Macbeth and the Case of the Painting

(This is the final part in a three part essay series. Part 1. Part 2.)

It has been said too often of British painting that its inspiration lies always in literature. As painters, our artists are no better than illustrators of poetry or fiction.
—Sacheverell Sitwell, Narrative Pictures

In his book Painting Shakespeare, Stuart Sillars describes and interprets a painting of Macbeth by John Wootton. In the foreground of the painting, Macbeth and Banquo (clothed in Scottish dress nearly a quarter-century before Macklin’s 1773 London production did so in the theater) encounter the three witches. In the middle ground, two attendants hold the soldiers’ horses, while Macbeth’s army can scarcely be seen in the distance.

(Click to Enlarge)

Sillars argues that rather than illustrating theatrical practice, Wootton’s painting uses techniques drawn from art history to offer a “reading” of Shakespeare’s play:

Wootton’s painting is an early example of a discursive medium increasingly significant during the eighteenth century: the visual image that offers a critical reading of one of the plays of Shakespeare. This it does in three linked ways. It stresses the collapse of Macbeth’s moral universe as implicit within the first meeting with the witches; it suggest later events by the use of emblematic detail in the presence of the owl, magpie, and crows; and it visualizes the language of the disturbance of the natural world and its order. (1)

The essay reminds us that even in the absence of a contemporary criticism with an interpretive emphasis, people in the eighteenth century were perceptive readers (or watchers) of Shakespeare.

This approach, though, inflicts upon the painting a double belatedness. Its meaning, to the extent that a painting can mean, exists as a gloss on a prior work of art. Moreover, the structure of Sillars’ argument requires an existing verbal criticism, of the twentieth and twenty-first century, for “visual criticism” to anticipate. In this sense, Sillars justifies a priority claim—that the visual criticism precedes the verbal in time—on the back of a relinquished authority—the painting now depends on a prior play and a later criticism.

I don’t mean to suggest that Sillars believes this precedence is all there is to the painting. I wonder, though, if the ideas of fictional worlds and the anaclitic that I have been worrying can lead to a more productive understanding of the relationship between this painting and Shakespeare’s play.

* * *

Macbeth and the Witches stands out within Wootton’s oeuvre in its choice of a subject from literature. Wootton illustrated Gay’s Fables and painted one piece owned by Pope (said to have affinities to that author’s writings) but the majority of his work, particularly in oil, depicts horses, hounds, or sporting scenes, in idealized classical landscapes. Years later, in 1836, Constable would complain of this combination: “The absurdity of imitation is nowhere so striking as in the landscape of the English Wootton, who painted country gentlemen in their wigs and jockey caps, and placed them in Italian landscapes resembling Gaspar Poussin, except in truth and force.” (2)

(Images: Starting for the Hunt: Composition of Numerous Figures and Hounds, in an Extensive Landscape, John Wootton (left); The Chestnut "Arabian" of Hampton Court, John Wootton (right). Photographs of paintings via ARTSTOR. Click to Enlarge.]

But in the middle of the eighteenth century, English gentlemen—and ladies—were prone to finding themselves placed in Italian landscapes, resembling Gaspar Poussin, or Claude Lorrain, or Salvator Rosa. Many travelers looked at particularly charming views through what were called Claude glasses, small dark convex mirrors which would reflect a prospect with lower light levels, as if painted.

(Image: Claude Glass, courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum)

Wilder vistas, with massed rock, trees with broken limbs, or turbulent water were imagined as Salvator Rosa paintings.

Elizabeth Wheeler Manwaring’s wonderful 1927 book Italian Landscape in Eighteenth-Century England attempts to capture something of the influence of these Italian painters. She suggests that the landscape painting taught, in the early part of the century, a compositional approach to natural description that filtered through English writing, and she follows the impact of this new way of looking through to end-of-the-century handbooks that taught tourists how to view the landscape themselves as a composition.

