s earlier writing on the Bonaventure, namely, that it “recapitulates and reflects the sprawling manufactured spaces of Los Angeles,” that it “simulates the restructured landscape of Los Angeles and is simultaneously simu-

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lated by it.” Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (Verso, 1989), 244. 4. Indeed, the Bonaventure has its own rooftop “donut” in the form of a revolving restaurant/cocktail lounge on the top floor. 5. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” The Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism, ed. Vincent B.  Leitch (Norton, 2010), 1855. 6. Ibid., 1856. 7. Qtd. in Nicholas Pegg, The Complete David Bowie, 7th ed. (Titan, 2016), 657. 8. Allan Jones, “Goodbye to Ziggy and All That…,” Bowie on Bowie: Interviews and Encounters With David Bowie, ed. Sean Egan (Chicago Review Press, 2015), 64. 9. Matthew Lampert, “The Madness of the Musician,” David Bowie and Philosophy: Rebel, Rebel, ed. Theodore G.  Ammon (Open Court, 2016), 147–48. 10. Soja, 244. 11. Bowie, “Always Crashing in the Same Car,” Low (RCA, 1977). 12. Pegg asserts that the song is based on an incident in “an underground parking-lot in Berlin,” while Chris O’Leary holds that the event in question could have transpired either in Los Angeles or in Berlin, “depending on who you read.” Chris O’Leary, “Always Crashing in the Same Car,” Pushing Against the Dame, 17 March 2011 (https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/?s=always+crashing). Accessed 8 May 2021. Logically speaking, the speed of 94 must certainly refer to KmH rather than MPH, the latter nigh impossible while circling a parking structure. Perhaps Bowie is melding elements from both Los Angeles and Berlin as he admittedly has a tenuous hold on memories from this period. 13. Bowie, “Always Crashing in the Same Car.” 14. Bowie, “Move On,” Lodger (RCA, 1979). 15. Sean Egan, Bowie on Bowie (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2015), 64. 16. Hugo Wilcken, Low. 33 1/3 Series (Bloomsbury, 2005), 10. 17. Bowie, “Station to Station,” Station to Station (RCA, 1976). 18. Egan, Bowie on Bowie, 64. 19. Tobias Rüther, Heroes: David Bowie and Berlin, trans. Anthony Matthews (Reaktion, 2014), 25. I have been unable to trace the source of this quotation given by Rüther. 20. Walker Percy, “The Loss of the Creature,” The Message in the Bottle (Picador, 1975), 47. 21. One way to parse this, in literary-historical terms, would be via Jameson’s observation that “radical breaks between periods do not generally involve complete changes of content but rather the restructuring of certain

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e­ lements already given: features that in an earlier period or system were subordinate now become dominant, and features that had been dominant now become secondary” (1859). Jameson is absolutely right as far as how transitions between periods happen in real time (is early Tennyson “Romantic” and late Wordsworth “Victorian”?) but in the case of Bowie, postmodernism, and Romanticism, the question is not about transitions or “breaks” but rather, “is each already inherent in the other?” 22. Mike Powell, “David Bowie: Lodger,” Pitchfork, 22 January 2016 (https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21476-­lodger/). Accessed 26 May 2021. 23. David Buckley, “Revisiting Bowie’s Berlin,” David Bowie: Critical Perspectives, ed. Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane, and Martin J.  Power (Routledge, 2015), 221. 24. Dylan Jones, David Bowie: A Life (Crown Archetype, 2017), 260. 25. Reminding us that only “Heroes” was written and recorded entirely in Berlin, that the three albums in question are sonically quite distinct, and that their only unifying feature is the production of Tony Visconti, the collaboration of Brian Eno, and the rhythm section of Carlos Alomar, Dennis Davis, and George Murray, Buckley subtitles a section of his article “Bowie myth one: The ‘Berlin’ albums” (216–17). 26. Pegg, 390. 27. Jones, Bowie: A Life, 266. 28. Egan, Bowie on Bowie, 62. 29. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes, 1987, 2 vols., Vol. 5 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Routledge & Kegan Paul, Princeton University Press, 1969–2002), I: 69. 30. Ibid., I: 27. 31. Qtd. in Coleridge Lectures 1808, I: lxviii. 32. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W.  Jackson Bate, 1983, 2 vols., Vol. 7 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, I: 304. 33. Frederick Burwick, “Coleridge and Schelling on Mimesis,” The Coleridge Connection, ed. Richard Gravil and Molly Lefebure (Macmillan, 1990), 187, 190. 34. Qtd. in Wilcken 101. 35. Lodger alone contains multiple examples of Bowie consciously playing with “second-hand ideas”: the backing track to “Move On” is actually “All the Young Dudes” played backwards, “Red Money” recycles the main riff of “Sister Midnight” from Iggy Pop’s The Idiot (1977), and “Yassassin” was the result of what Bowie called “putting two ethnic sounds together … we used the Turkish things and put them against a Jamaican backbeat” (Pegg 318). Commentators like to connect the album’s title to Roman Polanski’s

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1976 film, The Tenant, but in the context of the album’s sustained engagement with pop music (all but two of its tracks are shorter than four minutes in length [the longest is 4:17] and unlike Bowie’s previous two records, none are purely instrumental), it seems more immediately to refer to the idea/practice of temporarily living in someone else’s house. 36. Jameson, 1854. 37. Ibid., 1851. 38. Wilcken, 21. As O’Leary reminds us, “uninspiring” might be precisely the point of smash hit singles such as “Modern Love” from Let’s Dance (1983) and the “schtick” that accompanies them: “now rock and roll is the old, endangered music, coasting on past glories, recreating itself in lesser forms. Whatever transcendence the music once offered is gone, leaving just fading colors and noise, the false consolations of memory, revivalists shining up the relics of an emptied kingdom.” In other words, despite (or indeed in light of) the music video being a fixture on MTV, the album quickly becoming his bestselling-ever, and the accompanying Serious Moonlight Tour bringing in millions of dollars per show, the song is about resignation and spiritual emptiness. O’Leary, “Modern Love,” Pushing Against the Dame, 17 November 2011 (https://bowiesongs.wordpress. com/?s=modern+love) Accessed 10 June 2021. 39. Dene October, “Between Sound and Vision: Low and Sense,” Enchanting David Bowie: Space/Time/Body Memory, ed. Toija Cinque, et  al. (Bloomsbury, 2015), 276–78. October urges us to consider Low as the product of a decentered “rhizomic” network of creation rather than as the work of a singular, tyrannical “creative genius.” Like Buckley in his article of the same year, October’s impetus is to separate the music of the “Berlin period” from the mythology that surrounds it. 40. See n. 9 above. 41. Jane Stabler, “Byron, Postmodernism and Intertextuality,” The Cambridge Companion to Byron, Ed. Drummond Bone (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 265–284, ProQuest, https://www.proquest.com/books/byron-­ postmodernism-­intertextuality/docview/2137995965/se-­2?accountid= 11078. Accessed 23 June 2021. 42. According to web archives, the event took place on April 25th and was officially titled “An Evening With Brian Eno & Danny Hillis: Thinking After Einstein.” According to a friend who attended, it concerned “the Clock of the Long Now.” The flyers I had seen bearing “genius” in the title were either unofficial or were subsequently disavowed by the participants. 43. Julian Cope, Krautrocksampler, 3rd ed. (Head Heritage, 1995), 1. 44. Ibid., 2. 45. Ibid., 4.

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46. Founder and guitarist of Ash Ra Tempel. After the dissolution of this band, Göttsching, under the Ashra moniker, recorded the hugely influential New Age of Earth (1976), which gave a name to the genre now most commonly associated with Enya, Yanni, and record labels such as Windham Hill. In 1981, Göttsching recorded a single, hour-long, mostly electronic track (he starts layering in a guitar solo at the 31:30 mark) named E2–E4 which, as John Bush says, is “the earliest album to set the tone for electronic dance music.” “E2–E4—Manuel Göttsching,” AllMusic Guide (https://www. allmusic.com/album/e2-­e4-­mw0000061584). Accessed 15 June 2021. 47. The opening of Coldplay’s 2005 hit single, “Talk,” is a note-for-note guitar transcription of the melody to Kraftwerk’s prescient, indeed ever-­more-­ relevant 1981 song about looking for love on a computer network. 48. Title of a 1969 album by Amon Düül. 49. Bowie, “What in the World,” Low (RCA, 1977). 50. Bowie, “Sound and Vision,” Low (RCA, 1977). 51. Bowie, “Be My Wife,” Low (RCA, 1977). 52. See n. 24 above. 53. A similarity noted by Pegg (193), Wilcken (99), and O’Leary, “A New Career in a New Town,” Pushing Against the Dame, February 22, 2011 (https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/?s=a+new+career). Accessed 16 June 2021. 54. See n. 50 above. 55. See n. 49 above. 56. Jennifer Otter Bickerdike and John Charles Sparrowhawk, “Desperately Seeking Bowie: How Berlin Bowie Tourism Transcends the Sacred,” in Enchanting David Bowie: Space/Time/Body Memory (Bloomsbury, 2015), 51. While “returning home” via Berlin might seem odd given Bowie’s South London roots, the voyage of self-discovery is something to which he plays tribute on his Berlin recordings: first on the closing track of “Heroes,” “The Secret Life of Arabia,” which references the first track of Low (“I was running at the speed of life”); and then even more explicitly and pervasively on Lodger and songs such as “Fantastic Voyage,” “African Night Flight,” “Move On,” and especially “Red Sails” (“Struggle with a foreign tongue / Red Sails make him strong”). 57. Novalis, The Novices of Sais, trans. Ralph Manheim (Archipelago Books, 2005), 15. 58. Ibid., 93. 59. Ibid., 93. 60. Pegg, 34. 61. Jones, Bowie: A Life, 271. 62. Jean-Pierre Turmel, “Licht und Blindheit,” Joy Division—Atmosphere/ Dead Souls, 7” vinyl (Sordide Sentimental, 1980). Turmel’s text is included

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as an insert in the record sleeve, and a transcription is available at https:// chabrieres.pagesperso-­orange.fr/texts/lichtundblindheit.html. Accessed 19 June 2021. 63. Qtd. in Wilcken, 71. 64. Joy Division, “Shadowplay,” Unknown Pleasures (Factory Records, 1979). 65. Joy Division, “Disorder,” Unknown Pleasures (Factory Records, 1979). 66. Coleridge, “Dejection: An Ode,” Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Nicholas Halmi, et al. (Norton, 2004), 37, 38. 67. Ibid., 86. 68. Coleridge’s other poems deserve credit for this as well, particularly “Kubla Khan,” “The Pains of Sleep,” and “Work Without Hope,” and of course the Ancient Mariner who must wet his throat with his own blood in order to speak, yet whose endlessly repeated tale can never absolve him of his transgression. 69. U2, “The Fly,” Achtung Baby (Island Records, 1991). 70. Although technically produced by Daniel Lanois, Eno receives a “special thanks” in the liner notes to the single. 71. Bono, et al., U2 by U2, ed. Neil McCormack (HarperCollins, 2006) 225. 72. Like Blake’s narrator in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1789), Bono’s crank-caller “likes it there” in hell (Bono et al. 225). Blake is a fairly steady influence on Bono’s songwriting, from U2’s debut album Boy (1980) and its reflections on what U2 biographer John Jobling calls “adolescence, innocence, and the passage into adulthood,” up through its later albums Songs of Innocence (2014) and Songs of Experience (2017), named after the Blake books bearing the same titles. John Jobling, U2: The Definitive Biography (Thomas Dunne, 2014), 67. 73. Wilcken, 24. 74. Ibid., 35. Wilcken is paraphrasing Bowie’s statement that “Berlin really captured, unlike anything else at that time, a sense of yearning for a future that we all knew would never come to pass.” Qtd. in Pat Gilbert, Bowie: The Illustrated Story (Voyageur Press, 2017), 145. 75. Wilcken, 134. 76. Bono, et al. 225. Bowie’s (solicited) advice to the band about the song: “Re-record it” (Ibid.). 77. See n. 41 above. 78. The Velvet Underground, “Some Kinda Love,” The Velvet Underground (MGM, 1969). 79. See n. 41 above. 80. See n. 9 above. 81. Qtd. in Reino Virtanen, “On the Dichotomy Between Genius and Talent,” Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 18, no. 1 (March 1981): 75. 82. Coleridge, “Christabel,” in Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose, 161.

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83. Fleetwood Mac, “What Makes You Think You’re the One,” Tusk (Warner Bros., 1979). 84. Coleridge, The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke, 1969, 2 vols., Vol. 4 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, I: 109–10. 85. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W.  Jackson Bate, 1983, 2 vols., vol 7 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, I: 304. 86. See n. 17 above.

CHAPTER 7

Relics of The Future: The Melancholic Romanticism of Bowie’s Berlin Triptych Paul Steven Rowe

The Romantic Critique of Modernity Studies by Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre have reformulated Romanticism as a cultural Weltanschauung, a worldview expressive of an emotional, reactive critique of modernity under industrial capitalism. In their essay “Figures of Romantic Anticapitalism,” and later in their book Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, Löwy and Sayre identify the cultural mediums through which Romanticism finds homes for expression, including literature, art, philosophy, theology, social movements, and political theory. As cultural protests against modern industrial capitalist civilization, Romantic art takes up the tasks of re-enchanting the world and mourning what humanity has lost as a result of its transition into modern civilization. In its astonishing range of phenomenal diversity, Romanticism takes root This article is a revised and extended version of “The Roots of Romanticism in David Bowie’s Berlin Triptych,” published on PopMatters January 24, 2018.

P. S. Rowe (*) Endicott College, Byfield, MA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Rovira (ed.), David Bowie and Romanticism, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97622-4_7

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in modern and contemporary movements such as Expressionism as evidenced by August Wiedmann’s prescient study Romantic Roots in Modern Art, Surrealism, the environmental and ecological movements, the feminist movement, and rock and pop music of the twentieth century and beyond as explored in the recent collections Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2 and Rock and Romanticism: Post-­ Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms. David Bowie’s recording collaborations with Brian Eno, Tony Visconti, and Iggy Pop in the late 1970s demonstrate a multitude of Romantic typologies. Since the Romantic worldview is expressed through a multiplicity of artistic forms including pop and rock music, what follows is an examination of the albums Low, “Heroes,” and Lodger as Romantic endeavors that deepen our understanding of the ongoing cultural movement as a whole. These albums are commonly referred to as Bowie’s “Berlin Triptych,” and they rebel against and express the painful melancholy of a profound sense of alienation within modern civilization. They evoke tonalities in which critiques of the modern world may be conveyed, and they express, in the words of Löwy and Sayre, “the painful and melancholic conviction that in modern reality something precious has been lost…certain essential human values have been alienated.”1 In many notable ways, Low, “Heroes,” and Lodger educe the alienation and transcendent aspiration of the Romantic artist to imbue even the most mundane aspects of modern life with the power of myth, drawing from an ample primal wellspring of emotions recollected from the isolation of self-­ imposed exile. Although these groundbreaking albums feature formal qualities and electronic elements that scholars of literature and music might reasonably describe as modernist, it is important to recognize the distinction made by Löwy and Sayre that “Romanticism is a modern critique of modernity. This means that even as Romantics rebel against modernity, they cannot fail to be shaped by their time…Far from conveying an outsiders’ view, far from being a critique rooted in some elsewhere, the Romantic view constitutes modernity’s self-criticism.”2 David Bowie is an indispensable figure in pop’s novel expansion of Romanticism. Bowie’s Berlin period represents for scholars of Romanticism a flowering of the Romantic spirit under what Friedrich Schlegel calls “the willows of exile.”3 More specifically, Low, “Heroes,” and Lodger exhibit rich expressions of Romanticism through their embrace of various states of melancholia as forms of Romantic resistance to capitalist realism, the stifling condition that the late British philosopher Mark Fisher describes as follows:

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Capitalist realism as I understand it cannot be confined to art or to the quasi-propagandistic way in which advertising functions. It is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.4

Modern and contemporary Romantic artists resist this atmosphere of capitalist realism and the crushing sense of reality dominated by quantitative values of exchange through the creation of an atmosphere of melancholia, considered here as a typology of Romanticism manifesting what occurs inside one’s inner world when one struggles to grieve the loss of something that one struggles to identify. Here, Mark Fisher articulates a clear conception of melancholia: Melancholia…consists not in giving up on desire but in refusing to yield. It consists, that is to say, in a refusal to adjust to what current conditions call “reality”—even if the cost of that refusal is that you feel like an outcast in your own time…5

Refusal to adjust to the conditions of capitalist realism may result in symptoms that the contemporary medical community associates with clinical depression. Yet, expressions of melancholia create fresh, symbolic forms of communicating qualitative ideas and ideals that modernity renders otherwise unspeakable. In her chapter “Melancholia and the End of the Future” from Disquieting: Essays on Silence, poet, essayist, art writer, and Germanist Cynthia Cruz notes the more “nuanced and allegorical lens” that melancholia provides in its response to neoliberalism, the form of capitalism now utterly ubiquitous in the United States and the United Kingdom.6 Cruz describes how the character Justine from Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia “appears to mourn the future without knowing what she has lost in it.”7 Since she is “unable to erase who she is or hide from view the desires that are necessarily sublimated under neoliberalism’s incessant demands for conformism, Justine’s body speaks through the symptoms of… melancholia.”8 Within the Berlin Trilogy, David Bowie is similarly an outcast in his own time who mourns the future without knowing what he has lost or will lose, a dreamer who yearns for relics of the future, powerfully prophesizing the end of history associated with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Low, “Heroes,” and Lodger are imbued with a Romantic form of melancholia expressive of both mourning and resilience. These records provide

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possibilities for escape, windows for redeeming values true to subjective and collective realities, and opportunities for mythopoetic potentialities to rise from the depths of human interiority. Tones of melancholia are absolutely essential to each of these albums, where alienation and loss blend with oneiric power. From side one to side two of Low, Bowie hauntingly moves from expressions of alienation that vivify what modern fragmentation feels like to melancholic textures that intimate the precapitalist, prelingual world— what Schlegel termed the “originary chaos of human nature.”9 The unconscious ushers in the relics of the future before the future’s arrival. This Romantic voyage from alienated selfhood to the darkest realms of imaginative origination—this melancholic journey to counter the isolation of humanity under capitalist realism—is expressed through the emergence of the sublime instrumental elements inspired by Brian Eno on side two of Low. On “Heroes,” Bowie develops his Romantic project by rediscovering paradise in a present reality drenched in melancholia and by framing the human act of falling in love as utopian. Finally, in Lodger Bowie takes up a Romantic typology of melancholic escapism first explored on Station to Station (1976), a Romanticism of boundless movement and exoticism which abandons reality for an elsewhere that launches the Romantic spirit into a quest for measureless realms of human potential.

The Allure of Mysticism and Travel Romantic elements of re-enchantment are already present on Station to Station, the enigmatic precursor of Bowie’s commonly named “Berlin Triptych.” Opening to the discordant noise of a train clamoring along the tracks, this decadent album recalls the omnipresence of industrial society and heralds what Hugo Wilcken, author of a marvelous book on Low, dubs “the theme of restless travel as a spiritual metaphor…present on… Low, ‘Heroes,’ and Lodger” which begins with Station to Station and comes full circle on Lodger, capping off the most Romantic slew of records in Bowie’s catalogue.10 This travel theme is undeniably Romantic. Travel continually inspires Romantic writers, serving as an endless reservoir for spiritual fulfillment, as accounts of Mary Wollstonecraft’s expedition to Scandinavia, Wordsworth’s Continental walking tour of 1790, the roving of the Shelley circle in the Alps, John Keats’s pilgrimage to the Scotland of Burns, Gérard de Nerval’s travels to the Near East, and François-René de Chateaubriand’s voyage to America exemplify. Bowie’s myth-making on

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Station to Station and Lodger are clear expansions of this Romantic trope. Readers of the historical Romantic age were fascinated by the revelations of explorers, poets, emigrants, and tourists in their published journals and letters, just as music buffs of the twentieth century craved the allure of exotic musicians, instruments, influences, and genres.11 Restless movement inspired by the possibility of the open road pervaded the spirit of the early nineteenth century as it did for twentieth-century Beat Generation writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, writers who extend the Romantic theme of spiritual exploration through the glorification of motion and the excavation and integration of foreign cultural artifacts. The aural landscape of Station to Station, a grandiose mixture of funk and rock, draws from a range of European influences, showcasing the tumultuous colors of Romanticism through its assimilation of diverse cultural and sonic materials. Bowie’s hybridization of genre is an extension of the Romantic theory of Friedrich Schelling and Henrik Steffans, shared by Coleridge, that organicist conceptions of art provide the essential criteria for gauging aesthetic value. M.H. Abrams perhaps best expounds this theory in his classic study of Romanticism, The Mirror and the Lamp: For a work of art, the gauge of greatness becomes, jointly, the richness—the quantity and diversity—of the component materials, and the degree of beauty varies directly with the multeity: a work of art, as Coleridge puts it, will be “rich in proportion to the variety of parts which it holds in unity.”12

This multeity in unity—this dense fabric of European source material, provides the backbone of Station to Station. Bowie’s comprehensive standard of aesthetic value on the album “manifests itself as the Faustian ideal of insatiability, and the unceasing quest to include, and to assimilate to one’s own integrity, the fullest measure of the most diverse experience.”13 The Thin White Duke, Bowie’s self-invented persona on the album, personifies the desire to go beyond the limits of nature and the customs of modernity, a desire that is clearly Byronic, exemplified by such characters as Byron’s Manfred and Childe Harold, Lermontov’s Pechorin, and Brontë’s Heathcliff. The Thin White Duke emotes a discontented skepticism toward conventional sexual relationships on the song “Stay” and a Faustian fascination with Aleister Crowley’s occultism and the kabbalah of Jewish mysticism on the album’s jarring titular track. Station to Station embodies Bowie’s voracious desire to reach beyond the borders of modern capitalist

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value systems and the customary relationships of exchange that go along with its acceptance. Despite the splendid appearance of Romantic myth making on Station to Station, though, Bowie’s tone of cryptic detachment on the album is disagreeable with pivotal tenets at the heart of many Romantic typologies. His level of distance often reflects the art-for-art’s sake aestheticism of the late nineteenth century’s Decadent movement championed by Oscar Wilde, “an anti-bourgeois Bohemianism or ‘decadence,’ and a pseudo-­ politics of extravagant gesture conscious of its ineffectualness.”14 Although this anti-bourgeois Bohemianism does agree with Löwy and Sayre’s typologies of Romanticism,15 it is important to recognize that the pursuit of ineffectualness is precisely what Romanticism, by its very nature, tends to denounce; as we shall see in the analysis of “Heroes” that follows, Romanticism answers a genuine call to affect change. In stark contrast to this desire for progress and revolution, the Thin White Duke masqueraded emotion, ironically belting songs with feigned emotional intensity from a hollow emotional core. Although Bowie’s vague spiritual outline of the Duke indicates that his own astronomical intake of cocaine has taken a heavy psychological toll, any penetrating glimpse of the Duke’s inner world or the instantiation of that inner world into outward creation is blurred by drug-fueled obfuscation and arcane references to oracular, mythic obsessions, playing with our sense of estrangement associated with Bertolt Brecht. Bowie was on the brink of psychological collapse during this period, suffocated by an extreme consumerist atmosphere of capitalist realism in Los Angeles, and the flight of Romantic resistance to this very atmosphere became the thematic foundation for his next album. The turn to expressive yearning begins during the closing section of Station to Station’s title track. The turn to restless travel, the quest for psychic wholeness and spiritual origination in a fragmented world, is expressed in the lyric “Got to keep searching and searching / And oh what will I be believing and who will connect me with love?”16 And the lyric “the European canon is here”17 signifies that Bowie’s return to Europe’s rich cultural heritage and participation in the Romantic tradition of self-imposed exile in France and finally Germany, far from Hollywood’s glamorous estrangement, will spark an artistic rebirth. “I realized that what I needed to do was experiment to discover new forms of writing,” Bowie has said in a notable interview from Melody Maker, “To evolve, in fact, a new musical language. That’s what I set out to do. That’s why I returned to Europe.”18

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Bowie’s 1977 interview with Allan Jones in Melody Maker recalls Wordsworth’s own self-proclaimed desire to adopt a new poetic language in his 1800 preface to Lyrical Ballads, the groundbreaking poetry collection released jointly with Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1798 which marked the arrival of Romanticism in Britain. Art’s expressive function proves as key for Low as it does for Lyrical Ballads. Low’s lyricism employs key concepts of Romanticism, and Bowie’s turn to minimalism and the primeval sources of mythology echo Wordsworth’s own turn to cultural primitivism. With Low, Bowie’s melancholia helps him to express what within the confines of the capitalist realist atmosphere is inexpressive, from what Wordsworth calls “those thoughts and feelings which, by his own mind, arise in him.”19 Low’s rejection of outward decadence in favor of self-­ expression in isolation, and Wordsworth’s own theory of poetry as emotion recollected in tranquility, dominates twentieth-century pop music. This musical language helped Bowie conquer his addiction, delusion, and paranoia, and ushered in the post-punk and art rock of the present.

Nostalgia for the Future Throughout much of the 1970s Bowie wore masks: Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, and the Thin White Duke, to name a few. Writer, cultural critic, and English professor Shelton Waldrep writes that “if the ultimate goal of German Romanticism…was to make objective forms expressive— the ultimate way to express self—then the use of the mask was an ideal way to do this.”20 Upon his arrival in Berlin after recording some of Low’s material at the Château d’Hérouville in France, Bowie began to sing from perhaps the most intriguing mask of all of his self-invented, mythic figures: David Bowie. This new persona that we might call “David Bowie in Berlin” was created through a turn to the art of a past era that also grappled with capitalist realism: Expressionism, an artistic movement that deepens the Romantic vein of expressing emotional experience rather than impressions tainted with functionality within external capitalist reality. Bowie refined his expressive abilities in Berlin, began to paint again, and took frequent bicycle trips to the Die Brücke museum where he rekindled his love affair with his most cherished Expressionists, including Erich Heckel, who provided inspiration for the cover art of “Heroes.”21 Heckel’s colored woodcut Männerbildnis (Portrait of a Man) and his portrait Roquairol are depictions of sensitive, tortured artists that allude to fellow Expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, who was at the time of composition

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dealing with his own demons as he was traumatized from his time at the Front. Bowie set up shop at Hansa Studios near the Berlin Wall surrounded by friends and collaborators Brian Eno, Iggy Pop, and Tony Visconti. Here, he began an expressive journey that would heal his mind and body from the scars of his well-documented cocaine addiction, manic episodes, and fearful delusions while resisting the consumerist illusions of American music culture. As his art flourished, his psyche healed, and with Low, begun at Château d’Hérouville in the French village of Hérouville and completed in Berlin, Bowie gave rock one its most enduring and innovative albums to date. Low derived its material by projecting Bowie’s own state of melancholia. For the Romantic artist, “more emphasis is placed on the work of art coming from within, on the internal being made external and upon the ‘wondrous exchange’—to use Wordsworth’s phrase—between poetic selfhood and the external world.”22 Low is best understood as a “wondrous exchange” between Bowie’s artistic selfhood and the myth of the city of Berlin. Bowie’s subject, like Wordsworth’s subject for The Prelude, is the growth of the artist’s own mind. On Low, particular melodies suit certain emotions and particular shifts in cadences map pathways of an emotional journey to reach the sources of artistic inspiration in opposition to the materialism and mechanization of capitalist realism. Like many poets who came before him, the path to spiritual fulfillment for Bowie is blazed through the expression of his inner reality. As Coleridge believed possible, each song “assimilates disparate elements” to the purpose of reconciling them into a higher third element with curative potential.23 Famously, Utilitarian thinker John Stuart Mill acknowledged the healing power of Romantic art, claiming he found in Wordsworth’s poems the very culture of feelings.24 The discovery of Wordsworth’s self-expressive poetry helped Mill recover from his mental breakdown at the age of twenty, much like Bowie’s own collaborative output with Eno in Berlin helped him to overcome his own psychological crisis by reconciling disparate elements of modernity through a musical language at once expressive and resistant. A virtuosic mixture of Eno’s synthetic electronic sounds with organic R&B beats, “Speed of Life” opens Low in the spirit of sonic opposition, the yearning for artistic solace grating against futuristic forces of functionality, the cyclical descent of treated drums and harmonizing synths clashing with foregrounded bass and soulful lead guitar playing out the drama of organic against synthetic powers for artistic dominion. Although lyrics were originally planned for the song, Bowie abandoned them after several

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faulty attempts, heralding the album’s trend of unfinished Romantic fragmentation. Like Coleridge before him, Bowie leaves behind enigmatic artifacts. Much like the motorik of Kraftwerk’s Autobahn (1974), an album that deeply captivated Bowie, as Hugo Wilcken points out, the track “conjures up a largely pre-war world of futuristic optimism.”25 Listeners ultimately feel that they are marching alongside Visconti’s heavily treated Dennis Davis drumbeat toward a fresh landscape of artistic opportunity. This futuristic optimism blends the world-changing idealism of Shelley with retro-modernist aesthetics, blurring perception of an acknowledged past with yearning for a better future. Wilcken notes of the song as follows: This nostalgia for a future that never happened was something that Bowie … picked up on; it’s a sadness that informs the second sides of Low and … “Heroes.” At heart, it’s very much a form of Romanticism.26

A future is mourned in the spectral fade-out that closes “Speed of Life.” Through vanishing clouds of futurity, Bowie’s unprecedented musical language emerges.

The Looming Threat of Despondency “Speed of Life” kindles enthusiasm for Bowie’s journey toward a future perpetually suspended in its own potential, a future that may not occur but is called forth from the depths of imagination. “Speed of Life” is Bowie’s homage to Christopher Isherwood’s romanticized version of Berlin in Goodbye to Berlin, the autobiographical novel adapted into the 1972 film Cabaret, which captured Bowie’s imagination and filled him with an intense yearning for the bohemian culture of Weimar-era Berlin which powerfully repudiated the materialist atmosphere of capitalist realism.27 Sonically, the track reconciles disparate musical genres through its fusion of R&B and electronic music. This hybridization is a direct result of the creative tension between two visionaries—Bowie and Eno—and their traditional rock outfit composed of neo-soul lead guitarist Carlos Alomar, session rock drummer Dennis Davis, bassist George Murray, and rhythm guitarist Ricky Gardiner. “Speed of Life” is lyrical despite its lack of words, and Wilcken aptly refers to the track as “a brief ode to movement.”28 According to Jonathan Culler, the ode of the Romantic lyric tradition transcends narrative in its attempt not to represent experience, but to become an event in itself: “narrated events [are] subsumed by, trumped by,

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the present of lyric enunciation.”29 Pop’s abandonment of narrative does not exclude the genre from embracing this transcendent tradition of the ode form. Like many famous Romantic poems such as Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” the track exists as a fragment in isolation. It is Eno who may be credited with encouraging Bowie’s visionary fragments. “He [Bowie] arrived with all these strange pieces, long and short, which already had their own form and structure,” Eno has said, “The idea was to work together to give the songs a more normal structure. I told him not to change them, to leave them in their bizarre, abnormal state.” “Speed of Life” features an “abnormal” frenzy of crashing drums, harmonizing synths, soulful rock rhythms, and cascading synth effects competing for the attentions of listeners, but it isn’t until the second track, “Breaking Glass,” that Bowie begins to sing. Bowie croons in his neurotic pitch, “You’re such a wonderful person / but you got problems, I’ll never touch you.”30 He projects his own internal struggles onto someone else, blurring the listener’s sense of interiority with exteriority. As Wilcken has noted in his exemplary 33 1/3 volume, these lyrics are like a conversational fragment in which a psychotic is telling [his girlfriend] she’s the mad one. It’s a solipsistic world in which the psychosis is projected onto the other. … Everything becomes a reflection of the self, until you lose sight of where the self stops and the world begins.31

This muddling of the boundary between the self and what lies outside— the collaboration between inner and outer landscape—recalls Wordsworth’s intuition in his great quasi-ode “Tintern Abbey” that we “half create … what we perceive.”32 Bowie’s expressions of madness then reflects a key leitmotif of Romanticism: the looming threat of insanity and despondency for artists caused by their perpetual state of frozen alienation in the face of industrialized capitalist reality and the isolation this inflicts on human beings. Of the psychic damage inflicted by the forces of modern capitalism, Bowie elaborates as follows in Melody Maker: People simply can’t cope with the rate of change in this world. It’s all far too fast. Since the industrial revolution there’s been this upward spiral with ­people desperately trying to hang on, and now everybody’s started to fall off. And it’ll get worse.33

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The “upward spiral” Bowie describes here is the illusion of capitalist progress while human values, ideals, subjective truths, and interpersonal relationships are oppressed by forces of commodification and exchange. And with our current contemporary brand of capitalism, neoliberalism, Bowie’s prediction that “it’ll get worse” is proven accurate. Bowie’s elevation to the height of myth the desperate act of “hanging on” to the human imagination’s potential in the face of such pervasive despair is perhaps one of the boldest artistic achievements of pop music. Nonetheless, the threat of despondency and alienation lurks on the first side of Low. The fates of Cowper, Chatterton, and Smart combined with the legacy of Goethe’s eponymous protagonist in The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) at the hands of capitalist exploitation and alienation of artists blends fiction with fact to create the self-fulfilling prophecy of madness and death for generations of Romantic artists and thinkers.34 Friedrich Nietzsche went as far as to define Romanticism based on its connection to madness. “What is Romanticism? … Intoxication, paroxysm, numbness, madness,” he claimed.35 It is a staple for Romantic poets unable to pinpoint the source of the loss they feel so intensely to suffer from madness brought on by acute melancholia. Bowie’s expression of psychosis brought on by bouts of alienation is a key feature of his art echoing central themes of Romantic poetry. Michael Ferber notes that in his “Ode to Melancholy,” Keats urges readers to “drink in ‘the melancholy fit’ without trying to muffle or distract ourselves, for from it we gain, not philosophic serenity, but sheer intensity of life.”36 On Low, Bowie’s expressions of madness heighten otherwise mundane experiences, revealing the sheer intensity of his own inner life. Like Bowie, Wordsworth faces up to fears of madness in his poem “Resolution and Independence” with lines such as, “We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness.”37 After this reflection on insanity, Wordsworth embodies hope in the form of the elderly leech-gatherer on the lonely moor who, through his act of hanging on embodied through self-reliance and his resilient commitment to a marginalized vocation, provides the poet with strength in the face of alienation. Similarly, despite Bowie’s expressed fears of madness on Low, he has personally recognized that “Overall, I get a sense of real optimism through the veils of despair on Low. I can hear myself really struggling to get well.”38 Bowie achieves his own forms of resolution and independence. This becomes evident on the album’s next track “What in the World,” through Bowie’s tortured insistence that there is “something

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deep inside of me, yearning deep inside of me, talking through the gloom.”39 Bowie’s lyrics transcend “the gloom” of modern capitalist alienation. Of “Sound and Vision,” the famous single Bowie has called his ultimate retreat song, Bowie claims, It was … the idea of getting out of America, that depressing era I was going through. I was going through dreadful times. It [expressed] wanting to be put in a little cold room with omnipotent blue on the walls and blinds on the windows.40

Lyrically this track expresses Bowie’s emotion recollected in tranquility. The line “drifting into my solitude”41 vividly illustrates the retreat of Romantic escapism. And according to Wilcken, “Sound and Vision” calls to mind Dostoevsky’s Romantic dictum that “Life is in ourselves, and not in the external.”42 The track “Be My Wife,” a straightforward rocker touting pub-style piano and Alomar’s searing lead guitar riffs, continues to develop the theme of restless travel as spiritual metaphor through the lyrics “I’ve lived all over the world / I’ve left every place” and “Please be mine, share my life, stay with me, be my wife.”43 The need for love creeps back into the soul of the artist after a period of prolonged restlessness. Bowie has said of the track, “I was genuinely anguished,”44 indicating the heartfelt self-examination of his growth from the erratic adventurousness of youth to the desire for meaningful companionship. This love is not pedestrian by any means. As we shall soon find in “Heroes,” Bowie’s myth-­ making absolutely hinges on charging intimate encounters with the weight of myth. Side two of Low manifests German Expressionist theories of art through Brian Eno’s ambient soundscapes. Expressionism itself is an extension of the Romantic Weltanschauung. The intuition of the precapitalist, preindustrial, primordial world was an attractive theme prevalent in the work of European Romantics and Expressionists alike. Discovering intimations of the “primary vision” discussed by German poet-philosophers provided visionary artists with a glimpse of the preindustrial past before the process of reification objectified both material commodities and social relationships. The quest for primary vision thematically links side two of Low not only to the visual artwork of the Dresden artists Bowie admired at Berlin’s Die Brücke museum, but also to the works of Wordsworth and Shelley. As Wordsworth elucidates in his great “Ode [Intimations of Immortality],” the primacy of youth provides a “visionary gleam” which eventually fades

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away, leaving behind sobering perceptions of the “philosophic mind.”45 Wordsworth clings to the idea that primordial elements beyond the veil of the external world are things perceived at the dawn of life and eventually lost in adulthood: Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind, In the primal sympathy Which having been must ever be, In the soothing thoughts that spring Out of human suffering, In the faith that looks through death, In years that bring the philosophic mind.46

Shelley would claim years later that “when we were children…we less habitually distinguished all that we saw and felt from ourselves. They seemed…to constitute one mass.”47 Following in the footsteps of this fascination, Expressionists explored the connection between human perception and external nature. August K.  Wiedmann notes that the abiding faith of Expressionists in primary vision “was expressed in ways reminiscent of the [original] Romantics. Like [the Romantics] they…appealed to the ‘syncretic’ vision of the child which, impervious to component detail, perceived reality as a living whole.”48

Rekindling the Human Spirit Willi Baumeister, a colleague of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky at the Bauhaus, described primary vision as a type of vision that transcends the rational intellect and allows the artist to perceive things in a “non-­ objective” way. Baumeister imagined that “the world seen thus assumes a strange depth and vastness, an awesome neutrality … which reveals … the oneness of all.”49 This primary vision, thought to reveal the sublime manifestation of Baruch Spinoza’s idea of God in Nature explored by Shelley in his sublime poem “Mont Blanc,” is what Bowie seeks to assimilate with through “the strange depth and vastness” of side two of Low. These ambient tracks explore Franz Marc’s claim that there are preexisting forms in all things and that “they have their own speech—why must we interrupt

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them?”50 Bowie and Eno expand Marc’s theory and carry it out in the praxis of pop minimalism, expressing uncorrupted forms without pressing them into the mold of the rational preconceptions of their listeners. This inclination is epitomized through the minimalist soundscape of Low’s ethereal quest devoid of the interruption—and imposition—of human language which tends to readily conform to the dialogues of exchange within capitalist reality. Although “Subterraneans” originated from Bowie’s The Man Who Fell to Earth soundtrack, Bowie has Eno to thank for inspiring its deeply affecting ambiance. “Brian really opened my eyes to the idea of processing, to the abstract of the journey of the artist,”51 he recalls. Of the album’s final track, “Subterraneans,” Wilcken sharply notes “there’s an ache to it that is … an abstraction of that universal sense of the sorrow of vanished things.”52 While Wordsworth mourns the vanished intimations of his youth and the symbolic power of a preindustrialized civilization, Bowie’s invented language of “Warszawa” and “Subterraneans” communicates with—and from—vanished forms that the cloud of capitalist realism has kept hidden from visual artists, poets, and musicians. These tracks possess a redemptive force—they offer hope following the bleakness of “Weeping Wall,” a song capturing the divisive sorrows of the Berlin Wall, and the bleak instrumental expression of a West Berlin cut off from the heart of its culture in “Art Decade.” The irrational lyrics “share bride failing star, care-line, care-line, care-line, care-line, briding me shelley, shelley, shelley, umm”53 display the Romantic lyric’s attempt to deny language as a vehicle for representational exchanges and to become an event in and of itself. The closing track of Low is the crowning achievement of Bowie finding “strength in what remains behind”54 in the aftermath of capitalist modernity’s blinding of artists from the primacy of their primordial vision. Low expands Romanticism’s quest to intuit and express the true forms and figures of our world.

