Inherent instabilities: Lessing, aesthetics, and the Enlightenment

Kenkel, Karen J. “Monstrous Women, Sublime Pleasure, and the Perils of Reception in Lessing’s Aesthetics.” PMLA (116.3) 2001, 545-51.

Schneider, Matthew. “Problematic Differences: Conflictive Mimesis in Lessing’s Laokoon.” Poetics Today (20.2) 1999, 237-289.

These articles point to a similar structural paradox in Lessing’s work: the problem of mimesis in Lessing’s Enlightenment understanding how the relationship between cultural artifacts - painting, poetry and drama - and the emotional-moral pedagogy of the public. Lessing’s, and perhaps, the prevailing Enlightenment understanding, of mimesis rings of Plato’s: the mimetic representation is prescriptive of the audience’s emotional response (he believed in the value of Aristotelean catharsis), but is problematic when the representation elicits the wrong response. In Lessing’s case, this would be any desire that does not fit the moral-emotional normative framework of the Enlightenment.

Kenkel’s article is not on the Laocoön as such, nor is it addressing Lessing’s binary between painting and poetry. Rather, the article pairs Lessing’s theories with his dramaturgy practice, with the assertion that “Lessing’s drama criticism exposes problems inherent in the ideal of moral culture.” What becomes clear is that the problem is where the rubber hits the road; where moral culture fails is not in its conception but in its realization. Lessing’s drama is an interesting case study, given his stature as “the first dramaturge” and the union of poetic and visual expression in theater. Lessing’s underlying outlook was that cultural products must have moral pedagogy that aligns with the Enlightenment outlook concerning expression and gender norms. Because this pedagogy depended upon the audience’s identification with the representation of a person onstage, this meant that the character could not behave too far afield from their normative - framed as natural - behavior expectations.  Art must be as close as possible to naturalness, morally identified, in order to be a successful aesthetic representation. In Kenkel’s reading of his drama criticism, Lessing rejects the pleasure associated with ogling female ‘monsters’ in the theater, because they evoke terror, which, according to  him can never evolve into compassion. But this moral training became difficult to square with the pleasurable, because in practice, productions always reflected the given desires of the public - even if they did not measure up morally - Lessing’s drama’s included. Kenkel argues that though he saw himself more as a legislator of taste rather than a as a mediator, the pairing of his drama with his criticism reveals how he conceives of possible alternative models. “While Lessing’s criticism attempts to shut down such pleasure by attacking its moral integrity and subjecting those who enjoy it to his scorn, his characters often play at the boundaries of excessive, illegitimate, or self-preoccupied pleasure...His honest recognition of impediments to moral culture that are inscribed in the waywardness of attention to alternative aesthetic forms and gender configurations at the very moment he tries to exclude them.” The moment of exclusion is the moment they are brought closest together.

Beginning at the assertion of Kenkel’s conclusion, Schneider’s argument posits that Lessing’s binary opposition between poetry and painting runs up against the paradoxical nature of mimesis. This paradox is most acutely shown at the moments in Laokoon where Lessing asserts the clearest divide between the two cultural forms. Making grand philosophical gestures using the theories of only two literary scholars (Girard and Gas), he asserts how the inherent instabilities in representation - in the mimetic - are reflective of a paradox that is orignary to human nature itself. Schneider posits that part of that originary triangulation made by Lessing is Lessing comes close to a recognition of” the orignary links between mimesis violence, and aesthetics.” Schneider highlights how Lessing consistently uses images associated with violence as the means of giving examples of the fundamental operations of representation, thus placing his “ostensibly bracketed aesthetic discussion in the context of the fundamental human problem of violence.” He also turns to the theatrical to question how theater offer an especially troubling crossroads of these issues: “Beneath Lessing’s development of the pregnant moment, in other words, lies a potentially troubling intuition that the theater and the [gladiator] arena have something essentially in common.” He draws out here the question of the public spectacle, and the fine line between theater and theatricality as a developing structure for the “morals” of the audience. In both Kenkle’s and Schneider’s cases, the need for the division between poetry and painting has its roots in a kind of spectacle, terror and violence. One cannot help but turn the question in on itself - if this kind of cultural public pedagogy prescribed by Enlightenment thinking is not itself a kind of violence. 

His grandiosity and retroactive theoretical applications aside, highlighting the inherent instabilities of Lessing’s categories is correct and resonates with Kenkle’s work and with what seems to be an inherent problem in Englightenment thinking. The crux of the argument of these two articles raises the question that the Enlightenment seems to ignore by attempting to make the question moot: if the purpose of the aesthetic object in the Enlightenment is moral pedagogy, what about the disobedient spectator or reader? Lessing asserts that poetry is the higher form because it is better able than painting to imitate structures of action, and that poetry reveals the “fundamentally ethical orientation of verbal discourse.” And yet, we would assert today that language is a medium and has no fundamental ethical orientation; it can be used for good or for ill. The paradoxes in Enlightenment thinking these articles draw out touch upon highlight how its logic allowed for and fed into the commitment of atrocities such as colonialism, and, frankly, make it no surprise that Modernism came about. 

Looking for a greater understanding of Lessing's semiotics

Richter, Simon. "Intimate Relations: Music in and around Lessing’s ‘Laokoon’.” Poetics Today 20.2 (1999): 155-173.

Schneider, Matthew. “Problematic Differences: Conflictive Mimesis in Lessing’s ‘Laokoon’.” Poetics Today 20.2 (1999): 273-289.