At one point in mid-century, it seems, you could go out for tea and find yourself in a Claude Lorrain, or more horrifyingly, a Salvator Rosa. Thus Elizabeth Montagu, in 1754:

We drank tea yesterday in the most beautiful rural scene that can be imagined, which Mr. Pitt had discovered in his morning’s ride…. After tea we rambled about for an hour, seeing several views, some were as wild as Salvator Rosa, others placid and with the setting sun, worthy of Claude Lorrain. (3)

Or later, her friend Mrs. Carter:

The sublime views of wild, uncultivated nature, the silence of a desart, and the melancholy repose of a ruin, strikes the imagination with awful and affecting ideas. In such a situation the soul expands itself, and feels at once the greatness of its capacities and the littleness of its pursuits. (173)

Outlaw Parliamentarian John Wilkes strikes a similar mood in the visitor’s book at the Grande Chartreuse:

The savageness of the woods, the gloom of the rocks, and the perfect solitude conspire to make the mind pensive, and to lull to rest all the turbulent guilty passions of the soul. (178)

For each of these writers, the encounter with wild nature demands a doubled vocabulary, aesthetic and moral at once. Reading Manwaring's book, I am struck by the repeated occurrence of "delightful horror" to describe a view that looks like a Rosa. Here, "wild," "awful and affecting," "savageness," "conspire," and "the turbulent guilty passions of the soul" strike a tonal note that seems just right for a description of Macbeth. And isn't it the greatness of his capacities and the littleness of his pursuits deplored by Lady Macbeth as she seeks to drive him to kill the king: "Art thou afeard/ To be the same in thine own act and valour/ As thou art in desire?" (I.vii.39-41)?

Like Montagu's view, Wootton's painting has the golden sunlight of a Claude (4) with the wild sky and massy rocks of a Rosa. Or, as Macbeth puts it, "So foul and fair a day I have not seen" (I.iii.38). Riding off from the battle, the two soldiers wander into a strange prospect that gives them "awful and affecting ideas." The experience of the sublime in nature not only provides a reference for Macbeth's experience, it aligns our sympathies temporarily with his. After all, the viewer's experience of this painting should also strike the imagination in the mode of the landscape sublime.

This is neither a reading of the play Macbeth, exactly, nor an illustration of a theatrical performance. There is very little natural description in Shakespeare's version at all, besides "fair and foul": we learn from the witches of the "fog and filthy air" and (I.i.12) the "setting sun" (I.i.3), but there is no description of rocks, caves, trees, or even the crossroad. Nor, despite Wootton's friendship with scene painter George Lambert, is the background of the painting a stage backdrop, given the centered road and background army.

In the previous essays, I have argued that we might consider anaclitic works of art as "revisiting" rather than "revising" their originals. The original, that is, is an occasion and an opportunity. One website featuring the Wootton painting suggests that the "work is only superficially interested in his subject and the main effect is achieved by the landscape and the lowering sky." Paintings, though, are entirely surface. The difference between this painting, and a more romantic Macbeth painting, like Fuseli's (left), is not one of surface and depth, but of style and affect. Painting a quarter-century later, Fuseli has taken the relatively shallow foreground of the Grand Style and made it even tighter, in order to heighten the drama.

To a modern eye, I suspect that Fuseli's image is more compelling, but a contemporary review complains as follows:

In the characters of these imaginary "bubbles of the earth," this Artist has indulged the wildness of his fancy, with his usual enthusiastic energy: but he has carried it too far, in the real characters of Macbeth and Banquo; for although they may be surprised at what they saw, yet Shakespeare's language gives no warrant for this extravagance of action, in the English Drama, whatever it might do upon an Italian Stage. (6)

I don't mean merely to oppose a modern aesthetics of surface and depth to a eighteenth-century concern with fancy and warrant. The leaning work of art--Godzilla lunchbox, Macbeth painting--uses its original as a sort of implied depth. But that depth relation is defined and constructed by the later work. Moreover, even were one to pick out of Shakespeare's text, or an eighteenth-century performance, all of the words, phrases, and details that might give one warrant, most of the work of art is made in the artist's fancy.