Romanticism’s Grand Enterprise: “Heroes” From his studio control room at Hansa Studios, Bowie could look out the window at the Berlin Wall, as pertinent a symbol for “Heroes” as the Bastille was for the production of nineteenth- century European Romantic poets. Bowie’s feelings at the time seemed to half-create his Berlin surroundings. Berlin, like Bowie the artist, was bound up in a rebuilding process, semi-restored, harkening back to glory days long since faded.

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“Heroes” blends nostalgia with yearning for a brighter future. In his definitive and illuminating book Heroes: David Bowie and Berlin, Tobias Rüther explores philosopher Ernst Bloch’s idea of non-contemporaneity when discussing “Heroes.” Rüther points out that Bloch’s idea that “not all people exist in the same Now” pervades the album.55 According to Löwy and Sayre, fundamental to the Romantic worldview is a “hostility toward present reality,” a rejection of the alienating presence of capitalist realism that is “often quasi-total” and “heavily-charged with emotion.”56 Bowie attempts to transcend the present state of his own life and the ruinous conditions of Berlin by simultaneously projecting an alternate past and potential future capable of fulfilling an artistic rebirth on the title track “Heroes,” Bowie’s anthem of ever-becoming. If the future will not arrive, then the artist’s quest for the relics of the future in the present will forever remain present within the immediate forms of his creations. For Bowie on “Heroes” as for Byron, Keats, and Carlyle, the chaos of the world before him is fertile as opposed to destructive. “Heroes” becomes Bowie’s participation “ever more expansively in the abundance of creative becoming.”57 In this sense, Bowie’s project on “Heroes” can be said to be one of Romantic irony. Of this concept Anne K. Mellor states, Romantic irony … is a mode of consciousness or a way of thinking about the world that finds a corresponding … mode. The artist who perceives the universe as an infinitely abundant chaos; who sees his own consciousness as simultaneously limited and involved in a process of growth or becoming; who … enthusiastically engages in the difficult but exhilarating balancing between self-creation and self-destruction; and who then articulates this experience … is producing the literary mode Schlegel called romantic irony. As a literary mode, romantic irony characteristically includes certain elements: a conception of the universe as becoming, as an infinitely abundant chaos; a structure that reflects both this chaos or process of becoming and the systems that men impose upon it; and a language that draws attention to its own limitations.58

“Heroes” is Bowie’s never-ending movement toward self-fulfillment, a project that artistically connects his inner desire for artistic evolution to the redemption of a city. The city of Berlin becomes a symbol of melancholia. What has been lost cannot be returned by the project of reconstruction. Nonetheless, the project of seeking what has been lost in our world must be taken up, heroically.

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“Heroes” feels hazy, ruinous, and peripheral, with Bowie’s thunderous voice rising from the ashes. Even the recording equipment used for the song was taken from the decaying Hotel Esplanade on Potsdamer Platz, a place Bowie held melancholic nostalgia for as evidenced by the track “Where Are We Now?” from The Next Day (2013). In its ambitious quest for the renovation of the world of capitalist realism in accordance with qualitative artistic ideals, “Heroes” draws thematic parallels to Shelley’s “Hellas” and Prometheus Unbound. Much as in the future that “Heroes” strives to envision, as previously noted by Löwy and Sayre, Shelley’s future is not simply “a recreation of a real past, but rather the coming to full flower of all its qualities, qualities that were in bud in the past era.”59 “Heroes” is an anthem of melancholic non-contemporaneity as relevant for future generations as it is for the lovers Bowie describes in his song. Bowie dedicated a live performance of the track to NYC firemen at the Concert for New York City and used the song in the appeal for Africa at London’s Live Aid concert. The call to rekindle the human spirit to the purpose of constructing a better world, no matter how vague in its methods or lyrics, is inherently Romantic. Michael Ferber claims, “in its first high and heroic days, Romanticism answered a call to change the world.”60 “Heroes” then boldly continues the legacy of this Weltanschauung. Eno claims he had “that very word—heroes—in mind”61 before Bowie even wrote lyrics to the song, evidencing the sonic register of its heroic aspirations. A continuous, surging wave reminiscent of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound recordings, Bowie’s deliberate affectation of Romantic irony through slapping quotations marks around the album’s title and its title track doesn’t detract from its Romantic melancholia. The song transcends instrumental boundaries through sonic synesthesia, inverting the rigid competition between instruments found on Low into an intoxicating blend of piano, bass, rhythm guitar, drums, Eno’s portable EMS synthesizer, and King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp’s undulating guitar sound. Just as Keats called for a drink tasting of sight, color, sound, motion, and heat in “Ode to a Nightingale,” the intermingling of instruments on “Heroes” calls for an astute listener to pick them apart. They become as intertwined as the Gordian knot Keats explores in “Lamia.” Fripp’s lead riff achieves Eno’s dream “of a kind of music that merges in with the background.” A highly instinctive, intuitive progressive rock guitarist, Fripp’s outfit King Crimson and the progressive rock genre in general have their roots in Romanticism. The pairing of Bowie and Fripp is seamless. Author Peter Bebergal has aptly noted that “progressive rock sits … in the

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tradition of the Romantic composers [who sought to excavate] a past where they believed a more authentic human spirit dwelled with nature.”62 Fripp’s progressive drive adds the effect of bittersweet yearning, but also primitivism, as his lauded “Heroes” riff consists of merely three notes played through a guitar plugged into an effects processor linked up to Eno’s synthesizer. Eno lengthened Fripp’s already soaring notes, then played three versions of the track simultaneously to create unprecedented sonic depth. “Heroes” went on to shape the Shoegaze genre of the 1990s, a genre which is inherently Romantic. In his book on Bowie, Rüther is correct in describing Shoegaze as a “highly sensitive, mournful, marvelous din, [with] no solo guitar…a finely interwoven collective noise to the sobbing of thin young boys” continuing the sensibility of the Werther cult that was all the rage during the late eighteenth century.63 At the center of the boundless Romanticism of “Heroes” is Bowie’s voice, beginning as a whisper and growing until it nearly cracks from the sheer intensity of its delivery. The song’s vocal performance, like the song itself, exists on the very border of reality and imagination. “Though nothing, nothing will keep us together / We can beat them, forever and ever / Oh we can be heroes, just for one day”64 Bowie exclaims, mythologizing doomed lovers shaming the violence around them in an act of pacifist love much like Shelley’s own imagined heroes in “The Mask of Anarchy.” As explained by Rüther, Bowie’s inspiration for the track’s imagery may come from Otto Mueller’s Expressionist painting Lovers Between Garden Walls, an evocative piece Bowie was drawn to at the Brücke Museum.65 Bowie describes his vision for his couple taking refuge by the Wall “to cause the affair to be an act of heroism.” According to Bowie, the song faces “that kind of reality and [stands] up to it…[to] get on with life from the very pleasure of remaining alive.”66 What Bowie brings to light here about the melancholia of the song recalls Mark Fisher’s belief that melancholia “consists … in a refusal to adjust to what current conditions call ‘reality’—even if the cost of that refusal is that you feel like an outcast in your own time.”67 This melancholia is an expression of the Romantic refusal to yield in the face of capitalist reality, an escape through myth, a reinstatement of what has been lost—love’s position as the highest of human ideals. Bowie’s elevation of a private and passionate moment into the historic and political transcends the alienation of the capitalist present. Despite the lofty idealism of “Heroes,” there are tracks on side two of the record where Bowie seems to work his way through feelings of doubt, feelings shared by many Romantic artists; Coleridge’s “Dejection: An

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Ode,” Shelley’s Alastor, and his “Lift Not the Painted Veil” all come to mind. On “Sense of Doubt” Thomas Jerome Seabrook claims Bowie and Eno conjure up waves of synthesized sound and effects that evoke the trembling terror of ducking from searchlights on a dark, windy night … [there is] the sense of conflict, which Bowie and Eno struggle to resolve throughout, eventually allowing the song to drift, amid crashes of synthesized wind, into the more reassuring “Moss Garden.”68

Bowie’s hopes drift along with the wind much like the Aeolian harp, once expressing doubt, then hope, for the human condition.

Conclusion: Romantic Elsewhere Lodger is both Bowie’s final album in the Berlin Triptych and his expansion of the Romantic motif of restless travel as spiritual metaphor for the purpose of transcending an atmosphere of capitalist realism where artists have blindly and perhaps unwillingly learned to assimilate with a culture that hinders their creative potential. With the album’s opening track, “Fantastic Voyage,” Bowie describes the modern world as a threatening place, a criminal world where the threat of nuclear holocaust is very real. Yet through movement, travel, and the introspective self-analysis that goes along with it, Bowie provides listeners with a window for Romantic transcendence. No matter how dark our times may seem, Bowie reminds listeners on “Move On” that there is always a Romantic elsewhere far beyond the limits of capitalist realism where artists might expand their horizons and continue to educate themselves about the redemptive qualities of their own nature that capitalist reality dictates as off limits. From the subversive descriptions of the Turkish baths of Byron’s Grand Tour of eastern Europe and the Mediterranean, to the vogue associated with Mont Blanc, Etna, the Alps, Fingal’s Cave, and the Scottish Highlands, to the Cyprus of Bowie’s restless, picturesque “Move On” from his Romantic travelogue Lodger, the ultimate goal—the ultimate destination—of the Romantic project lies in some elsewhere beyond the quantified boundaries of human relations. For all Romantic artists, as Bowie sings in “Move On,” “Maybe it’s just a trick of the mind, but / Somewhere there’s a morning sky,”69

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glimpsing such a dawn has never been merely a naïve notion for artistic visionaries. Bowie’s brand of Romanticism ultimately affirms the transformative potential of art to transcend the alienation caused by capitalist modernity’s degradation of values most essential to humanity. These albums imply that art can transform our world. To this day, the Berlin Triptych serves as a reminder to scholars of literature and music that in its response to modernity, Romanticism’s grand enterprise inspires artists to question the current state of reality, to ponder how they might themselves become heroes.

Notes 1. Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001), 21. 2. Ibid., 21. Italics added for emphasis. 3. Friedrich Schlegel, in European Romanticism: Self-Definition, ed. Lilian R. Furst (London: Methuen, 1980), 34. The text cited is an excerpt from Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatus, Kritische Schriften, vol. 5, 25–26. 4. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books, 2009), 16. 5. Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014), 24. 6. Cynthia Cruz, “Melancholia and the End of the Future,” Disquieting: Essays on Silence (Toronto: Book*hug Press, 2019), 53. 7. Ibid., 53. 8. Ibid., 53. 9. Friedrich Schlegel, Rede über die Mythologie, 236–37. 10. Hugo Wilcken, Low (New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2005), 5. 11. Robin Jarvis, “The Glory of Motion: De Quincy, Travel, and Romanticism,” The Yearbook of English Studies 34, Nineteenth Century Travel Writing (Modern Humanities Research Association, 2014), 74–75. 12. M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 221. 13. Ibid., 221. 14. Michael Ferber, The Cambridge Introduction to British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 114. 15. Robert Sayre and Michael Löwy, “Figures of Romantic Anticapitalism” in Spirits of Fire, G.A. Rosso and Daniel P. Watkins, eds (Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 1990), 61–62.

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16. David Bowie, “Station to Station,” Station to Station, LP, RCA, 1976. 17. Ibid. 18. David Bowie, “Goodbye to Ziggy and All That,” Interview by Allan Jones, Melody Maker, October 29th, 1977. 19. William Wordsworth, Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose: A Norton Critical Edition (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014), 84–85. 20. Shelton Waldrep, The Aesthetics of Self-Invention: Oscar Wilde to David Bowie (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 17. 21. Tobias Rüther, Heroes: David Bowie and Berlin (London: Reaktion Books, 2014), 110. 22. Jane Moore and John Strachan, Key Concepts in Romantic Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 2. 23. Abrams, 19. 24. Ibid., 333. 25. Wilcken, 34. 26. Ibid., 35. 27. Ibid., 25. 28. Ibid., 70. 29. Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 36. 30. David Bowie, “Breaking Glass,” Low, LP, RCA, 1977. 31. Wilcken, 77 32. Wordsworth, 68. 33. David Bowie, “Goodbye to Ziggy and All That,” interview by Allan Jones, Melody Maker, October 29th, 1977. 34. Frederick Burwick, Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 12. 35. Friedrich Nietzsche, A Nietzsche Reader (London: Penguin Books, 1978), 109. 36. Michael Ferber, Romanticism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 21. 37. Wordsworth, 398. 38. Wilcken, 87. 39. David Bowie, “What in the World,” Low, LP, RCA, 1977. 40. Wilcken, 87. 41. David Bowie, “Sound and Vision,” Low, LP, RCA, 1977. 42. Wilcken, 88. 43. David Bowie, “Be My Wife,” Low, LP, RCA, 1977. 44. Wilcken, 88. 45. Wordsworth, 39. 46. Ibid., 439.

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47. Percy Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose: A Norton Critical Edition (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002), 507. 48. August Wiedmann, Romantic Roots in Modern Art: Romanticism and Expressionism: A Study in Comparative Aesthetics (Surrey: Gresham Books, 1979), 230. 49. Ibid., 231. 50. Ibid., 230. 51. Wilcken, 133. 52. Wilcken, 132. 53. David Bowie, “Subterraneans,” Low, LP, RCA, 1977. 54. Wordsworth, 439. 55. Tobias Rüther, Heroes: David Bowie and Berlin (London: Reaktion Books, 2014), 80–82. 56. Löwy and Sayre, 32–33. 57. Anne K. Mellor, English Romantic Irony (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 24. 58. Ibid., 24–25. 59. Löwy and Sayre, 54–55. 60. Ferber, 114. 61. Ruther, 165. 62. Peter Bebergal, Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll (New York: Penguin Random House LLC, 2015), 198–199. 63. Rüther, 136–137. 64. David Bowie, “Heroes,” “Heroes,” LP, RCA, 1977. 65. Rüther, 137–138. 66. Ibid., 137. 67. Fisher, 24. 68. Thomas Jerome Seabrook, Bowie in Berlin: A New Career in a New Town (London: Jawbone Press, 2008), 183. 69. David Bowie, “Move On,” Lodger, LP, RCA, 1979.

CHAPTER 8

“Rebel Rebel”: Bowie as Romantic “Type” Samuel Lyndon Gladden

“David Bowie is a Joy Forever”1 In a culture generally unaccustomed to theatrical displays of male plumage, the glittered, feathered, frequently half-naked David Bowie of the glam rock 1970s presented an affront to traditional notions of gendered norms, introducing instances of “gender expression” some forty years avant la lettre. Fast-forward to the relatively conventional final decades of Bowie’s private life, and his legacy takes on a sort of prismatic function, separating into strategic deployments of gender, sexuality, and desire that both piqued and provoked the public, disrupting notions about masculinity, desirability, the function of the artist, and the future of humankind. At the height of the glam rock period, Bowie posed a problem with regard to what Nowell Marshall characterizes as a “narrative of compulsory gender normativity.”2 Indeed, the parental conundrum Bowie mocked in 1974’s “Rebel Rebel”—“You’ve got your mother in a whirl / She’s not sure if

S. L. Gladden (*) College of Liberal Arts, Education, and Human Development, The University of New Orleans, New Orleans, LA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Rovira (ed.), David Bowie and Romanticism, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97622-4_8

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you’re a boy or a girl”—resonates as well in the question Anne K. Mellor asked at the outset of her groundbreaking study Romanticism and Gender, a question that could have been asked of the 1970s Bowie himself: “Does Romanticism have a gender?”3 Bowie “was more than an icon,” remembers Baz Luhrmann; as Sean Redmond observes, he was “a ‘supericon’ and a fully formed poseur” remembered for “a quite brilliant series of cameo poses.”4 “David,” Carlos Alomar extols, “was everything.”5 Throughout decades of ever-changing images, it is impossible to locate “the real Bowie” in any of them—perhaps an effect of celebrity, a phenomenon that arises from what Tom Mole describes as a desire for intimacy with the famous one, which Mole traces to the early nineteenth century in the widely circulated images of Lord Byron.6 That a rock icon would be the inheritor of such a tradition seems especially apt: in his review of Mole’s work, Oliver Clarkson argues that Romanticism, “above all else, connotes sex, drugs, and rock and roll.”7 And that the inheritor would in fact be Bowie neatly returns us to a persona from early in his 1980s period of global domination: Screaming Lord Byron, the dissolute rock star Bowie plays in Julian Temple’s long-form video Jazzin’ for Blue Jean (1984). It may seem that Bowie’s subversiveness went more or less permanently underground around the time of 1983’s Let’s Dance, but limiting subversiveness to the kinds of outré performances and guises Bowie offered in the 1970s overlooks the disruptive cultural work Bowie regularly accomplishes throughout what we may generally characterize as his enduring era of global superstardom. Rising to iconic status with EMI’s launch of 1983’s Let’s Dance, the boy from Brixton became “the” David Bowie, a fit, tanned, close-cropped, bleached, suited performer who took the world by storm—a truly radical departure from his earlier personae. The David Bowie of Let’s Dance looked, well, so normal that Kurt Loder’s cover story for the May 12, 1983 issue of Rolling Stone magazine was headlined simply “David Bowie Straight.”8 It seemed that since the Starman had fallen to Earth, so to speak, now we would be getting “the real David Bowie,” presented to us in what Shelton Waldrep characterizes as “the new persona of ‘normality’ that he was to adopt for the 80s”—“his Relatively Normal period,” as Emily A.  Bernhard-Jackson characterizes it.9 But this, too, was a pose, one Bowie more or less maintained for the rest of his career and under the (dis)guise of which he went about the powerful and provocative work of cultural subversion, of remaking the

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world according to his imagination. In short, even in his apparent normativity, Bowie embodies the Romantic type. To consider Bowie as a Romantic “type” is to engage a variety of assumptions and to suggest that many of these find form in Bowie—both the man and his work. While Romanticists have largely discarded the model of “The Big Six,” that grouping of first- and second-generation writers enshrined in various anthologies from the Victorian age through much of the twentieth century, returning to some of these in examining the life and work of Bowie in the context of the Romantic “type” proves helpful, in part because Bowie’s own performance as Screaming Lord Byron invites that very association. Jeffrey N. Cox notes that “as recently as the early 1980s, the definition of Romantic poetry would have been fairly clear and mostly non-­ controversial.”10 Still, definitional work is useful, as Cox continues: “‘Romanticism’ describes a body of experimental work in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that points to larger trends in poetry beyond its confines,” addressing “a common moment of massive cultural, social, and political change with varying attempts to remake poetry and re-vision [the] world.”11 For Cox, the Romantics were “poetic innovators seeking to remake the word through their art … [leaving] behind the confines of art to build or remake the human community.”12 Celeste Langan and Maureen N.  McLane argue that “Romantic poetry might even serve as a synonym for what we mean by multimedia,” a notion that rescues “the concept of a Romantic revolution in poetic language and form [from seeming] remarkably quaint.”13 Langan and McLane locate in the Romantic age a sensitivity and an experimental attitude regarding “the medial status of…art,”14 finding Romantic writers “preoccupied with poetry’s historicity, alive to its mediality” and therefore posed to “launch a wide range of transmedial investigations.”15 Bowie was this very type, an innovator working at the level of multimedia and reaching multiple generations, crossing media (music, video, stage, film) and introducing innovations in music and, equally importantly, in areas far removed from that realm, as we shall see. If, as Langan and McLane assert, “Shelley pictures revolution as a stunning sound-and-light show,”16 then Bowie manifests Shelley’s dream, most notably in the period from Let’s Dance forward— the relatively conservative half of his five-decade career, the period of Bowie’s global superstardom.

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“David Bowie is Resembling Himself”17 The long arc of Bowie’s global superstardom, reaching from Let’s Dance all the way to 2016’s ★ [Blackstar], is marked by three phases: domination, reinvention, and authenticity, real or supposed. In the first phase, Bowie seizes upon the opportunity to leap into an entirely new realm of celebrity, becoming one of several icons of the early age of music video. So present is Bowie, and so instantly recognizable, that he was one of the stars featured in advertisements for the music channel, shouting its tag line, “I want my MTV!” Throughout the 1980s, Bowie brokered his star power into opportunities to promote the work of others, and he called out the very instrument of his fame, music television, for reinforcing the underlying racism of popular culture by failing to feature artists of color. Bowie’s star dimmed a bit as the decade wore on, and the years following Let’s Dance were particularly unfortunate: He released the widely panned Tonight (1984) and was roundly criticized for his roles in the films Absolute Beginners and Labyrinth (both 1986). As if that weren’t enough, 1987 produced what he himself would later bemoan as the worst album of his career, Never Let Me Down, and he launched the equally derided Glass Spider international tour. As the decade ended, he tried once again to reinvent his image and to revitalize his brand by introducing what he insisted was a real band—not David Bowie’s backing band—the poorly received Tin Machine (1989). In short, following Let’s Dance, Bowie became a victim of his own fame as a series of disappointing projects cast doubt on his ability to deliver another great album, to be more than just an extra flashy “flash in the pan,” to borrow words from a seminal third-­ phase work, the single “Blackstar” (2015). The second phase of Bowie’s global superstardom finds him in a long period of reinvention. Free from his contract with EMI and from Tin Machine, in the 1990s Bowie burst forth with astonishing creativity, showcasing his penchant for moving quickly from one style to another. Black Tie White Noise (1993), a celebration of his happily wedded life, presents a series of collaborations with artists better known in minority communities. 1. Outside: The Nathan Adler Diaries: A Hyper-Cycle (1995) sees Bowie reunite with Brian Eno and reintroduce some of his most experimental recording techniques, blending media (music, painting, literature) and once again taking on guises through the electronic manipulation of his voice and the visual manipulation of his image. Earthling (1997) extends the long-standing association of Bowie with the alien:

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whereas Outside’s “Hallo Spaceboy” found him looking once again to the stars, Earthling’s “I’m Afraid of Americans” sees him recognizing how jarringly out of place he is in the world around him. Throughout these two eras, Bowie remains constantly visible and cycles through artistic phases in rapid succession. And while Bowie no longer regularly takes on the guise of characters, he continues to reinvent himself with each new artistic statement. In the first phase, as both his celebrity stature and the heteronormative nature of his work grew, Bowie was roundly criticized as having compromised his artistic vision for the sake of worldwide success; in fact, faced by countless popular Bowie inheritors, it seemed that there was “hardly any room for Bowie himself,” as Waldrep laments.18 By contrast, throughout the second phase, Bowie’s experimental work and his early adoption of new musical styles led many of his critics to reassess the megastar and to see his work as once again cutting-edge— even revolutionary. By the time he completed the Earthling Tour, a year which began with a televised concert in celebration of his fiftieth birthday at Madison Square Garden, it seemed Bowie was back, as powerful and as provocative as ever. But then things got quiet: Once again Bowie shape-shifted, entering a third and final phase of personal and artistic discovery. During this phase, Bowie’s status as a rock icon was cemented, most recognizably in his receipt of the Grammy Award for Lifetime Achievement (2006). At the same time, Bowie’s gradual retreat into private life saw this celebrated and once-controversial star doing everyday things under the cover of everyday clothes, occasionally appearing with his wife, Iman, at high-profile events, but more often than not sporting jeans and a flat cap, walking to the deli, shopping for books, and spending time with the couple’s young daughter. And then he roared back, shocking the world with the surprise release of The Next Day (2013), announced seemingly out of nowhere on his website on his birthday, a provocative precedent to the equally unexpected release of ★ which critics from the day of its release to the present praise as an unprecedentedly innovative, boundary-breaking work of artistic genius.19 The launches for these surprise late albums were interestingly identical: a release coinciding with Bowie’s birthday and a first video pointing backwards to signal moments in Bowie’s life (the “Song of Norway” t-shirt in the video for “Where Are We Now” [2013] pays homage to his decades-earlier lover Hermoine Farthingale) and in his work (the figure of the astronaut in the video for “Blackstar” references Major Tom).20

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In the observations below, I investigate how Bowie extends the notion of the Romantic type. In so doing, I borrow an approach from BBC2’s 2013 production David Bowie: Five Years in selecting specific moments from the three phases I have identified. Throughout, I explore the ways in which Bowie’s celebrity status and his performances of “David Bowie” amplify notions of “the Romantic,” ultimately to offer insight into the Romantic figure as a disruptive cultural type, even in its relatively conservative forms. Always a figure of disruption, “the Romantic,” like Bowie, revolutionizes, opening what Ross Chambers has described as “room for maneuver”21 through which important cultural work may be accomplished.

“David Bowie is the template for a new way of being a person”22 While the claim above flies in the face of my reading of Bowie as resuscitating the Romantic type, it does call up what is extraordinary about him, what makes him sui generis: innovative, iconic, and iconoclastic, Bowie was like no one in his own time. Examining his work in the context of aspects of Romanticism helps explain his enduring presence as one of few artists who truly transformed the world. At the same time, considering Bowie as a Romantic type illuminates the potential for such a figure to continue to shape human existence in ways consistent with signal Romantic ideals including the breaking of established forms and the call for the radical democratization of the world. Susan J. Wolfson writes that throughout Romantic writing, moments marked by dissonant dualities—hope and despair, joy and sorrow, creation and destruction—invoke a sense of melancholy23: “[M]elancholy,” she writes, “is the big tent for [the] oscillation” of so much of what we have come to consider Romantic, including “unities and fragments, identity formation and identity crisis … despondency and dispossession.”24 Simon Swift reads melancholia as “a Romantic legacy because it defines the sense in which Romanticism is both lost and retained … a site of both identification and disavowal.”25 Identifying the source of this melancholy in Bowie’s work, Simon Critchley argues that “at the core of Bowie’s music and his apparent negativity is a profound yearning for connection and, most of all, for love.”26 Hilton Als observes that Bowie “imagined other places in addition to this world—places he invented and filled with longing.”27 It is

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in and through this tendency, marking most heavily the third phase of Bowie’s global superstardom, that we see a particularly Romantic “type” emerge—and a clearly Shelleyan one, at that. As Shelley insists in A Defense of Poetry (1821), the artist functions as an “unacknowledged legislator of the World,” “not only behold[ing] intensely the present as it is, and discover[ing] those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but … behold[ing] the future in the present.”28 For Shelley, “[the poet’s] thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time” so that in the poet’s work, “the future is contained within the present as the plant within the seed.”29 Interestingly, it is throughout the era of such work that Bowie presents himself to us, more or less, as normal, as authentic, as Bowie—persona now non grata. Just as much of Bowie’s work is celebratory, riotous, energetic, and boundary-breaking, much, too, is mournful, particularly in the last phase, from ‘hours…’ (1999) to the post-9/11 Heathen (2002) to the rollicking Reality (2003) to the surprise “comeback” The Next Day, to his final masterpiece, ★, a work so tied up with his death that it becomes difficult to separate the brilliant album from the shocking loss, the permanence of the recorded work from the transience of the lived life. Of the three phases in Bowie’s era of global superstardom, it is during the last, from 1999 forward, that Bowie’s work most fully exemplifies his role as a Romantic poet of the sort imagined by Shelley. As such, Bowie shows us that in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries the poet’s role continues to be that of legislator—groundbreaker, disruptor, and visionary—even as his personal life veers toward conventionality and as he largely disappears from public view. Bowie functions throughout this period as sage and seer, a double role perhaps best seen in his performance at the post-9/11 Concert for New  York City which opened with Bowie performing two songs that took on new meaning in the wake of that epochal shift in our culture: a soul-searching, reflective version of Simon and Garfunkel’s “America” (1968) and a defiantly triumphant version of his own anthemic “‘Heroes’” (1977). Looking forward while looking back, Bowie performed precisely the role of the poet as Shelley described it. Bowie’s double vision comforted and consoled, lifting the victims of our nation’s tragedy to the status of hero, thereby including all of us in his prophecy of a broken world restored to wholeness.

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“David Bowie is the story of his times”30 Mole contends that “the crucial changes that produced modern celebrity culture occurred in the Romantic period”31 when the concept of celebrity became “concretized, becoming an individual’s definitive condition.”32 “Celebrity was no longer something you had,” Mole asserts; rather, “it was now something you were.”33 For Mole, “celebrity characteristics … required the growth of a modern industry of production, promotion, and distribution, and a modern audience—massive, anonymous, socially diverse, and geographically distributed—before these elements combined to form a celebrity culture in the modern sense.”34 But such visibility came at a cost: “celebrity,” Mole writes, “impacts not only on the selfhood of the celebrity, but on conceptions of selfhood itself.”35 Like Byron before him, Bowie’s celebrity brought with it the pressures of constant scrutiny, rendering Bowie, like Byron, at once a subject of interest and an object of fascination: “the celebrity experiences the subjective trauma of commodity capitalism in a particularly acute fashion … a producer of commodities and himself, in a sense, a commodity,”36 “[turning] his or her proper name into a brand name.”37 For Mole, “a cultural history of celebrity should begin in earnest in the Romantic period” and “should understand celebrity as a cultural apparatus constructed not only from ideas, attitudes, and discourse, but also from material conditions and technological innovations.”38 For Bowie, these included, most importantly, the rise of music video through the medium of MTV, the platform that elevated him to global domination. Mole writes that “for those … who could not hope to meet Byron in the flesh, pictures of him, and the visual tropes of his poems, enabled a kind of relationship that was always mediated through commercialized works of art.”39 The same, of course, is true of Bowie, particularly given the visual and auditory technologies key to his fame. These enabled fans to see their pop idol move and to hear him speak, encouraging them to imagine that in viewing his performances, videos, and interviews, they were getting to know the real Bowie himself. Of course, such an imagined relationship is an illusion: Glenn Hendler reminds us that “Bowie was always clear that he was engaged in a performance and that these personas weren’t necessarily a reflection of who he ‘really’ was.”40 Once again, Bowie conjures Byron: as Corin Throsby has noted, “much of Byron’s poetry is about constructing an identity for a public audience.”41 There is Byron and there is “Byron,” Throsby observes, a distinction that embeds

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the complications of celebrity, a bifurcation especially resonant in the work of an artist like Bowie who, for long periods throughout his career, played parts, continuing “the interrogation of identity that Byron began.”42 After all, as Kurt Loder wrote of Bowie in 1983, “metamorphosis has been his métier.”43 Perhaps none of Bowie’s metamorphoses was as remarkable as those prior to the watershed year of 1983, metamorphoses that exploited the power of gendered embodiments to disrupt. Even in those days, Bowie followed a Romantic precedent: Clara Tuite argues that “[Beau] Brummell’s understated mode of glamour is predicated upon a set of distinctions between visibility and invisibility, display and secrecy, distinction and democracy, effeminacy and masculinity.”44 Sending up notions of masculinity, in the early years of his fame, Bowie was often seen in a dress, sometimes accompanying his first wife and their infant son, a visual tableau that broke any assumptions about Bowie’s sexuality encouraged by his highly controversial mode of self-presentation: here was, for all intents and purposes, the happy family man, albeit in controversial London designer Michael Fish’s “man-dresses.” Bowie’s play across the lines of gendered embodiments recalls the larger realm of boundary crossings typical of Romantic works. In her study Romantic Androgyny, Diane Long Hoeveler notes that “interpretations of Romanticism as a literary movement have traditionally tended to emphasize dichotomies: self and other, mind and nature, natural and supernatural, allegory and symbol, mediated and unmediated, subject and object.”45 Citing the work of Michael G.  Cooke, Hoeveler observes that “Romanticism itself produced ‘a breakdown in the grammar of opposites—and opposition—that had defined the situation of the sexes,’ with the clear intention of instituting a new ideal: ‘a male-and-female principle’ where both modes of being were ‘included in each other.’” Hoeveler follows Albert Béguin in settling on “the image of the androgyne as the quintessential symbol of the Romantic era.”46 “Androgyne,” “alien,” “gender-bender”—all are terms that could easily have been applied to Bowie throughout the 1970s, particularly during his glam rock phase. And even after he developed what Mehdi Derfoufi describes as “a deliberate strategy to normalize his image,”47 Bowie continued to disrupt. From Let’s Dance forward, Bowie inherits, produces, and transmits this Romantic type, showing us the revolutionary potential in moving along a gendered continuum as well as the subversion still possible when one is closest to the position matching one’s biological identity.