Reading Lessing’s Laocoön, I was most intrigued by the introduction of semiotics into his comparison of poetry and painting (perhaps better labeled visual arts?). According to Lessing, the semiotics of poetry includes the ability to describe ugliness; the inability to effectively describe beauty (which is overcome by explaining its effect); the non-necessity of including those symbols, which painting requires, to identify their characters; and time and action. The semiotics of painting, on the other hand, includes the ability to depict beauty and the inability to depict ugliness (which is repulsive and counter to the purpose of painting); the use of symbols to identify the figures depicted; and space.

After reading a few of the blog posts, it would seem that Lessing’s arguments are a bit dated in a number of aspects, not least his ideas of acceptable gender-specific behavior, like crying in public. However, his discussion of time and space as representing the dividing line between poetry and painting, respectively, struck me as rather contemporary. I hadn’t read anything predating Lessing that similarly engaged in distinctions between time and space, and was eager to gain some context in my secondary reading. David Wellbery’s book, Lessing's Laocoon: semiotics and aesthetics in the Age of Reason, published in 1984, appears to be the authority on the subject of semiotics, but a few articles have been published since that time concerned with the same topic. Matthew Schneider’s “Problematic Differences: Conflictive Mimesis in Lessing's ‘Laokoon’”, for example examines Wellbery’s ideas on semiotics and further cites Simon Richter as having some authority on the subject. Unfortunately, Schneider’s article was unable to provide the analysis of Lessing’s argument I was looking for.

Schneider’s article was one of the closest matches investigating Lessing’s semiotics when I ran my search. True to his title, Schneider focuses more specifically on mimesis, but his article reveals this phenomenon as leading up to the eventual development of the sign. Summarizing René Girard and Eric Gans’ arguments, Schneider reveals mimesis, the ultimate driving force behind poetry and painting, as that characteristic which separates man from animal and the impetus for the creation of a system of signs. This system, language, developed out of the necessity to preserve man from imitation’s power to arouse, at times even fatal, conflict.

Perhaps to somehow link this violent tendency of man’s early mimesis to Lessing’s essay, Schneider then delves into an exploration of the imitation of violent acts within Lessing’s examples. In the third section of his article, Schneider briefly summarizes Wellbery’s critique on Lessing’s semiotics. Because Lessing is unable to provide a clear definition of semiotics throughout his essay, Wellbery all but discredits the use of this term deduce any distinctions between poetry and painting.

I was rather disappointed by this article in general, because I felt Schneider concerned himself more with briefly summarizing authorities on mimesis and Lessing and undertook very little analysis himself. While his section on the origins of mimesis was quite interesting, I feel his second section on depictions of violence in poetry and painting was misguided. His third section, which also served as his conclusion was also frustratingly brief and unhelpful.

Throughout his article, Schneider repeats that Lessing very conclusively places poetry in a place of distinction above painting. However, in my reading of the essay, I found Lessing to be much less concerned with which of the arts was superior as opposed to finding a way of distinguishing between the two. For example, in Chapter 20, Lessing investigates poetry’s insufficient resources for depicting beauty, whereas painting has the resources to depict this effectively. Further, Lessing acknowledges another advantage of painting, that it is able to present the sum of its parts simultaneously, whereas poetry must present them in succession.

While Schneider’s article was itself disappointing, it served to point me in the direction of another Lessing scholar, Simon Richter, whose article titled, “Intimate Relations: Music in and around Lessing's "Laokoon"”, while considerably more entertaining, was also much more helpful in understanding Lessing’s understanding of semiotics.

Drawing considerably on a number of supplementary texts from both Lessing and Lessing’s contemporary and friend, Moses Mendelssohn, Richter makes a convincing argument about the unfinished parts of Lessing’s Laocoön essay. Following Lessing’s example, and acknowledging Mendelssohn’s own decisive work establishing a clear understanding of semiotics, Richter also grounds his article within semiotics. While Lessing indicates poetry as being diametrically opposed to painting with regards to temporality and spatiality in the first section of his essay, Richter makes the case that, had Lessing eventually finished the essay, based on Mendelssohn’s suggestions, he would have indicated that it was in fact music, that was diametrically opposed to painting. Lessing explained in his essay that whereas poetry consisted of arbitrary signs, painting consisted of natural signs. Poetry, however, was to raise these arbitrary signs to natural ones, and this was best done through the various aspects of music. The marriage of these, poetry and music, was deemed opera.

Richter’s article offers a queer understanding of this union, arguing that both poetry and music are understood by Lessing, in modern readings of his texts, to be masculine. The resulting union is thus to be understood as a homosexual one. In defense of his own argument, Richter carefully examines the arguments relating Laocoon’s open mouth and cry to the abjection of the mother and the maternal. He finds this understanding incongruous with the 18^th century, and backs up his own argument with incidents of homosexuality and castration throughout Lessing’s works.

In concluding his article, Richter returns to semiotics with a discussion of tempo. Tempo is a characteristic of recited poetry and of music and refers to the timing of the performance; in fact, Richter writes, “the key to combining words and music is timing” (171), itself. While this only slightly increases my understanding of Lessing’s semiotics by extending it to further examples, the article as a whole was an intriguing read. 

The Tormented Body in Lessing's Laocoon

Gustafson, Susan E. "Sadomasochism, Mutilation, and Men: Lessing's "Laokoon", Herder's "Kritische Wälder", Gerstenberg's "Ugolino", and the Storm and Stress of Drama." Poetics Today 20.2 (1999): 197-218.

