Cultural responses to 9/11 and the healing power of songs. A Text-World-Theory analysis of Bruce Springsteen’s “The Rising”.

Abstract

Songs can be considered socio-cultural discourses with both a ludic and a communicative function: Through lyrics (and music), singers can establish a power/solidarity interpersonal relationship with audiences (Van Leeuwen 2012: 322) while, at the same time, promoting a given view of reality. With this in mind, it can be argued that songs can be also understood as useful multimodal instances of discourse for reacting to given socio-political events. This is the case of Bruce Springsteen’s “The Rising” (2002), which was written as a response to the 9/11 attacks. Unlike some other songs that were popular at the time, in “The Rising” we find a celebration of the heroes that were involved in this tragedy (Yates 2005). This focus on the human aspect, together with the linguistic strategies used to create physical and metaphorical worlds (Gavins 2007), are of key importance in order to explain the healing effect of this song. In this chapter I will analyse Springsteen’s “The Rising” following the postulates of Text-World Theory (TWT) (Werth 1999, Gavins 2007) and Discourse Space Theory (DST) (Chilton 2005), which will be mainly applied to the study of the lyrics. When necessary, references to the musical mode will be made if they emphasise or de-emphasise particular meanings (Van Leeuwen 2012). The analysis will show how three types of text-worlds are evoked by the song: a physical one, recalling the story of a firefighter going up the twin towers; a religious one, with Christ’s resurrection; and a metaphorical one in which Springsteen arguably uses the song as a metaphorical tool for healing the pain suffered by the nation after 9/11. An analysis of the linguistic strategies used in the song will show how certain features allow the physical and religious worlds to go through a process of conceptual blending (Fauconnier & Turner 2002) which results in the creation of a new mental space sharing both physical and religious features. This is the consequence of three main linguistic strategies: lexical ambiguity, the use of given conceptual metaphors, and deictic vagueness. It is particularly the latter, with the use of the first person singular pronoun, together with a lack of clear space and time references, which allows the abovementioned conceptual blend to work. Given that the deictic centre is textually occupied by a Jesus Christ/firefighter blend and that this deictic centre is contextually occupied by the singer, a new layer of meaning is added, and a new conceptual blend takes place with Springsteen acquiring also the heroic and religious traits associated to the firefighter and Jesus Christ. This multiple accretion of layers of meaning (Werth 1999) allows this song to be used in different communicative contexts. This in turn determines the metaphorical construal of the song and its powerful healing effect.