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A review of key moments from the period of Bowie’s global superstardom shows him growing increasingly conventional—dare one say normal?—but regularly looking back to his own radical embodiments from previous times. In video after video, a gesture, a dance move, or an article of clothing points to Bowie’s awareness of his status as an icon, and such moments of self-referentiality continue to broaden his body of work, adding layer upon layer of complexity. Donning the guise of the “real” Bowie allows him to continue to accomplish paradigm-shifting work, to reimagine aspects of the world, all while regularly engaging in cultural critique. With the launch of Let’s Dance and the intense media campaign promoting the album, Bowie, for the first time in his career, looked remarkably normal, an appropriate embodiment for this Bowie whose music had also become surprisingly mainstream. The new songs may have been sure-­ fire hits, but a closer examination of some of the album’s tracks shows how Bowie incorporates cultural critique even as he seeks widespread commercial success. While the album’s lead single, its title song, is celebratory, even jubilant, the David Mallet-directed video offers a critique of capitalist culture, critiques systemic racism, exposes the harsh lives of the working poor, and ultimately discards the trappings of Western life as corrupt and corrupting. Mallet’s video for “China Girl” (1983), Bowie’s version of a song he wrote for Iggy Pop, recalls an iconic moment from the golden age of Hollywood to establish Bowie as a sex symbol—and, importantly, a heterosexual one: Bowie and Geeling Ching lie naked on the beach and kiss as waves surround them, visually echoing the cinematic climax of 1953’s From Here to Eternity, but in offering up Bowie’s bare buttocks, the video introduces a sly subtext, objectifying him in a way that undermines the video’s putatively heterosexual presentation.48 Bowie, being Bowie, could never forgo an opportunity to nod back toward his gender-­ fluid past.49 Elsewhere on Let’s Dance, in his cover of Metro’s “Criminal World,” Bowie muses about “boys [who] are like baby-faced girls,” flutes fluttering on the soundtrack as the flamboyant Bowie of the 1970s briefly returns. A year later, two of the three roles Bowie plays in Jazzin’ for Blue Jean exemplify his deft deployments of gender, sexuality, and desire.50 That both are male demonstrates the fluidity of the concept of sex (a biological fact), which includes relative positionalities at extreme ends of a gendered spectrum (masculine and feminine). Hapless, lovelorn Vic spends the entire video in a comically futile pursuit of a young woman who has caught his attention—and who has no interest in him whatsoever except for the

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fiction he has created regarding his friendship with Screamin’ Lord Byron. As Byron, Bowie projects an exotic, seductive image, but he is rendered almost entirely passive by drugs and anxiety. In these ways, Vic occupies a masculine position, acquisitive and overtly sexual. Alternatively, Byron occupies a feminine position, passive to the point of unconsciousness. Even when he becomes active as a performer, Byron remains the object of the gaze, thereby occupying a traditionally feminine position in the eyes of the viewer.51 That in the end it is Byron, not Vic, who walks away with the girl renders the passive, objectified, and in these ways feminized male the ultimate object of desire—a social and sexual subversion of the sort the 1970s-era Bowie knew quite well. Early into the second phase of his global superstardom, Bowie’s sexual subversion continues in the stunning Matthew Rolston-directed video for “Miracle Goodnight,” the third video released in support of Black Tie White Noise (1993). Wikipedia amusingly characterizes Bowie as “unmoved by a harem of beautiful women” and notes that aspects of the video signal back to his past, particularly the sections in which Bowie plays a mime. Four years later, Floria Sigismondi’s hyperkinetic video for the lead single from Earthling, “Little Wonder” (1997), finds Bowie extending the post-­ apocalyptic mood from 1. Outside, donning an eyepatch reminiscent of Halloween Jack from the days of Diamond Dogs (1974) and sharing the screen with multiple clones of old versions of Bowie—significantly, all women. Cannily, Sigismondi’s video reminds us that Bowie is always looking forward while looking back, flaunting the notion of “Bowie” as a fluid signifier unmoored to gender or time. In the final video released in support of Earthling, “I’m Afraid of Americans,” directed by Dominic Hawley and Nick Goffey (“Dom & Nic”) (1997), Bowie launches an assault on the American fascination with religion, violence, and guns, playing an increasingly paranoid man who sees, at every turn, images of the violence the song critiques. “God is an American,” Bowie sings in the final line of the song, repeating the phrase nine more times over the last forty-five seconds of the video as a bizarre parade commences, led by what appear to be members of a tribal religion. The video exposes Bowie once again as the alien, the odd one out in this violent, frightening world. Together, the song and video stand as an indictment of America, a powerful instance of Bowie’s unrelenting cultural critique.52 Just as the work of his Romantic ancestors shaped and reshaped the world around them, throughout the 1990s Bowie’s disruptions

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revolutionized culture—and not only in the arena of music. During that decade, Bowie became the first recording artist to monetize future earnings on the strength of a healthy back catalog which he parlayed into a $55,000,000 fortune by selling Bowie Bonds, royalties from his work that reverted back to Bowie after ten years. He was also the first major artist to launch and actively maintain an online presence, BowieNet (1998), and the first to help develop software (“The Verbasiser,” an electronic means for cutting up text on a Macintosh computer53). The release of Black Tie White Noise (1993) included a then-cutting-edge interactive CD-ROM that allowed fans to remix and build anew the video for the album’s lead single, “Jump They Say,” thereby inviting fans to join Bowie as creators of visual art in a new technological world. Bowie was the first to “brand” a financial institution, BowieBanc (1998), and he was the first major artist to release a single on the Internet before it appeared in physical form (“Telling Lies” [1996]) and to release a full album online. The cover of that album, 1999’s ‘hours…’, a meditation on growing older, featured double Bowies, a newer version with longer, more naturally colored hair holding the Bowie of the just-past Earthling period in a pose reminiscent of the Pietà, a visual echo of Mary and Jesus—or, perhaps, given our concerns, of Mary and Percy Shelley who were memorialized in just such a pose in a marble statue commissioned by their son from sculptor Henry Weekes.54 Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Bowie’s work blends musical styles in intriguing and exciting ways: he straddles boundaries that distinguish arenas of engagement such as art and commerce, and he pursues answers to questions about the nature of life, the power of art, and the role of the artist in effecting cultural change. Along the way, Bowie would become an active member of the editorial board of Modern Painters magazine. Ever the prankster, in 1998 he would stage an elaborate art-world hoax, establishing 21 Publishing, Ltd., to publish William Boyd’s biography of Nat Tate, an artist who never actually existed. With only a handful in on the joke, on the eve of April Fool’s Day, 1998, 21 released the book at an elaborate launch for art-world types, and Bowie read selections from Boyd’s text. Some of the attendees claimed to have known Tate and his work only to be shown up by Bowie when the hoax was revealed. What is perhaps especially notable in all of this is the tremendous cultural power Bowie had come to wield, not only as a musician but as a member of the broader, culturally influential high arts community: simply because he endorsed the story, Nat Tate, for a moment, existed.55

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During these years, Bowie regularly considers the world and his place in it. The first single from ‘hours…’, “Thursday’s Child,” establishes the tone for the final phase in Bowie’s career: the song and the Walter Stern-­ directed video are quiet, subtle, dark, and moody to the point of being melancholic, offering an extended meditation on the strangeness of the self and its everyday surroundings. While ‘hours…’ is certainly not devoid of high-energy moments, “Thursday’s Child” provides a musical and visual context for much of Bowie’s work to come. That mood carries into his first album of the new century, Heathen (2002), whose advertisements hailed the return to form as “Classic David Bowie circa 2002,” a bizarre tag line that mixes past and present, suggesting an artist who transcends time, an embodiment of the Shelleyan poet’s double vision.56 Following an uptick in energy and visibility that began with his legendary headlining set at Glastonbury 2000 and ended when Bowie suffered a heart attack onstage in Prague during A Reality Tour (2003–2004), his work grows increasingly reflective, and Bowie himself becomes increasingly reclusive, entering the Greta Garbo stage of his career, disappearing into a long and, some suspected, permanent silence. Critics and fans alike feared that the work of this revolutionary was complete. A decade later, to the shock of everyone, they would be proven wrong. What would be widely touted as the biggest comeback in rock and roll history kicked off on Bowie’s birthday in 2013 with the Tony Oursler-­ directed “Where Are We Now?” video for the surprise album The Next Day. Appearing seemingly out of nowhere on Bowie’s web site on the morning of 8 January 2013, Bowie looked dramatically—and some would say disturbingly—different in this, his first official video release in almost 10 years.57 Having endured years of speculation about his health and having stayed largely out of sight since the end of A Reality Tour, Bowie looks noticeably older and downright bizarre in the distorted projections of his face on a sock doll. That doll and its companion, bearing the equally distorted face of artist Jacqueline Humphries, Oursler’s spouse, sit in an artist’s studio in front of a video screen. As the mournful song plays, the screen features images that recall a key phase of Bowie’s life, the so-called Berlin years during which he kicked his notorious cocaine habit and recorded the astonishing trilogy of albums Low (1977), “Heroes” (1977), and Lodger (1979). Bowie again acts in the role of poet as Shelley defines it: looking backward and looking forward, taking from the past that which is meaningful and making of it something new, remembering what has been lost while searching for what is to come. The very title “Where Are

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We Now?” suggests a curiosity about the self and its status as it moves through time, the subject as journeying, passing through, arriving, and so forth: “A man lost in time, just walking the dead,” Bowie sings, with “fingers…crossed…just in case.”58 In Floria Sigismondi’s video for “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” (2013), the second single from The Next Day, images of previous “Bowies” proliferate, encouraging us to see the Bowie of the present as the “real” one, not to mention the “normal” one—yet, for his history of radical transformation, and of course because of his celebrity, we understand that even “the real Bowie” is a fiction despite the fact that each new iteration of Bowie seems to offer us “the thing” itself.59 That Bowie’s costar in “Stars” is British actress Tilda Swinton—his doppelgänger—and that the other “Bowies” in the film are once again played by women enlarges the hall of mirrors and underscores the reality that all Bowies are gender- and generation-­ flexible impersonations of a thing we never knew, that all Bowies are “Bowie.”60 In his exploration of what he calls “the androgynous sublime,” Warren Stevenson argues that sublimity—for him, a transcendence achieved by raising the low to the high, as in earth to the universe, or by joining those original units that have been divided, as in the lover and the beloved— finds form in androgyny, the joining of halves, the union of opposites.61 Stevenson’s androgynous sublime (re)unites what had once been complete but had been forgotten, restoring broken halves to wholeness. Stevenson finds this activity present in the work of all the major Romantic poets, particularly in Shelley. One thinks of Shelley’s essay “On Love” (1818): “we are born into the world and there is something within us which from the instant we live and move thirsts after its likeness,” “not only the portrait of our eternal being, but an assemblage of the minutest particulars of which our nature is composed.”62 In “On Life” (1819), Shelley rhapsodizes that “those who are subject to the state called reverie feel as if their nature were dissolved into the surrounding universe.”63 More than any of the major Romantics, Shelley celebrates the androgynous potential of the mind, imagining such wholeness as a corrective to the fragmented state of the human condition. When such a potential is realized, worlds open up and characters blend with the universe, transcending space and time. This is exactly the desire of Newton, the central figure in Lazarus (2015), the off-Broadway stage play Bowie cowrote with Enda Walsh as a new adaptation of the novel The Man Who Fell to Earth, yet another instance of late-phase Bowie looking back, here on the very

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vehicle that forever solidified the connection between Bowie and all things alien: NEWTON: The door opens to our garden—and far in the distance—the hill—and we walk to it. GIRL: Countryside disappears under our feet—there’s only us two and that hill and the blue sky. … NEWTON: …I’ve stepped off this Earth and into that better place. An imagined world.64

Stevenson argues that “the androgynous sublime constitutes a major, hitherto neglected, aspect of English Romantic poetry.”65 Reading Coleridge, he concludes that “all art is androgynous, aspiring to sublimity.”66 More broadly, writes Stevenson, “we are all imaginatively androgynous and hence capable of sublimity.”67 While Bowie’s overt androgyny more or less ceased following the release of the “Boys Keep Swinging” promotional video from Lodger (1979) and the cover art for Scary Monsters…and Super Creeps (1980), throughout the era of his global superstardom, his work never ceases to explore mechanisms for uniting opposites, for approaching the sublime.

“Which one was the real David Bowie? They all were”68 Langan and McLane suggest that “the paramount question of all radicals and reformers” was “How to get there from here?”,69 a question Bowie’s work raises, most evidently in his songs about space travel and the celestial life as well as in his shifts in personal and musical style, a question echoed in paraphrase in the lead single from The Next Day, the aforementioned “Where Are We Now?” Flouting traditional notions of place and time, Bowie’s movement from one stylistic phase to another proceeded swiftly and seamlessly, a shape-shifting trick the world increasingly came to expect from this celebrity chameleon. Despite countless reflections on the Bowie of this period or that as the genuine article, throughout his half-century career, it remains impossible to locate “the real Bowie” in any one persona, if ever at all—perhaps an effect of celebrity as Mole has defined it. Even Bowie teasingly professed uninterest in identifying his “true” self: “I am only the person the greatest number of people believe I am,” he said

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to an unidentified off-camera interviewer in a clip featured in BBC2’s David Bowie: Five Years.70 In the end, of course, the enigmatic David Bowie survived longer than almost all of the major Romantic writers: He died at 69, the same age as Blake, who was outlived only by Wordsworth, who breathed his last at 80. Unlike Byron, Keats, and Shelley, Bowie lived long enough to cycle through myriad career phases, including an early midlife creative slump the likes of which the younger Romantics never knew, and yet he emerged refreshed, entering new phases of life personally and professionally, all the while remaining vital. Unlike Blake and Wordsworth, with advancing age, Bowie continued to push forward to explore radical new ideas, not only in music, fashion, and art but also in commerce and technology. As Keith Stuart noted in his Guardian tribute on the occasion of Bowie’s death, technology-savvy Bowie, an early adopter of the Internet, intuited “that a revolution was coming.”71 Even as he aged, Bowie continued to evolve, so much so that his final works were widely hailed as groundbreaking, particularly the jazz-­ influenced final album ★ (2016). Like the contemporaneous stage play Lazarus, ★ once again sees Bowie looking forward while looking back, even—and importantly—as death approached. Whereas members of the traveling company for Bowie’s final international foray, A Reality Tour (2003–2004), remarked on how his seemingly preternatural youth and vitality gave the impression he was aging in reverse, by 2015, the ravages of cancer had rendered him frail, affecting his stamina and at times compromising his ability to record. Nevertheless, at the end of his career, Bowie remained, to quote longtime producer Tony Visconti, “a man at the top of his game.”72 “David Bowie was one of those people the world couldn’t imagine living without,” notes Mikal Gilmore in his celebratory obituary published less than a month after Bowie’s passing.73 Celebrity and enigma, a vital presence and a curious absence, Bowie was perhaps never more fully present than just after his death. The lyrics to his final single “Lazarus” (2016) proved prescient, predicting the unprecedented media frenzy that would mark his passing and calling on us to look up to Heaven, perhaps to find him there. In that final song and its accompanying hospital-room video, filmed the very week Bowie received a terminal diagnosis and released just three days before his death, Bowie calls our attention to so many aspects specific to his career, acknowledging his celebrity and the passage of time by donning a copy of the outfit he wore in publicity photos for 1976’s Station to Station

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(itself an important structural and musical precedent for ★), fearlessly revealing his paper-thin skin and liver spots, cannily referencing the funereal video for “Blackstar” by incorporating clothing, props, and characters from that haunting testament, and, at the end, finally disappearing into a closet, a visual winking-back at all those years of speculation about his private life. In “Lazarus,” Bowie again echoes Shelley, who wrote, “We are on that verge where words abandon us, and what wonder if we grow dizzy to look down the dark abyss of—how little we know.”74 Through “Lazarus,” Bowie imagines his death and afterlife: “just like that bluebird,” he sings, “I’ll be free.”75 Whether a final nod to the past (perhaps a reference to the bluebird who flies “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”) or an acknowledgment of the infinite present of life on social media (the bluebird logo of Twitter, Bowie’s preferred platform in his final years), in the end, Bowie continues to assert Shelley’s double vision, a revolutionary whose celebrity galvanized the world’s attention and whose work disrupted culture, redefining our notions of artistry in all forms. Throughout his era of global superstardom, Bowie stands as a Romantic type in his power to illuminate and to disrupt, his celebrity not merely undimmed but increasingly burnished, ever brightened by the inspiration we continue to find throughout his work, even—and especially—in the final, quiet, “normal” decades of his life.

Notes 1. I am  indebted to  the  work of  my research assistant, Eveline Morrow, in  the  preparation of  research material for  this chapter. The  epigraph, a paraphrase of John Keats (“A thing of beauty is a joy forever”), was featured on  a  banner in  the  David Bowie Is exhibition and  was  published in the exhibition catalog. See Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh, eds., David Bowie Is (London: V & A Publishing, 2013), 10. 2. Nowell Marshall, Romanticism, Gender, and Violence: Blake to George Sodini (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2013), 19. 3. Anne K.  Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993), 1. 4. Baz Luhrman, qtd. in Dylan Jones, David Bowie: A Life (New York: Crown Archetype, 2017), 419. Sean Redmond, “David Bowie: In Cameo,” Cinema Journal 57, no. 3 (Spring 2018): 154, 156. 5. Alomar, qtd. in Jones, 508. 6. Tom Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (New York: Palgrave, 2007). Corin Throsby

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observes that “the type of fan activity that is understood as being unique to the online age has its genesis, as a major cultural phenomenon, in reading practices of the Romantic period.” See Throsby, “Byron, Commonplacing, and Early Fan Culture,” in Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, ed. Tom Mole (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 227. 7. Oliver Clarkson, review of Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, ed. Tom Mole, English Studies 93, no. 1 (2012): 116. 8. Christopher Sandford’s assessment of Bowie’s early 1980s’ stardom concludes with language reminiscent of the Rolling Stone cover: “There was also a feeling that, by the time of Let’s Dance, Bowie was acting himself, not another exotic artifact. The businesslike atmosphere and anaesthetized calm of many of the 1983 concerts flowed from a man who (as he frequently reminded crowds) was called Jones. ‘For the first time in his thirteen-year career, Bowie played Bowie straight,’ wrote the Express.” Christopher Sandford, Bowie: Loving the Alien (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 1998), 227. 9. Shelton Waldrep, The Aesthetics of Self-Invention: Oscar Wilde to David Bowie (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 130. Emily A. Bernhard-Jackson, “‘Sometimes I Feel Like the Whole Human Race’: Lord Byron and David Bowie Consider the Question of Identity,” Byron Journal 46, no. 2 (2018): 113. 10. Jeffrey N.  Cox, “The Living Pantheon of Poets in 1820: Pantheon or Canon?” In The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry, ed. James Chandler and Maureen N.  McLane (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 10. 11. Cox, 11. 12. Ibid., 11. 13. Celeste Langan and Maureen N.  McLane, “The Medium of Romantic Poetry,” in The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry, ed. James Chandler and Maureen N. McLane (New York: Cambridge United Press, 2008), 239. 14. Langan and McLane, 246. 15. Ibid., 248. 16. Ibid., 257. 17. Broackes and Marsh, eds., 278. 18. Waldrep, The Aesthetics of Self-Invention, 130. 19. While the release of ★ was pre-advertised, even with an online countdown clock, only a handful of people knew Bowie had been working on a new album, so its announcement after a period of quiet took the world by surprise. 20. Bowie’s conceit of looking backward while moving forward is evident in many instances of self-referential intertextuality throughout his visual

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work, typically in the replication of poses, moves, and styles from earlier works, suggesting an incorporation of the past in the present, a transcendence of time achieved through aesthetic continuity. For example, the image of Bowie lying atop a car in the video for “Jump, They Say” (1993) duplicates the pose from the cover of Lodger (1979), and the cover of Earthling (1997) finds Bowie standing in a pose first featured in the “Jump” video (back to the camera, legs spread, hands crossed over the small of the back). 21. Ross Chambers, Room for Maneuver: Reading (the) Oppositional (in) Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 22. David Buckley, Strange Fascination: David Bowie, The  Definitive Story (New York: Virgin Books, 2005), 520. 23. Susan J.  Wolfson, “Romanticism & Gender & Melancholy,” Studies in Romanticism 53, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 435–456. 24. Wolfson, 436; 435–436. 25. Simon Swift, in Legacies of Romanticism: Literature, Culture, Aesthetics, ed. Carmen Casaliggi and Paul March-Russell (New York: Routledge, 2012), 255. 26. Simon Critchley, Bowie (New York: OR Books, 2014, 2016), 193. 27. Hilton Als, “A Natural Collaborator,” in The Brilliance of David Bowie (2016): 100. 28. Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defense of Poetry, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), 508. 29. Ibid., 482–483; 481. 30. Sandford, 350. 31. Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity, 4. 32. Mole in Mole, ed., Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 2. 33. Ibid., 2. 34. Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity, 10. 35. Ibid., 5. 36. Ibid., 4. 37. Ibid., 16. 38. Ibid., 156. 39. Ibid., 79. 40. Glenn Hendler, Diamond Dogs, 33 1/3 (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 101. 41. Corin Throsby, “Byron, Commonplacing, and Early Fan Culture,” in Mole, ed., 241. 42. Bernhard-Jackson, 113. 43. Kurt Loder, “The Man Who Owned the World,” David Bowie: The Ultimate Guide to His Music and Legacy. Special Rolling Stone Edition. (2018): 40. Excerpted from RS 395, 12 May 1983. See Bernhard-Jackson

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on Bowie’s 1970s personae as embodiments “[modelled]…on Byronic signifiers” (114). 44. Clara Tuite, “Trials of the Dandy: George Brummell’s Scandalous Celebrity.” In Mole, ed., 147. 45. Diane Long Hoeveler, Romantic Androgyny: The Women Within (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1990), 15. Hoeveler quotes Cook from Acts of Inclusion: Studies Bearing on an Elementary Theory of Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). 46. Hoeveler, 15. 47. Mehdi Derfoufi, “Embodying Stardom, Representing Otherness: David Bowie in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,” in David Bowie: Critical Perspectives, edited by Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane, and Martin J. Power (New York: Routledge, 2015), 175. 48. Waldrep notes that many of Bowie’s performance outfits emphasize features generally eroticized on women: shoulders, long, thin legs, and tiny waist. See Waldrep’s The Aesthetics of Self-Invention, 112. 49. See also Shelton Waldrep on “The ‘China Girl’ Problem: Reconsidering David Bowie in the 1980s,” in Devereux, Dillane, and Power, eds., 147–159. 50. In the long form video, Bowie plays three roles: Vic, Screaming Lord Byron, and Bowie himself, who at the video’s end breaks the fourth wall to argue with director Julien Temple. 51. First introduced by Linda Williams in Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), the gendered model of viewership which reads the observer as masculine (subject) and the observed as feminine (object) is now a commonplace in film theory. 52. A competing interpretation of the video, that its critique of America is a misapprehension based on a media-driven delusion, is beside the point of this essay except to say that in both readings, Bowie is launching a work of cultural critique so complex that it supports what are in effect completely opposite readings. 53. Hendler, 36n4. 54. Weekes’s work was created in 1854 at the request of the Shelleys’ son, Sir Percy Shelley, and remains on display at Christchurch Priory in Dorset, England. Mary Shelley’s holding of the drowned Shelley may remind Bowie fans of part of the lyric from 1987’s “Time Will Crawl” which presages the eyeless image of Bowie on the cover of 2002’s Heathen: “[I saw] a drowning man / With no eyes at all.” 55. For a noteworthy account of the Nat Tate hoax, see “The Late Great Tate: An Artist is Rediscovered; April Fool” by Peter Plagens, originally

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published in Newsweek (20 April 1998) and available online at https:// www.questia.com/read/1G1-­20490317/the-­late-­great-­tate-­an-­artist-­is-­ rediscoverd-­april. Accessed 3 July 2020. 56. This marketing phrase appeared in a clear sticker on the cover of the Heathen CD. Like that phrase, the title of Shelton Waldrep’s book, Future Nostalgia: Performing David Bowie (Bloomsbury, 2015) also overlaps the past, present, and future. In this way, Heathen’s marketing phrase and Waldrep’s title position Bowie as somehow out of time, transcendent— sublime in the very way Warren Stevenson defines the term, as we shall see. 57. Prior to “Where Are We Now?”, Bowie’s most recent promotional videos had been those released in support of Reality in 2004. 58. David Bowie, “Where Are We Now?” in The Next Day (ISO Records, Columbia 1014). 59. Many instances could be cited, including two that underscore the iconic role Bowie had come to occupy in culture: the 2001 Sirius Satellite Radio commercial that plays on Bowie’s reputation as “the man who fell to Earth,” and the 2006 Vittel mineral water commercial where the Bowie of today saunters through an apartment full of old versions of Bowie, closing with a shot of Bowie placing his fingers in front of his lips as if encouraging us not to let others in on the secret. 60. High-profile females “played” Bowie throughout the rest of his years: for example, in 2003, supermodel Kate Moss donned Bowie’s suit from the 1972 video promoting “Life on Mars?” for a photoshoot in the British version of Vogue magazine, and in 2014 Jessica Lange wore a copy of the suit while singing a version of the song, one of many ways in which she channeled Bowie as she played Elsa Mars in FX television’s American Horror Story: Freak Show. 61. Warren Stevenson, Romanticism and the Androgynous Sublime (Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996). 62. Percy Shelley, “On Love,” in Reiman and Powers, eds., 473, 474. 63. Percy Shelley, “On Life,” in Reiman and Powers, eds., 477. 64. David Bowie and Enda Walsh, Lazarus (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2017), 61. 65. Stevenson, 129. 66. Ibid., 132. 67. Ibid.,19. 68. Rob Sheffield, “Introduction,” David Bowie: The  Ultimate Guide to  His Music and Legacy. Rolling Stone Special Collector’s Edition (2018): 6. 69. Langan and McLane, 256. 70. David Bowie to an unknown, off-screen interviewer, David Bowie: Five Years, BBC2, 2013.

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71. Keith Stuart, “BowieNet: How David Bowie’s ISP Foresaw the Future of the Internet.” The Guardian (11 January 2016), https://www.theguardian. com/technology/2016/jan/11/david-­bowie-­bowienet-­isp-­internet. So successful were Bowie’s visionary forays into the digital universe that J. Alex Tarquinio remarked of him in Forbes magazine that “When Bowie decides he has outgrown prancing around onstage, the Internet may well be his fallback” (Tarquinio, “Banking on Bowie’s Brand, Forbes [4 March 2000]), https://www.forbes.com/2000/03/04/feat.html#60add91030da. 72. Tony Visconti to an unknown, off-camera interviewer, David Bowie: The Last Five Years, BBC2, 2013. 73. Mikal Gilmore, “David Bowie, 1947–2016,” Rolling Stone 1254 (11 Feb 2016): 38. 74. Percy Shelley, “On Life,” 478. 75. David Bowie, “Lazarus,” in ★ [Blackstar]. Columbia 88875173862, 2016, compact disc.

CHAPTER 9

The Goblin King, Absurdity, and Nonbinary Thinking Aglaia Maretta Venters

Romanticism represented innovative ways for individuals to decide who they were despite interference from the outside world. As Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre discuss in Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, the movement inspired individuals to transform one’s immediate environment and one’s own life while remaining within bourgeois society: this can take the form of dandyism or aestheticism … the creation of a community of like-minded individuals … a utopian experiment … or simply falling in love.1

In the second half of the twentieth century, David Bowie was one artist who embraced ambiguity to resist external pressures to conform. In many ways, Bowie defied categorization by transcending binary identities like male and female or heterosexual and homosexual. Bowie even escaped fixed labeling as a musician, artist, actor, or performer, thereby asserting that rational order’s authority over individuals is illusory. His embrace of

A. M. Venters (*) South Louisiana Community College, Baton Rouge, LA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Rovira (ed.), David Bowie and Romanticism, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97622-4_9

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opposing images (male vs. female, public vs. private) was the linchpin of his commitment to his own genuine selfhood. Tanja Stark argued that “with the tension between opposites, Bowie’s art reflects a raw struggle for authenticity in the process of individuation.”2 Bowie’s career underscored that reason is largely based upon binary thinking; for example, a rational mind (according to Western biases) sees emotion as oppositional and chaotic, and therefore antagonistic. When individuals are conscious of nuances that undercut systems of oppositions, reason loses its power, and imagination becomes a path to construct new ideas. Bowie’s skepticism of binary categorization brought to his audience an ideology consistent with Romanticism as explained by Jerome McGann in The Romantic Ideology: The very belief that transcendental categories can provide permanent ground for culture becomes, in the Romantic Age, an ideological formation—another illusion raised up to hold back an awareness of the contradictions inherent in contemporary social structures and the relations they support.3

Transcending categories was one integral part of Bowie’s appeal, and the ideals of the Romantic Era thrived in the twentieth century through his artistry. Sociologist Nick Stevenson’s interviews with Bowie’s fans found that audiences appreciated his performances for the cathartic experiences that socially perceived rational order required them to suppress. As an artist who freed himself from the authoritarian rule of rational order and demonstrated that imaginative conjecture and emotional response have as much value as reason, Bowie became a twentieth-century paragon of Romanticism. Because Bowie employed science-fiction themes and performed as characters he invented, he connected to Romanticism by emphasizing imagination in his artistic expression. Romantic-era poets were pioneers for bridging reason and imagination in ways that acknowledged the value inherent to both.4 By the time of the Romantic poets in Britain, assumptions about imagination had changed to allow that, while imagination could lead to grotesque and horrifying results, it also could lead to brilliant and awe-inspiring creations. Hence, the Romantics chose to open dialogue about the complexity of an individual’s choices and aims when exploring imagination.5 Keats’s letter to George and Thomas Keats in

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1817 describes a human mind’s ability to understand concepts that could not be described in absolute, rational terms: I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge.6

In writing these words, Keats implied persons who ignored ideas and realities that were not linearly rational limited their minds, and that embracing “versimilitude,” which left room for the imaginary, was the way to overcome these limitations. In other words, the “half-knowledge” of the imagination allowed people to expand their minds. Indeed, Romanticism encourages adults to change their perceptions of imagination and childhood innocence, admitting that even the most rational people needed to find the spiritual benefits contained outside of society and within the fantastic.7 Bowie’s 1986 fantasy film Labyrinth explores adolescence as a liminal, unsettled period within human life. In Labyrinth, Bowie plays Jareth, the Goblin King, who sends a teenaged girl, Sarah, through a series of trials to find her baby brother, testing the girl’s will to persevere until she defeats him and triumphs over her internal conflicts about her identity and her judgments about herself and the world around her. Over time, the film merged with the total body of Bowie’s work, particularly his cinematic roles. Tanja Stark states about Bowie’s body of film work, “Significantly, the way out of this movie labyrinth lay in consciously confronting the shadow, rather than being hypnotically subsumed by its dark goblin energy.”8 Labyrinth, the story of a teenager’s quest to rise above her perceptions of herself and others through imagination and gaining small victories over the shadow aspects of self-realization before facing the final antagonist, the Goblin King, conforms to this description. The film is also an expression of Bowie’s Romanticism in his performance of the antagonist and in its soundtrack, which tackles the theme of the dangers of imprisoning the self in the world of the unconscious.9 Bowie, as an artist whose science-fiction themes created for him fantastic personae, and who focused much of his career out on overturning binary social assumptions, was a perfect fit for playing the Goblin King as

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an adult male whose true identity and motives are mysterious. Jim Henson asked Bowie to portray Jareth because the character must have something attractive and menacing about him at the same time. David Bowie has that quality; he is positive and negative at the same time. He also did the music for the film. I thought it would be interesting to put rock music in a fantasy film. It would be something new. And David Bowie thought that way too.10

Many viewers and critics were pleased by the tone that Bowie’s performance brought to the film. In a 1987 review of the film for the New York Times, Nina Darnton writes, “David Bowie is perfectly cast as the teasing, tempting seducer whom Sarah must both want and reject in order to learn the labyrinth’s lessons, and his songs add a driving, sensual appeal.”11 Even decades later, viewers believe that The casting of Bowie can’t be faulted on any count. He has just the right look for a creature who’s the object of both loathing and secret desire. And this is one rock star who can deliver his lines with a combination of menace and playfulness that few seasoned actors could even begin to match.12

By performing Jareth, the Goblin King as a contradictory and perplexing figure, and being the main performer of the film’s soundtrack, Bowie became the central figure and the crux of the film’s Romantic themes. Indeed, as writer and performer of the songs, Bowie is the focus of the film’s defiance of logic. He wrote the songs featured in the film, which were noted for “satisfying arrangements with beautiful execution,” yet When one considers the lyrics of the songs separately from the music they are set to, all become a bit confusing. The lyrics don’t always seem to even be in line with the plot of the film. The film is openly strange and does not aim to be otherwise, but there is still a style and logic to it that doesn’t go smoothly with the lyrics of the songs.13

Bowie also had been known for surprising elements in lyrics, like the song, “Be My Wife,” which was a marriage proposal that never includes the word “marriage.”14 The songs’ bizarre relationship to the film also makes it difficult for audiences to be clear about what boundaries exist between the Goblin King and Bowie. Bowie was present during some unexpected moments, such as using his own voice for baby-gurgling sounds in “Magic

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Dance,” when the voice of a real baby was unsuitable.15 What Bowie accomplished in Labyrinth was exactly what the film’s title implied; the actual labyrinth of the film interacts with Bowie as he undermines binary thinking by becoming a character who ultimately is defined by viewers. As a performer of an intriguing character, songwriter, and singer for the film, Bowie became the soul of the film. Hence, Labyrinth pulls audiences into a maze of questions that can be answered only according to the needs and biases of individual viewers. Immediately, Bowie’s presence in the film instills in some members of the audience a lack of clarity about whether or not Labyrinth is not like the other times Bowie lured his fans into imaginary worlds in his on-stage performances in which he became one of the many strange personae he created. Merely by being the actor cast as Jareth created different layers of uncertainty for individual audience members, some of whom were familiar with Bowie’s style and personae, and others who might not be so intrigued by the question because of their lack of previous experience with Bowie as an artist. In fact, Bowie fans knew him as a music star who used visual images as part of his artistry, thereby facilitating his transformation into an actor. Julie Labolzo Wright explains that Bowie can be viewed as a successful crossover star in cinema owing to three main areas associated with his music star image: visual transformation, emphasis on performance and his non-naturalistic, “alien” image. All three areas as encapsulated by Bowie’s queer iconography, especially to his androgynous persona. His queerness has underlined his ability to transform himself and perform different characters in the cinema as he has done throughout his music career.16

Because a noted hallmark of his performance style involved overturning assumptions, Bowie drew attention to Romantic dialogue about how questions regarding individuals’ choices about identity, values/morals, and genres of art are too complex for mainstream answers. Viewers would not be able to agree on even whether or not Jareth belongs to Labyrinth as an independent character or more to Bowie’s total body of work. Casting Bowie meant that the character could not fit into a binary classification system. As an established performer whose career already spanned decades, Bowie also brings to the film an appeal that transcends generations. With an audience consisting of members from a wide range of ages, Labyrinth naturally became an individualized experience for viewers; the Romantic

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themes of defiance of logic and binary categorization could fit each viewer. Bowie’s mere presence in Labyrinth encouraged audiences to question traditional men vs. women, good vs. evil, order vs. chaos, childhood vs. adulthood, reality vs. imagination, and hero vs. villain. Evidenced by his androgynous appearance and mannerisms, such as juggling bubbles and other magical abilities, the Goblin King demonstrates the individual’s assertion of his own power over accepted authority, thereby creating brilliant expressions of Romanticism. Bowie’s Goblin King is a Romantic character who exposes binary categorization as absurd. The first minutes of the movie introduce viewers to the main character, a teenage girl wearing a white, flowing dress that one might have expected to see on a medieval princess. She begins to recite lines of a scene which she has committed to memory, one that she is role-playing alone. The lines she recites suggest conflict, and her overcoming the Goblin City suggests that her triumph is imminent. Sarah’s character is a heroine who is confronting someone who has taken a child by saying, “My will is as strong as yours and my kingdom is as great.”17 These words reveal that her fantasy involves self-empowerment and a show of strength against antagonists. However, Sarah never remembers the line, “You have no power over me,”18 thus she does not complete her victory. Dressed as a princess but wearing jeans underneath implies that Sarah faces an internal conflict that involves placing her imagination over her identity in reality. Obviously, Sarah clings to her fantasies and might not be willing yet to commit to the final stroke. An owl watches Sarah recite the lines, apparently taking interest in the girl. In the form of an owl, traditionally associated with the goddess Athena and wisdom, it is possible that the owl sees potential in Sarah. Yet, viewers follow Sarah as she arrives home, who screams at her stepmother upon being admonished for being late. Even though her stepmother is scolding her for breaking curfew, there is no evidence that Sarah is being mistreated by her parents. Sarah could be the party at fault for breaking curfew when she agreed to babysit her little brother, even though her stepmother stated adamantly that she would rather that Sarah date and spend time with her own friends. Considering that Sarah was so wrapped­up in her fantasy that she lost track of time, audiences can guess that Sarah uses her imagination to avoid her own life. Disillusionment and escape were Romantic themes, especially among poets like Lord Byron. McGann pointed out in The Romantic Ideology that “The grand illusion of Romantic ideology is that one may escape such a world through imagination and poetry. The great truth of Romantic work is that there is no escape, that

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there is only revelation…”19 Herein lies the majority of Sarah’s problems. Her stepmother reveals that Sarah does not date nor spend time with friends of the same age-group. Rather, Sarah escapes from her feelings of alienation within her family through isolation, which may be self-imposed. Sarah’s sense of alienation gives the character common ground with many of Bowie’s fans. Bowie’s fans wanted to go with him through his imaginary worlds; Sarah has the personal conflicts that would draw her to Bowie’s characters and follow him into worlds he created. From watching Sarah’s interactions with her stepmother, audiences can question whether Sarah’s sense of unjust treatment by her family and her unhappiness are mainly her own misguided perceptions. For instance, the first instance of cruelty the audience sees is Sarah’s screaming that she hates her baby brother, Toby, while he is crying because he is afraid during a thunderstorm, which is not unusual for small children. Again, Sarah could see this uncomfortable situation in another way. As Sarah spitefully wishes that the goblins would kidnap the baby “right now,” viewers see that she behaves impulsively. Impulsive behavior and failure to consider consequences for actions and choices are signs of Sarah’s immaturity. Sarah first considers consequences for her actions when she leaves for a quiet room because she cannot stand to hear Toby cry. In this instant, Sarah’s perception of Toby’s cries changes; it suddenly frightens her that she no longer hears the sounds that had so infuriated her a few moments earlier. The Romantic concept of ambiguity has been established in these first few minutes. The concept of ambiguity becomes critical for story development in Labyrinth. The tendency for western minds is to associate reason with categorization and separateness; reason is considered separate from absurdity. Absurdity overturns reason not by asserting its superiority to reason, but by the revelation that the lines between the absurd and the rational are ambiguous. Absurdity takes preeminence in the film with the arrival of its antagonist, the Goblin King. The movie’s tone becomes eerie as the owl flies into the only small light in the now dark room. This owl transfigures into the Goblin King so that Jareth, the Goblin King, enters as a mystical and dangerous figure and someone who is difficult to understand at this point. This moment begins the audience’s journey into an experience with Bowie’s artistry (because it is never clearly established that the Goblin King truly is a character who is completely independent of the corpus of Bowie’s stage personae). Bowie’s performances as the Goblin King and on the soundtrack will structure the remainder of the film. Questions about

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Jareth’s motives and behaviors lead audiences through a process of uncertainty that reveals Romantic overturning of binary thinking as a major focus of the film. Beginning with his transformation from the owl, an image of the Mentor, the goddess Athena in disguise, who encouraged a young Telemachus to stand up for what was right and go on a journey, the Goblin King compels Sarah to accept the role of the young hero on a quest to rescue a helpless innocent, thereby confusing the genders of these characters. It is worth noting Athena’s androgynous traits appear in the Goblin King, but not Sarah, which add complexity to this early subversion of gender roles. Bowie, known throughout his career as an artist who accomplished gender fluidity effortlessly, already establishes that he is the Goblin King as much as he was Ziggy Stardust or the Thin White Duke. Hence, it will be difficult to determine whether the audience is watching a film with a story of its own versus more of Bowie’s unique artistry, and by extension, who Jareth is versus Bowie himself. Viewers must come to their own particular understanding: Young audiences might not dwell much on such questions because of their lack of familiarity with Bowie’s previous work, whereas those who already know Bowie and his work understand his habitual transformations into different personae. One point to add is that viewers like Alison Stine report that they understand Labyrinth very differently as adults than they did as children, and the sexual nuances surrounding Bowie that they missed before cause them discomfort as adults.20 This change of perception is part of the film’s Romanticism; the nuances change according to the life experiences of the viewers. Each time one individual watches the film, they can walk away with a new understanding of it, and Bowie’s character is the driving force of evolving perceptions. Bowie, as an artist who challenged his audience to question reality by twisting their expectations for socially established categories (e.g., forms of art, genders), shines through the Goblin King. From the moment of Jareth’s entrance, audiences find themselves facing conflicts that Bowie would establish for them. Complicating matters is the fact that none of Jareth’s decisions, nor incentives, throughout the film fit easily into traditional classifications of gender and morality. The Goblin King’s choices seem as nonsensical as Bowie’s lyrics for the soundtrack; it is hard to understand exactly why he would allow Sarah to try to win back her baby brother, let alone redeem herself for spitefulness toward the baby, and to escape from him by finding her way through the labyrinth. Jareth never states emphatically why he wants Sarah to fail. Some viewers might (and