Rennie, Nicholas. ""Schilderungssucht" and "historische Krankheit": Lessing, Nietzsche, and the Body Historical." The German Quarterly 74.2 (2001): 186-96 

Susan Gustafson's article on sadomasochism and the obsession with mutilation present in not only Laocoon, but also the eighteenth century aesthetic, is in many ways very similar to Nicholas Rennie's article. Rennie is also concerned with the "convulsed" body and its role in the eighteenth century aesthetic, and both articles are comparative. While Gustafson approaches the sculpture of Laocoon and the example of Philoctetes as an example of Freudian anxiety over male castration (wounding) and the obsessive practice of sadomasochism in father-son relationships, however, Rennie approaches the tortured body as a representation of "cultural crisis," historiographical in nature rather than sexual. 

Gustafson begins her analysis by linking Lessing's Theory of Beauty in painting to an idealized male body, which much be preserved whole and unadulterated. His bodily aesthetic requires the body be umblemished, even if illusory, as demonstrated by Lessing's example of the artist Timanthes' veiling Agammemnon's face, as it would be too distorted and horrific for the viewer. However, she notes that Lessing's emphasis on beauty necessarily remind us of its transgressions, and the horrors that rest at its borders; it is a "cover-up" which inevitably draws attention to the exact thing it seeks to hide. 

Lessing's celebration of the scream and of mutilation in the story of Philoctetes is nearly reversed when he questions whether drama might follow the laws of the plastic arts; he goes on to assert that it is Philoctetes' "perfection" that offsets the physical horror on stage. Touching on the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) movement towards the end of the eighteenth century, a counter-Enlightement movement which placed emphasis on subverting the emotional regulations of the Enlightenment and giving voice to subjectivity and extreme emotion, Gustafson highlights the similarity between this release and Lessing's dispensation of the "restrictive rules of tragedy inherited from the Enlightenment tradition" (203). She emphasizes that while another eighteenth century German critic, Johann Gottfried Herder, rejected Lessing's validation of the on-stage scream, his own suppression of the scream in fact underscored the brutality and mutilation of the male form. Herder, in response to Lessing, asserts that Socrates never had Philoctetes scream on stage, but instead had him suffer with dull groaning, until he was briefly overwhelmed. However, in his musings on the subject, Gustafson asserts that he obsesses over "the manifestations of pain that he would expect to see on the surface of the suffering subject's body, in the form of corporal distortions," and later characterizes this as a fantasy (204) Curiously, Herder emphasizes the mutilated body's appropriateness on stage, but restricts the vocalization of these injuries.Thus, Gustafson claims, Herder and Lessing are both interested in the male body and grappling with the fear of its mutilation; while Lessing conceals the wounded body, Herder distinguishes between the reality (vocalized and grotesque) and the "illusion" (the "theatrical, nonthreatening performance" of mutilation) (206).

Gerstenberg, finally, engages in the debate by returning to Lessing's assertion that the heart of tragedy is corporal pain. In his play, Ugolino, he brings to the stage the gruesome starvation of Ugolino and his two sons, as well as the mutilations of their dead bodies through cannibalism. After an analysis of this frankly disurbing play, Gustafson concludes that while Herder and Lessing both attempt to hide the potentially mutilated paternal body, but inevitably highlight it instead, Gerstenberg reverses this, placing it front and center in an effort to conceal it through exposure. Indeed, the graphic return to mutilated body parts, Gustafson claims, draws attention towards them and away from the body as a whole. Finally, it seems, all three authors return to a Freudian dilemma: the need to conceal the castrated body of the father, and the sadomasochistic relationship between father and son, in which the father consumes himself and his progeny.

Rennie, however, approaches Lessing's emphasis on the human body in a different way. He begins by underscoring Lessing's fascination with the body, and the body's role in painting rather than in poetry. Commenting on Lessing's famous quote that beautiful statues were both produced by and produced themselves beautiful humans, he claims that Lessing believed that "nowadays and aesthetically indigent culture has mistakenly abandoned the creation of its successive generations to the tender and corruptible imaginations of its mothers" (187). His concern with bodies and the preservation of their beauty has a necessarily gendered component, where Laocoon's scream is a feminine "weakening of resolve." Though in many senses, Lessing is partial to poetry over painting, here he insists on cutting of Laocoon's scream and the inclusion of the narrative in the "domain of beautiful, closed forms" and prevent what Rennie calls a "monstrous crossbreeding" between the verbal and the visual (188).

Rennie reminds us that the disintegrating body, found in both Nietzsche and Lessing, is a symbol of collective, not solely individual, dissolution. While Lessing defers this dissolution by closing the mouth of the statue, it is the anticipation of the tragedy of the Trojan people, not solely Laocoon's own death. Rennie states that, "Underlying Lessing's argument is a troubling sense of the incoherence of history, and an awareness that no historicizing eye can dwell perpetually among images of order and organic unity" (189). The rupture of the statues mouth prefigures the rupture of the city. Both Nietzsche and Lessing, the author notes, identify cultural crisis with bodily illness, and Lessing in particularly marks the borders of the body as borders of the city as well. 

While Gustafson and Rennie identify the mutilated body and Lessing's aesthetic as addressing different anxieties, I find that neither argument is particularly persuasive. Though both articles address the obvious interest that Lessing displays over bodies, and particularly, as scholars have often noted, the male body, both critics seem to have their own intellectual blinders. Gustafson's argument is spot on in noting that these critics' efforts to conceal the wounded body in fact only serves to highlight their mutilation, and noting that they are interested in these mutilations of the father or the patriarch in a manner that could be interpreted as sadomasochistic. But I find the castration element to be an imposition. As for Rennie, his argument is both made better and worse by the fact that it is less risky. Gustafson makes fascinating, though sometimes difficult claims; Rennie's argument that the body is allegorical of the cultural crisis is well supported, but not particularly surprising.