James Thurber's short story "The Macbeth Murder Mystery" (text here--Go read it if you haven't; it's much better than the rest of this essay) describes a conversation between the narrator and "an American woman [he] had met... in the English lake country." Quite the fan of murder mysteries, the woman picks up Macbeth by mistake and sets out to discover who was the real killer:

"I don't think for a moment that [Macbeth] killed the King," she said. "I don't think the Macbeth woman was mixed up in it, either. You suspect them the most, of course, but those are the ones that are never guilty or shouldn't be, anyway." (7)

Based on her close reading of the text, the woman suspects Macduff, concluding that Macbeth and his wife each act guilty to protect the other. No one, she points out, carries a candle to walk in their sleep. The narrator, amused and bewildered, orders another brandy and then asks to borrow the book: "'I believe,' I said, 'that you have got hold of something. Would you lend me that "Macbeth"? I'd like to look it over tonight. I don't feel, somehow as if I'd ever really read it.'"

This seems exactly right-- the anaclitic work of art often throws you back on the earlier work on which it leans. The American woman made Thurber's narrator wish to re-read Macbeth. In the review above, the reviewer's quotation of Shakespeare and the insistence on "Shakespeare's language" testifies to his own return to Macbeth. Even the Godzilla lunch box sent me back to the film and the animated series, in order to understand how the image works. But whenever I reread Macbeth to look for myself at the evidence against Macduff, I realize that there is no such evidence. There isn't even enough to warrant a search.(8) Nor is there landscape, nor extravagant action. The whole case was dreamt up in the woman's fancy--perhaps literally, as the woman read while "real comfy in bed."

When the narrator finally does reread the story, in the comfort of his own bed, though, he does not merely realize that the evidence is lacking for the woman's interpretation:

"Could I see you alone?" I asked, in a low voice. She nodded cautiously and followed me to a secluded spot. "You've found out something?" she breathed. "I've found out," I said, triumphantly, "the name of the murderer!" "You mean it wasn't Macduff?" she said. "Macduff is as innocent of those murders," I said, "as Macbeth and the Macbeth woman." I opened the copy of the play, which I had with me, and turned to Act II, Scene 2.

The question having been raised, he offers his own interpretation, and the process begins anew.

In Wright's formulation, Thurber has combined the "nouns" of Macbeth and the "verbs" of a detective story. What makes this combination work to the extent that it does is the quality Keats calls negative capability in the letter cited in the previous essay, albeit taken as a general principle of writing, rather than an individual talent: all "nouns" in writing are suggested, rather than existing by themselves; they are thereby left surrounded in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts. Put another way, writing, like painting, is surface with the illusion of depth. The anaclitic work of art starts from the point of those uncertainties, fills in some of them, and creates others anew.

The result neither revises nor interprets the original. It can't--the uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts are as much a part of the original as the "nouns" and "verbs" were. And whenever one returns to that original, those gaps are insistently there. I find a better image in the road Wootton adds to his painting of Macbeth. A road painted on a stage backdrop must end in an obstruction or one of the wings, if actors are to follow it--you can't have your actors shrinking into nothing and then vanishing at a single point of perspective. Wootton's Macbeth, though, must follow this road, back into the depths of the painting.

(1) Sillars, Stuart, Painting Shakespeare, London: Cambridge, 2006.
(2) Allen, Brian. “Wootton at Kenwood. London,” The Burlington Magazine, 126:978 (September 1984) , p 586-587. Accessed via JSTOR, 4/17/08.
(3) Manwaring, Elizabeth Wheeler, Italian Landscape in Eighteenth-Century England
(4) It's difficult to judge the color of a painting by a reproduction, and the many reproductions I have viewed all show slightly different coloration. Wootton's indebtedness to Claude is well-known, however.
(5) http://www.english.emory.edu/classes/Shakespeare_Illustrated/Wootton.Macbeth.html
(6) Repton, Humphrey, The Bee; Or, A Companion ot the Shakespeare Gallery: Containing a Catalogue-Raisonne of All the Pictures With Comments, Illustrations, and Remarks, London: T. Cadell, 1789.
(7) I'm using the online version of the text I linked to, for convenience. No page numbers given.
(8) Sorry!