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do) assume that the Goblin King wanted to ensnare Sarah in an illicit sexual relationship with an adult, which causes a reflexive sense that Jareth definitely is a villain whose intention is to harm Sarah. If Jareth really wants to take advantage of Sarah, delaying his plans for her by granting her an opportunity to win her brother back which results in her escape from him is an illogical choice. Had Jareth offered Sarah her dreams to run away with him earlier, before kidnapping Toby, while she was role-playing or angry with her family, he might have had a much better chance of winning her over. Instead, Jareth kidnapped Toby, which made him appear to Sarah as antagonistic and threatening, diminishing his chances of wooing her. However, the aura of danger surrounding the Goblin King might appeal to an ingenue’s romantic and sexual desires. Nevertheless, setting up the labyrinth as a game for Sarah to be heroic, typically a vehicle for masculine empowerment, reduced Jareth’s chances of retaining control over her for purposes of sexual exploitation. Challenges to traditional conventions about the sexual and romantic fantasies associated with virgins arise: An innocent girl might not have to be seen only as prey for seducers. Rather, accepting their own desires to be pursuers who are threatening to Lotharios can be empowering for young women. Reflexive definition of characters, however, is one of the pivotal facets of the Goblin King’s challenge for viewers to rethink their own trust in first-glance labeling and role-­ assignment so as to identify surprising motives hidden within these characters’ assumed, socially defined roles. Meanwhile, depending on their familiarity with Bowie’s earlier work, audience members could start to wonder who set these conundrums before them. Jareth’s ambiguous motives could be part of the screenplay, or they could be more of Bowie’s signature style seeping through the screenplay. Other questions include whether or not Bowie has created another persona in Jareth, whether or not Bowie is portraying a character (like all of his others), or if the character is actually the real Bowie in a costume (like all of his others may have been), or if Jareth is closer to the real Bowie than his stage characters. Costuming would become one of the most memorable features of Labyrinth. The Goblin King’s entrance is striking in the manner that conjures images of an immortal rock star. Jareth’s appearance sets up Bowie’s portrayal of a Romantic figure for the remainder of the film. Foremost among the film’s Romantic blurring of social expectations for accepted gender norms appear in the Goblin King’s androgynous and glittering figure (features that audiences had come to expect of Bowie). Bowie’s thin

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physique, eyes, and cheekbones always had facilitated feminization and natural strangeness, coupled with his reported queer identity, which rendered his science fiction images of the 1970s credible.21 Jareth’s appearance recalls renowned Romantic poet Lord Byron’s androgynous and dark semblance. Bryon reportedly said that he was “as vain of my curls as a girl of sixteen,” darkened his hair to emphasize his pale complexion, and asked his portrait artists emphasize his striking eyes, full lips, long throat, ears without lobes—all of these facial features feminized him.22 Indeed, Jareth’s long, spiked hair resembled the styles worn by female rock stars of the 1980s (like Joan Jett and Tina Turner). He also wore tights which mirrored skin-tight pants worn by female celebrities from Irene Cara to Jane Fonda. Jareth was covered in glitter, which is another feminine attribute that creates a light effect that naturally attracts attention from any person who sees him regardless of sexual orientation. For the majority of the film, the Goblin King coyly sits in his castle as the ultimate quarry, a conquest as elusive and valuable as any beautiful maiden, while someone who is really young and female assumes the role of a frustrated and determined hunter. At the same time, Jareth also knows from watching Sarah in the park that afternoon that the climax of her fantasy of the labyrinth is her own empowerment, even though she was reluctant to admit it. Attempting to entice someone into sexual exploitation (because of Sarah’s age) by using her fantasy about empowering herself is a risky choice for a predator who intends to win. Simultaneously, the Goblin King is clearly a masculine character. George Lucas and Brian Froud explained that Jareth’s appearance was designed specifically to combine Bowie’s rock star image (the walking stick was to recall a microphone, for example) with elements of medieval knights and heroic figures to present a Goblin King who was an “alluring” object of a teenaged girl’s romantic fantasies.23 Jareth’s masculinity is made obvious by his genitalia, which the feminine tights make almost impossible to miss. The codpiece was a particularly controversial aspect of the film, though Jim Henson defended the idea because it was intended to make adulthood seem frightening.24 However, if Jareth is to resemble a teenaged girl’s image of a rock star, then drawing attention to his genitalia suited the image. To an inexperienced young girl who probably has not seen male anatomy, penises might seem larger-than-life. Male genitalia is mysterious and forbidden, at once intriguing and frightening. Noting that much of Bowie’s appearance is feminine and that the masculine aspect of his appearance is exaggerated is a perfect means of showing how a virgin (who only

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has a concept of female anatomy) might understand masculinity. Here is where the audience has a chance to see their own sexuality played out through Sarah’s eyes. Inexperienced viewers, especially young women who lacked frame-of-reference for seeing male anatomy, could see the enlarged genitalia in the same manner that Sarah would, as both alluring and dangerous in varying degrees. Experienced or mature viewers, at the same time, could ascribe to Jareth/Bowie any ideas of sexual attractiveness that suited their interests—from desirable to absurd. Simply by confusing gender norms, Sarah’s first confrontation with the Goblin King reverses traditional tropes of seduction narratives. Bowie inverted the assumed order simply by making an entrance, and Labyrinth would not restore traditional expectations for the remainder of the film. A particularly intriguing feature of this revelation process was that Jareth forces audience members to confront their own questions about sexual attraction. Critics like Alison Stine and Amy Hubbard explain that many young women experienced feelings of “sexual awakening” after watching Labyrinth.25 Audience members of all ages, genders, orientations, and levels of sexual experience, compelled to understand sexual attraction to the Goblin King through Sarah’s eyes, faced their own uncertainties about sexuality. Acknowledgment would be shaped by individual viewers, though, according to their particular needs for answers. Indeed, some mature viewers might have seen drawing attention to Bowie’s codpiece as caricatured and might have understood that a virginal teenager might have unrealistic ideas about sexuality and male genitalia simply because she has no experience with male anatomy. Viewers who were mature enough to feel attracted to Jareth/Bowie could allow their own fantasies to take flight, and some of these viewers might have wondered how they could be attracted to someone who was effeminate and obviously masculine at the same time, paralleling Sarah’s experiences with confused feelings for the Goblin King. Bowie/Jareth also was the most objectified figure in Labyrinth by inciting intrigue and/or desire in viewers while mocking socially determined expectations of gender. Allowing audiences to decide who Jareth is according to their own experiences continues throughout the remainder of the film as another of the Goblin King’s special illusions is revealed. Jareth, like Bowie, is a skilled shape-shifter. Again, a salient question could be where Bowie ends and Jareth begins, and vice versa. Bowie, as an artist, was seen as a shape-shifter years before being cast in Labyrinth; his range of characters was one reason why fans found him intriguing.26 As a

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shape-­shifter, Bowie also kept the outside world from knowing the man behind the characters, allowing him to make artistic statements without revealing anything about his personal life and identity. Ana Leorne explains that Bowie’s characters are not only different in their core, but also contain distinct mixtures—if one can metaphorically address it as a chemical compound—of basic drives of Life and Death, resulting in a more or less poisonous cape or cover for the individual.27

Never in the film does the audience get an idea of Jareth’s backstory, making it impossible for anyone to know the character outside of Sarah’s adventure with him. Hence, it is possible that viewers see only a biased depiction of the Goblin King, and in reality, judgments based on one-­ sided experiences can prove toxic for all individuals involved. Whether audience members idolize or loathe Jareth parallels manners in which celebrities like Bowie are seen for the characters they play. Jareth also changes costumes almost every time he enters, just as Bowie became a new character, many of which paralleled his life experiences, many times throughout his career. In fact, Jareth’s appeal, much like Bowie’s, involves shock. Bowie becomes objectified by viewers’ sexual fantasies. A rock star who is the dream of so many people is little more than an object to them. Furthermore, objectification is traditionally associated most often with women than men. In the case of Jareth, an effeminate character becomes an object because of a masculine element. The question that arises is whether many glaring cases of objectification of femininity carry with them elements of masculinization, either through physical appearance (Jareth), or simply via the experience of lustful desire. In other words, viewers who identify as female might question whether or not they are crossing into a realm of masculine lust merely by finding Jareth/Bowie enticing. Depending on the extent of sexual experience of the individual viewer, levels of discomfort at the thought, or intrigue, could vary immensely. The “sexual awakening” many young female audience members experienced probably involved coming to accept that sexual desire was not limited to heterosexual and cisgender males in spite of social conventions. Meanwhile, some viewers might not have felt any sexual desire for Jareth/Bowie. The Goblin King never mentions explicitly that he wants a sexual relationship with anyone, which implies that there is no reason to believe that he judges

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anyone for lack of interest in him. Undoubtedly, there were audience members who were not attracted to Jareth nor to Bowie. Another crucial feature that Jareth shares with Bowie is his cleverness with words and ridicule. The Goblin King is a character whose sardonic smile could be seen as tempting or taunting, as though holding back secrets, another of Bowie’s noted characteristics. As discussed by Brian Tucker in Reading Riddles: Rhetorics of Obscurity from Romanticism to Freud, Romanticism departed from eighteenth-century emphasis on clarity in writing by using riddles as a means of engaging readers by giving them no choice but to understand a text via exegesis and by using riddles as the measure of a brilliant use of words.28 Noting Jareth’s mocking tone when he offers Sarah her dreams in the form of a magic crystal brings audiences to another ambiguous moment; tempting another person to violate her sense of moral duty by mocking what you offer her as empty and meaningless is nonsensical. The crystal Jareth offers Sarah to see her dreams, one of which is becoming powerful by conquering him, may have been intended for her to see her labyrinth fantasy as worthless, making her give in to him, or maybe he tempted her to goad her into living the fantasy, after all. Jareth’s real temptation is not really the crystal, and he is laughing at Sarah to dare her to conquer him (again, a reversal of gender roles). The audience now faces choosing whether they want a virgin to conquer the man, or if they want her fantasies of being rescued to come true. Furthermore, they face the strange implications of what it means for a virgin to take the role of the vanquisher when she clearly asked to be rescued. No one can be certain of what it means for established tropes to be overturned so easily by Jareth’s challenge. Considering that many audience members already might struggle with deciding whether they are watching Bowie or an independent Jareth, inverting story tropes would not have been surprising. These questions lead viewers to consider that there might be more to Jareth’s decisions than simple choices between good and evil. Indeed, the Goblin King’s entire characterization is eerily similar to a labyrinth as it becomes a series of double entendres and ambiguous implications, a riddle set up to lead and mislead audiences through a maze of uncertain conclusions. The prospect of wandering through riddles with no answers might seem like the most absurd offer the Goblin King can make to Sarah and to the audience by extension. However, in pursuit of Bowie/Jareth, the mission is to find questions, which no individuals can answer with certainty. The Goblin King’s questions pull his pursuers through the antitheses of

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their thoughts, beginning with taking away Sarah’s immaturity by using a baby (instead of assuming the role of a mature adult teacher instructing a teenager). Still, a baby might appear as an ominous and tragic means of making a young woman lose her innocence if Labyrinth had adhered to the expected narrative. Yet, the Goblin King twists the tragedy of the expected narrative by insisting that Sarah must learn the consequences of her immaturity as he quips that “What’s said is said.”29 Jareth continues in a tone that sounds condescending and mean-spirited by ridiculing her with the line, “Sarah, go back to your room, play with your toys and costumes.”30 This menacing element seeps through Jareth’s mocking offer to allow Sarah to remain a child. Jareth also overturned Sarah’s role; asking for her brother to be kidnapped means that she can no longer consider herself the innocent victim of a “wicked stepmother” and a “spoiled child.” Shifting Sarah’s role in a story is one of the Goblin King’s first lessons for the protagonist (and the audience)—no role defines an individual, no one’s role is fixed, or permanent, and no two binary opposing roles are absolute. The Goblin King reveals that victims are perpetrators and vice-­ versa, leaving the audience with the question of whether they want Sarah to accept that she alone is ultimately accountable for her predicament. Jareth clearly did not seduce Sarah into wishing that he would kidnap Toby. And even though a baby results in a young virgin’s loss of innocence, the Goblin King accomplished the feat without carrying her away for a tryst. The Goblin King’s ambiguous characterization extends beyond his gender roles to his moral choices. Jareth appears slightly sadistic whenever he mocks Sarah while she is frustrated in the labyrinth, falls into a trap, or suffers some other setback. In his villain aspect, the Goblin King wants Sarah to face challenges and will throw in extra trials to make it harder for her. Nevertheless, Jareth’s behavior reveals a character whose attitude stands in contrast to Sarah’s whenever he appears to interact with Toby. Jareth is playful when he entertains Toby during “Magic Dance”; he is even somewhat affectionate when he jokes that he will rename the baby “Jareth.” Most telling is that while Toby howled with fear when he was in Sarah’s care, especially as she cruelly taunted him and shouted for the goblins to take him away, the baby sits on Jareth’s lap tranquilly and quietly. Jareth’s role as a mentor then becomes apparent, lending itself to Romanticism because the film addresses a liminal state between “childhood” and “adulthood.” Romantics changed the discourse to cast women as neither children nor adults possessing the capacity for reason allotted to

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fully functioning males; women were assigned the role of mediators between the “innocent child” and the “rational adult.”31 Sarah, as a young woman, does not live up to social expectations of a nurturing caretaker. Viewers see in Sarah a lack of compassion for the only innocent child in the film, Toby. Romantics connected childhood and adulthood by considering that contact with children allowed adults to remember their time of innocence.32 Reality is as “great” as fantasy, and she is reluctant to accept that fantasy has no power. Sarah does not understand that neither fantasy nor reality has power over her. Sarah feels forced to choose between the two “kingdoms,” which is another misconception. Again, Bowie is playing one of his tricks by robbing a girl of her innocence without touching her and proving that he is a better babysitter than the young woman. Audiences also have to consider that some could find this androgynous Goblin King to be sexually appealing. Some viewers might wonder if attraction to Jareth/Bowie implied ambiguity about heterosexual or homosexual experiences. Some viewers might have found such ambiguities alarming. The audience also sees that Jareth relates to characters in nonsexual ways, and those interactions introduce further gender ambiguity. The Goblin King seems a far more protective nurturer than Sarah. By having Jareth interact with characters, particularly a baby, in nonsexual ways, audience members are welcome to decide that they feel no sexual interest in him. In Labyrinth, there does not seem to be any definite truths, let alone unspoken social conventions, regarding anyone’s feelings for Jareth, similar to how audiences have seen Bowie for decades. Also, a man becoming a better caretaker than a young woman demonstrates that ideas that evolved under the Romantic movement remained dynamic and continued to develop during the twentieth century. Although nineteenth-century Western society had not advanced to the point at which Romanticism’s emphasis on questions had overturned many oversimplifications of gender roles, staying true to the spirt of questioning “reason” meant that binary categorizations of gender would crumble with time. Bowie’s ability to bend gender standards fit perfectly into this part of Jareth’s characterization. Jareth’s parental demeanor with Toby, contrasted with Sarah’s harshness, gives viewers a reason to reconsider whether or not he is good or evil. If the Goblin King’s moral sympathies are questionable, then his role as the villain in the film also becomes uncertain. Here is more of Bowie’s style of chicanery: Social conventions about moral definitions do not make sense when applied to Jareth. Moral conventions do not apply to Sarah, who could be seen as either Toby’s villain or savior.

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Bowie, through Jareth, does not aim to tell everyone about himself so much as to compel all around him to question themselves. In fact, self-actualization, the only means for finding a semblance of authenticity, is the end of Jareth’s realm of absurdity; Sarah and individual viewers become honest because of an illogical adventure with him. The Goblin King’s alternate side, shimmering and visually appealing, tempting quarry, and nurturer, are roles that one could see a teenaged girl exploring within her own identity-shaping. Oddly, Jareth adopts the persona that viewers might expect for Sarah. Characters in Labyrinth are too complex to be defined merely according to traditional labels. All personae are questionable: a villain is the prey and playful caretaker for a baby; a girl who lives in her head takes heroic action. Of course, a penchant for defying traditional labels was one of the main assets Bowie brought to the film. Exposing the absurdity of binary thinking is a critical part of Jareth’s role in Labyrinth. Rejection of binary thinking lends the film its Romantic direction. Jareth intends for Sarah to accept her potential as a mature individual while retaining the innocent child within her as a means of rising above the confines of her world. Seeing the Goblin King antagonize her by stealing the imaginary roles she wanted becomes an experience of self-­ actualization for Sarah. Jareth’s challenge will teach Sarah that binary thinking is absurd and that it prevents her from transitioning from childhood to adulthood. Much of Bowie’s work with all forms of artistic expression emphasized themes of helping youthful audiences, particularly those who felt alienated by the world, find self-acceptance as they grew­up,33 a fact which underscored Jareth’s characterization. Faithful to his “owl” guise, the Goblin King has overtones of a mentor and teacher to Sarah throughout the plot, as though the entire adventure is a pedagogical exercise for a young woman who was standing on the border between childhood and adulthood (even though his teacher role was hidden within abducting Toby). Bowie’s image as an unconventional figure also seeped into Jareth’s characterization so that audiences could sense that society’s insistence that people choose between opposing categories would be part of Sarah’s journey to maturity. Part of the appeal of casting Bowie was the fact that his stage performances encouraged individuals to question all demands, society’s and their own, which had proved helpful for young audiences to understand sexual growth on their own terms.34 Audience members could determine how far they intended to consider their sexuality by deciding when they wanted to stop questioning.

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Bowie’s artistry flowed into the character with whom Sarah experiences the tense conflict between imagination and childhood and reality and adulthood and was the key element for communicating Labyrinth’s Romanticism. Recognizing Bowie as an artist who changed personae and melded genres of art, performance styles, and influences makes it easy to see him as a character who deliberately confuses reality and imagination. Especially helpful were Bowie’s previous appeals to science-fiction in his performances. Furthermore, by constantly changing images, Bowie was a perpetually evolving artist, a never-ending project. Ana Leorne found that “Bowie was determined not to trust anyone, nor count on anything to obtain his purposes. This, of course, led him to use ‘others’ in order to reach his goals—be they real people or simply his personae.”35 All humans are ongoing projects, and Bowie alerted society to this point of view, whether he spoke to his fans or critics. Each individual’s self-actualization project evolved through perceptions that changed with experiences and maturity. The Goblin King even demonstrates certain power over perceptions of reality and imagination by using magical tricks. An adept juggler whose manipulation of crystal balls seems uncannily effortless, Jareth appears to defy realities of the material world like gravity. Jareth is aware that he can dazzle others with his crystal balls and offers Sarah a ball through which she can see her fantasies. What is most striking is that he describes the crystal as useless. Offering Sarah a gift that would allow her to see her own dreams, which are already in her mind, is a ridiculous gift. In making the offer, Jareth shows Sarah the absurdity of trusting material objects to have value, like the teddy bear that caused her to torment Toby. By proceeding to manipulate the ball with his fluid legerdemain, Jareth makes obvious that the object’s power rests with him, an idea that is similar to Bowie’s message that individuals could make their identities their own and not reflections of the ideas society gave them. Audience members have the same choices that Bowie’s fans have about how impressed they are by illusions—whether or not they get lost in viewing their dreams through a crystal or a stage performance or choose to understand that they are seeing merely tricks that conjure fancy images of the world they want to see. Indeed, the power of any world is in the mind of the individual. Jareth demonstrates that “reality” and “imagination” turn out to be useless when compared to the power within human potential. Again, the entirety of Bowie’s work had already revealed that socially determined categories of personal identity are not absolute,36 allowing viewers to understand

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Jareth’s purpose in the film. Sarah, however, is unaware of how powerless these perceptions are; she clings to the value she ascribes to her teddy bear without admitting that these toys do not have enough power to help her find contentment. Bowie, embodying the figure of the “bohemian artist,” facilitates transcendence of traditional assumptions and mundane life for his admirers, and he compels them to embrace worlds of their own perceptions as wondrous.37 It seems natural for viewers to be convinced by his transformation into a mythical Goblin King who sends a teenager into a magical realm to find the best in herself. Here, audience members can see themselves in Sarah. Bowie’s career pulled his fans into his fantastic worlds, and the meaning lay in the fact that the confusion his fans found in him taught them about themselves as questioning, or alienated, individuals much more than they learned about the man who entertained them. Sarah’s experiences with the Goblin King and the labyrinth are a mirror of how fans experience Bowie’s artistry, and consumers of the nineteenth century experienced Romantic art as pursuit of a prize in order to find themselves as absurd, though honest. Bowie has moments of tricking the audience in ways that are not so obviously meant for Sarah. The audience sees that whenever the Goblin King decides to frighten any of the film’s other characters with his supernatural abilities, it soon finds out that the worst effects of his threats lie within the minds of his “victims.” When he decides to exert power over time and subtract hours from the time limit he originally promised Sarah, the teenager utters a pathetic protest against how unfair the labyrinth is. Jareth’s rather sarcastic reply, “I wonder what your basis for comparison is,”38 gives the film definite Romantic implications by showing her that all people perceive everything via binary categorizations (in this case, fair versus unfair) that leaves little room for nuances or alternate perspectives. A few beats later, Jareth transforms one of the crystal balls into cleavers to chase Sarah and Hoggle after the protagonist boasts about solving the labyrinth (immediately following her complaints about the unfairness of reducing her allotted time). Sarah and Hoggle appear to flee for their lives from cleavers, while the audience sees that they turn out to be merely a comical vehicle driven by several tiny goblins. Audiences see throughout the film that all of Jareth’s threats turn out to be exaggerated in the minds of his chosen victims. After falling on his knees to beg Jareth not to throw him in the Bog of Eternal Stench, Hoggle willingly follows Sarah into the dreaded place. Since passing through the Bog of Eternal Stench is one of the steps Sarah and Hoggle would have to take in order to progress

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through the labyrinth, Hoggle’s fear seems overdramatic. Following this line, when the pair meet the guardian of the Bog, Sir Didymus, they find a new character who has become accustomed to the smell while on duty. Stench is a matter of perception only. Sarah, Hoggle, Ludo, and Sir Didymus proceed to exit the Bog for the next phase through the labyrinth without being tainted by the “eternal stench” that Hoggle so dreads. Hence, Jareth does leave open the possibility that audience members can assign whatever level of malice to him they choose. To some, Jareth still might be a threatening figure, especially when seeing Hoggle on his knees affords the audience a clear view of his codpiece. The nuances of Hoggle’s act of submission depends on the maturity of the viewer; of those who understand sexual innuendo in the scene, some might see the act of kneeling as definitely submissive. However, when another person (not always female) kneels before a man for sexual purposes, the role of the receiver becomes ambiguous. For example, a virgin might see herself as submissive, a passive receptacle. Her role as the receiver might, on the other hand, be the same as a black widow spider who consumes the man. The young lady does have the power to determine whether his experience is pleasurable or excruciating. Even though she is kneeling before him, the man is completely at her mercy, and she can dominate him by manipulating the source of his masculinity. Depending on the life experiences of individual viewers, audience members might feel uneasy with thoughts about the inversion of dominant and submissive roles. Other viewers might have felt proud that they understood that female or male receivers could dominate givers via sexual gratification. Others still might have wondered what such confusion of social conventions meant to them. Viewers who were inexperienced might not have been ready to consider such ideas. Again, the individual’s perception of Jareth in moments like these was the determining element for the experience of the film and the character, much like the personae Bowie adopted throughout his career. As she wanders through the labyrinth, Sarah also learns that what seems harsh or mean spirited is not really as frightening as one might imagine. During a scene framed by the song, “Chilly Down,” a group of odd red creatures make a surprise entrance and try to pull Sarah’s head off during an almost ritualistic dance. Bowie stated that One of the songs I composed for the film was “Chilly Down,” a little swamp-type number for the Chillies or Wild Things, strange woodland

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c­reatures who waylay Sarah on her travels: they’re a bit cruel, but infectiously hilarious, and I think they’re going to prove to be very popular.39

Indeed, the scene becomes most comic when Sarah decides to throw the Chillies’ heads far from their bodies so as to escape. In this episode, heads could be associated with reason, and the Chillies’ ritualized dance could be seen as antagonistic to reason. Sarah’s solution observes and uses the Chillies’ absurdity to her advantage. Bowie wrote “Chilly Down” to underscore the absurd effect, revealing that brutality is not so harrowing as perceived, demonstrating that the rational solution lay in processing the irrational reality around Sarah. “Chilly Down” also likely appeals to viewers who choose to watch Labyrinth mainly for entertainment purposes and want to chuckle when a bunch of silly red creatures scramble to find their detached heads. In writing “Chilly Down,” Bowie shows that he did not want Labyrinth to be a movie only for audiences who would spend the entirety of the film trying (and failing) to dissect all of Jareth’s decisions. The total sum of Bowie’s artistry underscores the Goblin King’s role as the embodiment of Romanticism for the film. Throughout his life as an artist, Bowie never fully answered questions about the true identity behind his stage personae. Everything about Jareth, from his appearance to his mannerisms and behaviors, communicates to viewers that individuals define themselves and steer others’ perceptions via performance. For his entire career as a rock star, Bowie forced the man he felt was inside him into a submissive role to the personae and cared little for his own opinions as any one of the persona’s choices, stating that “when he talks about his most recent albums and states that their only purpose was to make ‘it’ work—that he himself was never meant to like them or not.”40 Themes of how public performances of identity circumscribe the lives of all individuals become most apparent when one of Jareth’s magic tricks involves Hoggle’s offering Sarah a peach, which was really one the crystal balls that can reveal her dreams. Like Eve, Sarah cannot resist and eats the fruit, which transports her to a masquerade ball while she sleeps. If audiences consider Sarah as having fallen to temptation like Eve, then they must wonder about Jareth’s role as tempter. Jareth was the creator of the peach, and he was not the one who gave it to her directly, which places twists on his role as the serpent—the creator set up the temptation. Usually, Eve was the temptress, and Adam was her victim. Thus, boundaries between masculine and feminine roles are nonsensical. Creator (masculine) and serpent (masculine) and temptation (feminine) are represented all at once, to draw

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the innocent human (masculine) to a fairy tale ball (feminine) also represented in one character. Yet, Sarah also plays the role of an innocent female who is seduced by Jareth in his rake persona. This rake, however, seduces her by allowing her to fantasize about him rather than have sexual relations, thereby choosing to be the objectified party. Jareth also declines the masculine tropes of effectiveness and success by accomplishing little; Sarah had fantasized about him before her adventure in the labyrinth. Bowie always bends the rules to deliver the trope in an unexpected way. Use of items that Sarah owns shows that this fantasy ball is her own invention within one of Jareth’s dream-revealing crystals. This episode places Sarah in the role of one of Bowie’s fans, watching him on the stage from below, which are also forms of Romanticization and objectification. She is the only attendee at the masquerade ball who does not wear a mask, symbolically communicating that she is the only one present who is real. Here, masked characters speak to the individual’s experiences with others; no one really knows other people underneath the masks that are the appropriate attire for whatever part of life. Not knowing the true person behind the costuming also makes the Goblin King the most dangerous character of all in those moments. Being an idolized rock star, especially like Bowie, places him in the same genre of danger because no one can know for certain who the man is without the costume. Bowie was most dangerous because he seduced his fans to question society’s assumptions and make their own reality. He was subversive to everything society constructed that made people feel safe. In the ballroom scene, Bowie is doing to the audiences what Jareth does to Sarah. The one authentic person in the room watching Labyrinth is the individual viewer, and all others are masked figures. For viewers who are young and inexperienced, entering a ballroom as the only character wearing a mask could be particularly frightening, and any of these who already felt alienated by their peers might have understood the implied rescue that Jareth orchestrates for Sarah. The Byronic figure of the Goblin King watches Sarah and finally entices her by taking off his mask, which could imply he intrigued her by the little authenticity she sees in him, just as Bowie enticed his fans with queer identity and gender ambiguity. Removal of the mask could also parallel revealing clothing, such as low décolletage to entice men (again, a feminine trait). This scene is the only time the audience sees familiar cultural tropes as Jareth becomes a rake pursuing a beautiful virgin who runs away yet wants to be caught. Listening to Bowie’s voice on “As the World Falls Down,” Bowie

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challenges audiences to decide whether they truly want the traditional story any more. The world is falling down because the fairy tale has been subverted. The masquerade ball is a critical point in developing the Romantic themes of Labyrinth. It is the test that causes Sarah to break through binary categories of real and imaginary. Hence, Bowie shows audiences a seduction in which the rake intends the virgin to escape. Technically, it is a seduction, even though Sarah’s loss of innocence makes her lose her vulnerability (i.e., feeling desire, then realizing that her fantasy is not satisfying for her) rather than her sexual innocence. Bowie shows audiences that every trope they know about romance is ambiguous. Much like Sarah, the ball scene is similar to finding that idolizing a rock star is another unsatisfying fantasy; Bowie is admitting that his fans may have romanticized him, when the reality is that they crave the self-acceptance he inspires in them. Moreover, Bowie’s own experiences fit into this aspect of the film, meaning that Bowie brought his total Romantic artistry to the character. Bowie also brought with him his understanding of performing social roles while masking the individual psyche beneath the disguises. Leorne writes, suggesting a motive, “Bowie was determined not to trust anyone, nor count on anything to obtain his purposes. This, of course, led him to use ‘others’ in order to reach his goals—be they real people, or simply his personae.”41 This inability to trust others reveals that Bowie never felt comfortable with another person’s behavior as evidence of a definite truth about them. Any person’s real-world identity, as performances of socially determined identities, ultimately seeps into the realm of the imaginary. Yet, Bowie wanted to use love themes in his music as a way of reaching for transcendent, even sanctified, emotional bonds that fused masculine and feminine.42 In Labyrinth, Bowie plays Jareth, yet communicates his own skepticism about his celebrity status and whatever sentiments (tender, or harsh) other people display to him when they know him only as a rock star. For audience members whose own experiences allow them to question who Jareth is with respect to Bowie, the ballroom scene could encourage some sympathy for the man who could not be seen for himself because of his fame. Especially confusing is the fact that Jareth’s trick with the peach leads Sarah to escape from the ball by smashing a mirror to run into a replica of her bedroom, where she rejects all of her toys. Jareth deliberately orchestrated Sarah’s moment of empowerment, which seems like a strange choice for him to make unless he planned for her to face him and win in

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the end. Had Jareth set up the game to have her come and catch him, he gave her the means to do so. Had he wanted to lure her into one of her dreams, using Toby to draw her into the labyrinth, and then give her a dream-come-true to tempt her from saving the baby and herself, his was a self-defeating choice. Just as Bowie did not feel committed to absolute judgments as to whether or not another individual could be trusted, so Jareth does not feel bound by any ideas of absolute reason. Hence, through Bowie’s nuanced characterization of Jareth, Labyrinth becomes a Romantic statement about reason, and how its dependence on set binary oppositions to fit all experiences into definite conclusions are more limiting of human potential than a source of empowerment. Viewers must ask what exactly was the nature of the Goblin King’s labyrinth, just as Bowie’s fans often had to wonder about how to describe his art. Carl Jung’s “visionary artist,” a creative person whose work transcends cultures because its origins in ideas and images reach beyond the depths of human social interaction and into worlds of dreams applies to Bowie’s entire career.43 Even though audiences most likely would be familiar with traditional images of labyrinths as logically patterned sets of directions with set-in-stone solutions, Jareth clearly created an irrational labyrinth to suit his aims, which still follows no reason apparent to other characters, nor the audience, in this story. Yet, the labyrinth is under Jareth’s control, which means that there is a modicum of order lurking underneath it. Ironically, a protagonist who has not achieved fully rational adulthood is developing her maturity in this realm of seemingly organized chaos. The solution to the labyrinth is to accept chaos and order as transcendently codependent. Bowie’s delivery of most of the Goblin King’s lines as clever quips gives the sense that his character finds Sarah’s entire predicament comic. Whether Jareth sadistically mocks her frustration or is amused because he has known that Sarah will triumph the whole time adds even more mystery to his character. Indeed, the assumption until the final confrontation with the Goblin King is that Sarah will triumph when she recovers Toby. Still, before Sarah can face him, Jareth creates illusions around Sarah and throws the crystal to Toby. Hence, the question of why Jareth wants to force Sarah to choose between looking into her dreams and saving Toby arises again. Viewers must acknowledge that it is not clear what exactly will happen should Sarah fail to rescue Toby. As Toby catches the crystal, audiences notice foreshadowing of the film’s resolution, that Sarah will pass the torch of childhood to Toby. When Jareth poignantly sings, “I can’t live within

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you,”44 he acknowledges that he must lose and fade inside Sarah’s dream world should she prove herself worthy of taking responsibility for her baby brother, though some viewers understand these lyrics to be sexual innuendo. Now viewers see a side of Jareth that might have wanted to look upon Sarah, from his owl eyes, like a proud parent of a child who is achieving maturity, even though he is feeling hurt that she will not depend on her fantasies about him at the same time. In fact, it is only when Sarah realizes that she does not have to believe in these illusions that she jumps to meet with Jareth for a final time. In their final scene together, Bowie’s Goblin King confronts the teenager wearing an ironically angelic white costume while taunting her with paradoxes instead of rewarding her or comforting her. So far, viewers have seen in him a character whose moral allegiance is impossible to define, who flaunts androgyny, transforms into different forms and changes costume every scene (shapeshifter), stirs distress in other characters with overdramatic displays of supernatural powers, delivers sarcastic quips and taunts, and recreates reason, all for some purpose he still has not revealed. In sum, the audience sees the entirety of Bowie’s art and Romantic modus operandi represented in a few minutes’ depiction of a character in a fantasy film. All of Jareth’s final jabs at Sarah, in which he points out that he has done everything she asked of him, including taking the baby, and manipulating time and the world itself, are not lies. Jareth is being honest even when he reminds Sarah that her choices have determined the tone of his character: “You cowered before me. I was frightening. I’m exhausted of living up to your expectations of me.”45 Here, the Goblin King admits that he really is merely a projection of qualities Sarah assigns to him according to her own emotional needs. The admission appeals to absurdity: it seems ludicrous for Sarah to have remained so bedeviled by Jareth’s antics when he really is merely a character in one of her fantasies. Another absurd feature is that even though the adventure nears its climax, it remains unclear whether Jareth, or Sarah, is right or wrong in this confrontation. Though Jareth’s statements are true in the most direct sense, Sarah is free to understand nuances within them however she chooses. Jareth’s words in this scene are the catalyst for Sarah to pass her ultimate test by admitting that her own immature perspective is responsible for her predicament, and that only by shifting perspectives will she be able to see that human experiences are largely determined by how individuals choose to perceive them. At last, Sarah begins to see that her “will is as strong” as Jareth’s because she can decide not to perceive him as

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antagonistic nor powerful. By extension, Sarah does not have to see her stepmother as “wicked,” nor Toby as “spoiled,” nor any part of her life as “not fair,” nor herself as stuck between any binaries. Bowie allowed his audiences to see him through his characters. The Goblin King is like one of Bowie’s stage performances as a rock star; identifying clear lines between the man and the character is a perplexing matter. Jareth offers Sarah the crystal one last time and tempts her with promises: “Just let me rule you, and you can have everything you want,” and, “Just fear me, love me, do as I say, and I will be your slave.”46 Jareth describes accurately just how unhealthy their relationship would be. For someone who wants to trap an ingenue in a perpetually codependent dynamic, presenting the offer in this frank manner is self-sabotage. These last temptations bring about the climactic paradoxical moment, highlighting the absurdity of binary thinking. Offering Sarah perpetual entrapment in an abusive dynamic in which both of them are enslaved to the other does not seem like a decision that would help a villain win over his victim. This moment is the push that Sarah needed since the beginning of the film to utter the line that she supposedly forgot (more like never wanted to admit) that Jareth, as the embodiment of fantasy, has “no power over” her. This climax also adds to the ambiguity of Jareth’s character. In spite of the fact that it appears that the Goblin King is the villain in this story, and one with a disturbing preoccupation with Sarah, this is moment he has been awaiting. At the beginning of the film, he watches Sarah rehearse this exchange in the park. If Jareth truly wants to ensnare Sarah with an offer of a relationship with him, he could have just made the offer at the beginning, before kidnapping Toby, when she wanted most to escape the real world, still reluctant to give up her fantasy, and still mostly isolated. This magical Goblin King, who has manipulated time and matter with his magic, has been defeated by simple utterance of the words “You have no power over me.”47 Even more bizarre is the fact that he accepts his defeat without resistance. Jareth willingly throws the crystal (Sarah’s fantasies) to the heavens, and Sarah pops them like the bubbles that captured her and brought her to the masquerade ball, demonstrating her belief in her power and her realization that his power over her was illusory. Popping the bubble was Sarah’s acceptance of the Goblin King’s absurd wisdom: changing her perception of his power to regard it as without substance revealed the truth after all. The audience can understand that every instance in which Jareth/Bowie lures her into the antithesis of her (and their) assumptions about what is true and real vs. what is false and imaginary did turn out to

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be baseless, and all involved have grown in the confusion. Bowie’s fans might feel such a sense of triumph over their sense of alienation from society because of their questions about gender and identity. Jareth’s angelic white costume is significant; by mocking and tempting Sarah, rather than comforting her, he gives her the inspiration she needs to save herself. Again, audiences might question where Bowie ends and the Goblin King begins. Bowie helped people who felt alienated empower themselves in the same way throughout his career. Jareth has the last words in the film. The owl jokingly repeats the opening lines from the “Magic Dance” scene as he soars into the night, having accomplished his goal. Now that Sarah understands that she can accept responsibility without losing touch with her dreams, and that she does not have to spend her life fighting through binary oppositions, she earns her maturity through surviving Jareth’s ruse. Jareth has raised a new adult from a place of disorder and rebellion against the traditional binary oppositions. As noted by Jerome McGann: The displacement efforts of Romantic poetry, its escape trails and pursued states of harmony and reconciliation—ultimately, its desire for process and endless self-reproduction (“something evermore about to be”)—are that age’s dominant cultural illusions which Romantic poetry assumes only to weigh them out and find them wanting.48

As Romantics, Jareth and Bowie understood that transcendence of the rational world’s rigid order of opposing concepts allows individuals to discover freer human identities and experiences. It would not be difficult to see Bowie regarding one of his fans with similar irony and approval as Jareth’s for Sarah. Bowie’s goal as an artist was for his fans, and society at large, to find ways of questioning “knowledge” of the world, and for them to grow in the process. For viewers who dealt with questions of sorting out Bowie and Jareth, the film’s conclusion does not provide a definite answer but another layer of uncertainty. Bowie accepted the role because he “loved the magic, the mystery,” of Jareth, and felt a connection to the character, saying that “I only act because I enjoy it. I don’t want to be a movie superstar. I only play the characters I can identify with and believe in.”49 In Labyrinth, viewers also see through watching Bowie that finding is the character’s goal, not their answers. Even question vs. answer is a binary classification that is not as absolute as most assume. Thus, the entire quest of the Goblin King’s

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labyrinth is to teach Sarah a lesson that ultimately helps her through her sense of alienation and her frustration and anger with everyone, including her innocent baby brother. Like Bowie’s fans, Sarah learns to acknowledge her power over her own perceptions of all aspects of her life. Viewers who understand Sarah’s alienation, and that of Bowie’s fans, learn that rejection of absolute reason, a crucial component of Romanticism, serves as a means of ameliorating their own frustration and anger. Labyrinth proves to be an exemplary expression of David Bowie’s Romanticism. In spite of its lack of financial success, the film eventually attracted the attention of young audiences during the 1980s and 1990s,50 thereby creating new generations of fans for the corpus of Bowie’s art. Paralleling the experiences of Bowie’s fans, and Sarah’s adventure in Jareth’s labyrinth, younger generations of Labyrinth fans could find the questions they needed for self-actualization reflected in Bowie’s portrayal of the Goblin King. In his work on Labyrinth, Bowie thus continued the spirit of Romanticism through the end of the millennium so as to raise questions that encourage individuals, especially those who still feel misunderstood, to accept that the choices they have been presented are not absolute.