-Izzy

Academic Storytelling and Gotthold Lessing's Laocoön

        Reading Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry and thinking about how to respond to the text reminded me of the wealth of material on the importance of the stories we tell. The material encompasses both interior stories, the stories we internally create about ourselves and how they affect our mental health, and exterior stories, oral and written stories that create communities. Scott Russell Sander's, in “The Most Human Art: Ten Reasons Why We'll Always Need a Good Story,” claims that one reason we delight in stories is that they create community. However, he also cautions that “there is danger in story, as in any great force.... If they are cruel, they make us callous. If they are false and bullying, instead of drawing us into a thoughtful community they may lure us into an unthinking herd or, worst of all, into a crowd screaming for blood—in which case we need other, truer stories to renew our vision.” (Sanders, 1) Stories create community by excluding as well as including, and it is important to continually question the boundaries the stories of our communities create if we are at all concerned with being part of a thoughtful community rather than a false and bullying one. While Lessing's text does not necessarily fall under Sander's category of story it does fit into a mode of storytelling engaged in by the academic community, and how we talk about Lessing's text, the stories we tell using it, create a set of inclusions and exclusions for our community. Some of these boundaries are an arbitrary matter defining a genre, discipline, and/or topic of inquiry, but others, that may overlap with the previous category and many times remain unacknowledged, create boundaries by privileging gender, culture, and/or race. Both Susan E. Gustafson's Absent Mothers and Orphaned Fathers: Narcissism and Abjection in Lessing's Aesthetic and Dramatic Production and Mai al-Nakib's “Assia Djebar's Musical Ekphrasis” provide examples of how it is possible to re-shape the stories we choose to tell about Lessing. (Or they at least provide examples of the types of stories I want my academic community to be formed around.)

        Susan E. Gustafson's book gives a psychoanalytical critique of the role of the mother in Lessing's aesthetic and dramatic works. She argues that the mother is not absent in the critical and literary work of Lessing, rather the mother's role is suppressed because of the threat she poses to Lessing's patriarchal-aesthetic order and analyzes how this manifests itself in some of Lessing's plays. Gustafson uses Julia Kristeva's model of psychoanalysis because of Kristeva's focus on how systems of patriarchy have suppressed the mother in culture and subject formation. Kristeva's feminist psychoanalytic framework allows Gusafson to critique the familial-cultural myth underlying Lessing's writings. (Gustafson, 15) The first chapter of the book frames a discussion of Lessing's theoretical works around an analysis of the Laocoön and his concern with the representation of male and female bodies in sculpture and tragedy. “In his theoretical essays Lessing demonstrates the centrality of the body for the process of narcissistic (paternal) identification and the abjection (exclusion) of the mother crucial to the production of sympathy on stage.” (Gustafson, 16) One example Gustafson uses to illustrate the process of paternal narcissistic identification is Timanthes' painting of the sacrifice of Iphigenia. (Gustrafson, 68-71 and Lessing, 16-18) She points out that Lessing's explication of the painting neglects to account for the sacrifice of Iphigenia. He mentions the spectators' faces as sad and Agamemnon's suffering as to great to reproduce, but he never addresses the torture Iphigenia is undergoing and the pain that may be written on her face. Thus, while the depiction of the father in pain (either Agamemnon or Laocoön) is problematic for Lessing, since it would evoke disgust and ugliness and turning away, and it is sympathy and beauty which lead to identification, the depiction of the female body in pain does not appear problematic or even of concern to Lessing. Gustafson explains that “on a symbolic level, Lessing's theory of visual and dramatic sympathy presupposes a veiling of the father's corporeal deficiency (the distorted face), a turning away from (abjection) of the daughter, and ultimately a narcissistic identification with the father.” (Gustafson, 70) This aesthetic theory is ground in the primacy of the male voice and identification with art. By outlining this patriarchal aesthetic Gustafson also creates a new story to tell about Lessing, a story that encompasses a new community that is inclusive of female voices and figures. 

 

        Mai al-Nakib's article “Assia Djebar's Musical Ekphrasis” engages with Lessing's text in a very different manner. She sets up an analysis of Djebar's musical ekphrasis by tracing its history as an aesthetic position that undermines Lessing's own position. Ekphrasis is the verbal description of the visual arts, and Lessing claimed that each art form must occupy its own separate domain. Ekphrasis reveals the correlation of all art forms by showing the arbitrariness of associating certain senses or characteristics with only one art form. It breaks down the boundaries or borders between the art forms. Al-Nakib claims that “this paradoxical aspect of ekphrasis makes it an effective tool with which to trace unexpected, sometimes even unwanted, conjunctions and disjunctions between all manner of conventionally opposed categories of historical, linguistic, and identic understanding. In part, this might explain why so many postcolonial writers concerned with these issues, including Djebar, choose to use it.” (al-Nakib, 256) Throughout the body of the article al-Nakib uses Lessing and Deleuze and Guattari's concept of deterritorialization to engage with Djebar's ekphrasis. She looks at how Djebar uses verbal descriptions, what al-Nakib calls deterritorializing expressions (al-Nakib, 262), of photos and painting of the French conquest of Algeria to inscribe them with new meaning. Thus the visual images, that to the colonizer represent Algerian brutality and savagery, become re-expressed as images of heroism and courage. She also analyzes how Djebar has written L'Amour,la fantasia as a piece of verbal music that “captures the complexity of the colonial encounter.” (al-Nakib, 268) Djebar writes in a French intersected with Arabic and Berber. She admits she has stolen the colonizer's language. “Out of this theft or, to use Deleuze's term, double-capture, emerges a minor French with deterritorializing or transvaluative implications.” (al-Nakib, 268) This might also been seen as undermining Lessing's statement that “it is impossible to translate this musical picture which the words of the poet present into another language.” (Lessing, 72) Djebar is not seeking to directly translate a piece of writing from one language into another, but is attempting to disrupt the border between the language of the colonizer (French) and the languages of the colonized (Arabic and Berber). By creating this new French cadence that contains both Arabic terms transliterated into French and Arabic/Islamic expressions translated into French she is inflicting a violence on French that mirrors the violence of the French colonization of Algeria. In this process she is also creating the musical score of a new community by “transform[ing] the language of the enemy into a medium with the capacity to arrange an altogether different composition.” (al-Nakib, 270) Thus, both scholarly works addressing Lessing's Laocoön engage with creating new stories that destroy the boundaries and exclusions Lessing sets up.