Godzilla and Geoffrey Hartman

(This is the second part of a three-part essay series. You'll find the first part here.)

What is one to do critically with poems that come to us displaying the constitutive presence of a subtext within the verbal structure, insisting on this presence as an essential component?
--Thomas Greene, The Light In Troy


We FLOAT through the demolished station almost as though we were a moving point of view. We travel thorough the debris of the station into one of the tunnels.

We travel deeper and deeper into the distance. A shaft of light up ahead. We move closer to it.

As we get nearer we realize it's one of Godzilla's gigantic EGGS. WE move closer and closer to the solitary egg. Just as we are about to collide with it. CRACK. IT OPENS.

FADE OUT
--Dean Devland and Roland Emmerich, Godzilla script

The last essay in this series proposed a family resemblances model for the relationships between different texts within a single "fictional world." Before elaborating on the implications of this model, it is worth differentiating it from another model of literary influence: Harold Bloom's family romance. In The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom applies Freud's description of psychological defense mechanisms to the misreadings that poets adopt to mediate their relations with their precursors. The history of poetry since Milton becomes a narrative of decline, in which each poet tries to escape the influence of his or her predecessors through strategic misprision --tries, that is, and fails. His book, as Geoffrey Hartman notes, works towards a new sort of criticism, "which would transfigure source-study by revealing in each poem, or in the poet's corpus as a whole, echoings of a precursor, intimations as complex as those by which the child wrests his life-space from parents." (2) For Bloom, the younger poet always loses this wrestling match, forced out of the ring into sublimation and the diminished space of post-Miltonic poetry, but the match itself remains worth watching.

Bloom's description of influence as a family romance relies on at least three assumptions--not without justification within the domain of poetry--that prevent it from applying more generally to fictional worlds as a whole:

(1) Works of art are created by single and particular individuals. (Influence operates between individuals.)
(2) Works of art are closed off from each other.
(3) Meaningful influence occurs within a single genre and medium.
(4) The frontiers of art, if they ever existed, have been closed. (3)

The texts I have been discussing, by way of contrast, are created by corporations, teams, fans, or their users; are highly interrelated; and spill over into each other across genres and media. The fourth assumption is perhaps a bit too epigrammatic: by it I mean that Bloom's theory requires that the potential design space for works of art be fixed. To the extent that new works of art can achieve effects that older works could not because of developments in artistic technique (single-point perspective, the soliloquy, the jump cut) or changes in culture (sexual mores, viewer/auditor sophistication), there would seem to be uncontested space for artistic production.

But Hartman's critique of Bloom suggests lines along which that theory could be altered to include these new works of art. He draws a fundamental distinction between authority (a spiritual concept) and priority (a natural concept), in order to argue that the burden of the past is not inevitably overwhelming. In the second edition of The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom quotes Hartman: "By seeking to overcome priority, art fights nature on nature's own ground, and is bound to lose." (3) On this, the two agree. Hartman, however, believes that art and criticism can have their own ground, be secondary in priority--that is, belated--without conceding their own authority.