Notes 1. Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism and the Tide Against Modernity, trans. Catherine Porter (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 23. 2. Tanja Stark, “‘Crashing Out with Sylvian:’ David Bowie, Carl Jung, and the Unconcious.” In David Bowie: Critical Perspectives, ed. Eoin Devereux, Alieen Dillane, and Martin J. Power (New York: Routledge, 2017), 106. 3. Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), 134. 4. David Halpin, “Pedagogy and the Romantic Imagination,” in British Journal of Educational Studies, vol. 56, 1 (March 2008): 61. 5. Ibid., 62. 6. John Keats, “To George and Thomas Keats: (Hampstead: December 22, 1817),” http://keats-­poems.com/to-­george-­and-­thomas-­keats-­hampstead­december-­22-­1817/. 7. Jeanette Sky, “Myths of Innocence and Imagination: The Case of the Fairy Tale,” Literature and Theology 16: 4 (December 2002): 375. 8. Stark, 103. 9. Ibid., 103.

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10. Els Smets, ‘New Film From Jim ‘Muppet’ Henson: ‘Puppet Movies Are Not Just For Children.’” Veronica, 20 December 1986, https://web. archive.org/web/20180501114252/http://oddpla.net/jareth/ephemera/veron/veron.html. 11. Nina Darnton, “Screen: Jim Henson’s Labyrinth,” New York Times June 27, 1986, https://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/27/movies/screen-­ jum-­henson-­s-­labyrinth.html. 12. Bruce Bailey, “Labyrinth is a Fairy Tale Movie that Grown-ups Can Believe In,” Montreal Gazette, July 3, 1986. 13. Genna Blair, “Labyrinth: 5 Things that Did Not Age Well (& That Remain Iconic),” Screen Rant. June 3, 2020, https://screenrant.com/ labyrinth-­aged-­well-­vs-­poorly-­comparison-­david-­bowie-­jennifer-­connelly-­ jim-­henson/. 14. Perone, 147. 15. Robin Hilton, “Remember ‘Labyrinth?’ David Bowie’s Score for the Cult Classic is Back,” All Things Considered, April 28, 2017, https://www.npr. org/sections/allsongs/2017/04/28/526044258/remember-­labyrinth-­david-­ bowies-­score-­for-­the-­cult-­classic-­is-­back. 16. Julie Lobalzo Wright, “David Bowie: The Extraordinary Rock Star as Film Star,” in David Bowie: Critical Perspectives, ed. Eoin Devereux, Alieen Dillane, and Martin J. Power (New York: Routledge, 2017), 232. 17. Terry Jones, Labyrinth. Film. Directed by Jim Henson. Los Angeles: TriStar Pictures, 1986. 18. Ibid. 19. McGann, 131. 20. Alison Stine, “Labyrinth and the Dark Heart of Childhood,” The Atlantic, June 29, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/ 2016/06/labyrinth-­captured-­the-­dark-­heart-­of-­childhood/489146/. 21. Wright, 232. 22. John Clubble, Byron, Sully, and the Power of Portraiture (London: Routedge, 2005), 193–8. 23. Tanya Pai, “Labyrinth is now 30 years old. Here’s how this gloriously weird movie became a cult classic,” June 27, 2016, https://www.vox. com/2016/1/12/10755050/labyrinth-­david-­bowie. 24. Amy Hubbard, “The Romantic Rebel: Falling in Love with the Goblin King,” One Room with a View, June 27, 2016, https://oneroomwithaview. com/2016/06/27/romantic-­rebel-­falling-­love-­jareth-­goblin-­king/. 25. Amy Hubbard, “The Romantic Rebel: Falling in Love with the Goblin King,” One Room with a View, June 27, 2016, https://oneroomwithaview.com/2016/06/27/romantic-­r ebel-­f alling-­l ove-­j areth-­g oblin-­ king/; and Alison Stine, “Labyrinth and the Dark Heart of Childhood,”

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The Atlantic, June 29, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/06/labyrinth-­c aptured-­t he-­d ark-­h ear t-­o f-­ childhood/489146/. 26. Stark, 90–2. 27. Ana Leorne, “Dear Dr. Freud—David Bowie Hits the Couch,” In David Bowie: Critical Perspectives, ed. Eoin Devereux, Alieen Dillane, and Martin J. Power (New York: Routledge, 2017), 112, 121. 28. Brian Tucker, Reading Riddles: Rhetorics of Obscurity from Romanticism to Freud (Lewisburg: Bucknell, 2011). 29. Jones. 30. Ibid. 31. Sky, 369. 32. Ibid., 373. 33. James E. Perone, The Words and Music of David Bowie (Westport: Praeger, 2007), 146–7. 34. Robert Matthew-Walker, David Bowie: Theatre of Music (Buckinghamshire: The Kensal Press, 1985), 166. 35. Matthew-Walker, 167. 36. Nick Stevenson, David Bowie: Fame, Sound and Vision (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 58. 37. Ibid., 113–4. 38. Ibid. 39. David Bowie, Interview, https://www.bowiebible.com/songs/ chilly-­down/. 40. Leorne, 119. 41. Ibid., 119. 42. Stark, 94. 43. Stark, 106. 44. Jones. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. McGann, 133. 49. “‘A Loveable Villian,” an interview with David Bowie,” Bravo, January 1987, https://web.archive.org/web/20180501114156/http://oddpla. net/jareth/ephemera/bravo/bravo.html. 50. Paul Trykna, David Bowie: Starman (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2011), 403.

CHAPTER 10

1. Outside as Bowie’s Gothic Technodrama: Fascism and the Irrational Near the Turn of the Millennia James Rovira

Introduction: Welcome to Leon David Bowie is … determin[ed] to create something that was not there before. It probably comes from the need to have seen it all1 Good is the passive that obeys Reason Evil is the active springing from Energy2

In 1993, David Bowie released his first two albums of new solo material in six years, Black Tie White Noise and The Buddha of Suburbia, the first launching a new Bowie album review cliché, “Best album since Scary Monsters,” that was repeated in reviews of a number of his albums until the end of his life.3 Going into the mid-1990s, Bowie experienced an unprecedented surge of productivity that led to twenty to thirty-five hours of recorded music, depending on the source,4 out of which Bowie initially

J. Rovira (*) Keiser University, Merritt Island, FL, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Rovira (ed.), David Bowie and Romanticism, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97622-4_10

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developed a three-hour, finished dramatic suite titled Leon. In a 1995 interview, he described the origin of this project as follows: When Brian [Eno] came to my wedding in 1992, I had instrumental pieces for what would eventually become a third of Black Tie White Noise—music that I composed to be played in the church and at the party afterwards. He explained he was working in a not dissimilar area and I was starting on The Buddha Of Suburbia, where I pretty much started to survey the territory I wanted to be involved in. After a series of conversations, working with Brian really came together in early March 1994 … we worked on a three-hour improvisational piece which was mainly dialogue [Leon]. Brian gave me the job of a griot [an African storyteller]. As a result, characters started to develop, so there was semblance of a narrative.5

Eno’s creative process since 1975 involved assigning different band members fictional identities associated with a style of music, a songwriting/ composition game he called Oblique Strategies, so when Eno assigned Bowie a storyteller identity, Bowie started creating characters.6 Eno’s written instructions for David Bowie were: You are a member of an early 21st Century “Art and Language” band. You make incantations, permutations of something between speech and singing. The language you use is mysterious and rich—and you use a mélange of several languages, since anyway most of your audience now speak a patois that effortlessly blends English, Spanish, Chinese and Wolog.7 Using on-­ stage computers, instant sampling techniques and long delay echo systems, you are able to build up dense clouds of colored words during performance. Your audience regards you as the greatest living exponent of live abstract poetry. Samuel Beckett is a big influence.8

Bowie followed through with these instructions on a number of points in a three-hour suite of still unreleased material titled Leon. On the bootlegged extracts from Leon available online, voices chant and shout in different foreign languages; some voices are treated with echo, if not always long delay, while others receive vocoder treatment, a technology that makes the human voice sound synthetic or computerized. Leon, over time, transformed into Bowie’s mid 1990’s album 1. Outside.  Commentators on Bowie’s 1. Outside stress the importance of the album’s setting, emphasizing how much it was a response to his times. Bowie said about the album that

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The subject of the album may be the story of Nathan Adler. The content is actually the texture of 1995. The story is the skeleton and the flesh and blood are the feeling of what it’s like to be around in 1995. In fact, this is an ongoing series of albums. This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance, by a narrative device, to chronicle the final five years of the millennium. The over-­ambitious intention is to carry this through to the year 2000.9

The milieu in which the album was written, composed, and set is for Bowie the primary content of the album. His fragmentary, unfinished narrative exists to give that content structure. While storytellers have emphasized either plot or character even prior to the advent of Greek epic and drama, Bowie focuses 1. Outside on setting, subordinating plot and character to the world in which the characters live. As a result, the genesis of this material becomes vital to its understanding as it reveals the milieu that is the real subject of the work. Bowie and Brian Eno began work on this project by venturing “in January of 1994 to Gugging Hospital, near Vienna, where psychiatrist Leo Navratil had assembled a group of patients who would become known as outsider artists.”10 My notes in the appendix detail further influences: Viennese Castrationists, Ron Athey, and Guy Bourdin, but other sources also point to Twin Peaks for inspiration and describe the album as an updated version of the dystopia Bowie created for Diamond Dogs, originally developed from material intended to be a musical version of 1984. The development of new technology via the expansion of the Internet alongside these brutal art forms, gruesome murders, and outsider art at the turn of the millennia inspired Bowie to capture this confluence of social forces and artifacts on an album. Bowie’s and Eno’s rediscovered musical rapport after a fifteen-year hiatus led to compositions that blended industrial, jazz, and rock in a return to experimental form and genre bending unseen on Bowie albums since 1980, demonstrating the validity of the review cliché. Bowie’s ambitions for this project went beyond a long suite of music, however. He wanted to release tracks on CD ROM that would allow fans to remix his music for themselves. Record companies passed. They weren’t interested in more noncommercial work by Bowie, and then someone leaked the album files online. Bowie moved on by reworking the Leon material into a new album comprised of songs of more traditional length titled 1. Outside. It was subtitled “The Nathan Adler Diaries: a hyper cycle” on the original CD spine but is described as “A non-linear Gothic Drama Hyper-cycle” inside.

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While the Leon work was comprised of long compositions—rare in Bowie’s career—1. Outside consists of radio-friendly songs (in terms of length) interspersed with very short, spoken segments from different characters in the drama. James Perone describes the experience of listening to 1. Outside this way: The album itself presents challenges to the listener, partly because Bowie portrays all of the story’s seven characters, but mostly because the deliberately non-linear nature of the piece forces the listener to take a bunch of disconnected impressions (unsupported, by the way, by the printed lyrics in the CD booklet) and then put the whole thing together. This requires considerably more thought, focus, and attentiveness than conventional concept albums and rock operas. … In this respect, Outside [sic] ventures closer to the world of art music: it is more like a[n] experimental song cycle … than a work such as, say, the Who’s Tommy.11

The incomplete plot of 1. Outside is as follows: early in the morning on New Year’s Eve, 1999, a character referred to as “the Artist/Minotaur” engaged in an “art ritual murder” and dismemberment of the fourteen-­ year-­old girl Baby Grace Blue in Oxford Town, New Jersey, mounting her body parts in the Oxford Town Museum of Modern Parts as part of an “art crime” installation. Her body was discovered shortly afterward, and Professor Detective Nathan Adler was sent by Art Crimes, Inc. to investigate. Adler keeps a “non-linear” diary of his investigation, recording in it information about Grace’s known associates. He has a history with one of these associates, Ramona A. Stone, and by the end of his diary he realizes that Ramona had a child who would be about the same age as Baby Grace. Diary entries are recorded in the order in which this material comes to Adler so are non-chronological. This partial narrative doesn’t extend beyond Adler taking initial notes on the crime. Because of the complexity of 1. Outside, this chapter takes a few steps investing in the “thought, focus, and attentiveness” needed to grasp this album. First, I review Bowie’s engagement with fascism, which began simultaneously with his study of Nietzsche in 1970, hit a brief nadir in his Playboy interview in 1976 during which he endorsed fascism, but from which he had fully recovered by 1980. Sayre and Löwy’s concept of “Fascistic Romanticism” will be introduced to contextualize Bowie’s use of Gothic narrative conventions and tropes to meditate on the confluence

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of art and technology, particularly the Internet, as the twentieth century was drawing to a close. Through this  material, we will see that Bowie employed Gothic conventions in 1. Outside to comment on late twentieth-­ century fascism in ways that seem prescient of early twenty-first century political events. I have also attached an appendix to which I will periodically refer that follows the evolution of Bowie’s 1. Outside from the Leon suites into a work of “Gothic technodrama” which includes a description of the genesis of the project and a comparison of track listings. Because the material on 1. Outside is both fragmentary and nonlinear, I then organize its material using Aristotle’s categories of theme, plot, character, diction, and music to help structure Bowie’s fragmentary, nonlinear material.

Romanticism, Fascism, and Bowie’s Aesthetic David Bowie is alert to the distorting and falsifying potential of images12 The crow wish’d every thing was black, the owl, that every thing was white.13

1. Outside, I will argue in this section, is Bowie’s last major statement about fascism and the forms it had taken at the end of the twentieth century, forms best represented in his judgment by a Gothic work of art. I’m taking as my starting point Bowie’s comments about fascism in an interview with Cameron Crowe published in Playboy in September 1976, which is one of the worst episodes of his career, as Bowie’s comments on fascism in that interview were and continue to be controversial. In my discussion of Bowie and fascism, I’m less concerned with passing an obvious moral judgment on a coked-up rock star in his twenties than with understanding what Bowie’s comments meant in relationship to his art, largely because Bowie’s comments in this interview were in fact exceptional rather than representative of the attitude he held toward fascism throughout his life. I will focus instead on the arc Bowie’s life was following during that period, as well as how that focus can illuminate Bowie’s own relationship to his art both at that time and going forward. His own real opinion about fascism was probably not the point of his comments. The interview revealed a young man who had achieved some fame attempting to manage his public image while communicating an air of sophistication and detachment about it, to be entertaining while he was doing so, and to be shocking—to be the “media manipulator” that he himself described in that same interview,

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perhaps a kind of manipulation he learned from his father, who worked in advertising. Bowie’s general patterns of communication in this interview by themselves are instructive. There are moments of direct but polite sincerity during the interview (no question what he thought of Streisand’s cover of “Life on Mars?”—“Sorry Barb”), but at other times his language follows a pattern of (1) diversionary or indirect polite answer, (2) revealing detail, (3) straight to the point. For example, when asked about his family, Bowie said, “I haven’t a clue. I haven’t spoken to any of them in years. My father is dead.” When asked about Dylan, he said, “We don’t have a lot to talk about. We’re not great friends. Actually, I think he hates me.”14 Diversionary, detail, to the point, but working his way toward an honest answer with each step. He’s very British and polite. At times he never moved beyond being diversionary, however: When Crowe’s questioning seemed to be leading nowhere—talking to Bowie was like trying to talk to a ball in a pinball machine—Crowe said, “We give up. Let’s talk about movies.”15 When Crowe ended the interview by asking, “Do you believe and stand by everything you’ve said?”, Bowie responded, “Everything but the inflammatory remarks,”16 perhaps regretting his comments already, perhaps just being coy, or perhaps performing the role of “Bowie,” a transgressive shock-rock star. I should add that Crowe’s prefatory comments include the detail that the published interview is a compilation of sessions that began in early 1975, but especially the following: Bowie is expertly charming, whether in the company of a stuffy film executive, another musician or a complete stranger. He is fully aware that he is a sensational quote machine. The more shocking his revelation, from his homosexual encounters to his fascist leanings, the wider his grin. He knows exactly what interviewers consider good copy; and he gives them precisely that. The truth is probably inconsequential.17

But I think the interview itself is revealing of less directly observable motives for these answers and can illuminate some elements of the emotional impulse behind Bowie’s composition process from the mid-1970s through 1. Outside. Bowie’s engagement with fascism predated his interview with Cameron Crowe by some years. In a March 1973 interview with Patrick Salvo for Interview, he revealed that it started around the time of his composition of the song “The Supermen” for The Man Who Sold the World (1970):

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I wrote a song called “The Supermen” which was about the Homo Superior race and through that I got interested in Nazism. I’m overwhelmed at their methods—diabolical. I have no room in my head to entertain their theory, the gross effects, the terrible disregard for human life, especially for particular races and religions… Hitler wanted to develop an Aryan race. For what reason? To fight Homo Superior. He was dreadfully afraid of Homo Superior and his aims to develop a race of Aryan people was a misrepresentation of that good feeling of Homo Superior.18

There’s quite a bit to unpack here, but I’d like to start by dating his initial interest in fascism. The earliest recording of “The Supermen” was March 23, 1970 after being performed for the first time earlier that March.19 The most likely date of composition for “The Supermen,” then, was no later than February or very early March 1970. Pegg records that “David had been reading Jenseits von Gut und Böse [Beyond Good and Evil] and Also Sprach Zarathustra during the early part of 1970,”20 both titles by Nietzsche. Bowie appropriated Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch from the latter title and believed that Hitler misunderstood it—even that Hitler’s version of it was designed to suppress the true Übermensch, which goes a step beyond the more common claim that Hitler simply misunderstood Nietzsche. Bowie expressed horror at Hitler’s racism and violence. He could not comprehend it. So Bowie first started reading Nietzsche in 1970, became interested in fascism as a result of that reading, and as of 1973, was still horrified at fascist behavior and thought. Moving forward to the 1976 interview, when Crowe asked Bowie about his interest in fascism, Bowie responded: Christ, everything is a media manipulation. I’d love to enter politics. I will one day. I’d adore to be Prime Minister. And, yes, I believe very strongly in fascism. The only way we can speed up the sort of liberalism that’s hanging foul in the air at the moment is to speed up the progress of a right-wing, totally dictatorial tyranny and get it over as fast as possible. People have always responded with greater efficiency under a regimental leadership. A liberal wastes time saying, “Well, now, what ideas have you got?” Show them what to do, for God’s sake. If you don’t, nothing will get done. I can’t stand people just hanging about. Television is the most successful fascist, needless to say. Rock stars are fascists, too. Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars.21

Bowie exhibited a number of different communication patterns in this short interview. These are among his most direct and earnest remarks, and

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of course his incendiary comment is, “I believe very strongly in fascism.” He was direct and to the point in saying so. But Bowie’s definition of fascism has to be part of this discussion. When Bowie describes television and rock stars as fascists, he’s talking about how these media are created: one person in charge giving orders, organizing activity. For example, Gabrels referred to Bowie’s commitment to artistic democracy on the Tin Machine albums negatively: “I thought the Sales brothers [Hunt and Tony Sales, drums and bass] were nuts! I didn’t want to be in a band anymore. Bands are a nightmare, and democracy doesn’t work as well as benevolent dictatorships in rock’n’roll in my opinion.”22 Bowie elaborated on this period in a 1993 interview: “Goebbels intrigued me more than any of the other Nazis because of the way he used the media. He was an extraordinary guy. He used the media the way nobody used it. It was at his instigation that Hitler flew everywhere—it had never been done before.”23 Simon Reynolds describes glam itself as a “blend of exhibitionism and authoritarianism: the star enthralls the fan, who is midway between voyeur and vassal.”24 Bowie had media and entertainment in mind. He appears to be imagining a society run the way he ran the creation of his albums: Rock and TV stars are fascists because they order people around as they create a product that manipulates masses. By this definition, Hitler was a rock star. Bowie defined fascism, of course, as a “dictatorial tyranny”: He’s defining fascism as authoritarianism, but he’s not thinking in much specific detail about an organized political system. For him, fascism is just ordering people around.25 Again, from the 1993 interview, “Politically, I equated Fascism with Communism, or rather Stalinism. On my trips through Russia I thought, well, this is what Fascism must have felt like. They marched like them. They saluted like them. Both had centralized governments.”26 But even in 1976 he referred to fascism as a stage to get through “as fast as possible” rather than a desirable, long-term political end, so he may have been motivated primarily by his disgust and fascination with liberalism and the media. He also assumed—insightfully or naively?—that the fascist agenda would be equivalent to liberalism’s agenda, working toward the same goal at a faster pace. When Crowe asked Bowie how, exactly, Hitler was a rock star, he responded, Think about it. Look at some of his films and see how he moved. I think he was quite as good as Jagger. It’s astounding. And, boy, when he hit that

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stage, he worked an audience. Good God! He was no politician. He was a media artist himself. He used politics and theatrics and created this thing that governed and controlled the show for those 12 years. The world will never see his like. He staged a country.27

Bowie is not being hyperbolic. One needs only to remember Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will, which probably provided Bowie with his most direct, if not only, experience of German fascism. Later in that same interview he speaks of Hitler using the same kind of language he used in 1973: “The attitude that says the artist should paint only things that the proletarian can understand, I think, is the most destructive thing possible. That sounds a little like Hitler’s going around to museums and tearing modern paintings down, doesn’t it?”28 Fascism suppresses art destructively. He may have been rolling back comments he already believed went too far, but his primary interest in fascism seems to be in its effectiveness at manipulating media to the point where it can direct an entire country, and intentionally or not, he seems to be revealing a fascism at the heart of liberalism which finds an outlet through media—while US and UK political processes may be democratic, many elements of society are not: like privately-­ owned  businesses, television, and rock music. Either way, there’s no consistent attitude toward fascism even from one page to the next during this interview. He was mainly interested in promotions. In later interviews, Bowie ascribes these comments to cocaine abuse. All biographers seem united in reporting, as he consistently did himself (and his fellow musicians, studio engineers, producers…), that during his first American tour he had drugs offered to him everywhere he went and started using cocaine heavily.29 Hugo Wilcken asserts that during the period of Bowie’s interviews with Cameron Crowe, “Bowie was suffering from severe bouts of cocaine psychosis, a condition very similar to schizophrenia, with its highly distorted perception of reality, hallucinations, affectlessness and a marked tendency towards magical thinking.”30 At the beginning of one interview for Dutch television in 1977, he is hyperactively joking with the interviewers and can barely sit still in his seat.31 Crowe observed similar behavior: “Few of our sessions were marathon affairs. No matter how stimulating the conversation, after any longer than an hour of sitting still, Bowie could barely contain himself.”32 Bowie used the energy cocaine gave him to work for days on end, often going with

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little sleep or food. At a low point he lived on a diet of milk and peppers and only weighed about ninety pounds. Ultimately, he left the United States for Europe to get away from US drug culture, and while he didn’t completely stop using drugs, including cocaine, for a number of years, his intake slowed down enough to save his life. David Buckley records that the two-and-a-half years of New York then LA insanity had reduced Bowie to a state of emotional collapse. He would later admit that the entire ’76 tour was undertaken under duress; that his mind had fractured under the pressure of substance abuse… By the summer of ’76, Bowie officially lived at Clos des Mesanges, a villa near Blonay on the north side of Lake Geneva.33

Bowie’s move to Europe coincided with the time Crowe was finalizing his interview for Playboy. While his drug abuse does not excuse his comments about fascism, it may have some explanatory power. But I believe that drug abuse is only a partial explanation for his comments at best, as are his coherent, direct, and sincere comments about media manipulation. Those comments saw Bowie in earnest. It’s significant that Bowie’s attraction to fascism occurred during a period when his life grew increasingly out of control, as Crowe’s interviews were conducted in the months leading up to Bowie’s departure for Europe. It’s possible he attempted to manage his internal lack of control by projecting an outwardly fascist persona, one that appears in the guise of the Thin White Duke from his 1976 album Station to Station. The surfaces of Bowie’s art in this case do not reflect his emotional state or political commitments but his need for self-control. I think it would be too simplistic to say that he was working with an aesthetic of inauthenticity, however fitting the comparisons are to Oscar Wilde and The Picture of Dorian Gray. He is deeply engaging how his own culture is reflected in his own emotional disorders and his own disordered and destructive behavior. The fascism David Jones painted onto the surface of his canvas, David Bowie, is the mirror image of the chaos he was trying to suppress internally.34 Bowie was working here, as elsewhere, like a painter. At his lowest point, this confluence of forces drew Jones toward painting an exterior fascism onto Bowie as a means of self-restraint. This aesthetic movement was also an expression of Bowie’s own control issues. Looking back on his previous relationships after his then-recent marriage to Iman, Bowie described his relational history this way: “I hope

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I have become more capable of loving someone without being possessive of them. And wanting to control them. It’s knowing how to let go of the other person and let them be who they are. A major character fault of mine is that I do try to control people.”35 His reflections on his previous relationships were confirmed by his first wife, Angela Barnett, in an interview with Peter Koenig: “David wants to be a dictator, not God. His fixation is with himself and he strives to ignore his own self-loathing.”36 She was describing the David Bowie she knew throughout the 1970s through the lenses of her understandable bitterness about their relationship. There’s plenty of fault to be shared between them both, but she wasn’t the only person to describe Bowie during this period as a narcissist, and self-­ loathing has some explanatory power. It would explain Bowie’s intense privacy, his retreat behind a rotating array of personas throughout the 1970s, and his drug use and promiscuity. If he had control issues, it’s plausible that he would retreat behind a fascist persona if he felt he was losing too much control of his own life. However, Bowie is doing more than autobiography in 1. Outside: he’s describing a world, the real world of the 1990s. And he was painfully aware of how susceptible he was to his outside environment: “Whether it’s fortunate or not I don’t know, but I’m absolutely and totally vulnerable to environment, and environment and circumstances affect my writing tremendously. To the point of absurdity sometimes.”37 Bowie very much sounds like Keats’s chameleon poet here. I suspect that Bowie drew upon his past attraction, however brief, to fascism to comment on its rise in the United States, so that his previous inner states and his current external world reflect upon one another on this album. To help understand how Bowie approached the fascism embedded in the liberal democracies of the 1990s, I will evaluate Bowie’s comments about fascism in the light of Löwy and Sayre’s description of “Fascistic Romanticism,” which will also connect this discussion of fascism to the album itself. In the introduction to this collection I explain how and why Bowie should be thought of as a Romantic (in part because he thought of himself as one), and how Löwy and Sayre develop a concept of Romanticism that allows it to extend from its origins through the twenty-first century. They define Romanticism as an emotional reaction to modernity that takes the form of a desire to return to a premodern past, and they define “modernity” as the combination of capitalism and Enlightenment. That reaction takes many forms, however, so Löwy and Sayre develop a taxonomy of Romanticisms that take on very different characteristics. Fascistic Romanticism is one of

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them. Romanticism’s many different forms, however, remain united in their reaction against a modernity that isolates individuals, motivating our desire for a return to an early state. In this extended discussion of fascism and Bowie, there is a real danger that I’m making too much of a short episode in Bowie’s long career, and Löwy and Sayre preface their comments with the observation that “Nazi ideology—and fascist ideology more generally—and the Romantic spirit do not coincide,”38 making Fascistic Romanticism not only just one limited form of Romanticism but one limited form of fascism as well. It is an outlier in both camps. Nevertheless, they do see in Fascistic Romanticism “the paradoxical combination of irrationality and technics” whose outcome will be that “humanity will shortly reach a higher stage,”39 which seems to exactly mirror Bowie’s mindset at the time. Nazism, in its Romantic form, combines authoritarianism with irrationality and technology to speed human development toward an imagined ideal state: recall that in the 1976 interview Bowie wanted to use a brief fascist period to speed the progress of liberalism. It is perhaps no coincidence that Bowie’s performance of the alien Thomas Jerome Newton in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)—a character he carried forward on the album cover artwork for Station to Station (1976) and Low (1977)—may have been simultaneous with his comments about fascism to Cameron Crowe and coincided with a period in which he was concerned with the development of “homo superior,” seeing in fascism a means of pushing through to the next stage of human development, after which it would be abandoned. This performance of the alien brought Bowie in close proximity with “technics” and the irrational even beyond his science fiction and space excursions in “Space Oddity” and Ziggy Stardust. For the irrational, Bowie had been employing a “cut up” style of composition for his lyrics at least since meeting William Burroughs for a joint interview published in Rolling Stone in 1974 which, by its nature, introduces an element of the irrational into his art. He started out literally cutting up pieces of newspaper copy and rearranging them into song lyrics, but by the composition of 1. Outside he employed technology in this process through an app he designed in conjunction with Apple to generate random phrases—the Verbasiser:40 “I’ll take articles out of newspapers, poems that I’ve written, pieces of other people’s books, and put them all into this little warehouse, this container of information, and then hit the random button and it will randomize everything.”41 He didn’t just use unedited randomized text for his lyrics, however, but constructed his lyrics from this randomized text,

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so they remain a deliberately constructed aesthetic product even if he left some randomized text unchanged. During his alien, technological phase in the 1970s, Bowie introduced the irrational to his songwriting, and from the 1970s through the 1990s he wed the irrational with the technological to create art. Fascistic Romanticism as the confluence of technology and the irrational seems an apt description of the material on 1. Outside, whose commentary on fascism is underscored by Bowie’s composition of Industrial music, which Nicholas P.  Greco describes as a “loud, powerful and often shocking style of avant-garde popular music” having as its musical characteristics “mechanical rhythms, harsh and distorted timbres, and dark minor key or modal harmonies.” Important in his description of the musical style is the notion that all of these elements “contribute to the creation of a dystopian soundscape.” It is within this context, though, that the bands are able to work against “the evils of disguised fascism and totalitarianism in general.”42

As a musical genre, Industrial links technology with the irrational to both reflect and critique a dystopian, fascistic world—particularly the disguised fascisms embedded in our capitalist, liberal democracies—an effect amplified by the narrative of 1. Outside, where advanced computer technology is employed in the service of a gruesome art installation involving the murder and dismemberment of a young girl. Furthermore, the unknown artist behind the murder narrated in 1. Outside is not known only as “the Artist,” or as “the Minotaur,” but as the “Artist/Minotaur,” a hybrid identity combining the controlled, human work of creating art with the irrational, animalistic impulse represented by the Minotaur. It may not hurt to remember that techne simply means “making or doing” or, in other words, art. The figure of the Minotaur itself points to deeply buried, highly taboo psychological impulses: in the myth, the part man, part bull Minotaur was born to King Minos’s cursed wife Pasiphae after she fell in love with a bull, mated with it, and gave birth to their offspring. The king employed the artist/engineer Daedalus to create a labyrinth to hide the beast, burying the offspring of this illicit desire. The Minotaur, being an unnatural creature, could only satisfy its hunger by devouring human beings, and this unnatural hunger was controlled, contained, and hidden

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from human eyes by the technological feat of Daedalus’s labyrinth. Technology exists on the outside to bury the horrors contained within. Nick Stevenson’s David Bowie: Fame, Sound and Vision describes these elements of Fascistic Romanticism in his discussion of the video for “The Hearts Filthy Lesson” although he doesn’t name them as such. He instructively associates the imagery in this video with Damien Hirst and Brit Art without connecting them to the Minotaur myth, but the connections are all there: The video of the single shows Bowie in a warehouse that is slowly being transformed into an art gallery… In the video, Bowie appears as an artist making life-size plaster casts of “primitive” human beings. He and the other assembled artists are shown eating human flesh, holding human organs (notably a human heart) and wearing masks of dead animals. The central plaster cast is eventually supplied with an animal’s head… The video is shot through a brown lens, giving the scene the appearance of either rotting flesh or of excrement.43

In the light of the details of 1. Outside described above, this video depicts the crime scene, the art-ritual murder itself, and the Minotaur’s consumption of human flesh. So the video stages either the creation of the Artist/ Minotaur or the transformation of one of his victims into a Minotaur. That “Damien Hirst is perhaps best known for the practice of bringing animal corpses into the gallery”44 certainly adds texture to the world Bowie sought to capture in 1. Outside. Alex Sharpe reminds us that the first time Bowie engaged a dystopian landscape, on the Diamond Dogs album (1974), he introduced another human/animal hybrid, a painting depicting Bowie with a human torso and a dog’s hindquarters.45 Sharpe’s study of the monstrous ends in 1980; even though he mentions the Minotaur, he doesn’t mention 1. Outside. I think those limitations are necessary given Sharpe’s thesis, which is in part that the monster is a figure of hope. If we accept that reading, by the mid-­1990s Bowie seems to have believed that hope itself was monstrous— hope for a speedy perfection of the human race, hope for a better millennium—both are monstrous because of the attraction to fascism they create. Bowie’s own description of 1. Outside points that way as well: “The one continuum [on Outside] that is throughout my writing is a real simple, spiritual search… and everything I’ve written is about ‘Who is my God? How does he show himself? What is my higher stage, my higher being?’”46

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He was indeed seeking his next development, his higher self, but while the album reflects this searching, it also reflects the dangers inherent in the search, one of which is impatience. Fascism is a fatal shortcut. Given Bowie’s mid-1990s’ context, the Minotaur seems an apt image for the artworks he confronted in that milieu, perhaps representing for him the buried, forbidden desires that would lead people to cannibalistically self-mutilate to create their art. The song “No Control,” which I believe gets close to the emotional core of 1. Outside, may point to the impulse guiding this art: “It’s all deranged—no control / Sit tight in your corner / Don’t tell God your plans.”47 The Artist/Minotaur carries this impulse for control to its extreme: “I shake for the reeking flesh is as romantic as hell / The need to have seen it all / The Voyeur of Utter Destruction.”48 In these lines, the Artist/Minotaur describes a derangement that takes erotic pleasure in decaying flesh combined with a driving need to witness destruction, though “eating” here, the Artist/Minotaur’s consumption, takes the form of consuming things with his eyes, making him a voyeur. Is the Minotaur driven by the need “to have seen it all”? Is the Minotaur the Artist, or the audience that the Artist creates? Either way, his voyeurism prompts him to create a visual art installation out of a brutally murdered young girl rather than physically consuming her flesh. In “I’m Deranged,” this character seems to locate this impulse in his feelings of being chained or controlled and in the loss of hope associated with his bound state: “Thin skies, the man chains his hands held high… / No return, no return / I’m deranged.”49 Bowie’s Artist/Minotaur embodies Fascistic Romanticism, one combining technology with a fundamentally irrational hunger driven by its own feeling of being controlled, and it expresses this psychological state with the ultimate act of control: the reduction of a human being to an object. As a Minotaur, he also embodies the subjectivity of our own repressed desires. Perhaps as an inverse of Bowie himself, the Minotaur projects chaos outwardly in response to an excessive state of inward control. We should also take seriously Bowie’s choice to use his own voice for the Artist/Minotaur. By the time of 1. Outside, he had developed a significant stage and screen career. Two of his lesser-known performances particularly stand out: lending his vocal talents for a production of Peter and the Wolf for the Philadelphia Orchestra and his performance of Bertolt Brecht’s Baal,50 his last Berlin recording and collaboration with Tony Visconti for some years. Bowie’s performance of different voices in Peter and the Wolf is quite charming; he jumped at the opportunity to perform

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something like this for his son Zowie (later named Duncan), who in 1978 was still young enough to enjoy it as a child. Additionally, one of Bowie’s more entertaining routines during interviews involved celebrity impersonations, and he was very good at it. In their survey of Bowie’s interviews with Q Magazine, Usher and Fremaux record that across Bowie’s interviews with Q, “On 19 different occasions there are references to him ‘adopting a voice’ or ‘adopts the personality of’ while answering a question. These range from Kenneth Williams to Bing Crosby, from South London civvies when wanting to appear self-deprecating, to Yorkshire dryness when making a point about his homeland.”51 He created characters through voice in some of his earliest recordings as well, such as “Please Mr. Gravedigger” and “The Laughing Gnome.” Bowie was a seasoned actor used to presenting different characters in different voices by the time he recorded the Leon material and 1. Outside, talents he employed in the creation of these different characters which were fairly consistently voiced from one project to the next. Detective Nathan Adler even has singing parts in his own Sam Spade voice in parts of Leon. Therefore, when Bowie chooses to voice the Artist/Minotaur in his own untreated voice, a choice especially apparent on “Wishful Beginnings,” we should view that choice as deliberate and interpretable. Even though elements of Bowie’s art were at times left to chance, and even though he accepted mistakes as part of the creative process, the choice to use his own natural voice for parts on 1. Outside stands out given the many characters he voiced differently. In a 1995 interview with Moon Zappa about 1. Outside, Bowie was asked, “So you are what’s been manipulated in each of these pieces [segues]?” He responded, “Yes, they’re all based on me.”52 Of course, he was photographed as every character but Algeria Touchshriek and voiced every character. Nathan Alder indirectly reveals in the diary that, like Bowie, he was born in 1947. Bowie is the middle-aged detective investigating his own art crimes, keeping his own diary. In the process, Bowie realizes he was also the victim of his art, Baby Grace, who represents the sacrifice of his innocence to become a rock star, as well the young artist being accused, Leon Blank (his name indicating obliviousness), and Ramona A.  Stone (her name indicating a hardened character), possibly a former sex worker and Baby Grace’s mother. Seeing the Artist/Minotaur character as a point of self-reflection on Bowie’s part would be consistent with this pattern. And this pattern isn’t alien to Bowie’s thought. In 1976, he said, “I just… decided the use the easiest medium to start off with which was rock ‘n’ roll… so that really by the end of it I was my own medium.”53 Bowie’s

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revisiting of a dystopian landscape on 1. Outside, according to Stevenson, suggests that “the deliberate blurring of boundaries between humans and animals has a kinship with some of Bowie’s earlier transgressions,”54 while Tiffany Naiman similarly argues that on this album Bowie was “positioning himself as a kind of modern master, concerned about his own legacy within the canonised history of music and art.”55 Bowie dropped subtle hints about his identification with the Artist/ Minotaur years later, in a May 24, 1999 interview on ZDTV. In the late 1990s, Bowie was deeply invested in his website, BowieNet, and spent some time during the interview discussing his activity online, which was described during this conversation as “voyeuristic”—he took pleasure in getting to know details of his fans’ lives. Later in the interview, Bowie met Alex Grant, winner of a songwriting contest Bowie sponsored through his website, and after their photos were taken, Grant asked Bowie what fragrance he wore. After an awkward pause, Bowie answered, “Minotaure. From France.”56 Bowie’s use of this cologne may be a passing coincidence, but given Bowie’s choices for vocal performance of this character, likely not. In the figure of the Minotaur Bowie confronted elements of his own past that seemed monstrous to him in retrospect, especially after his own very recent marriage to Iman and the possibility of having another child with her. That Leon is also voiced in Bowie’s natural voice, and that the Artist/Minotaur expressed hopes that Leon would become a murderer in the Leon suites, indicates the possibility that alter egos are involved, or multiple personalities, so that within the narrative Leon and the Artist/ Minotaur may have wound up relating to one another the way that Tyler Durden does to the narrator of Fight Club, or  conversely the Artist/ Minotaur might represent Leon’s possible future self. As reflections of Bowie himself, these two characters may also represent alternate possible destinies as Bowie began reinventing his career and life, once again, in the early 1990s. And since Leon is our guide through the world of 1. Outside, he represents an authorial presence within the narrative. Ramona A.  Stone similarly embodies the combination of technology with the irrational, as her voice is treated with a vocoder to sound synthetic or artificial. Ramona’s segue is voiced by three characters: herself in verse one, David Bowie mostly singing the bridge and verse two, and Nathan Adler in verse three. Bowie’s singing, given his lines, may be serving the function of a Greek chorus. His parts sound appropriate for the introduction of a new character, but since these parts employ Bowie’s own voice, it’s possible they are voiced by the Artist/Minotaur. Nathan Adler,

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when speaking verse three, describes anxiety about the turn of the millennia and the loss of identity in the form of losing one’s name, perhaps as a form of note-taking on Ramona’s character: “Feels anxiety descending / Left at the crossroads, between the centuries / A millennium fetish.”57 In the very first line of her segue Ramona refers to herself by name in the past tense, as if in the present she has become something other than herself. The segue, then, presents Ramona from three different perspectives, one of them presumably Adler’s notes to himself on her character. The chorus refers to Ramona as an artificial good time girl, pointing back to a previous life as a sex worker, so that the trope of the artificial female embodied by her character may involve commentary on the effects of the sexual exploitation of women: women who are reduced to objects become machines, the introduction of female Gothic into 1. Outside. This reading would be consistent with the use of space or alien imagery in Black music as described by Ken McLeod, particularly in “Proto-hip-hop works, such as Afrika Bambatta’s ‘Planet Rock,’ [which] embraced the android synth-pop of Kraftwerk because, in the words of hip-hop critic Tricia Rose, they recognised ‘an understanding of themselves as already having been robots… that they were labor for capitalism, that they had very little value as people in this society.’”58 Bowie would then be extending this development of space/alien imagery in 1. Outside and redirecting it toward the Internet, a new form of “space,” and the exploitation of women. Naiman links Bowie’s use of the Verbasiser to Ramona’s character: “Very much like Bowie cutting up sentences into parts and reassembling them, Ramona provides a cut-up service for artists looking to create something new out of the human form. Simply put, the ‘heart’s filthy lesson’ is that we will all die and that death is an integral part of one’s life and existence,”59 so that her character’s rage is a rage at death itself. If the chorus is the voice of the Artist/Minotaur, another cut-up artist, and not just Bowie as narrator, these lines may point back to a liaison with Ramona fourteen years earlier that produced Baby Grace, which would also explain Ramona’s reference to her name in past tense. “I’d Rather Be Chrome” appears in the Leon material sung by Nathan Adler, but as his description of Ramona A.  Stone. The word “chrome” reappears in Ramona’s segue, chrome possibly referring to the metal surfaces of her new self, her chrome plated breastplate, or to the circuit boards containing her new identity, so that “I’d Rather Be Chrome” from the Leon material expresses longing to be transformed into an electronic version of herself.