 

Works Cited

Gustafson, Susan E. Absent Mothers and Orphaned Fathers: Narcissism and Abjection in Lessing's Aesthetic and Dramatic Production. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995.

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Translated by Edward Allen McCormick. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1984.

al-Nakib, Mai. “Assia Djebar's Musical Ekphrasis.” Comparative Literature Studies 42, 4 (2005): 253-76. 

 

Sanders, George Russell. “The Most Human Art: Ten Reasons Why We'll Always Need a Good Story.” The Georgia Review, 1997. http://www.utne.com/arts/ten-uses-of-storytelling-how-to-be-human.aspx?PageId=1

The Pregnant Moment in Laocoon

Gombrich, Ernst H. "Moment and Movement in Art." Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 27 (1964): 293-306. Print.

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim Laocoon. Trans. Frothingham, Ellen 1887. Print.

钱锺书. "读< 拉奥孔>." 钱锺书:《 七缀集》, 三联书店  (2002): 33-61. Print.

Both of the essays were written in the 1960s; one by a Chinese classical and literary scholar, Qian Zhongshu, and the other by E. H. Gombrich, the renown British art historian. While they touched on some common topics, the two writings reflects different takes on Lessing's Laocoon, one from the perspective of comparative literature, and the other from aesthetic theory. Surely they are far from being the standard scholarly work such as those we are usually expeceted to produced today, but I find these rewarding in extending and reflecting on Lessing's work.

Qian's essay, "On Reading Laocoon", as the title suggested, was the less critical and reflective and more appreciative work of the two. Crudely speaking, what he does in the essay is just to provide more examples for Lessing's formulations, examples extracted from Chinese, German, French, Italian and English literatures.

For example, Qian furthers Lessing's argument by drawing from classical Chinese literature and western literatures to show that there are even static objects in poetry that painting cannot depict. He distinguishes between the "solid" and "empty" (or real and unreal) words of color. He cites from classical Chinese poetry to show how, for instance, it is impossible to paint the 'bright green' red of poeny, because the 'bright green' is to modify the color redness, and in this sense "emptly deployed to enhance the solid red." Similar usages Qian cites include Goethe's green golden tree of life in Faust and Robert Frost's golden first green of nature (42). Pushing this further, Qian shows how painting cannot deal with the contradictory mixture of colors, such as the black sun in Chinese poetry, and darkness visible and black fire in Milton. And finally Qian extends the discussion to include literary metaphors, and shows how even if a painter is capable of draw the metaphor of the mote and the beam, the result will be nothing like the poetry.

Most of the examples are short quotations, mostly a sentence or two, never a whole paragraph. In above section alone, Qian quotes from about a hundred authors. Yet the sheer number and sources of the examples are more than a show-off of the virtuosity of this encyclopedic scholar; they are also in service of his method of doing comparative literature.

In the preface, Qian reflects on the possible objections to his method, "it is possible someone may say, these trivial things in bits and pieces are not worth the effort. They are at most isolated, occasional opinions, far from being systematic and self-conscious theories" (33; translation mine). Yet, Qian argues that not only "it is precisely because the trivial is easy to be forgotten that they need to be collected and appreciated", but that "the private and lonely opinions are seeds of self-conscious, well-reasoned theories." He expands on the latter point,

"if we look back at intellectual histories, we will find many well-reasoned thoughts and philosophical systems did not survival the corrosion of time and collapsed as a whole; yet some fragmented thoughts in them survived for they are still used by the later generations. It is like how the bricks and lumber can still be of use after the edifice has been demolished. Often the most valuable thing about a system are the fragmented thoughts, which are as fragmentary as those seminal thoughts on which systems are built" (34).

The disregard for system is not simply an idiosyncratic preference for the particular. In drawing on sources across cultures, Qian is looking for universal patterns and deep meanings that emerges through acts of comparison, even though the things compared can be as disparate as a Chinese "old saying" and a paragraph in Lessing's Laocoon. If the above passage about Qian's method is not completely digression, then the connection perhaps lies in how he see the particular and how Lessing treats the problem of "the moment".