It is precisely this that is at stake in his call for an interpretation against hermeneutics. He concedes the belatedness of all interpretation vis-a-vis the work of art: "Interpretation is always anaclitic: the art of leaning, of falling back on something given." (4) Interpretation must avoid converting that temporal belatedness into a search for a lost original, to try not "to reconstruct, or get back to, an origin in the form of sacred text, archetypal unity, or authentic story." (5)

In consequence, the works that I have been referring to under the heading of "fictional worlds" might also be dubbed anaclitic art, in their capacity of falling back on other works of art, incorporating them as what Greene calls a constitutive presence or essential component. The challenge, then, is to develop a ground for interpretation that recognizes the relation between a given anaclitic work and the other work or works on which it rests, without reducing the former to a diminished version or comment on the latter. As I suggested in the last essay, I will begin with a particularly modern example, before moving to the broader problem of reception.

This image, on the right, features a Godzilla lunch box. Made by Thermos 1998 to capitalize on the feature film released in that year, it depicts Godzilla climbing the Chrysler Building. It may seem like invoking Wright, Bloom, and Hartman has been unnecessary, given the obvious relationship between lunch box and film. But what exactly is the nature of this relationship?

The film Godzilla never climbs the Chrysler Building: in fact it never climbs at all. The film script repeatedly uses the verb "climb" to describe human action, so as to emphasize the scale disparity between monster and human and the difficulty of moving in the ruins of New York.(6) It therefore seems problematic to describe this as an image of the film Godzilla but misleading to say that it is not. Wright's term "noun" exists precisely to dodge this dilemma, by suggesting that there is some structural commonality between the two works, such that a common referent can be implied.

With a little more information, Hartman's distinction between authority and priority will help to describe the relation more precisely. First, some context. In the months before the launch of the film, an extended marketing campaign sought to build interest with trailers (1, 2), television spots, and posters. The below poster is representative. Images tend to be shown from roughly a human perspective, with a portion of the monster (eye or foot) showing to break proportion. Until the movie launched, the entire monster was never shown, in order to preserve the surprise and entice viewers to the theater.

The intentional incompleteness of these images serves as a metonymy for their dependence on Godzilla. See the movie, they suggest, and the incompleteness will be completed. This suggestion is not merely expressed through the fragmentation of the monster's body. It is implicit in hints of narrative--the helicopters in the poster shown, the fishermen silhouetted against the monster's eye in the second trailer, and the museum crowd in the first. Incompleteness of representation does not necessarily entail incompleteness of narration, of course. (See Marv Newland's very short animated film Bambi Meets Godzilla.) But in the Godzilla marketing campaign, the two stand in for each other.

The film shows the whole monster, and in that sense, fulfills the promise of its advertisements. It is a model of a successful hermeneutic (in Hartman's terms): part relates predictably to a larger (prior nad more authoratitive) whole.

But narratively, the film positions itself as another fragment of a yet greater whole. In its last scene, quoted above, Godzilla has been killed, tangled in the cables of the George Washington Bridge. As our heroes celebrate, the viewer is shown a single giant egg, in the ruins of Pennsylvania Station. Crack. It opens.

* * *

All works of art are bounded, in time or space or material. And even within these physical bounds, there is a further less defined limit, inherent to the project of representation itself. Hartman writes: "Symbols or figures point to a lack: to something used up or lost or not sufficiently 'present.'" (7) Here he is formulating a psychoaesthetics combining ideas from Freud, I. A. Richards, and Kenneth Burke but he hits at a more general principle. Whatever it is that we imagine is the work of the work of art, there is always something left undone. No work ever suffices. There is always something left unsaid. Too quickly, the spell dissolves, the charm shatters, the dreamer awakes. Keats writes: "The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth." (8) The silence of his Grecian urn, though, outlasts the reverie.

The final shot of Godzilla's egg is a trope, even a cliché, of narrative incompleteness, included to leave room for a sequel. But the function of the egg trope is to map the breaking of the charm--the condensation of disagreeables--onto the material cessation of the film, and that onto the idea that this film is in itself only a fragment of a larger Godzilla world. What Wright called fictional worlds, then, are really works of art that postulate their own insufficiency as narrative incompleteness. (9) That is to say that they offer themselves as the objects of a false hermeneutics, encouraging their viewers to consider themselves as a fragment of a Great Original.

