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