In chapter XVI, Lessing states, "painting… can use but a single moment of an action, and must therefore choose the most pregnant one, the one most suggestive of what has gone before and what is to follow" (92). While Qian cites a number of authors and theorists to support and illustrate this concept of "pregnant moment" of Lessing, his main contribution in this essay is to extend the concept to literary arts. Example of this kind include the famous line in Dante about the love story of Francesca and Paolo, "that day we read no more", and the inconclusive ending to Chekhov's short story "The Lady with the Dog". Moreover, he uses Chinese literary works to show that not only the pregnant moment could be the ending to short stories, but could be the transition for longer fictions, and he attribute 'cliffhanger' to be one type of such transitional moments between events. Consider the value Qian accredit to the notion of "moment", one wonder if that also speaks true of his method in doing comparative literature. A fragmentary sentence, a short quotation or a few words in isolation, could become the pregnant moment not only connects the past and future but also East and West, and philosophy and literature.

The pregnant moment is also the starting point of Gombrich's essay, which is a theoretical critique of the "a priori principle" that Lessing deduce his argument from, the principle of the static moment. For Gombrich's basic argument is that there is never a static moment, or what is called by Lessing's precursor James Harris 'a punctum temporis'. With this he is not denying that it is theoretically possible isolate a moment in time. In fact he mentions one such attempt, the famous snapshots Muybridge took of a galloping horse in 1878. For Gombrich, the meaning of Muybridge's stills are not about the failure of painters to capture the "truth of that moment" as well the camera does, but precisely how the stills which is the theoretical equivalent to Lessing's moment fails to capture the dynamics, or perhaps the pregnantness, of the moment. One reason Gombrich gives for this, is that the moment is never naturally pregnant. That is, if we are to choose one snapshot from a series of succession of photos taken of an action, it is often the case that the none of them might be the moment (296). This is because the very conception of pregnant moment involves both temporality and spatiality that connects the moment with others.

By making this theoretical argument for the non-existence of pure isolated moment, Gombrich is also shifting the focus to human perception. He uses the functioning of television screen to illustrate how the "sluggishness of our perception" enable us to perceive what in fact is only a flickering dot in each instant to be moving pictures. The role of perception involved in the construction of a moment led Gombrich to go back to Augustine's notion of the synthesis of time-perception and to the recent psychological findings of "temporal integration" to explain what really takes place in reading poetry and looking at a painting.

For example, he argues it is only through retention of a note just passed and expectation of a upcoming note that we can grasp a melody. That is "in listening to music the moment is as it were spread out to a perceptual span in which immediate memory and anticipation are both phenomenally present (300)." In other words, the experience of what Lessing calls temporal arts also involves the spatial juxtaposition of elements which he ascribes exclusively to visual arts. Similarly, when we look at a picture, we are never able to seize the picture as a whole in a single moment, but always through a processional understanding, by first absorbing the details of this part of the picture, and then that part, and so on and so forth. Thus, reading a work of visual arts is also temporal in nature. For Gombrich, "these experiements and speculation … corrode the sharp a priori distinction between the perception of time and space" (299). And from this perspective, "the instant of which the theoreticians speak, the moment when time stands still, is an illicit extrapolation" (306; italics mine).

Personally speaking, I feel it is not totally unproblematic that Gombrich shifts the battleground to perception so as to criticize Lessing's conception the moment itself. For the very wording of Lessing's formulation of the conception already involved temporality in describing the moment as pregnant with "what has gone before and what is to follow". It is true that Lessing might have ignored the problem of perception in the book (though he certainly shows his awareness of this by performing many of his analyses in a phenomenological fashion) and he gives too rigid a distinction between temporal and spatial arts. But I am not entirely convinced by Gombrich because, first, I read Lessing as making an analytical distinction, and, second, Lessing is describing what the painter have to work with, not what happens in perceptual processes. But, overall, I still find Gombrich's essay does a good job problematizing the innocent moment that Lessing, and Qian may have taken for granted.

Getting Trapped and Breaking Free, or what Max thinks you should do as a lit critic

The two articles I have read could not be much further apart in terms of scope, approach, and argument. One I liked, one I didn’t. Rather than simply criticize one and praise the other (though there will be plenty of this) I want to think about what it means to read something we like or dislike, and what we can do in response to these two reactions. Lessing establishes in the preface how a critic should look at things, so here’s my two cents on modern critical perspective.

The first article, the one I didn’t like, is a 1974 article by Allan Blunden from The Modern Language Review titled “A Question of Time: Notes on Hölderlin’s “Sonnenuntergang” and Lessing’s “Laokoon.” It is essentially a hermeneutic approach to a short poem by the romantic German poet Friedrich Höldelrin; the basic claim is that the poem adheres to Lessing’s aesthetic norms, which make it beautiful and also proves Hölderlin’s excellence over other contemporary poets. In one light, the article is perfect: it demonstrates with lucid and careful reasoning that part of the poem’s success is derived from the fact that is does not “illustrate” its subject with visual descriptors, but rather “suggests” it in a careful way, giving particular attention to actions, the passage of time, and the emotions that are invoked in the event. Rather than a series spatial descriptions, argues Blunden, Hölderlin invokes a wealth of affective and spiritual dimensions immanent within the sunset revolving around the familiar theme of the departure of the gods (in this case Apollo, the sun). Blunden also points out that in other sun-poetry, Hölderlin’s contemporary’s did too much in actually describing the sun and its visual effects, hence violating Lessing’s rules which results in less felicitous poetry.

While Blunden’s article has its strengths in giving a detailed description of the poem’s themes and how they relate to Hölderlin’s aesthetics, it really does very little with Lessing’s Laocoon, using it neither as a tool that helps us dig into the work nor as an object of criticism which the poem might contradict. But, beyond this lack of integration between the two texts is a greater problem. This is the article’s blind adherence to Lessing’s take on aesthetics. This adherence follows a circular logic: Lessing was right because Hölderlin’s poem is beautiful because it followed Lessing’s logic. Anything outside of this neat circle, i.e. Hölderlin’s contemporaries who relied too much on the physical description of the sun, is not valid.