Returning to the lunch box, I would like to propose that it, second in priority, gains its authority by suggesting itself as a resolution to the failure of presence in the prior work. The Godzilla of the lunch box is not a representation of the Godzilla of the film; it is a re-presentation. It revisits the scene of the disaster, not as a perpetrator, but as a detective, inventing an account of what went wrong.

The destruction of the Chrysler Building is one of the set pieces of the film. It is not the monster at fault:

From behind, the Cobra helicopters come SCREAMING down on him, they FIRE ROCKETS at Godzilla who, again, deftly turns a corner.

The errant rockets BLAST into the CHRYSLER BUILDING, as they attempt to follow him but fail. (10)

If the first Japanese Godzilla movie treated the monster as a metonym for nuclear war and valorized the Japanese Self-Defense Forces for their ability to respond, the 1998 film considers the monster as a sort of natural disaster--"NICK: You know, he's not an enemy trying to evade you. He's just an animal." (11) (12). The danger here, sadly prescient, is that the federal response is too slow, too poorly planned, and insufficient.

For the lunch box, on the other hand, Godzilla becomes an almost totemic figure, suggesting a power and ferocity that are at the same time under the control of the lunch box's wielder. The monster fills the frame, but from an angle that suggests the viewer, too, must be gigantic. (The effect is of course increased by the fact that the viewer actually is gigantic compared to the image.) When the lunch box is carried in one's left hand, with the image inwards, Godzilla faces forward.

Godzilla's gesture seems aggressive but there is no evidence of destruction. His grip on the building is almost protective. In the months following the release of the movie, the Fox television network released a children's animation series, in which a second Godzilla (hatched from the egg shown in the closing shots of the film) imprints on the male lead and fights evil monsters in defense of the planet. In the opening sequence of that series, even more concerned with giving a positive image to Godzilla, we see a similar image (below right).

The relation between these ancillary works of art and the original is not fundamentally one of misprision, willful or otherwise. Nor is it--to pick out two other metaphors that work there way into accounts of influence--revision or criticism. To a certain extent, these later works take the original for granted. Or, more precisely, they use structures given meaning by the early work in order to generate their own set of reader/viewer responses and meanings.

The beauty of Wright's linguistic terminology is that it builds into the metaphor an account of why each successive work of art must attempt this re-presentation, and why it must fail. Words themselves, after all, attempt to represent their signifieds in precisely this way, inevitably leaving a gap that may be the subject for future articulation. Paul de Man's review of The Anxiety of Influence suggests that Bloom's model of misreading may describe even "the interplay between literal and figurative meaning within a single word or grammatical sign." (13) We are beginning to see that the same may be true as well of this alternate model, built out of Wright and Geoffrey Hartman.

What then does this new way of reading the relationship between twentieth-century texts tell us about reception as a whole?









(1) Anxiety of Influence, p. 9.
(2) "War in Heaven," in Fate of Reading, p. 41.
(3) I am really unhappy with this metaphor, but I can't come up with a better formulation. Suggestions?
(3) As cited, from "War in Heaven," p. 49. The quotation also appears on page 9 of Anxiety of Influence
(4) "The Interpreter," in Fate of Reading, p. 14.
(5) Ibid, p. 16.
(6) Godzilla script, first draft by Dean Devland and Roland Emmerich. Downloaded from Internet Movie Script Database, http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Godzilla.html. Accessed 03/30/2008.
(7) "The Dream of Communication," in Fate of Reading, p. 38.
(8) Letter of 21 Dec. 1817.
(9) This formulation isn't quite right, yet, but I'm working at it. Any suggestions?
(10) Godzilla script.
(11) See, for instance, Nancy Anisfield's "Godzilla/Gohiro: Evolution of the nuclear metaphor," Journal of Popular Culture. 29:3 (Winter 1995), p. 53-62. This summary of a talk by University of Kansas Professor of History William Tsutsui has also been helpful.
(12) Godzilla script.
(13) Blindness and Insight, p. 276