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If she is Baby Grace’s mother, then the murder and dismemberment of her daughter and her daughter’s transformation into a piece of artistic technology are continuations of what happened to her. She has seen to it that her daughter has been recreated in her own image, into her own computerized, electronic, perversely mutilated Barbie doll that chants haikus derived from her bodily fluids as her memories are harvested from them and then sent back to speakers mounted to her dismembered limbs. Ramona started killing people decades ago, after all. Considering 1. Outside as a Gothic work of art, Bowie incorporates traditional Gothic conventions of a story involving a curse (generational exploitation of women) with a trap (rather than a cathedral or castle, the story is set in a Museum, consistent with its art theme) followed by a sickening descent into disintegration and a young female victim.60 He incorporates elements of both male and female Gothic as he does so, representing the wedding of technology with the irrational in both the male Artist/ Minotaur and the female Ramona A. Stone. For his part, Bowie said in a 1995 interview that he meant the album was Gothic in that “it is like a grand guignol.”61 “Grand guignol” refers to a French hotel that once staged gruesome, melodramatic Gothic plays alternating with comedies: more familiar works today might be Sweeny Todd and Johnny Depp’s film version of Sleepy Hollow, so that when Bowie said he was wearing a fragrance called “Minotaure” from “France,” he may also have been referring to the influence of this theater. Grand guignol was committed to naturalistic horror rather than supernatural, so that Bowie’s modification of this genre pushes it away from pure, organic naturalism through the incorporation of technology, which still avoids reference to the supernatural but distorts the natural out of recognition. In doing so, then,  he employed Gothic conventions to make his statement about late twentieth-­ century fascism and its wedding of technology with the irrational. As commentary on fascism, it is worth revisiting Bowie’s thoughts on fascism in this commentary on the Tin Machine song “Under the God”: A democracy carries the bacillus of its own destruction: the freedom of identity it gives its citizens is easily corruptible. “It’s painful being a democracy because one of the fucking things you have to do is allow people to say what they want to,” he [Bowie] said in 1991. Freedom of speech could be weaponized. Should a David Duke be allowed to run for office, to broadcast his racism? Bowie wondered. Hunt Sales pointed out that Duke had failed at the ballot box. Bowie replied that Duke “created a power base for himself.

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He should not be taken lightly, we have not seen the last of him by any means at all.”62

Bowie’s comments probably seemed paranoid at the time, but in the light of the events in Washington DC on January 6th, 2021, they now seem eerily prescient. In his 2016 history of glam, Shock and Awe, Simon Reynolds drew these comparisons between glam, early Bowie manager Tony Defries’s management style, and Donald Trump: The second [kind of entrepreneur] seduces using techniques that bypass the rational: charisma, word-magic, a sense of theatre…  In some ways he [Defries] resembled a seventies music-biz version of Donald Trump. In The Art of the Deal, Trump wrote that “the final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies”… The showmen-businessmen understand the power of wild promises, impulsive investments, irrational exuberance.63

While Reynolds doesn’t make this connection, he is also describing the fascist dictator as Bowie understood him and is assuming the technologies of media combined with theater for the effectiveness of these strategies. The introduction to this collection defined the legacy of Romanticism in the present as one of absolute freedom of identity, while my chapter on Romantic androgyny earlier in this collection extends that freedom of identity to a freedom of sexual identity untethered to the body, focused on David Bowie in the 1970s. In 1995’s 1. Outside, confronted with an increasingly violent, harmful artistic milieu at the turn of the millennia combined with the rise of an internet able to circulate that milieu around the world in moments, Bowie dramatized his anxieties about the freedoms he had explored, and won, over the course of his life’s work in the form of a Gothic technodrama, reflecting on his own fascistic period and on the fascism embedded in liberal democracies as he did so.

Appendix 1: An Account of Leon and 1. Outside David Bowie is William Burroughs singing Anthony Newley64 Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.65

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Because the album 1. Outside partially consists of material extracted and reworked from previous material, this appendix will review the Leon tracks and their development into 1. Outside to provide an account of the material as it exists in all forms, narrating the development of Leon into 1. Outside. 1. Outside is further complicated by the fact that not only is it an incomplete telling of a murder mystery (we never get past the detective’s notes), it’s also the first installment of what Bowie imagined would be a cycle of up to five albums released one per year from 1995 to 2000 culminating in an opera. Most available sources assert that the second album in this cycle was to be named 2. Contamination. Bowie promised this material would be forthcoming for some years until finally abandoning his plans, releasing the albums Earthling (1997) and ‘hours…’ (1999) before the end of the ‘90s instead. Earthling merges Bowie’s interest in industrial music on 1. Outside with a drum and bass sound also employed occasionally on 1. Outside, but ‘hours…’ is a complete departure from any of his work since 1975, returning to a 1970s’ pop rock sound updated with late twentieth-century production values. Almost all accounts of the development of 1. Outside follow a similar narrative, which is that it began with The Leon Suites, which were written about a loosely connected group of characters, became more focused when Bowie wrote a fictional diary about one of the characters, and then was reworked into 1. Outside after record companies rejected Leon. The two fullest accounts are the entries related to this album in Nicholas Pegg, The Complete David Bowie, and in Chris O’Leary, Ashes to Ashes: The Songs of David Bowie 1976–2016, both of which include details about the recordings provided by David Bowie and his associates.66 Paul Trynka’s David Bowie: Starman is an excellent biography also written in close contact with Bowie and members of his circle.67 The Leon recordings are covered in relatively short form in both Pegg and O’Leary but are available for download via easy to find torrent sites and on generally hard to find bootleg CDs, as the Bowie estate has not yet officially released this material. Because the Leon material is only incompletely available in bootlegged form on torrent sites, or on hard to find CDs, we have to address the available bootlegs and the narrative they present in associated .txt files as they have influenced public discourse about the album in rock reporting. Some .txt files associated with the Leon suites misidentify these songs as 1. Outside outtakes. However, the .txt file associated with “David Bowie— Leon 4. Downside Up, Inside Out—Version 2016/2019,” written by username “paperdragon,” relates the following:

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I talked to one of the musicians who is on this and got a more complete story. First, these aren’t outtakes at all, and second, they weren’t initially intended to be a Bowie album.   The idea was to form a sort of supergroup behind Bowie and Eno, and record an album as a one-off project for that group. This is essentially that album.   So what we have here is a fully-realized concept album for a group that never came into existence.   It was then presented to the record company, who as we all know rejected it as “uncommercial.” After that, Bowie used parts of it as the basis for an entirely new project, which became 1. Outside. So, had this been released, 1. Outside would have never happened.   So, rather than this being outtakes from Outside, it’s actually more true that Outside was based on outtakes from The Leon Suites, an album in it’s [sic] own right. There were five suites recorded for Leon. Two were deleted, with three receiving a final mix then being presented to the record company for release.   It’s possible that some of the outtakes came from the two other suites, which themselves became outtakes.   And that’s only talking about the Leon project.   When the record company passed on Leon, Bowie took parts of it and used them as the basis for 1. Outside. That project has it’s [sic] own outtakes.   The confusion comes in because people fail to realize that we’re talking about two separate projects, Leon and the later Outside. They tend to lump the outtakes from both together and call them all outtakes from Outside. Even this was called Outside outtakes, when in reality it’s a finished album which, if released, would have meant that Outside would never have happened.

Paperdragon is responding to an initial bootleg of the Leon material that described it as outtakes from 1. Outside, and he’s correct in saying that’s a misunderstanding. Most of this information has been publicly verified by sources close to the recordings. Paul Trynka asserts that all “of the musicians remember the genesis of certain key songs [on 1. Outside] as dating from this period [Leon], with more than thirty-five hours of songs that evolved over the sessions. When complete, the work was edited into two CDs of material and titled Leon.”68 It’s entirely possible the “leak” of this material was staged, as Brian Eno “was eager to release the results [of the Leon recordings] as a black label, ‘with no name on it,’ says [Reeves] Gabrels,” the album’s lead guitarist and co-composer for some tracks.69 Bowie used a similar strategy for his

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release of The Next Day, dropping a new video on the Internet with no advance notice except a suggestive email sent to journalists the morning of its release. The account in the .txt file, on the other hand, seems confused on other points, as no other source cites the plan for a “supergroup” behind David Bowie except perhaps as an early conception of, or misunderstanding of, Tin Machine, which was over and done with for at least two or three years when the Leon recordings were made. The black label release may have also been mistaken for a group behind Bowie rather than a Bowie release. Reeves Gabrels, the only player from Tin Machine still working with Bowie during this period, has said in public interviews that finished tapes were presented to record companies for the Leon suites, describing them as “a three hour plus improvised opus,”70 so there’s no question that Bowie intended the Leon material to be his album from the beginning. All available recordings of the Leon suites have Bowie on vocals when vocals are present. The Leon recordings are certainly background for 1. Outside, however. Available downloads on torrent sites consist of only a portion of the three hours of finished material, some of it chopped up and rearranged. It’s unclear if any of the bootlegged material represents Bowie’s final mixes of any song. These downloads include five sets of tracks consisting of the following, with song titles repeated on 1. Outside in bold and song material reused on 1. Outside in italics: Download title: Leon 4. Downside Up, Inside Out—The Leon Suites Box Remastered (Arthur.Goody) [These tracks were remastered into lossless audio files. Track lengths are to the left of their titles.] 1.alt The Outtakes—Something Really Fishy 1. (4:20) Hello Leon 2. (22:36) I Am With Name/Hide Me/We’ll Creep Together (Part 1) 3. (1:53) Hide Me/We’ll Creep Together (Part 2) 4. (4:04) I’d Rather Be Chrome 5. (4:04) The First Time/I’d Rather Be Chrome 6. (15:48) I Am With Name/We’ll Creep Together (Part 3) 7. (6:53) The Leak Soldiers (2003 remix) 8. (5:36) I’d Rather Be Chrome (2003 remix) II.alt Leon Suites—the album 1. (22:49) Suite 1—I Am With Name 2. (22:08) Suite 2—Leon Takes Us Outside 3. (28:29) Suite 3—The Enemy is Fragile

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III.alt 2.Inside—The Reordered Album 1. (7:03) Leon Takes Us Outside, Pt. 1 2. (28:29) The Enemy Is Fragile 3. (22:47) I Am With Name 4. (15:06) Leon Takes Us Outside, Pt. 2 IV.alt 3.Upside—Another Album Assembly Untitled, numbered tracks simply listed as “Track1” through “Track15,” except for “Track3,” which is additionally titled “I’D RATHER BE CHROME.” These files exist in varying sound quality and may include files intended for a fan remix CD-ROM. Tracks vary in length between 2:04 and 7:34 except for Track13, which is 11:07. Download title: The Leon Suites (1. Outside Outtakes) (BOWSTAT018, older bootleg) 1. (22:09) Suite 1—I Am With Name 2. (21:29) Suite 2—Leon Takes Us Outside 3. (27:37) Suite 3—Enemy Is Fragile

The existing Leon material available for download seems to reflect paperdragon’s explanation that “There were five suites recorded for Leon. Two were deleted, with three receiving a final mix then being presented to the record company for release” as we see from the final three suites, which do indeed sound like finished products adding up to over an hour of music. The three tracks on The Leon Suites (subtitled 1. Outside Outtakes) are the most fully developed of them all, but they are also found in slightly different lengths on the second group of Arthur Goody tracks. It’s hard to know if the other two suites are represented in any of the material listed above, but my guess is they are not. The tracklist for 1. Outside listed below includes eight titles recorded during the Leon period which aren’t represented on the bootleg musically or otherwise. The next stage in the development of the Leon material into 1. Outside occurred when Q Magazine asked Bowie to keep a diary for ten days, as he related in a 1995 interview: Last December, Q asked me to do a diary of my past 10 days, which I thought might be a bit boring—going to a studio, coming home and going to bed. So I wondered what this character Nathan Adler would have been doing. Rather than 10 days, it became 15 years in his life! So I wrote that story for them, pulling on the elements of that improvisation. Then I realised this was a great skeleton to put the texture on.71

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Bowie began somewhat directionless storytelling following Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards by creating characters, and then after being asked by Q to keep a diary for ten days, decided to write a fictional diary based on the characters he had sketched for the Leon recordings. An unformed narrative began to emerge organically from Bowie’s creation of these characters, but the diary assignment gave his work more specific direction. Leon recordings had commenced in early 1994 in Mountain Studios, Montreux, Switzerland, which eventually included a first draft of the fictional diary. Eno did further work on these tracks in London, and then after seeing this material rejected by the record companies, Bowie and his crew relocated to New York City by early 1995 to record additional tracks. Their goal was to develop a more commercially accessible album out of the Leon material. These sessions lasted throughout January of 1995. The fictional diary found its way into 1. Outside as part of a booklet enclosed in four-panel digipak CD which includes photographs of the principal characters, all of whom except for Algeria Touchshriek are photographs of Bowie in different costumes and with different photographic treatments accompanied by lyrics. Turning to 1. Outside, tracks reworked from the Leon material can be found alongside additional tracks recorded in New York.72 Repeated titles are in bold, and tracks that reuse at least some material found in the Leon bootlegs are italicized: 1. (1:25) Leon Takes Us Outside 2. (4:05) Outside (originally “Now,” an outtake from Tin Machine I rerecorded in NYC) 3. (4:57) The Hearts Filthy Lesson (some lyrical material taken from Leon)73 4. (6:36) A Small Plot of Land (Montreux session recording not found on Leon bootlegs) 5. (1:39) Segue—Baby Grace (A Horrid Cassette) 6. (5:14) Hallo Spaceboy (Montreux session recording not found on Leon) 7. (6:49) The Motel (Montreux session recording not found on Leon) 8. (3:47) I Have Not Been to Oxford Town (new track recorded in NYC) 9. (4:33) No Control (new track recorded in NYC) 10. (2:03) Segue—Algeria Touchshriek 11. (4:21) The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (As Beauty) (Montreux session recording not found on Leon) 12. (4:01) Segue—Ramona A. Stone/I Am With Name 13.  (5:08) Wishful Beginnings (Montreux session recording not found on Leon)

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14. (4:33) We Prick You (new track recorded in NYC) 15. (1:00) Segue—Nathan Adler 16. (4:31) I’m Deranged (Montreux session recording not found on Leon) 17. (4:22) Thru’ These Architects Eyes (Montreux session recording not found on Leon) 18. (0:28) Segue—Nathan Adler 19.  (5:07) Strangers When We Meet (Montreux session recording not found on Leon) 20. Nothing To Be Desired (outtake, Montreux session recording)

Appendix 2: Theme, Setting, Plot, Character, Diction, and Music of 1. Outside  What follows is my organization of the material on 1. Outside following the conventions of theme, setting, plot, character, diction, and music to help organize this incomplete, nonlinear material. Music and diction aren’t treated as separate categories but are included in discussions of their associated characters. Diction, I should add, doesn’t extend to specific word choice, as most characters draw from the same vocabulary, and samples are too small to detect meaningful patterns of word choice across characters apart from vocal stylization. I should add that while the music on 1. Outside complexly blends genres, Tiffany Naiman argues in “Art’s Filthy Lesson” that this genre blending has recuperative value when placed within the world of the album: … it is important to foreground Bowie’s use of Western art music history, which he employs throughout the work by quoting multiple composers and genres, which allows him to artificially reinsert aesthetic boundaries into a narrative of a world with none. Thus, by juxtaposing an array of styles, by not weaving snippets of genres neatly together, but by letting them stand on their own within a collage, songs such as “The Hearts Filthy Lesson” are acts of musical creation where boundaries, distinctions between musical genres, are reinserted through proximity and contrast.74

The booklet enclosed with the original CD includes the words “to be sung by…” beneath some song titles, but not all. While the back cover of the CD has a full track listing (included in the previous index  above), the booklet only includes a partial list of tracks. Album artwork is so heavily stylized that song lyrics are occasionally unreadable, possibly inspired by

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the art of insanity Eno and Bowie witnessed at the Gugging Hospital. The booklet includes lyrics for the following songs in the following order: “The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (As Beauty),” sung by the Artist/ Minotaur. Lyrics are alluded to on the inside front cover of the booklet but appear on page twenty. “Outside” (Prologue), unassociated with any character in the album lyrics. “The Hearts Filthy Lesson,” sung by Nathan Adler. “Hallo Spaceboy,” unassociated. “I Have Not Been to Oxford Town,” Leon Blank. “No Control,” Nathan Adler. “Wishful Beginnings,” Artist/Minotaur. “I’m Deranged,” Artist/Minotaur. “Thru’ These Architects Eyes,” Leon Blank. “Strangers When We Meet,” unassociated.75

Theme, associated tracks: Keeping in mind that the theme of 1. Outside is the world of the mid-1990s, while the songs “Outside,” “Hallo Spaceboy,” and “Thru’ These Architects Eyes” do not advance plot, they do add texture to the world Bowie created on 1. Outside. Songs establishing theme, setting, and character with little or no direct relevance to plot sometimes appear in musicals. “Leon Takes Us Outside” is a spoken word track backed by ambient electronic music. Bowie’s untreated voice recites dates, some of them associated with holidays, some of them incompletely expressed. “Outside,” a mid-tempo electronic pop song with a brooding feel, immediately follows “Leon Takes Us Outside” and is subtitled “Prologue” in the lyric book but not on the track listing. Leon, through his music, takes us outside (our usual experience) to a world in which we witness “The crazed in the hot zone / The mental and diva’s hands / The fisting of life.”76 The audience is being warned. Besides alluding to outsider artists at the Gugging Hospital, Bowie may have also been influenced by Brian Eno’s conceptions of “inside” versus “outside” artists. An inside artist focuses on “the conventional elements of a musical work,” while an outside artist “deals with the ‘world surrounding the work—the thoughts, assumptions, expectations… and so on’… Eno calls all of these elements ‘the frame of the work,’ which, in turn, creates a ‘little world’ around it.”77 Titling the album 1. Outside and saying that the narrative is just a frame for the album’s real focus, the world of the mid-1990s, points directly to Eno’s conception of the outsider artist. This idea was already fundamental to Bowie’s own ideas about his art; in the

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introduction to this collection, I discover how Bowie thought of his own music the way painters think about their art, in terms of the manipulation of surfaces. Almost twenty years after the recording of 1. Outside, during an interview covering the 2013 David Bowie is… exhibition that featured, among other things, his costumes through the years, Bowie said, “It’s much more a realism for me to think that this (clothes, hair, gestures, the room) is all me; that there’s nothing else in here,” and in another interview, “It’s all outside. I prefer that way of existence.”78 “Hallo Spaceboy” sounds like a song that 1990s’ Bowie is singing to his own 1970s’ self, describing his sexual ambiguity and feeling of being lost,79 an impression emphasized with the Pet Shop Boys’ remix of the track integrating cut up lyrics from “Space Oddity.” O’Leary reads the song as a tribute to Brion Gysin, a painter and sculptor who integrated the cut-up method of assembling words from newspapers into his paintings and poetry.80 Musically, “Hallo Spaceboy” is a menacing, pounding industrial track. Setting: Oxford Town, New Jersey, the Oxford Town Museum of Modern Parts. The principal action takes place on December 31, 1999. Associated tracks: “Thru’ These Architects Eyes” contributes to both theme and setting, especially when architecture is considered as a form of artistic expression. Sung by Leon Blank, his trio of songs establishes him as the guide through the world of 1. Outside. “Thru These Architects Eyes” expresses ambiguity about the city itself, but that impression is transformed when seen through an architect’s eyes: “All the concrete dreams in my mind’s eye / All the joy I see through these architect’s eyes.”81 The city is an object of fear throughout the song until seen through architect’s eyes. But it’s specifically these architect’s eyes. Whose? Is the Artist/Minotaur in some way, figuratively or directly, the city’s architect?

Plot: Early in the morning on New Year’s Eve, 1999, the Artist/ Minotaur engaged in an “art ritual murder” and dismemberment of the fourteen-year-old girl Baby Grace Blue in Oxford Town, New Jersey, mounting her body parts in the Oxford Town Museum of Modern Parts as part of an art crime installation. Her body was discovered shortly afterward, and Professor Detective Nathan Adler was sent by Art Crimes, Inc. to investigate. Adler keeps a “non-linear” diary of his investigation, recording in it information about Grace’s known associates. He has a history with one of these associates, Ramona A. Stone, and by the end of his diary he realizes that Ramona had a child who would be about the same age as

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Baby Grace. Diary entries are recorded in the order in which this material comes to Adler, so are non-chronological. This partial narrative doesn’t extend beyond Adler taking initial notes on the crime. Narrative segments of the diary cover the following dates and times: June 15, 1977, Kreutzburg, Berlin: Nathan Adler’s earliest memory of Ramona Stone, where he discovers she’s running a “Caucasian Suicide Temple” in Berlin. October 27, 1994: Adler recalls the performance of Ron Athey, an HIV/ AIDS victim who pierces his forehead with a knitting needle and mutilates himself in other ways for an art installation. This description is of a real art installation Bowie attended during the ‘90s when he “was becoming particularly fascinated by the macabre end of the performance art spectrum, notably Rudolf Schwartzkögler, leading light of the ‘Viennese Castrationists’ who had cut off his own penis, and Ron Athey, an HIV-positive New Yorker whose Four Scenes in a Harsh Life involved impaling himself with knitting needles…”82 October 28, 1994: Adler recalls a similarly gruesome art installation by Guy Bourdin, also a real artist. December 31, 1999, 5:47 a.m.: Murder, dismemberment, and display of Baby Grace at the Oxford Town Museum. December 31, 1999, 10:15 a.m.: Nathan Adler begins his investigation of the murder of Baby Grace. December 31, 1999, 10:30 a.m.: Adler’s thoughts about the Museum. December 31, 1999, 11:00 a.m.: Adler gets files from the “Data bank” on known associates of Baby Grace, which include Leon Blank, Ramona A. Stone, and Mr. Algeria Touchshriek. December 31, 1999, 11:15 a.m.: Adler receives information from the “Mack-Verbasiser” hoping that its randomly generated strings of text will help him develop leads. For the writing of 1. Outside, Bowie used a Mac app called the Verbasiser that he developed in conjunction with an Apple programmer to create random phrases from newspapers and other sources he could then arrange into lyrics. December 31, 1999, 11:30 a.m.: Last diary entry, Adler takes notes on Ramona’s life, which consists of selling art products in London made from human and animal parts. The diary ends with the revelation that Ramona was “going shopping for a diamond-encrusted umbilical cord as a celebratory thing to announce her pregnancy… That pregnancy would have ­produced a being that would be around 14 years of age,”83 implying that Ramona is Baby Grace’s mother.

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Characters: Nathan Adler • A “Detective Professor” who works for the private investigation firm Art Crime, Inc., which is funded by the “Art Protectorate of London” for the purpose of supporting the products of art crime as art.84 Greco sees a play on words with addled/Adler, asserting that this character is generally confused.85 Seeing a play on words is certainly reasonable given other character names: Touchshriek, Walloff, Stone, Blank. However, readers encounter Adler only during the first six hours of his investigation into a gruesome crime, so his processing of information related to the crime is in its early stages. Like any detective, he’s ruminating possible leads, following other leads, trying to discover connections, and making some. Since we encounter him in his first six hours of his investigation, in my opinion it’s too early to say he is confused. Bowie pictures this character in the album booklet as a Caucasian in his forties blowing smoke out of his mouth and wearing a dark green coat and what is probably a fedora hat—the hat is pushed back on his head so we can’t see the top—with a scar on his cheek. The pun on this character’s name may have been fully realized had Bowie finished the story. • Diction: Bowie voices Adler in the clichéd style of a 1940s–1950s pulp detective film. Adler’s accent became heavier in the transition from Leon to 1. Outside so that he sounds like a bad Humphrey Bogart, or in other descriptions, a Sam Spade character. This performance is Bowie’s equivalent of Dick Van Dyke’s “Cockney” accent in Mary Poppins: no one actually talks that way anywhere around New  York or New Jersey, but it’s not hard to identify the kind of accent he’s trying to imitate. Since Bowie is a talented voice actor and visual elements of this character are clichéd as well, Adler’s voice signals that the detective narrative itself is melodrama. • Associated tracks: “The Hearts Filthy Lesson,” “No Control,” and two segues. • Musical style: “The Hearts Filthy Lesson” is a hybrid combining a “Bo Diddly bassline” with “a guitar so distorted it could be ­synthesized strings” and “an eight-bar Garson piano solo” that also incorporates “waves of static” with the sounds of shaken chains to give it an industrial sound.86 “No Control” is characterized by

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Alomar’s rhythm guitar juxtaposed against Eno’s “purling banks of synthesizers and sequencers” and Bowie’s “mood swing vocals.”87 This song was the last studio recording in New York and alludes to, either musically or lyrically, the musicals High Society and Oklahoma. Both tracks associated with Nathan Adler lean more toward an industrial sound than other tracks on the album, possibly to represent a gritty character that lives at the leading edge of art, technology, and investigation. In the segues, Bowie uses “reworked lines from Adler monologues on Leon while speaking over… ‘jungle’ beats.”88 Segues on 1. Outside aren’t as developed musically as the main tracks: Adler’s first segue sounds like the rhythm section for a dance track, while his second, very short segue has slow tempo synthesizer sounds laid over a rapid drum beat. • Adler is also associated with a character named Paddy who only appears in “The Hearts Filthy Lesson” as an assistant or informant of Adler’s. Adler asks Paddy in this song about Miranda’s clothes—he wants to know who is wearing them. Neither Paddy nor Miranda appear elsewhere on the album. The Artist/Minotaur • Because this character is unidentified he could be Leon Blank, Algeria Touchshriek, or Nathan Adler in disguise, or he may be another character whose identity has not yet been revealed. Either way, he murdered Baby Grace for the art installation. His picture, placed on the inside front cover, is what readers first encounter in the booklet. This character is pictured as an almost nude David Bowie wearing a bull’s head, crouching down and leaning forward with his hands extended to present a menacing figure. In the video for “The Hearts Filthy Lesson,” Bowie puts on and takes off a bull’s head. • Diction: Bowie’s natural voice perhaps pushed a bit more than usual toward elegance and sophistication. • Associated tracks: “The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (As Beauty),” “Wishful Beginnings,” “I’m Deranged.” • Musical style: “The Voyeur of Utter Destruction” sounds like a dance track overlaid with Mike Garson’s avant-garde piano playing, “its clatter of rhythm tracks, tom fills against buzzing insurgencies of electronic percussion points toward Earthling.”89 “Wishful Beginnings” is a slower tempo song in which “the only harmonic

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structure is a synthesizer chord synced to the kick sample… By the midpoint… a few tiny melodies escape via keyboard.”90 “I’m Deranged” builds an “arrangement [that] is both propulsive and tinny” on “drum ‘n’ bass rhythms” overlaid with what could be “a sampler track labeled ‘Off-Kilter Mike Garson solo.’”91 Ramona A. Stone • Described in the diary as “Female. Caucasian. Mid-40s,” Baby Grace’s mother (implied); she has a long history of interest in macabre art consistent with art crimes. Therefore, it’s possible the Artist/ Minotaur is Baby Grace’s father. She seems to have a longer-term connection with Nathan Adler, as some of his lyrics describe her almost in terms of a past, failed relationship, which makes it possible, alternatively, that Adler is Baby Grace’s father. In the booklet, Bowie presents Stone as a green-skinned character wearing a black choker, a short black tunic, fishnet stockings, and large black sandals. The tunic is overlaid with a chrome-plated corset, and she has an ammo belt wrapped around her waist. Chris O’Leary describes this character as being dressed in “battle gear,”92 and some lyrics allude to her being a sex worker at one time. • Diction: Bowie’s voice, higher pitched, through a vocoder. • Associated tracks: One segue and “I Am With Name.” Lyrics associated with this character and her equivalent on the Leon recordings make her sound like she’s attempting either to turn herself into a machine or to digitize herself. • Her segue is spoken over slow synthesizer fill and her voice is subject to vocoder treatment and punctuated with bitterness. Drums start to fill the segue at the end, leading directly into the song “I Am With Name,” which is a principal track on the Leon recordings. However, Ramona’s voice does not appear on “I Am With Name,” just Bowie’s natural signing voice, his spoken word, and Nathan Adler’s spoken word about Ramona. Musically, “I Am With Name” is more experimental than some other tracks; it’s not clear which instrument is keeping time, and it mixes genres, possibly to represent a character who maintains a hybrid identity and seems to be evolving herself out of her humanity.

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Algeria Touchshriek • Described in the diary as “Male. Caucasian. 78 years,” Touchshriek is a lonely store owner in Oxford Town, NJ. He is the only character represented by someone other than Bowie in the booklet: an older, balding man with a large, bent nose. • Diction: working class British, a “refugee from Bowie’s Sixties songs: the confirmed bachelors and elderly shoplifters,” possibly derived from Charrington in 1984.93 • Associated tracks: one segue. • Musical style: quiet, slow tempo music reminiscent of tracks on a Windham Hill album overlaid with Algeria’s spoken word monologue. • Also associated with a character named “Mr. Walloff Domburg” to whom he is thinking of renting a room above his shop. Touchshriek doesn’t seem to have any specific purpose in the narrative, but the introduction of Domburg as a tenant may have later developed into Domburg being the Artist/Minotaur. Domburg is the name of a city in the Netherlands on the North Sea. In his commentary on the Leon suites, O’Leary identifies him as “Wolof Bomburg,” named after David Bomberg,94 a favorite painter of Bowie’s, but Bowie changed his name to “Domburg” for 1. Outside. However, the association of this character with a painter further points in the direction of Domburg being the Artist/Minotaur. “Walloff” may be a pun on “walled-­off,” indicating isolation or withdrawal, making him a good potential companion for a man named “touch shriek,” who would not want to be touched. Domburg is described in Touchshriek’s segue as “A reject from the world wide Internet / He’s a broken man, I’m also a broken man.”95 During their imagined future conversations, Touchshriek anticipates they will spend their time “Lookin’ through windows for demons.”96 Leon Blank • Described in the diary as “Male. Mixed race. 22 years,” he has a minor criminal record. The Artist/Minotaur character on the Leon tapes seems hopeful that Leon will become a murderer. Bowie repre-

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sents this character in the booklet exactly as described, his skin darkened to give him a mixed-race appearance. He has very short black hair and is wearing a zippered black coat. The booklet image of this character has his name spray painted in the upper left-hand corner of the page in the style of graffiti art with the words “lord get me out of here” and “the finger points at me” typed on different areas of the page, indicating that he’s been framed for the murder. • Diction: Bowie’s natural voice, but somewhat modified on the Leon suites. • Associated tracks: “Leon Takes Us Outside,” “Thru’ These Architects Eyes,” and “I Have Not Been to Oxford Town,” the latter of which in the context of the narrative sounds like his alibi—the crime was committed in Oxford Town, and he hasn’t been there. While not listed as an associated track on the lyric page, Adler’s notes describe Leon as an “Outsider,” so “Outside” might be an associated track, especially since it immediately follows “Leon Takes Us Outside.” • Musical style: “I Have Not Been to Oxford Town” is the most pop song on the album, one dominated by a rhythm section that foregrounds Carlos Alomar’s guitar playing, which closes the song. This musical style may have been chosen to associate Leon with youth culture. Baby Grace Blue • Fourteen-year-old female victim of the art crime, her name was spelled “Belew” on Bowie’s first draft of the diary after his former guitarist Adrian Belew, whose wife had recently had a child. In the art crime, Baby Grace’s body was dismembered and her torso was then mounted on a stand in a way reminiscent of the mounting of Greek statuary in museums. Her intestines were hung up in the building and her arms and legs were mounted in separate parts of the room: “Each limb was implanted with a small, highly sophisticated, binary-code translator which in turn was connected to small speakers attached to far ends of each limb.”97 The Artist/Minotaur removed her bodily fluids and from them computer-processed her memories into haikus broadcast from these speakers. Bowie dresses as this

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c­ haracter as well, kneeling in a satin nightgown and looking up hopefully and innocently with her arms crossed over her chest. • Diction: Bowie’s voice at a higher pitch electronically treated. • Associated tracks: One segue subtitled “A Horrid Cassette,” Bowie drew inspiration from an actual cassette recording made by the Moors killers, “who taped the ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey pleading for her life.”98 • Musical style: treated spoken word over ambient guitar and synthesizer sounds.