So. What I think this article does that we, as scholars, should not do, is attempt to validate a work of art (a poem, a movie, a dance, whatever) by means of its adherence to some or another aesthetic. There any number of interesting conclusions to be drawn from this adherence, but one of them should not be the double validation of both theory and artwork. For one, it does an enormous injustice to the work of art since in applying the aesthetic theory we overcode the work of art, robbing its ability to speak for itself. Doing this tends to create the kind of circular logic mentioned above, closing out other possibilities. Literature for me is something that should open possibilities, not close them. I think the next article, from W.J.T. Mitchell does just that.

It is titled “The Politics of Genre: Space and Time in Lessing’s Laocoon.” The scope is much wider and its argument much more interesting. Essentially, Mitchell begins by addressing the two camps of criticism; one that embraces Lessing’s establishment of spatial form as free from time and relates this to the cult of the image in modernist, the second accuses this Lessing, and this camp, of a Fascist rejection of history through the timelessness of images. (What this means exactly, I’m not sure—it’s not explained in the article). Taking a step back from the debate, the critic cleverly takes another look at Lessing and demonstrates that both groups were operating under a bit of false pretense: Lessing does not argue that time is not/cannot/should not be a part of visual art; rather, he notes that visual arts simply more easily represent bodies.

Mitchell then makes a move to try to reframe the battle over Lessing. Instead of it being about what to do with the timelessness of images, he investigates what is at stake, politically speaking, between the two genres of visual and verbal art. Following an interesting cue from an aside in Lessing’s thought that accuses visual depictions of gods as a cause for adulterous though in women, Mitchell makes a strong case that part of Lessing’s devalorization of the visual in comparison with poetry is really an iconoclasm driven by the need to establish masculinity. While I am not entirely convinced by the argument, I do find it interesting, and more importantly, I think the critical move is infinitely better than Blunden’s. Rather than reinforcing the Laokoon as an authoritative urtext for aesthetics, he challenges a particular debate going on in the text’s reception.

Whether wrong or right, the Mitchell’s article at least attempts to break the logic of a critical discourse and reposition it altogether. I find more often than not whenever there is a debate, it is not usually one side or the other that is wrong, but often the question altogether: nature vs nurture, monism vs dualism, conservative vs liberal, etc. Even if an argument attempting to supersede the discourse is not always going to be successful, at least it works to generate a new way to look at the problem, which is exactly what Blunden’s article does not do. At least Blunden highlights a wonderful poem, which I have clumsily translated below:

“Sunset”

Where are you? From all your bliss

   My soul dawns before me; so it is, then,

      That I hear, as if full of golden

         Sound, the enchanting Youth of the Sun

His evening song played on heavenly lyre;

   It resounded through the forests and hills.

      But now he is far from the pious people

         Still honoring him, gone far away.

“Sonnenuntergang”

Wo bist du? trunken dämmert die Seele mir

   Von aller deiner Wonne; denn eben ist's,

      Daß ich gelauscht, wie, goldner Töne

         Voll, der entzückende Sonnenjüngling

Sein Abendlied auf himmlischer Leier spielt';

   Es tönten rings die Wälder und Hügel nach.

      Doch fern ist er zu frommen Völkern,

         Die ihn noch ehren, hinweggegangen.

Lessing's Gendered Aesthetics-Gustafson and Richter

Gustafson, Susan. “Beautiful Statues, Beautiful Men; The Abjection of the Feminine Imagination in Lessing's Laokoon.” PMLA, Vol 108, no. 5. Modern Language Association. Oct., 1993.

Richter, Simon. “Intimate Relations; Music in and Around Lessing's Laokoon”. Poetics Today, Vol. 20, No. 2. Lessing's Laokoon: Context and Reception. 1999.

    Gustafson's overarching argument claims that Lessing's Laocoon project involves the rejection of both female body and feminine imagination cultural formation. The crux of Lessing's hierarchy of poetry and visual arts (with poetry representing the higher order) to Gustafson lies in the representation of the ugly and the abject. The poetic representation of ugliness, through its segmented/sequential state through time (in math terms, it would have a time derivative), is permissible (or at least more permissible) because the fragmentation diminishes the repulsiveness of the ugly subject. The poetic representation turns away from the repulsive body through its attempt to break it. The visual arts however, can never represent ugliness because of its simultaneity in time (though it would have a position derivative) which amplifies its effect. Furthermore, and most interestingly to me, the elongation of the repulsive through time (in literature) mixed with pleasurable effects (from style and structure) creates the ultimate pleasurable experience whereas this “mixture” in the visual arts proves too transitory to create a noticeable effect on the viewer. In essence to Lessing, the reader holds a certain degree of control over the dose of receiving both the pleasurable and the repulsive (and Gustafson makes the point that the repulsive also induces pleasure through an effect of magnetism; we are also drawn to the “deviant”) whereas the viewer has no such control. The literary masks the repulsive through a pleasurable presentation of fragments so as to lose sight of the corporeal reality of the hideous whereas the visual arts confronts the reader with this reality. Therefore the visual arts must always represent beautiful bodies, and Gustafson specifies, beautiful male bodies. Whereas the male body represents unity, the female influence (and specifically the maternal) manifests itself as monstrous and fragmented. Crucially the scream of Laocoon, as symbolic of both the fullness and void of language, threatens the emasculation of the male subject through the scream's association with “feminine impotence”, and Gustafson further notes that if the female is not fully impotent, she is the progenitor of the monstrous and deformed. Lessing's notion of “the most pregnant moment” lies in the moment just before dismemberment of the male body (as in the Laocoon statue and Medea slaughtering her daughters). The male imagination (through its conception of beautiful and whole male bodies) must direct the imaginations of pregnant women lest they produce monsters from the independence of the female imagination. Gustafson argues that ultimately, it is the female imagination and the female body that are devoured by the gaping mouth of Lessing's Laocoon essay. Gustafson notes the significance of the devouring of Laocoon's sons (in terms of devouring the feminine) but I wonder if instead this could be reversed into a performance of perverse maternity, that instead of Laocoon devouring the feminine, he performs the role of the “mother” where the stomach replaces the womb. Therefore, it is the suggestion of a perverse masculine attempt at parodying femininity that incites anxiety, and that the monstrous creature nursed in the mock womb had been fragmented at its conception-by the male imagination, just as the Laocoon essay itself is a fragment.