Introduction: Spore and Its Offspring

At the 2008 Game Developer's Conference, designer Will Wright offered a model for thinking about fictional worlds. Attempting to account for such phenomena as the Star Wars universe, the series of Godzilla films, the internet activity surrounding the show Lost, and so forth, Wright suggests that these extended stories comprise "nouns" and "verbs"--a set of characteristic persons, objects, and locales and a set of potential actions that together delineate an expected range of activity. In each of Frank Baum's Oz books, for instance, a certain set of characters (Gilda, the Wizard), locations (Emerald City), and objects (the road!) yield continuity, while the set of possible actions is circumscribed. Tornadoes, wishes, and poppies work in eminently predictable ways. And together these "nouns" and these "verbs" establish what it means for a story to be an Oz story.

It is worth noting that the words "nouns" and "verbs" are more than metaphorical for Wright. His most successful product is the video game The Sims, in which players create their own simulated cities, placing simulated houses, appliances, pets, and even persons as they see fit and then causing them to interact. "Nouns" are placed in the world by one set of menus and the "verbs" they undertake chosen by another. (The game is of course complicated than this: In addition to items and activities chosen by the player, some are automatically generated by the program.) In effect, The Sims is a computerized doll house, only expandable to the scale of a city. The strength of Wright's metaphor is that it uses this fairly literal account of his simulation games to explain the expansion of a given product to multiple platforms and media: the endless sequels, prequels, upgrades, tie-ins, and alternative versions of late capitalism. To the question of what explains our conviction that these different texts in different forms and genres are related, are in some sense the same thing, Wright answers: they share the same set of "nouns" and "verbs."

Wright only mentions his current project, Spore, on a single slide, but it is clearly fundamental to his thinking. The website for that game describes it as "an epic journey that takes you from the origin and evolution of life through the development of civilization and technology and eventually all the way into the deepest reaches of outer space." (1) Players will begin by controlling a single-cell organism and, through several stages, eventually progress to controlling a civilization of that creature's "descendants." Each stage is also a study in genre, influenced by the action of other video games.

So Wright's metaphor at its most basic tells us how we are to read the different stages of Spore (Tide Pool, Creature, Tribal, Civilization, Space) as the same thing: some sort of equivalence among the "nouns" and "verbs" of these different stages. Indeed, the double metaphor of evolution and "epic journey" insists upon noun-lineation and a sense of noun-identity. And in interviews, members of the Spore team often describe the amount of effort put into making the various editors that allow players to design their own creatures, buildings, space ships (and other nouns) all feel similar: that is, to define "to edit" as a central "verb" of the game.



(Image: Genres of Spore. Slide from 2007 D.I.C.E. summit presentation by Wright's creative team from www.gamespot.com. Click to enlarge)

To this point, I have been discussing Spore as if it is a single game. In fact, the product will launch first as an interactive website, a video game in six or seven versions, a mobile phone game, and shortly thereafter, the ability to purchase customized figurines. We can expect an authorized book for each version of the game, new and old media advertisements, fast food tie-ins, appearances on various television programs, reviews, blogs, and fan forums. And eventually sequels. If the game is highly successful, Electronic Arts--Wright's employer--may authorize a movie, an animated television show, or a cartoon. Are all these things, in some sense, Spore? And if so, in what sense? How are they related?

A first approach would be to follow the money. In that sense, these different things share two qualities: Electronic Arts will make a profit, directly or indirectly, from each of them and Electronic Arts has decided to call each of them (or at least most of them) by the same name: Spore. We could even posit a couple of direct benefits of doing so. Electronic Arts, for example, can maximize the productivity of their labor (planning, coding, distribution) by re-using it as much as possible across multiple platforms and can increase their sales with mutually reinforcing advertisements.