Notes 1. Paul Morley, The Age of Bowie: How David Bowie Made a World of Difference (New York: Gallery Books, 2016), 135. 2. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in The Early Illuminated Books: The Illuminated Books, Vol. 3 ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N.  Essick, and Joseph Viscomi (Princton University Press, 1993), 144. 3. I should add that the reception of some of Bowie’s work in the 1990s was mixed. Usher and Fremaux record that Q Magazine calls the albums 1. Outside and Earthling “Bowie Disasters” and refers to them as part of a “decade of painful reconstruction” (394). They attribute this reaction to an unwillingness to allow Bowie to move past his 1970s’ personae. See Bethany Usher and Stephanie Fremaux, “Who Is He Now: Dave Bowie and the Authentic Self,” Celebrity Studies vol. 4, issue 3 (Oct. 2013): 393–396. 4. Bowie can be found saying twenty hours of music, twenty-four, and between twenty-five and thirty in different interviews, while Paul Trynka, after interviewing Bowie and members of his band about the album, said “more than thirty-five hours of recorded music” (439). Paul Trynka, David Bowie: Starman (New York: Little, Brown & Company, 2011). 5. Paul Gorman, “David Bowie,” MBI 1995, accessed May 15, 2021, https://web.archive.org/web/20010716140714/http://www.algonet. se/~bassman/articles/95/mbi.html. 6. Back cover notes on Brian Eno’s 1978 album Before and After Science reveal the following: “Apart from our collaboration on this record, Peter and I have been working together and comparing notes for some time. In 1975 we produced a boxed set of oracle cards called ‘Oblique Strategies,’ which were used extensively in the making of this record.” “Peter” is Peter Schmit, four of whose tarot-like “offset prints” taken from watercolors featuring domestic and natural scenes are pictured on the back album

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cover. Brian Eno, Before and After Science, Island Records, Inc. ILPS-9478, 1978, 33 1/3 rpm. 7. It’s unclear what “Wolog” may refer to. WOLOG is a mathematical expression meaning “without loss of generality” in reference to an arbitrarily chosen example of a general principle rather than a specific case—the generality of the general principle is not compromised despite reference to a specific example. “Wolong” is a district in central China in which Jin and Mandarin Chinese are spoken, and “Wolof” is one of the languages spoken in Senegal. I suspect “Wolog” is an erroneous transcription of “Wolof” since Chinese is already on the list, and the list seems to be hitting different continents. 8. Brian Eno, “Games for Musicians,” More Dark than Shark, October 1995, accessed May 17, 2021, http://www.moredarkthanshark.org/eno_int_ rayg-­oct95.html. 9. Gorman. 10. Trynka, 437. 11. James E.  Perone, The Words and Music of David Bowie (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2007), 115. 12. Morley, 63. 13. Blake, 158. 14. Cameron Crowe, “David Bowie—Playboy Magazine: A Candid Conversation with the Actor, Rock Singer and Sexual Switch-hitter,” Sept. 1976, accessed April 13, 2020 http://www.theuncool.com/journalism/ david-­bowie-­playboy-­magazine/. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Dennis Johnson, David Bowie: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (London: Melville House, 2016), 22. 19. Pegg, 273. 20. Ibid. 21. Crowe. 22. Pegg, 414. 23. “David Bowie Interview in Arena Spring/Summer 1993,” accessed June 2, 2021, https://welcomebackbowie.wordpress.com/articles/david-­ b o w i e -­i n t e r v i e w -­i n -­a r e n a -­s p r i n g s u m m e r-­1 9 9 3 / h t t p s : / / f b . watch/59juuiXuKy/. Interview by Tony Parsons. 24. Reynolds, 12. 25. Bowie’s collaboration with artists and musicians varied widely. He seemed overcontrolling when collaborating with members of Queen on “Under Pressure” according to several reports, while Davide De Angelis, the artist who designed the artwork for 1. Outside and Earthling, said, “it seemed

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that once he chose someone to work with he trusted them and left them to weave their particular magic into a project. He was very open and responsive to different ideas and always up for challenging what was expected.” De Angelis, interestingly, met Bowie in 1973 at the age of ten in his father’s Soho restaurant when Bowie was recording Ziggy Stardust. Bowie saw De Angelis drawing, encouraged him, and offered to draw something with him. See Emily Gosling, “Davide De Angelis on working with David Bowie, their unrealised ideas, and why creatives should make work that ‘astonishes’ them,” Creative Boom, Jan. 13, 2017, accessed June 6, 2021, https://www.creativeboom.com/features/davide-­de-­angelis-­on-­working-­ with-­david-­bowie-­the-­as-­yet-­unrealised-­ideas-­they-­created-­and-­why-­its-­ so-­i mpor tant-­f or-­c r eatives-­t o-­m ake-­w ork-­t hat-­s urprises-­a nd-­ challenges-­them-­/. 26. “David Bowie Interview in Arena…” 27. Pegg, 414. 28. Ibid. 29. See Eric Pellerin’s chapter in David Bowie and Romanticism (Palgrave 2022) for a more detailed account of Bowie’s drug use. 30. Hugo Wilcken, Low, 33 1/3 (New York: Continuum, 2005), 11. 31. “David Bowie Dutch TV 1977,” Facebook, New Rocker, accessed April 28, 2021, https://fb.watch/59juuiXuKy/. 32. Ibid. 33. David Buckley, Strange Fascination: David Bowie, the Definitive Story (London: Virgin Books, 2005), 258. 34. See the introduction to David Bowie and Romanticism (Palgrave 2022) for a discussion of the painterly metaphor. 35. “David Bowie Interview in Arena Spring/Summer 1993.” 36. O’Leary, Pushing Ahead. 37. Tanja Stark, “‘Crashing Out with Sylvian’: David Bowie, Carl Jung, and the Unconscious,” in David Bowie: Critical Perspectives ed. Eoin Devereaux, Aileen Dillane, and Martin J.  Power (London: Routledge, 2015), 85. 38. Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, trans. Catherine Porter (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 67. 39. Ibid., 67, 69. 40. Matthew Braga, “The Verbasizer was David Bowie’s 1995 Lyric-Writing Mac App,” Vice, Jan. 11, 2016, accessed April 28, 2021, https://www. vice.com/en/article/xygxpn/the-­verbasizer-­was-­david-­bowies-­1995-­ lyric-­writing-­mac-­app. Needless to say I looked for this app in Apple’s App Store and had no luck, though there are several random number, character, word, and phrase generators available, mostly for randomizing passwords,

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number choice games, teams, etc. Sunny Walker’s app “Phrase Generator” includes customizable “recipes” for kinds of phrase generation that could simply be any number of consecutive English words. This app comes closest to Bowie’s own, but it doesn’t allow the user to select a corpus such as, for example, only text from the day’s newspaper. 41. Colin Marshall, “How David Bowie Used William S. Burroughs’ Cut-Up Method to Write His Unforgettable Lyrics,” May 7, 2019 Open Culture, accessed April 18, 2021, https://www.openculture.com/2019/05/how-­ david-­b owie-­u sed-­w illiam-­s -­b urroughs-­c ut-­u p-­m ethod-­t o-­w rite-­h is-­ unforgettable-­lyrics.html. 42. Greco, 75–6. 43. Nick Stevenson, David Bowie: Fame, Sound and Vision (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2006), 122. 44. Ibid., 123. 45. Alex Sharpe, “Scary Monsters: The Hopeful Undecidability of David Bowie (1947–2016),” Law and Humanities 11, no. 2 (2017): 228–244. 46. Stark, 97. 47. David Bowie, “No Control,” in 1. Outside, 7243 8 40711 2 1, Virgin Records, 1995. CD. 48. Ibid., “The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (As Beauty).” 49. Ibid., “I’m Deranged.” 50. Profokiev, narrated by David Bowie, Peter and the Wolf b/w Eugene Ormandy Conducts Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra ARL 1-2743 RCA, 1978. LP; David Bowie, perf., David Bowie in Bertolt Brecht’s Baal DBBAAL 2018 Regal Zonophone/ Parlophone, 1989/2017. LP. 51. Bethany Usher and Stephanie Fremaux, “Turn Myself to Face Me: David Bowie in the 1990s and Discovery of Authentic Self,” in David Bowie: Critical Perspectives ed. Eoin Devereaux, Aileen Dillane, and Martin J. Power (London: Routledge, 2015), 66. 52. O’Leary, Pushing Ahead of the Dame. 53. Qtd. in Kathryn Johnson, “David Bowie is,” in David Bowie: Critical Perspectives ed. Eoin Devereaux, Aileen Dillane, and Martin J.  Power (London: Routledge, 2015), 14. 54. Stevenson, 122. 55. Naiman, 179. 56. “I Participate a Lot More Than You Think,” Facebook, Stargirl Showtime, accessed May 24, 2021, https://fb.watch/5I5tvZpd9O/. “Minotaure” is a real men’s cologne by Paloma Picasso available for sale, as of the time of this writing, on Walmart’s website for $100.00 and on perfumespot.com for $36.00 for a 2.5  oz bottle. From the Perfume Spot website: “An Oriental fragrance for men. Minotaure was launched in 1992. The nose

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behind this fragrance is Michel Almairac. Top notes are aldehydes, coriander, tarragon, fruity notes, galbanum and bergamot; middle notes are jasmine, lily-of-the-valley, rose and geranium; base notes are sandalwood, tonka bean, amber, musk, vanilla and cedar. UPC: 3360373007905Ref: ammipa25s.” No, I have not yet purchased a bottle. 57. David Bowie, “Segue: Ramona A. Stone/I Am With Name,” in 1. Outside, 7243 8 40711 2 1, Virgin Records, 1995. CD.  Ibid., “The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (As Beauty).” 58. Ken McLeod, “Aliens, Futurism and Meaning in Popular Music,” Popular Music 22, no. 3 (Oct. 2003): 342 (337–355). Julie Lobalzo Wright, qtd. in Troija Cinque and Sean Redmond, The Fandom of David Bowie: Everyone Says “Hi” (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 52. 59. Naiman, 180. 60. See the introduction to James Rovira, ed., Rock and Romanticism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 7–12; 15–21 for a discussion of the relationship between Gothic and Romantic art forms and a discussion of male and female Gothic in relationship to the study of rock music. 61. Dennis Young interviewing David Bowie, “Exploring David Bowie,” originally published in The Journal, October 1995, reprinted in More Dark than Shark, accessed May 17, 2021, http://www.moredarkthanshark. org/eno_int_jour-­oct95.html. 62. O’Leary, Ashes to Ashes, 293. 63. Reynolds, 232. 64. Morley, 53. 65. Blake, 152. 66. Nicholas Pegg, The Complete David Bowie (London: Titan Books, 2016); Chris O’Leary, Ashes to Ashes: The Songs of David Bowie 1976–2016 (London: Repeater Books, 2018). 67. Trynka. 68. Ibid., 439. 69. Ibid. 70. Pegg, 154. 71. Gorman. 72. Locations of different recordings taken from O’Leary. 73. Nicholas P. Greco, David Bowie in Darkness: A Study of 1. Outside and the Late Career (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2015), 154. Song titles are reproduced three times in the CD digipak: the back cover, throughout the booklet, and on the inside back cover, where they are normally and clearly printed to provide songwriting credit. The words “Hearts” and “Architects” in all three places lack the apostrophe. Some critics read this as a group possessive, but then the apostrophe should appear after the “s.”

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74. Tiffany Naiman, “Art’s Filthy Lesson,” in David Bowie: Critical Perspectives ed. Eoin Devereaux, Aileen Dillane, and Martin J.  Power (London: Routledge, 2015), 184. 75. Greco associates “Strangers When We Meet” with Leon Blank, but however much I look I don’t see those words on the lyric page for this song, which is very busy visually: lyrics are written onto two interpenetrating layers, a black base layer with a green paint layer smeared over it, the lyrics typed across both layers in four columns. Greco appears to be working with a copy of the Japanese double CD edition while I’m working with the original UK digipak, so there may be variants in the artwork. Thematically, the song seems closest to Nathan Adler’s feelings for Ramona A. Stone, and it's very likely the song has no connection whatsoever to the album narrative. 76. David Bowie, “Outside,” on 1. Outside, 7243 8 40711 2 1, Virgin Records, 1995. CD. 77. Greco, 83. 78. Simon Reynolds, Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century (New York: Dey St., 2016), 106. Reynolds sees in Bowie’s early 1970s’ thought a “convergence” of Buddhist belief in “the everyday world as an illusion” with “the performative notion of gender and self-construction that underpins camp and drag” (105). 79. David Bowie, “Hallo Spaceboy,” on 1. Outside. 80. O’Leary, 401. 81. David Bowie, “Thru’ These Architects Eyes,” on 1. Outside. 82. Pegg, 425. O’Leary says that Scharwkögler was “wrongly believed to have castrated himself in performance,” but “did fall out of a window to his death” (372). See Greco’s more extensive and very good discussion of the specific artworks mentioned in the diary in David Bowie in Darkness (130–138). 83. David Bowie, “The Diary of Nathan Adler, or, The Art-Ritual Murder of Baby Grace Blue,” 1. Outside, 7243 8 40711 2 1, Virgin Records, 1995. CD, p. 14. 84. Ibid., 2. 85. Greco, 136. 86. O’Leary, 386–7. 87. Ibid., 405. 88. Ibid., 388. 89. Ibid., 390. 90. Ibid., 392. 91. Ibid., 399–400.

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92. Chris O’Leary, “I Am With Name/Segue: Ramona A.  Stone,” Pushing Ahead of the Dame: David Bowie, Song by Song, accessed June 2, 2021, https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2013/01/31/i-­a m-­w ith-­n ame­segue-­ramona-­a-­stone/. 93. O’Leary, Ashes to Ashes, 382. 94. Ibid. 95. Bowie, “Segue—Algeria Touchshriek,” on 1. Outside. 96. Ibid. 97. Ibid., “The Diary,” 2. 98. O’Leary, Ashes to Ashes, 382.

CHAPTER 11

“Blackstar”: David Bowie’s Twenty-FirstCentury Ars Moriendi Jennifer Lillian Lodine-Chaffey

Introduction Shortly before his death in 1631, the poet and minister John Donne prepared for his end in an extraordinary way. According to his biographer, Izaak Walton, Donne commissioned a painter to draw a portrait of him in his shroud, posed as if already dead. This image, Donne envisioned, would become the basis of a statue showing the writer rising from a funeral urn with a winding sheet wrapped around his corpse. Walton recounts that “when the picture was fully finished, he caused it to be set by his bed-side, where it continued, and became his hourly object ‘till his death.’”1 While the creation of such a memorial may strike us as morbid, by fashioning his own funerary monument Donne actually participated in an important early modern tradition that allowed individuals to prepare themselves for death. The ars moriendi, or art of dying, encouraged individuals to

J. L. Lodine-Chaffey (*) Department of English, Philosophy, and Modern Languages, Montana State University Billings, Billings, MT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Rovira (ed.), David Bowie and Romanticism, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97622-4_11

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thoughtfully and artfully plan for and practice their deaths. By playing at being dead and envisioning himself as a corpse, Donne hoped to mitigate his fear of death and embrace his mortality. Indeed, the English ars moriendi called for individuals to not only conceive of themselves as dead, but it also required preparation that addressed those left behind and the state of the dying individual’s soul. According to tradition, in their final moments the dying person needed to make amends with family members and friends, seek validation from the divine, and resist giving into despair. To meet these conditions, Donne also provided detailed instructions in his will, leaving meaningful parting gifts to friends and kin, and expressing his faith in God and hope in the resurrection. Thus, Donne’s death, with its focus on accepting his mortality and getting right with the living, fulfilled the early modern requirements for an artful and unified end. On January 7, 2016, about a week before his death, David Bowie released his final music video, “Lazarus.” The similarities between Donne’s death shroud portrait and Bowie’s video are unmistakable as both highlight the artists’ engagements with mortality and creation of an artful death. In this song and video, and throughout his final album, ★, Bowie’s use of symbols associated with early modern death rituals as well as the communal aspects of his parting gift to fans reveal possibilities for rediscovering the art of dying for our modern age. Part of what makes Bowie’s work relevant, I contend, is the way he used art to cultivate the type of community necessary to shape a meaningful experience of death. Such considerations are often lacking in contemporary society due to the current biomedical approach to dying, but they were a significant part of the ars moriendi tradition and the way early modern people and the Romantics approached death. While the English craft of dying reached its pinnacle during the late medieval and early modern periods, a revival of death as art also concerned the Romantics. Indeed, the Renaissance preoccupation with preparing for a good end and the sentimental death rituals associated with the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries share commonalities as both stress the dying subject as the center of attention and both attempt to overcome the alienation that dying alone and unrehearsed threatened. The Enlightenment period’s accommodation of death and dying, according to Philippe Ariès, shifted drastically from the medieval and early modern “sensibility that assigned an increasingly high value and increasingly important role to physical death.”2 Instead, during the Enlightenment, Ariès specifies another phase of engagement with death he calls “Remote and Imminent

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Death,” which was characterized by the sense of death as distant and fearful and the devaluations of the rituals surrounding human mortality. However, during the era associated most fully with Romanticism, as Ariès argues in his groundbreaking study, The Hour of Our Death, death once again became something individuals must perform artfully. For Ariès, who designates this time “The Age of the Beautiful Death,” dying during the Romantic era included intimacy with death, a shared sense of community, and a renewed emphasis on the worth of the individual.3 These values resonated not only with the early moderns, but exemplify the spirit of Romanticism as outlined by Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, who contend that at its core Romanticism broadly defined responded to a range of social forces, including not only capitalism and rationalism, but also the breakdown of collective social relations.4 Thus, the Romantic return to the death rituals of an earlier era can be viewed in “opposition to capitalism in the name of pre-capitalist values,” which in this case include establishing a community around death and verifying the worth of the dying individual as a subject outside of the capitalist realm.5 Similarly, Mark Sandy notes that Romantic forms of mourning demonstrate not only the historical realities of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but also “manifest themselves … as powerfully proleptic and lasting transhistorical presences” that inform many artists in our current age.6 Thus, a return to the traditional rituals as outlined in the ars moriendi and echoed by the Romantics can be interpreted as a denouncement of contemporary approaches to death, which have become commercialized by the funeral industry and increasingly detached from familial and societal experiences. Bowie’s engagement with his own mortality, I argue, returns to earlier practices because it reengages with community and utilizes the symbols and methods associated with an artful approach to dying rediscovered in the Romantic period.

The Death Arts: A Brief Discussion The ars moriendi, or the art of dying well, developed in Germany during the fifteenth century and originally “was popularized by the printing press in the form of books containing woodcuts, individual images that each person contemplated in his own home.”7 The most popular early version of these handbooks, created for the illiterate as well as the literate, consisted of a series of woodcuts, each representing the temptations a dying person would face in their final moments. During the late medieval and

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early modern period, men and women across Europe relied on the ars moriendi tradition to prepare themselves for death. These religious handbooks offered readers “a well-defined set of attitudes and gestures which dying Christians were expected to manifest at this, the most solemn and important moment of their lives” and admonished them to adhere to their faith and make amends with God and their fellow humans.8 The ars moriendi taught that death was inevitable, but it also offered comfort to Christians by reminding them of Christ’s sacrifice and reassuring them of their salvation and place in heaven if they prepared themselves with contrition and sincere faith. By thinking on death, individuals could learn to regard the vanities of life as transient and endeavor to enhance the inner spiritual self, thus assuring their correct preparation for the life to come. In practical terms, the ars moriendi tracts and subsequent tradition provided a narrative framework for individuals to prepare themselves for the moment of death not only spiritually, but also physically and socially. Indeed, many of these manuals included a theatrical type of staging meant to manage the fears of the dying and those surrounding him or her. One of the earlier English tracts, for example, Richard Whitford’s A Dayly Exercyse and Experyence of Dethe (1537), advised that preparation for death should include performing being dead, and recommended that his reader: prostrate upon your face: remain, bide, and dwell here still / here expire and die stark dead / and utterly that no soul nor spirit be left or bide in your body / but all for the time so far departed / not only all things of the world, but also from the self body yet there lying as a lump of clay be left without any sense or wits of hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, or touching.9

By practicing the actual physical aspects of death by shutting out the senses and lying completely still, Whitford believed that individuals could defend themselves against the terror of death by making it familiar. Additionally, Whitford, as well as other notable English ars moriendi writers such as William Perkins (Salve for a Sicke Man, 1595) and Christopher Sutton (Disce Mori, 1600), stressed the communal aspects of a good death. Perkins, for instance, notes that the dying individual “is exercised partly in conference with the Physitian, partly with the minister about his soules health and matters of conscience, and partly with friends that come to visit.”10 Likewise, the original fifteenth-century Latin version of the Ars

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Moriendi outlines the roles of family members and the clergy when helping the dying individual navigate his or her last hours.11 This communal aspect of death, as attested to by early modern and Romantic practices, remained important in the Western world until fairly recently. As Ariès notes, “death was always public” until the end of the nineteenth century.12 Families and friends kept vigil, the dying asked for forgiveness from loved ones, and minsters provided absolution from sins. So important was the presence of friends at the bedside of the dying that a 1497 English treatise on the ars moriendi advised lay people how to help their dying neighbors: When any of likelihood shall die / then is [it] most necessary to have a special friend / the which will heartily help and pray for him / and therewith counsel the sick for the wellbeing of his soul / and moreover to see that all other[s] so do about him / or else quickly for to make him depart.13

Of note here is the author’s stress that the dying need “a special friend” to assist them in their final hours through prayer and making sure that all visitors show concern for the dying individual’s soul. These communal aspects of death were very important to individuals and communities during not only the early modern period, but during the Romantic era as well. Indeed, as Ernest Bernhardt-Kabisch notes in his study of the epitaph and the Romantic poets, literary epitaph-writing, which sought to establish communal bonds between the deceased and those who remained, peaked during two main time periods: “One occurred in the first half of the seventeenth century, the other in the second half of the eighteenth century.”14 William Wordsworth, whose work influenced early nineteenth century engagements with human mortality, based much of his thinking about the commemoration of the departed on John Weever’s 1631 treatise Antient Funerall Monuments, which sought to preserve the connections between the living and the dead through monument and memory.15 This concept of a community of the dead is most fully explored in Wordsworth’s “Essays upon Epitaphs,” the first of which was published in 1810. As Wordsworth notes, epitaphs serve the needs of both the living and dead by functioning as “a record to preserve the memory of the dead, as a tribute due to his individual worth, for a satisfaction to the sorrowing hearts of the Survivors, and for the common benefit of the living.”16 These records of the dead, containing biographical information and celebrations of individual worth, facilitate the continued

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contemplation of the dead by the living. Applying Wordsworth’s understandings of epitaphs, as Dewey H. Hall notes, allows for a reanimation of the dead through the inscription of the self that “occupies the gap beyond life at the threshold of death.”17 According to Wordsworth, a proper consideration of death and the creation of epitaphs that preserved connections between the departed and the living allowed people to face their ends communally and in some ways to transcend the limits of mortality. Thus, for Wordsworth, the country parish church, with its memorials to the deceased in close proximity to the celebrations and social gatherings of the survivors, functioned as “a visible centre of a community of the living and the dead; a point to which are habitually referred the nearest concerns of both.”18 For the Romantics, death also signified opportunities to imagine a type of material transcendence made possible through the artists’ hope in their continual presence in the objects they fashioned to outlive them. John Keats’s poem, “This Living Hand, Now Warm and Capable,” explores this posthumous transcendence: This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be conscience—calm’d–-see here it is–I hold it towards you.19

Here, the speaker expresses his awareness of his upcoming death and that the lines of poetry he writes will someday replace his hand as material evidence of his existence. Yet the hand Keats extends to the reader at the end becomes more than just a sign of the poet. Instead, the lines suggest that the poem itself is in some way a true representation of the poet and that by reading or listening we as readers pour ourselves into the piece so that Keats lives again. As Brendan Corcoran contends, Keats, in this poem, and indeed, throughout his body of work, “is not merely concerned with endowing his writing with a resolute materiality; he seeks to be present in, to be an absolute part of, the writing that stages his very peculiar danse macabre.”20 For the Romantics, then, confronting death necessitated

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establishing bonds between the living and dead and endowing their creative work with individuality that could imaginatively transcend human mortality.

Contemporary Western Engagements with Death The attitude toward death today in the Western world, however, is often one of denial, evasion, and isolation. New technologies, which keep death at bay longer than ever before, have resulted in many individuals dying in hospitals and nursing homes, far from their homes and families and often without the ability to fashion a death that matters. In a recent book, physician Haider Warraich notes that “these days, not only are people dying more often in hospitals, they are seeing a lot more of the hospital in the time before they die.”21 Warraich also pointed out that “scientists now estimate that by 2020, 40 percent of Americans will die alone in nursing homes.”22 Concerns about the bio-medicalization of death have prompted some scholars to call for a new ars moriendi, one involving rituals that allow the dying “to achieve important personal and social ends” and “be more at one with ourselves and those around us.”23 One way for modern individuals to craft their own deaths may be through social media and first-person accounts of their process of dying. Michael Brennan, in a 2018 article about current attempts to rethink the biomedical approach to death, notes the recent proliferation of auto/ pathographies or “published, first person accounts of illness, bereavement, or dying.”24 According to Brennan, motivations for chronicling a personal experience of dying range from monetary gain to a desire for public recognition to experiencing a sense of agency during a time when life decisions spiral out of the individual’s control. Yet all of the pathographies Brennan discusses rely on individuals relinquishing their privacy and publicly divulging their upcoming deaths on a national or global stage, which often thwarts the dying person’s desire for agency. Perhaps the most famous example of such dying, British reality star Jade Goody’s decision to expose her terminal cervical cancer and suffering on social media, met with both praise and condemnation from the public. Some journalists, for instance, interpreted Goody’s openness about her dying as educational and brave, while others criticized her for using her terminal illness to garner wealth and attention.25 And while public dying may allow others to learn about passing away, open up an important discourse about modern approaches to death, and even provide the dying with a community of

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mourners and witnesses, other avenues for a modern ars moriendi exist. As David Bowie’s approach to dying illustrates, contemporary individuals can fashion deaths that rely not on an abdication of privacy, but instead preserve individuality, promote community, and artfully use religious and secular symbols to create meaning in the face of mortality.

Bowie’s Interest in Mortality: A Brief Synopsis While ★ serves as Bowie’s final artistic masterpiece and may be interpreted as his artfully performed approach to death, Bowie’s interest in human mortality is present throughout his music repertoire.26 Niall Boyce contends that “illness and death were part of his work right from the start” and notes in particular the final track of Bowie’s first album, “Please Mr. Gravedigger” as well as the singer’s 1985 commentary on his brother’s suicide, “Jump They Say.”27 Similarly, Michael K. Potter and Cam Cobb argue that “Blackstar was merely the last step in a lifelong lyrical preoccupation” with death and dying, and Tanja Stark suggests that the continual presence of death in Bowie’s lyrics shows his interest in navigating and understanding “liminal spaces” and exploring the possibility of life beyond or outside of death.28 Finally, Will Brooker, while agreeing that Bowie’s work encompasses an “undeniable theme of death,” argues that Bowie regularly kills off his various personas—Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke, and Major Tom, to name a few—only to revive, regenerate, and return these characters in new forms.29 For Brooker, regenerations of older characters continually resurface within newer works, as if Bowie’s personas coexist in a dimension all their own.30 And for Brooker, such resurrections reveal that Bowie consistently presented himself as “an unstable figure of becoming” in order to craft a “discernible identity” based on the pattern of his alterations.31 Yet, while Brooker offers a portrait of Bowie that convincingly takes into account his backward glances at past personas and his consistent engagement with themes of death and resurrection, a closer look at Bowie’s musical career suggests a move towards a new engagement with and understanding of death that occurred throughout his career. Two particular songs illustrate Bowie’s developing approach to human mortality throughout his life: his 1972 translated cover of “La Mort” (“My Death”) and his rumination on death, “Bring Me the Disco King,” which was first recorded in 1993 but not released until 2003’s Reality. Although originally written by Jacques Brel, “My Death” remained a

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mainstay in Bowie live playlists throughout his career, beginning with his Ziggy Stardust Tour in the early 1970s.32 While acknowledging the inevitability of death, the lyrics of “My Death” offer an approach to mortality that echoes Andrew Marvell’s famous c. 1653 poem, “To His Coy Mistress.” Drawing on the classical tradition of carpe diem, Marvell suggests that although he can imagine endless time devoted to the seduction of his beloved, the awful fact of human death and the fruitlessness of eternity inspire him not to embrace mortality, but instead to grasp passionately the here and now.33 Likewise, “My Death” suggests that although the singer, like Marvell, continually hears “Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near,” Bowie chooses to embrace present moments of friendship and sexual intimacy in spite of his inescapable appointment with death.34 In the translated lyrics Bowie sings, the awareness of death’s inevitable arrival inspires him to drink with friends, to laugh, and to concentrate on the body of his beloved.35 Thus, the certainty of death, rather than inspiring the artist to prepare for his mortal ends, causes him to dwell more fully in the moment and fill up the time before the inevitable occurs. Like Marvell’s seventeenth-century poem, “My Death” focuses on the sexual act as a way to push death aside. Additionally, both pieces link sexual intimacy and death. Marvell’s solution to the transience of time and the horror of death and bodily decay is a vehement rebellion against the unrelenting progress of human life. Not only does he suggest that the couple consummate their relationship, but that they do so “like amorous birds of prey” with “rough strife.”36 The realization of human finitude—that the speaker and his lover can never overcome death—leads thus to a violent expression of erotic desire that Marvell suggests will shorten their lives. Likewise, Bowie’s rendition of “My Death” acknowledges that death lies in wait in the body of the woman, bound up in his enjoyment of her arms and thighs. In “Bring Me the Disco King,” in contrast, Bowie seems more aware of the futility of his earlier escapades and carpe diem approach to living. “Life wasn’t worth the balance / Or the crumpled paper it was written on,” he muses.37 In this song Bowie looks not only backward to his wasted youth, but also forward to his demise, addressing a personified Death directly and expressing a desire for the grim reaper to take him unaware, despite his initial hope in Death’s promise to make his final moments clear. Here, in contrast to his later artful construction of death, Bowie wants to passively fade into eternity and begs for an end without foreknowledge or time for preparation. However, while the speaker seems to long for a quick and unanticipated demise, in the chorus he expresses a fear of becoming

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“invisible.” To combat the loss of self he imagines Bowie urges his listeners to “dance through the fire,” and to memorialize the figure of the Disco King, which the listener can only assume is the mythic persona of Bowie himself. If “Bring Me the Disco King” plots out Bowie’s death, it does so by imagining a world in which the ending remains unclear and unplanned, but the memory and legend of the deceased continues to exert a powerful influence on those who remain. Bowie’s final engagements with mortality build upon but significantly alter this perspective. Bowie’s understanding of mortality, I argue, changed over time, as shown through shifts in his musical focus and adoption of Romantic ideas of transcendence, but also in part due perhaps to his extensive reading about matters of death.38 Not only did Bowie compose and resurrect lyrics related to death, he also, as shown through his widely publicized 2013 top 100 books list, read deeply about mortality.39 Of particular note is his inclusion of Jessica Mitford’s 1963 exposé of the modern death industry, The American Way of Death, and William Faulkner’s Southern Gothic meditation on death and burial, As I Lay Dying. Mitford’s work, in particular, offers readers a new approach to death, based not on capitalist values and the unnatural embalming and sanitization of the corpse, but on a respect for the dying and an acceptance of death as a part of life. And perhaps Mitford’s book influenced Bowie, who requested a simple cremation and opted not to have a funeral service.40

“Lazarus”: David Bowie’s Ars Moriendi Unlike modern pathographies, which often spark a round of public interviews and an open discussion of the process of dying, David Bowie chose to keep his own upcoming demise a secret. Instead of publicly lamenting his terminal cancer or speaking openly about his suffering, Bowie created ★, which his producer Tony Visconti noted was not only “a work of Art,” but “his parting gift.”41 And this final work, rather than statements to the press, or written messages left behind for adoring fans, serves as Bowie’s ars moriendi—his own unique art of dying. In particular, the track “Lazarus” and its music video echo earlier death rituals, including both the medieval and early modern approach to death as an artful construction and Romanticism’s focus on death as quest for transcendence. The music video for “Lazarus,” shot when the singer knew his cancer was terminal, begins by focusing on a dark wooden wardrobe, coffin sized and slightly ajar. A close-up of Bowie in a hospital bed follows. Here the

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musician’s eyes are covered by a bandage with buttons sewn on top, suggesting that, like Donne, Bowie dons a type of shroud and enacts being dead to prepare himself for such an eventuality. Indeed, Bowie’s deathbed persona in “Lazarus,” positioned in a hospital bed, straining against the sheets, with eyes covered, practices death as if to embrace his mortality. In addition, the video incorporates a number of memento mori elements, including a skull positioned on Bowie’s writing desk, the coffin-like wardrobe, and even the empty shoes left beneath the bed. All serve to remind the audience of death’s inevitability, and by including these images Bowie forces the audience to confront human mortality.42 Like the original medieval and early modern guides to performing a good death, Bowie’s “Lazarus” stresses the positive aspects of death. Henry Montagu, Earl of Manchester, in his seventeenth-century treatise on death, Manchester al Mondo, Contemplatio Mortis & Immortalitatis, argues that death provides freedom from “all worldly injuries,” ends human misery, “frees us from all bodily labours,” and “eases us of all cares and troubles.”43 Bowie’s lyrics to “Lazarus” echo this positive approach to death, stressing his freedom from earthly cares by reminding his audience that he will become “Just like that bluebird / Now, ain’t that just like me?”44 In the music video these words, significantly, are followed by the final movements of Bowie’s onscreen persona as he pens his closing missive, stretches out his arms, and retreats into the wardrobe. The freedom he sings of here is a deathly freedom that leaves behind the sick bed and enters into the afterlife. Bowie’s inclusion of the bluebird, though, signifies more than just freedom. For a number of Romantic poets, bird song and bird flight symbolized the human soul or represented the creative muse. Wordsworth, for example, wrote of a sparrow that unexpectedly flew out of a winter storm into a king’s dwelling and then just as suddenly flew out. For Wordsworth, the bird’s brief entry into the human realm represents mortal life: Even such, that transient Thing The human soul; not utterly unknown While in the body lodged, her warm abode.45

Yet, while Wordsworth uses the bird to comment on the brevity of human life, other Romantic poets addressed themselves to birds as earlier poets had invoked the muse.46 In Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famed “To a Sky-Lark,” for instance, the poet speaks to the bird directly, asking that it teach him

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“What sweet thoughts are thine: / I have never heard / Praise of love or wine / That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.”47 Throughout the poem, Shelley compares himself to the sky-lark but finds that he lacks its perfect creativity and happiness, one which surpasses human understanding. The speaker also considers the bird’s ability to live in a perfect transcendent moment outside of time. Unlike humans, who “look before and after, / and pine for what is not,” the sky-lark is free to give itself over to the joys of song and flight without worldly care or sorrow.48 Bowie, therefore, by imagining himself transformed into a bird, suggests that his new being will become independent of the weight of human existence and able to focus on the creative moment. Bowie’s use of the bluebird, in particular, symbolizes, according to Henry Rose’s study of the work of Maurice Maeterlinck, “an ideal after which man may be striving … the symbol of celestial truth which is essential to Man’s highest spiritual well-being.”49 This suggests not only Bowie’s acceptance of his death, but his wish that through death he will obtain certainty and transcend his mortal being. Furthermore, Bowie’s lyrics here highlight his individuality, reminding listeners that he retains his identity as an artist and seeker of truth, even as he nears death. In addition to his embrace of mortality, in the “Lazarus” video Bowie reveals his concerted effort to resist some of the specific temptations outlined in the ars moriendi, including despair and avarice. The traditional woodcuts from the British handbooks typically include images of demons, often placed beneath the deathbed, tempting the dying man or woman. In one particular image, from the 1450 version of the ars moriendi, demons tempt the dying man to despair by holding up signs that tell the man he has sinned (by fornication, perjury, and murder) and is thus unworthy of heaven and God’s grace.50 Yet, each temptation in the book is accompanied by an image meant to bring peace to the dying, and thus the woodcut directly following the temptation to despair is that of the dying man finding salvation through humility. Similarly, in “Lazarus” a demonic female figure lurks beneath the bed of the dying Bowie, often reaching out for him, suggesting not only disease, but hopelessness. Like his late medieval and early modern counterparts, though, Bowie seemingly resists this temptation in the video. Rather than allowing the dark woman to drag him from the bed, Bowie’s persona instead, in a move that echoes Christ’s position on the cross, stretches out his arms toward an angelic figure who stands in the shadows across the room. And this shadowy figure clad in white appears to gesture toward the Bowie persona with acceptance and grace.51

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While the video shares obvious parallels with early modern death rituals, Bowie’s “Lazarus” also suggests an approach to mortality embraced by the Romantics. As Raymond L. M. Lee argues, the Romantics exhibited a marked fascination with death and “approached [it] as a transition to undiscovered levels of existence rather than” equating it with “the sinister figure of the Grim Reaper.”52 Because Romanticism stressed the sublime, or an experience that takes individuals beyond themselves, death became a possible avenue for transcendence. Bowie’s movement from death bed to wardrobe suggests that death opens, rather than closes, a door. Likewise, the lyrics to “Lazarus” highlight the musician’s heightened experience of seeing the world from above and sloughing off the material world—his money and his cell phone. Additionally, Bowie’s final music video offers his fans objects that will add to the continuation of his place in the audience’s memory, which is something common to the later Romantic poets. Deborah Lutz argues that Keats’s poems, for instance, represent artifacts like urns and nightingales as objects of memory that both signify the mortality of the poet and point to his posthumous identity as a relic freed from time. 53 Of particular note is Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in which the poet considers how artifacts can preserve a moment in time. Although the artist who sculpted the urn Keats celebrates died long before, the figures gracing its surface continue to exist for the poet, forever fair and young. Indeed, Keats attests to the urn’s and its denizens’ permanence beyond his own lifetime: “When old age shall this generation waste, / Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe.”54 Significantly, the urn’s ability to transcend time, which is based on both the beauty of its design and its power to inspire thoughts of eternity, is also an object designed to hold human remains. Thus, the urn, while attesting to the enduring nature of art, also testifies to mortality. This same juxtaposition of death and deathlessness pervades Bowie’s “Lazarus” video, as evidenced by the juxtaposition of objects that transcend time and objects that remind the audience of death. Some of the objects showcased in the video, like skulls, clearly embody Bowie’s mortality, but others, like the costume he wears at the end of the video, offer the viewers a fleeting memory of a past Bowie (in this case Steve Schapiro’s 1974 photoshoot). In a sense, Bowie here re-envisions his history through objects that tell of his demise, while simultaneously reminding the viewers of his past and pointing toward his future as an object of memory. The relics the video showcases include the specter of the wardrobe, which serves as an entry point from the past and to the

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future; the high-heeled shoe left beneath the bed, signifying all that we leave behind; and the writing desk with its decorated skull, darkened lamp, and reams of paper, which highlights death and the artist’s hope to give a record of his life. By highlighting these things, Bowie signifies their importance to his story and his memory. Like Keats’s urn, which is decorated with images that will never fade although their meaning may be lost, Bowie’s video points towards his hope for a posthumous future in the minds of the public.55 Finally, “Lazarus” deliberately speaks to the community of Bowie’s fans, who stand in as witnesses to his last public performance. As noted before, Bowie’s character in the video dons clothing fans would recognize from his earlier performances, as if paying homage to those individuals who followed his career through all of its ups and downs. In addition, the use of jazz saxophones in the song, a sound that Bowie’s 2013 album The Next Day steered away from but harkens back to his earlier work in the 1970s and 1980s, allows fans to recall the melodies that Bowie embraced earlier in his career. Without giving it all away, Bowie points toward his death throughout the entire video, combining old and new symbols, juxtaposing the modern hospital bed against the old world ars moriendi and the Romantic fascination with objects of transcendence.56 Fans’ and journalists’ reactions to Bowie’s final music video and approach to death speak to the ability of this type work to function as an effective ars moriendi for our modern era. Bowie himself, at a speech given to graduating students at Berklee College, noted that music provided him with “a sublime means of communication when I wanted to touch people.”57 And following his death, numerous people attempted to interpret “Lazarus,” finding healing and community through their engagement with the lyrics and video. Jess Denham, for instance, theorized that in his final creative work Bowie represented himself as the resurrected Lazarus, “knowing that his musical legacy [would] transcend his death,” and continue to touch the lives of his fans. 58 Perhaps most poignantly, a palliative care doctor penned a thank you letter to Bowie in the days following the singer’s death, recognizing Bowie’s approach to death as “carefully planned,” thought provoking, and able to help one of his terminal patients face the end of her life.59 Contemporary scholars define a good death as “one in which a person dies at home surrounded by family and their community at the end of a long and fulfilled life.”60 David Bowie’s death met these requirements. Not only did he die at home in the supportive presence of his family, but

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he also incorporated the greater community in his passing. By staging his death as a performer for the public through his video “Lazarus,” Bowie allowed for the community of his fans to be involved in his demise, even if his fans did not at first realize the significance of his final video. Sociologist Jack Black notes that in the days following the singer’s death, numerous newspaper accounts stressed both Bowie’s desire for privacy and his silence about his upcoming demise, which allowed for his fans to create various and individualized versions of Bowie.61 Indeed, by fashioning a final album that remained ambiguous and remote, even while it spoke to his death, Bowie, according to Cowan, provided “a means of assisting and joining his listeners in their work of mourning.”62 And this mourning became, in the wake of Bowie’s death, a communal event, in which the outpouring of remembrances of the late singer and his music were shared throughout global networks. In addition to giving his audience a way to mourn, Bowie’s “Lazarus” allows his listeners to prepare for and accept their own eventual deaths. By dramatizing death, Bowie forces his viewers and listeners to consider human mortality. Fans looking back on these videos following Bowie’s demise see death painted large, but also perhaps sense a carefully constructed goodbye—an artful end to a life of immense creativity. And while we can’t all create a work of art to say goodbye to our family and friends, perhaps those of us who know our end is nigh can learn from Bowie’s final creative output and compose in words, or through actions, a final goodbye that reminds our loved ones of who we were, provides comfort through ritual, and embraces mortality not as simply loss, but as part of what makes us human.