Later in this essay, though, I will discuss certain fictional worlds that are not singly authored, even by a corporate entity, and others that do not deliver a profit to their authors or owners. In the meantime, I will merely point out these same economic principles--re-use of labor and branding--are used by, for example, car manufacturers and consumer goods concerns to a different effect. There is an imaginative cohesion to Spore or Oz that does not obviously reduce to the profit model of Electronic Arts.

(Of course, economic considerations are not limited to the concerns of the owner/author. A cultural materialist reading of these products might begin by pointing out that the progressive version of evolution they entail is in fact not an evolutionary model at all, at least in the scientific sense. Instead, it is a familiar narrative of late capitalism, in which one's life is dedicated to the accumulation of money, items, or status. Moreover, despite the supposed open-endedness of play, the goals of each stage, as stated on the Spore website, are familiar Western wish-fulfillment narratives: to "conquer the planet," to "colonize" or "terraform" other worlds, and ultimately to achieve "galactic dominance." To explain the similarities of these different Spores, though, I believe such a reading would have to turn towards the same formal concerns I will proceed to address.)

The idea of branding, though, suggests a second approach to these products: their shared style. The Spore website abounds in examples of the visual vocabulary of the Spore products:



(Images: Spore demonstration creatures Blorthog, Toucan Pam, and Bladonkfrom www.spore.com/screenshots.php. Click to enlarge.)

The style of Spore owes much to the plasticity, texturedness, and glossiness of contemporary computer-generated animation movies and the ugly-cute aesthetic of recent children's animation. Sianne Ngai's recent work on cuteness (2) suggests that we might consider this cuteness of style as metonym for the ideas of malleability and responsiveness at the heart of the core Spore texts. She writes of "the aggressive desire to master and overpower the cute object that the cute object itself appears to elicit." Aggressive desire, of course, describes as well the tenor of the proto-capitalist, pseudo-evolutionary narrative outlined above. What this sort of reading cannot explain, however, is the relationship among different Spores. It necessarily assumes that the subject of its inquiry is constant, while in fact, the different products will probably differ in appearance.



(Images: Mike, from Monsters, Inc., Pumba, from The Lion King, and Toucan Sam, logo for Fruit Loops brand cereal. Respectively from www.pixar.com, www.disney.go.com, and www2.kellogs.com.)

To use an evolutionary biology metaphor that would be inconceivable within the world of Spore itself, the different products appear, like Darwin's finches, to be the results of an adaptive radiation. Each is specialized for its own niche but all show their similarities to the other. In fact, working along precisely this axis of comparison between ideational constructs and organisms, evolutionary biologist and popular science writer Richard Dawkins has coined the term "meme" to apply to the smallest "unit of cultural transmission or imitation" (3). Spore, though, is not particularly about ideas--one would be hard-pressed to find a Spore meme, in any strict sense.

Turning the metaphor to lingustics and philosophy rather than evolutionary biology suggests one way out: the various versions of Spore share a set of family resemblances. (Note to self: I don't think I need to go to Wittgenstein or Lakoff here. Maybe later, if I get caught up in frames.) What Wright's metaphor points out is that these family resemblances are patterns, rather than content or style per se. That is to say, Wright's formulation of the "nouns" and "verbs" of fictional worlds, mediated by the additional linguistic metaphor of "family resemblances" offers a formal way to talk about the sort of expanded groups of related artistic products common in the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries. And, that is to suggest a formal way of talking about artistic reception as a whole.


(Image: Darwin's drawings of the beaks of finches, from www.bbc.co.uk.)

The remainder of this series of essays will explore these family resemblances. I am particularly intrigued by the possibility that considering a handful of the dozens of contemporary "franchises," "fictional worlds," or "story universes" will help to provide a formal vocabulary useful in the investigation of the problem of reception (across genres, time periods, and subjectivities) as a whole.




(1) http://www.spore.com/about.php. Accessed 3/9/2008.
(2) Ngai, "The Cuteness of the Avant Garde"
(3) Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. PAGE NUMBER?