Notes 1. Izaak Walton, The Life of John Donne, Dr. in Divinity, and Late Dean of Saint Pauls Church London (London: I. G. for R. Marriot, 1658), 112–113. 2. See Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes Toward Death Over the Last One Thousand Years, Helen Weaver (trans.), 2nd Edition (New York: Vintage Books, 2008), 297. 3. Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, 409–474. 4. Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2001), 1. 5. Robert Sayre and Michael Löwy, “Figures of Romantic Anti-Capitalism,” New German Critique 32 (Spring/Summer 1984): 46.

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6. Mark Sandy, Romanticism, Memory, and Mourning (New York: Routledge, 2016), 1. 7. Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, 107. 8. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400–c. 1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 322–323. 9. Richard Whitford, A dayly exercyse and experyence of dethe, gathered and set forth, by a brother of Syon Rycharde Whytforde (London, 1537), 36. The text has been modernized and originally read as follows: prostrate vpo[n] your face: remayne, byde & dwell here styll / here expyre & dye starke deed / & vtterly that no soule ne spiryte be lefte or byde in youre body / but all for the tyme so ferre departed / nat onely from all thynges of the world, but also from the selfe body yet there lyenge as a lu[m]pe of cley be lefte without any senses or wyttes of heryng, seynge, smellynge, tastyng, or touchynges. 10. William Perkins, A Salve for a Sicke Man, or a Treatise Containing the Nature, Differences, and Kindes of Death; as Also the Right Manner of Dying Well ([Cambridge]: John Legate, Printer to the Universitie of Cambridge, 1595), 32–33. 11. Fernando Espi Forcén and Carlos Espi Forcén, “Ars Moriendi: Coping with Death in the Middle Ages,” Palliative and Supportive Care 14 (2016): 554. 12. Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, 19. 13. Here begynneth a lytell treatyse called Ars moriendi (Westminster: Wynken de Worde, 1497), A II. The text has been modernized and originally read as follows: Whan ony of lyklyhode shall deye / thenne is moost necessarye to haue a specyall frende / the whiche wyll hertly helpe & praye for hym / and therwith cou[n]seyll the syke for the weele of his soule / & more ouer to se that all other so do about hym / or elles quyckly for to make hym departe. 14. Ernest Bernhardt-Kabisch, “The Epitaph and the Romantic Poets: A Survey,” Huntington Library Quarterly 30, no. 2 (February 1967): 113. 15. For the connections between Wordsworth’s essays and Weever’s work, see Thomas W. Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 372 and Jessica Fay, “Prospects of Contemplation: Wordsworth’s Winter Garden at Coleorton, 1806–1811,” European Romantic Review 24, no. 3 (2013): 307–315. See also John Weever, Ancient Funerall Monuments Within the United Monarchie of Great Britaine, Ireland, and the Ilands Adjacent (London: Thomas Harper, 1631).

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16. William Wordsworth, “Essays Upon Epitaphs (1810),” in 21st Century Oxford Authors: William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, 541. 17. Dewey H.  Hall, “Signs of the Dead: Epitaphs, Inscriptions, and the Discourse of the Self,” ELH 68, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 657. 18. Wordsworth, “Essays Upon Epitaphs,” 543. 19. John Keats, “This Living Hand, Now Warm and Capable,” in John Keats: Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1978), 384. 20. Brendan Corcoran, “Keats’s Death: Towards a Posthumous Poetics,” Studies in Romanticism 48, no. 2 (2009): 348. Italics in original. 21. Haider Warraich, Modern Death: How Medicine Changed the End of Life (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017), 44. 22. Warraich, Modern Death, 45. 23. Daniel Callahan, The Troubled Dream of Life: In Search of a Peaceful Death (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 200. 24. Michael Brennan, “Christopher Hitchens’ Public Dying: Toward a SecularHumanist Ars Moriendi?” OMEGA—Journal of Death and Dying 77, no. 2 (2018): 105. 25. Hannah Frith, Jayne Raisborough, and Orly Klein, “Making Death ‘Good’: Instructional Tales for Dying in Newspaper Accounts of Jade Goody’s Death,” Sociology of Health and Illness 35, no. 3 (2013): 424. 26. See also Jacqueline Furby’s recent article, in which she contends that “images of violence and death are commonly found in David Bowie’s music and film art.” Furby, “New Killer Star,” Cinema Journal 57, no. 3 (Spring 2018): 164. 27. Niall Boyce, “Strangers when we Meet: David Bowie, Mortality, and Metamorphosis,” The Lancet 387. February 6, 2016, 528–529. 28. Michael K. Potter, and Cam Cobb, “David Bowie and Death,” in David Bowie and Philosophy: Rebel Rebel, ed. by Theodore G. Ammon (Chicago: Open Court, 2016), 111. See also Tanja Stark, “Confronting Bowie’s Mysterious Corpses,” in Enchanting David Bowie: Space/Time/Body/ Memory, ed. by Toija Cinque, Christopher Moore, and Sean Redmond (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2015), 61–78. 29. Will Brooker, Forever Stardust: David Bowie Across the Universe (London/ New York: I. B. Tauris, 2017), 166–167. 30. Ibid., 178–179. 31. Ibid., 192 32. For an in-depth look at Bowie’s cover of Jacques Brel’s “La Mort” (“My Death”), see Chris O’Leary, “My Death,” Pushing Ahead of the Dame, https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2010/06/02/my-­death/ (accessed 2 January 2019).

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33. Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress,” in Andrew Marvell: The Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 50–51. 34. Ibid., lines 21–22. 35. David Bowie, vocal performance of “My Death,” by Jacques Brel, translated by Mort Shuman, on Live Santa Monica ’72, EMI BOWLIVE 201072, 2008, compact disc. 36. Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress,” lines 38, 43. 37. David Bowie, “Bring Me the Disco King,” on Reality, Columbia Records CK 90576, 2013, compact disc. 38. Some scholars noted a change in Bowie’s creative output even prior to his demise. Nick Stevenson, for instance, argues that Bowie, as evidenced by the songs on The Next Day (2013), began to exhibit signs of a “late style,” or a more insistent focus on human mortality and re-narration of the individual human life. See Stevenson, “David Bowie Now and Then: Questions of Fandom and Late Style,” in David Bowie: Critical Perspectives, ed. Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane, and Martin J.  Power (New York: Routledge, 2015), 280–294. Bowie’s interest in early modern literature and possible familiarity with the ars moriendi is also attested to by his song “‘Tis a Pity She was a Whore,” which pays homage to John Ford’s early-seventeenth-­ century play, Tis Pity She’s a Whore, and by his use of a skull when performing “Cracked Actor.” The latter, while interpreted by many as a reference to Yorick’s skull in Hamlet, may more accurately signify the skull of Gloriana in Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607). 39. David Bowie, “Bowie’s Top 100 Books—The Complete List.” Davidbowie. com. 1 October 2013. Accessed 2 January 2019. 40. Harriet Alexander, “David Bowie ‘cremated without ceremony in New  York,’” The Telegraph, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/ music/music-­n ews/12098782/David-­B owie-­c remated-­w ithout-­ ceremony-­in-­New-­York.html (14 January 2016; accessed 16 June 2018). 41. Daniel Welsh, “David Bowie dead: ‘Lazarus’ producer Tony Visconti reveals he knew of parting gift plan for a year,” Huffington Post, http:// www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2016/01/11/david-­bowie-­dead-­l azarus-­ music-­video_n_8953102.html (11 January 2016; accessed 19 December 2018). 42. David Bowie, “Lazarus,” YouTube video, posted by David Bowie, 7 January 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-­JqH1M4Ya8. 43. Henry Montagu, Manchester Al Mondo: Contemplatio Mortis et Immortalitatis (London: Richard Bishop for Francis Constable, 1642), 58–60. 44. David Bowie, “Lazarus,” on “★” [Blackstar], ISO Records 88875173862, 2016, compact disc.

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45. William Wordsworth, “Persuasion,” in The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford University Press 1928), 422, lines 7–9. 46. Frank Doggett, “Romanticism’s Singing Bird.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 14, no. 4, Nineteenth Century (Autumn 1972): 551. 47. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “To a Sky-Lark,” in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat. (New York: Norton, 2002), 304–307, lines 61–65. 48. Ibid., lines 86–87. 49. Henry Rose, Maeterlinck’s Symbolism: The Blue Bird, and Other Essays (New York: Dodd Mead & Company, 1911), 6. 50. Ars Moriendi (edition Princeps, Circa 1450): A Reproduction of the Copy in the British Library, ed. W.  Harry Rylands, London: Wyman & Sons, 1881, n.p. 51. Bowie, “Lazarus,” YouTube video, posted by David Bowie, 7 January 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-­JqH1M4Ya8. 52. Raymond L.  M. Lee, “Modernity, Mortality and Re-Enchantment: The Death Taboo Revisited,” Sociology 42, no. 4 (2008): 751. 53. See Deborah Lutz, Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 37–38. 54. John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in John Keats: Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1978), 282–283, lines 46–47. 55. Ibid., 282–283. 56. Likewise, in his video, “Blackstar,” Bowie blends religious imagery with symbols and characters well known to his fans. The jewel-encrusted skull discovered in the astronaut’s suit, for instance, has been interpreted by many critics as the final remains of “Major Tom,” while three scarecrows crucified in a field bring to mind the death of Christ. Samuel Lyndon Gladden also notes that “Blackstar” references other Bowie productions, including the music videos for “Fashion” and “Ashes to Ashes.” See May Kokkidou and Elvina Paschali, “Signs of Mortality in David Bowie’s ‘Blackstar’ Video Clip [★],” Philosophy Study 7, no. 12 (2017): 645–661 and Gladden, “Manner, Mood, and Message: Bowie, Morrissey, and the Complex Legacy of Frankenstein,” in Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms, ed. James Rovira (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 145–162, especially 149–150. 57. “David Bowie—Berklee Commencement,” YouTube video, posted by Berklee College of Music, 11 January 2016, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=IZNEvTYVo4s.

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58. Jess Denham, “David Bowie dead: Swansong ‘Lazarus’ takes on poignant new meaning in lyrics and music video,” The Independent. 11 January 2016. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-­e ntertainment/music/news/ david-­bowie-­dead-­swansong-­lazarus-­takes-­on-­poignant-­new-­meaning-­in-­ lyrics-­and-­music-­video-­a6805571.html (accessed 13 January 2019). 59. Mark Taubert, “A Thank you Letter to David Bowie from a Palliative Care Doctor,” January 15, 2016. BMJSPCblog. https://blogs.bmj.com/ spcare/2016/01/15/a-­thank-­you-­letter-­to-­david-­bowie-­from-­a-­palliative-­ care-­doctor/. 60. K.  Thornton and C.  B. Phillips, “Performing the Good Death: the Medieval Ars Moriendi and Contemporary Doctors,” Medical Humanities 35, no. 2 (2009): 96. 61. Jack Black, “The Reification of Celebrity: Global Newspaper Coverage of the Death of David Bowie,” International Review of Sociology (2016): 9, 16. 62. Jack Cowan, “Autobituary: The Life and/as Death of David Bowie & the Specters from Mourning,” Miranda 17 (2018), http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/13374.

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Discography Bowie, David. “Space Oddity.” Mercury Side A, 7 inch vinyl single. Recorded June 1969. ———. “Five Years,” in The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, RCA, vinyl LP. Recorded November 1971a. ———. “Life on Mars?” in Hunky Dory. RCA, vinyl LP.  Recorded June– August 1971b.

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———. “Oh! You Pretty Things.” in Hunky Dory. RCA, vinyl LP. Recorded June– August 1971c. ———. “Starman,” in The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, RCA, vinyl LP. Recorded November 1971d. ———. “Ziggy Stardust,” in The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, RCA, vinyl LP, Recorded November 1971e. ———. “Andy Warhol,” in Hunky Dory. Parlophone 218999-PRL2, compact disc. Originally released in 1971f. ———. Aladdin Sane. Parlophone 219022-PRL2, 2014, compact disc. Originally released in 1973. ———. “Rebel Rebel,” in Diamond Dogs. RCA Victor CPL1-0576, 1974, 33 1/3 rpm. ———. “Fame,” RCA 7 inch vinyl single. Recorded January 1975a. ———. “Golden Years,” in Station to Station, RCA vinyl LP. Recorded September– November 1975b. ———. Young Americans. Parlophone 219055-PRL2, compact disc. Originally released in 1975c. ———. Station to Station. Parlophone 219066-PRL2, compact disc. Originally released in 1976a. ———. Station to Station. LP, RCA, 1976b ———. Low. Parlophone 219077-PRL2, 2014, compact disc. Originally released in 1977a. ———. “Heroes.” LP, RCA, 1977b. ———. Low. LP, RCA, 1977c. ———. Lodger. LP, RCA, 1979. ———. “Ashes to Ashes,” in Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), RCA vinyl LP. Recorded April 1980a. ———. “Ashes to Ashes,” in Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps). Parlophone 218956-PRL2, 2014, compact disc. Originally released in 1980b. ———. “Loving the Alien,” in Tonight, EMI compact disc. Recorded May 1984. ———. “Time Will Crawl,” in Never Let Me Down. Columbia 2407461, 1987, compact disc. ———. “Hallo Spaceboy,” by Bowie and Brian Eno, in Outside, BGM compact disc. Recorded January–February 1995. ———. “I Took a Trip on a Gemini Spaceship,” by Norman Carl Odam, in Heathen, ISO and Columbia compact disc. Recorded October 2000– January 2002. ———. “Bring Me the Disco King.” Reality. ISO/Columbia, 5125559, 2003. ———. “My Death.” Santa Monica ’72. EMI 07243 583221 2 5. 2008. ———. “Born in a UFO,” in The Next Day Extra, Spotify digital. Recorded 2013a. ———. “Dancing Out in Space,” in The Next Day, Spotify digital. Recorded 2013b.

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289

———. “Where Are We Now?” in The Next Day. ISO Records, Columbia 88765461862, 2014, compact disc. ———. Hunky Dory. Parlophone RPR2-218999, 2015a, compact disc. Originally Released in 1971. ———. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Parlophone RP2-791382, compact disc, 2015b. Originally released in 1972. ———. The Man Who Sold the World. Parlophone DB69732, 2016a, 33 1/3. Originally released in 1970. ———. “Lazarus,” in ★ [Blackstar]. Columbia 88875173862, 2016b, compact disc. ———. ★ [Blackstar]. ISO Records 88875173862, 2016c, compact disc. ———. Station to Station. Parlophone R2-219066, 2017, compact disc. Originally Released in 1976. ———. “Blackstar.” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kszLwBaC4 Sw&list=PLkRzqIoq7yc0Av28DVOEA6dxDdpTk2CSD&t=0s&index=8. (accessed 10 January 2020). ———. “Lazarus.” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-­ JqH1M4Ya8. (accessed 8 January 2020). ———. “Fame,” in Young Americans. ———. “Starman,” in The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. ———. “Young Americans,” in Young Americans. ———. “Ziggy Stardust,” in The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Bowie, David. and Brian Eno. “I’m Afraid of Americans,” in Earthling. Virgin 724384262723, 1997, compact disc. Brown, Duncan, Peter Godwin, and Sean Lyons. “Criminal World,” performed by David Bowie, in Let’s Dance. EMI America CDP 7460022, 1983, compact disc.

Index1

A Alomar, Carlos, 8–9, 149, 152, 245, 248 Anthropocene, 21, 53 Arias, Joey, 32 Ariès, Philippe, 24, 258–259, 261 Ashra, 22, 137n46 Austen, Jane, 28n59 Authentic, authenticity, 13, 23, 32–34, 45, 47, 100, 119, 121, 124, 132, 157, 166, 169, 186, 200, 205, 224, 249n3 B Bastille, 131, 154 Baudelaire, 21, 70, 73 The Beatles, 69–70, 78 Beckenham Arts Lab, 9 Beethoven, 13, 131

Benjamin, Walter, 96–99 Bisexual(ity), see Bowie, David and sex, sexuality Blake, William, 14, 20, 24n2, 28n59, 39, 40, 138n72, 178 Bono, see U2 Bowie, David Absolute Beginners, 166 acting, actor, 12–13, 96, 98–99, 185, 189, 230, 244 “After All,” 75 Aladdin Sane (persona), 13, 121, 147 Aladdin Sane (album), 19, 79, 92 as alien, 20–21, 24, 34, 42, 45, 48, 52–59, 61, 65n32, 88–91, 93, 98–110, 118, 121, 166, 171, 173, 177, 189, 226–227, 230, 232 “All the Young Dudes,” 135n35

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Rovira (ed.), David Bowie and Romanticism, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97622-4

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INDEX

Bowie, David (cont.) “Always Crashing in the Same Car,” 120, 134n12 and analysis, 4, 13, 158 and/as art, 3, 8, 13, 24, 35, 42, 51n45, 59, 83, 124, 147–148, 151, 159, 174, 186, 208, 217–219, 224, 226–230, 233, 240–242, 266 “Art Decade,” 124, 154 “Ashes to Ashes” (song), 129 “As the World Falls Down,” 205 Baal, 229 Barnett, Angela (wife), 43, 225 “Be My Wife,” 128, 152, 188 Berlin (city), 33, 83, 122, 127, 129, 134n12, 135n25, 137n56, 138n74, 143, 147–149, 154–155, 175, 229, 243 Berlin Trilogy, 22, 92, 99, 121, 135n25, 136n39, 141–144, 158–159 ★ [Blackstar] (album), 11, 19, 24, 166–167, 169, 178–179, 180n18, 258, 264, 266 “Blackstar” (song), 166, 264 “Blackstar” (video), 3, 167, 179, 275n56 Black Tie White Noise, 166, 173–174, 215–216 BowieNet, 174, 231 “Boys Keep Swinging,” 31–32, 177 “Breaking Glass,” 127, 150 “Bring Me the Disco King,” 264–266 The Buddha of Suburbia, 215–216 “Can’t Help Thinking About Me,” 10 as chameleon, 100, 119, 121, 122, 177, 225 CHANGESONEBOWIE, 119 childhood, 7–10 “Chilly Down,” 203–204

“China Girl,” 172 and cocaine, 5, 21, 54, 60, 73, 76, 79–83, 93, 119–120, 127, 146, 148, 175, 223–224 “Cracked Actor” (song), 274n38 “Dancing Out in Space,” 21, 56 David Bowie (1967 album), 11 death, 5–6, 169, 178–179, 196, 232, 257–271, 273n26. 275n56 Diamond Dogs (album), 44, 92, 173, 217, 228 and drug use (see and Bowie, David and cocaine) early bands, 9–10 Earthling and tour, 166, 167, 173, 174, 181n20, 235, 245, 249n3, 250n25 “Enemy is Fragile,” 237, 238 Evans, Terry (half-brother), 8 “Fame,” 63, 91, 94 “Fantastic Voyage,” 137n56 “Fashion,” 124, 275n56 “Five Years,” 57 and gender, 10, 19, 32–42, 45–48, 60–61, 103, 109–110, 124, 163–164, 171–173, 176, 182n51, 192–193, 195–199, 205, 210, 254n78 Glass Spider Tour, 8, 12, 166 and Gugging Hospital, 217, 241 “Hallo Spaceboy,” 56, 167, 241–242 Halloween Jack (persona), 92, 94, 173 “The Hearts Filthy Lesson,” 228, 239–241, 244, 245 Heathen, 169, 175, 182n54, 183n56 “Heroes” (album and song) 22, 121, 122, 130, 135n25, 146, 154–157 “A Horrid Cassette,” 249 ‘hours…,’ 169, 174–175, 235

 INDEX 

Hunky Dory (album), 69, 75, 77–78 “I Am With Name,” 237–239, 246 “I Can’t Give Everything Away,” 3 “I’d Rather Be Chrome,” 232, 237, 238 “I Have Not Been to Oxford Town,” 239, 241, 248 “I’m Afraid of Americans,” 167, 173 Iman (wife), 43, 124, 167, 224, 231 “I’m Deranged,” 229, 240, 241, 245–246 and interpretation, hermeneutics, 3–4, 81, 89–90, 93 “I Took a Trip on a Gemini Spaceship,” 60 Jazzin’ for Blue Jean (film), 164, 172 Jones, Haywood (father), 7–8, 11, 18, 220 Jones, Peggy (mother), 7–8, 18 “Jump They Say,” 174, 181n20, 264 Kids on the Roof, 11 Labyrinth, 23, 166, 187–211 “La Mort,” see Bowie, David, “My Death” “The Laughing Gnome,” 230 Lazarus (play), 12, 176, 178 “Lazarus” (song and video), 24, 178–179, 258, 266–271, 274n41 “Leon Takes Us Outside,” 237–239, 241, 248 Leon (unreleased album), 23, 216–219, 230–232, 234–240, 244–248 Let’s Dance, 23, 136n38, 164–166, 171–172, 180n8 “Life on Mars?,” 63, 183n60, 220 “Little Wonder,” 173 Lodger, 22, 32, 120–121, 126, 129, 135n35, 137n56, 142–145, 158, 177, 181n20

293

and London, 7, 78, 92, 122, 171, 230, 239, 243–244 “Loving the Alien,” 57, 58 Low, 12, 22, 92, 94, 120–122, 124, 126–130, 133, 136n39, 137n56, 142–144, 147–149, 151–154, 156, 175, 226 “Magic Dance,” 189–190, 198, 210 Major Tom (persona), 55, 57, 60, 94, 121, 167, 264, 275n56 The Man Who Fell to Earth, 21, 87, 91, 96, 112n13, 17, 118, 154, 176, 226 The Man Who Sold the World (album), 21, 31–32, 34, 43–44, 69–71, 73–75, 78–79, 81, 83, 220 “The Man Who Sold the World” (song), 31–32, 44 and media, 5, 44, 51n51, 91, 95, 111–112, 124, 165–166, 172, 178–179, 182n52, 219, 221–224, 234, 263 “Modern Love,” 136n38 “The Motel,” 239 “Move On,” 120, 135n35, 137n56, 158 and musicals (see Bowie, David and theater) “My Death,” 264–265 “A New Career in a New Town,” 126 Newton (Lazarus), 176–177 Newton, Thomas Jerome, 21–22, 87–91, 93–94, 96, 98–111, 112n10, 226 Never Let Me Down, 8, 166 The Next Day, 21, 156, 167, 169, 175–177, 237, 274n38 “No Control,” 229, 239, 241, 244 “Nothing To Be Desired,” 240 and the occult, 21, 70, 76–78, 80–83, 145

294 

INDEX

Bowie, David (cont.) “Oh! You Pretty Things,” 57–58 1. Outside, 3, 12, 15, 23, 166, 173, 217–220, 225–249, 249n3, 250n25, 253n73 “Outside” (song), 239, 241, 248 as painter (see Bowie, David and/as art) Peter and the Wolf, 229 as Pierrot, 45, 129 plastic soul, 91–92, 99 “Please Mr. Gravedigger,” 230, 264 “Queen Bitch,” 77 and Queer, Queer identity, 42, 48, 189, 194, 205 “Quicksand,” 75, 77 Reality and tour, 169, 175, 178, 183n57, 264 “Rebel Rebel,” 23, 163 “Red Money,” 135n35 “Red Sails,” 137n56 The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, 21, 77–79, 91, 226, 251n25 and Romanticism, 10, 14–15, 17–19, 21–23, 36, 61, 88, 121, 142, 144, 157, 159, 187, 190, 211 Saturday Night Live (perf.), 31, 34–35, 44–47 Scary Monsters and Super Creeps, 21, 89, 122, 124, 129, 177, 215 Screamin’ Lord Byron, 23, 164–165, 173, 182n50 “Secret Life of Arabia,” 137n56 “Segue,” 231–232, 239, 240, 245–247, 249 “Sense of Doubt,” 158 Serious Moonlight (tour), 136n38 and sex, sexuality, 4, 31, 35, 38, 41–46, 60–61, 69, 107, 109–110, 164, 172, 230, 232, 246

“Small Plot of Land, A” 239 “Sound and Vision” (song), 126–127, 152 and space (outer), 20–21, 42, 45, 52n63, 53–63, 67n75, 88, 91–94, 107, 109, 110, 176–177, 226, 232 “Space Oddity,” 8, 10, 19, 21, 55, 61, 64n4, 226, 242 “Speed of Life,” 137n56, 148–150 “The Stars (Are Out Tonight),” 176 Station to Station (album), 21, 22, 76, 81–83, 94, 99, 117, 122, 133n1, 144–146, 178, 224, 226 “Station to Station” (song), 127, 133 “Strangers When We Meet,” 240, 241, 254n75 and the sublime, 53, 55–56, 59–60, 63, 97, 144, 153, 176–177, 183n56, 269, 270 “Subterraneans,” 92, 154 “The Supermen” 75, 78, 220–221 and theater, 10–12, 33, 217, 233–234 The Thin White Duke, 13, 94, 121, 130, 145–147, 192, 224, 264 “Thru These Architects Eyes,” 240–242, 248 “Thursday’s Child,” 175 “Time Will Crawl,” 182n54 Tin Machine, 166, 222, 233, 237, 239 “Tis a Pity She Was a Whore,” 274n38 Tonight, 23, 166 “TVC15,” 31–32 2. Contamination, 235 “Under the God,” 233 and the United States/America, 69, 90–93, 99, 105, 120, 144, 152, 169, 173, 182n52

 INDEX 

The Verbasiser, 174, 226, 243 “The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (As Beauty),” 229, 239, 241, 245 “Warszawa,” 154 “We Prick You,” 240 “Where Are We Now?,” 156, 167, 175, 177, 183n57 “The Width of a Circle,” 20, 44, 75, 81 “Wishful Beginnings,” 230, 239, 241, 245 “Yassassin,” 135n35 Young Americans (album), 8, 21, 81, 91–93 “Young Americans” (song), 113n11 Ziggy Stardust (persona), 6–7, 13, 19, 20, 34–35, 41, 43, 45, 58–60, 65n32, 77, 92, 94, 103, 111, 121, 147, 192, 264–265 Bono and U2, 8, 129, 138n72 Byron, 14, 20, 25n17, 28n59, 42, 47, 131, 155, 164–165, 170–171, 173, 178 Beppo, 22 Cain, 5 Don Juan, 131 C Capitalism, 15–17, 21–22, 61–63, 71, 74, 87–89, 95–100, 102–103, 111, 124, 133, 141–159, 170, 172, 225, 232, 259, 266 Christ, 41, 109, 119, 221, 275n56 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 14, 21, 22, 28n59, 70–73, 75, 78–79, 82, 83, 122–123, 129, 132–133, 138n68, 145, 147–150, 157, 177, 187 Biographia Literaria, 133 “Christabel,” 72, 132

295

“Dejection, an Ode,” 129, 157 Friend, 132 “Kubla Khan,” 72, 73, 75, 138n68, 150 Lectures on the Principles of Poetry, 122 “The Pains of Sleep,” 72, 138n68 “Work Without Hope,” 138n68 Coltrane, John, 9 Clapton, Eric, 8 Cracked Actor (documentary), 92, 93, 274n38 Crowe, Cameron, 6, 26n24, 73–74, 77, 79–80, 219–224, 226 Crowley, Aleister, 21, 69–70, 75–77, 79–81 D Dacre, Charlotte, 20 Dada, Dadaist, Dadaism, 44–45 David Bowie is. . . (exhibition), 3, 25n11, 179, 242 De Quincey, Thomas, 21, 70–74, 78, 79, 82–83 Democracy, 2, 17, 171, 222, 233 Donne, John, 257–258, 267 Dylan, Bob, 122, 220 E Enlightenment, 15–17, 24, 95, 225, 258 Eno, Brian, 13–15, 131 Expressionism, 142, 147, 152 F Faithfull, Marianne, 4 Fandom of David Bowie, 1–2, 24n5, 34 Fascism, 23–24, 94, 97, 218–229, 231, 233–234

296 

INDEX

Frampton, Peter, 8, 11, 26n28 Frampton Comes Alive, 8 Frampton Forgets the Words, 26n28 Frampton, Owen (father), 8, 13, 26n28 Freud, Sigmund, 79–80, 197 Fripp, Robert, 122, 156–157

Jesus, see Christ Jones, Alexandria Zahra, 43 Jones, David, 2, 6–10, 13, 42, 180n8, 224 See also Bowie, David Jones, Duncan, 43, 230 Joy Division, 128, 129

G Gabrels, Reeves, 222, 236–237 Garson, Mike, 244–246 Gay, see Bowie, David and sex, sexuality Glam rock, 18, 33, d61, 92, 99, 163, 171, 222, 234, 254n78 God, 35, 38, 56, 75, 83, 122, 153, 173, 223, 225, 228–229, 233, 258, 260 Godwin, William, 39–40 Gothic, 15, 18, 23–24, 40, 72, 217–219, 232–234, 253n60, 266 Göttsching, Manuel, 22, 137n46

K Keats, John, 4, 14, 21–22, 25n13, 28n59, 54–55, 59, 64n3, 88, 151, 155, 156, 178, 179n1, 186–187, 262 chameleon poet, 225 consequitive reasoning, 4 “Lamia,” 107–108, 156 negative capability, 20–21, 54–56, 59–63, 187 “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 269 “Ode to Melancholy,” 151 “Ode to a Nightingale,” 156, 269 “This Living Hand. . .,” 262 Kierkegaard, Søren, 17, 19, 45–46, 48 Kraftwerk, 22, 125, 126, 232 Krautrock, 22, 125, 133

H Haag, Romy, 33 Hitler, Adolph, 221–223 Hoffmann, E.T.A., 13 Homosexuality, see Sex I Industrial music, 117, 217, 227, 235, 242, 244–245 J Jagger, Mick, 7, 14, 93, 222 Jameson, Frederic, 118, 124, 133n3, 134n21 Jazz, 8–9, 178, 217, 270

L Led Zeppelin, 32, 78 Lesbian, see Bowie, David and sex, sexuality Little Richard, 8, 10, 35–36 Los Angeles, 81, 92, 113n12, 117–121, 125–127, 133n3, 134n12, 146, 224 Löwy, Michael and Robert Sayre, 15, 17, 19, 22, 23, 54, 58–62, 65n3, 70–72, 74–75, 77, 87–88, 94–96, 98, 100, 102, 141–142, 146, 155–156, 185, 225–226

 INDEX 

M McGann, Jerome, 186, 190, 210 Milton, John, 16, 20, 35–40, 46, 48 Modernity, 15–16, 21–23, 60, 71–75, 87–91, 94–100, 102–106, 108, 110–112, 141–143, 148, 154, 159, 225–226 Paradise Lost, 16, 20, 36–37 MTV, 9, 136n38, 166, 170 N Neu!, 22, 117, 122, 125 Newley, Anthony, 7, 234 New York City, 9, 13, 122 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 75, 77, 151, 218, 221 Nomi, Klaus, 32, 34 Novalis, 22, 127–128 O O’Leary, Chris, 25n10, 134n12, 136n38, 235, 242, 246, 247, 254n82 P Page, Jimmy, 8, 9, 78–81 Pegg, Nicholas, 25n12, 134n12, 137n53, 221, 235 Picture of Dorian Gray, 8, 42, 224 Pitt, Ken, 9–11, 77 Plato, 17, 20, 35, 38, 40 Pop, Iggy, 11, 77–78, 142, 172 Postmodern/ism, 119, 131 Pre-Rafaelite, 21, 70, 71, 74, 78–79

297

R Reception history, 1–2, 5, 20, 24n4, 41, 249n3 Reed, Lou, 77–78, 131 Religion, 4, 36, 58, 77, 87, 173, 221 Renck, Johan, 3 Rock guitar/guitarist, 4, 8, 117–118, 137n46, 148, 149, 152, 156–157, 236, 244–245, 248, 249 Roeg, Nicholas, 21, 87, 90, 93, 95–97, 100, 106, 108, 110, 118 Romantic/Romanticism and androgyny, 20–21, 31, 33, 35–42, 45, 47–48, 58, 61, 63, 65n32, 104, 109–110, 131, 171, 176–177, 189, 190, 192–194, 199, 208, 234 celebrity, 5, 15n14, 23, 25n17, 62, 64n5, 91–94, 131, 164, 166–168, 170–171, 176–179, 206 definition, 5, 13, 15–19, 54, 61–62, 70–71, 74, 87–88, 130, 135n21, 141–142, 146–147, 151, 159, 185–187, 259, 269 and fascism, 225–229 German Romanticism, 22, 45, 122–123, 127–130, 143, 147 irony, 22, 41, 45–46, 102, 106, 129, 131, 133, 133n2, 155–156 Rovira, James Blake and Kierkegaard: Creation and Anxiety, 20–21, 45–46 Reading as Democracy in Crisis, 17 Rock and Romanticism, Lexington, 1–2, 4, 16–17, 28n59, 70, 142 Rock and Romanticism, Palgrave, 1–2, 4, 16–18, 28n59, 36, 142, 253n60, 275n56 Women in Rock, Women in Romanticism, 4, 24n4

298 

INDEX

S The Schlegels, 15, 22, 142, 155 Schulze, Klaus, 22, 125 Sex, sexuality, 36–41 Shakespeare, William, 46, 54, 122–123 Shelley, Mary, 18–19, 28n59, 144, 174, 182n54 Frankenstein, 7, 18–19, 21, 59, 174, 275n56 Shelley, Percy, 14–15, 20, 22, 23, 28n59, 40, 42, 144, 149, 152–154, 165, 169, 174–176, 178–179, 182n54 Adonais, 88 Alastor, 158 A Defense of Poetry, 169 “Hellas,” 156 “Lift Not the Painted Veil,” 158 “The Mask of Anarchy,” 157 “Mont Blanc,” 153 “On Life,” 176, 179 “On Love,” 176 Prometheus Unbound, 156 “To a Sky-Lark,” 267–268 Zastrozzi, 40

V Velvet Goldmine (film), 42 Velvet Underground, see Reed, Lou Vietnam War, 16, 34 Visconti, Tony, 11, 135n25, 142, 148–149, 178, 229, 266

T Tangerine Dream, 22 Tempel, 22, 125 Trump, Donald, 5, 6, 234

W Warhol, Andy, 12–13, 95, 113, 119, 121 Wilde, Oscar, 43, 48, 69, 146, 224 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 18, 144 Wordsworth, William, 14, 22, 28n59, 70, 72, 130, 135n21, 144, 151–154, 178, 261–262, 267, 272n15 “Essays upon Epitaphs,” 261 Lyrical Ballads, 147–148 “Michael,” 88 “Ode: Intimations of Immorality,” 151–153 “Persuasion,” 267 The Prelude, 148 “Resolution and Independence,” 151 “Tintern Abbey,” 150 World War II, 7, 16, 23

U U2, 8, 129–130, 138n72

Y Yeats, W.B., 70, 76