      Richter responds to the feminist criticism of Gustafson and others (Wellbery, Mitchell) by expanding Lessing's Laocoon to the realm of music, specifically opera. The introduction of our book notes that Lessing's Laocoon is incomplete; he had intended to write a full critique of other arts (music, dance, pantomine) as well and his discussion of the Laocoon only serves as the first part of the work. If Gustafson highlights the binary of temporal variance as masculine and the visual (temporal stasis) as feminine, Richter suggests the queering of this theory through a marriage between of two temporal (male) elements, music and text, in opera. Richter speculates (and he openly acknowledges the necessarily speculative nature of his article) that opera “perfectly instantiate[s] the effort to achieve [the unification of masculine completeness]” (159). Richter's interpretation of the primal, void scream of Laocoon becomes the basis for music. Lessing believes that “there really was a time when both poetry and music together were a single art” (161). Furthermore extending Gustafson's interpretation of the scream as one originating from and symbolizing castration, Richter interprets this in the context of the castrato. Therefore, the “primal” scream (associated with the feminine) is transformed into one of a carefully studied and controlled projection of a beautiful note. 

     I find Richter to be incredibly vague in that he hints at the implications of the queer nature of opera but doesn't quite follow through. What exactly does it mean for the scream of the Laocoon to be transformed into song in terms of Gustafson's gendered theories? What does it mean that primal instinct becomes changed into the product of carefully manicured social forces (and Richter notes that castration at the time would have been a calm, structured surgical process made through careful decision)? I also just noticed that the previous post also discussed these two articles. Shannon raised the excellent question of “is it possible to assign genders to mediums of art” and noted that Lessing may not have consciously been making these assignations. However, I would say that consciously or unconsciously, there is the implication of the assigned genders in his hierarchy of poetry above the visual arts. Namely, I would say that the gender assignations comes from the notion of control; the reader is in control of his/her consumption of the text in a way that the viewer is not in control over his/her consumption of the painting. The associations Lessing makes with the feminine is associated with this lack of control: the involuntary cry and the monstrous birth. I do agree that this assignation may be “arbitrary” (in the sense of a triple bar equality) stemming from the rooted idea of female subordination. I think another question here would be: is it productive for Gustafson and Richter to so specifically delineate gendered aesthetics in their discussions of Lessing?

Lessing's Laocöon

        On first reading Lessing’s Laocöon, I gained the impression of most other readers: it is an interesting critical work on aesthetics—simply on, as the title suggests, “the limits of painting and poetry.” However, looking at other responses (posed by those much brighter than me) forced a re-examination of the text in light of cultural and personal gender connotations, which Lessing may have revealed through his analysis. In her article, Beautiful Statues, Beautiful Men: The Abjection of Feminine Imagination in Lessing’s Laocöon, Susan Gustafson insists that at the heart of his writing, Lessing colors women as weak and degraded, nostalgically hinting towards the return of an Ancient Greek-like culture, which properly places men at the center of art and society.  His bias manifests in the assertion that poetry is far less limited than painting— temporal rather than spatial, and therefore the stronger (and less susceptible to the repulsion of ‘ugly’) of the two art forms. Women are painting; men are prose.

Her line of thought rests on the idea that, “For Lessing, physical beauty in the visual arts is equated with physical unity and harmony. The visual arts play a unique and seminal role in physical, spiritual, and cultural formation” (Gustafson, 1086). The individual (and by extent, the culture) identifies to a beautiful ideal, in order to displace the schism that is otherwise felt in the fragmentation of one’s own body. (She compares this to Lacan’s “mirror stage,” in which a child for the first time unifies the external image of his physical body with his subjective consciousness.) Visual art is now seen as both influential and precariously vulnerable. Gustafson uses Lessing’s quote that in modern art, “ ‘the susceptible imagination of mothers seems to express itself only in monsters’ ” (Gustafson, 1087). In essence, Lessing cites fault in modern visual art for falling below the standards of the identifiably beautiful, and then blames this descent on the “susceptible imagination of mothers.” However, not only does he imply that women are the cause of visual art’s modern decline, but that they are also the very essence of its abjection, while the masculine image is that of the beautiful: “ ’Even if a man of the greatest firmness and steadfastness screams, he does not do so incessantly. Only the apparent ceaselessness in the imitations of material art allows the cry to degenerate into feminine impotence’ “(Gustafson, 1091).  A perpetual scream will physically mutilate the otherwise perfect beauty of man’s face, and degrade him to the antithesis of that beauty: “feminine impotence.”  The feminine embodies the repulsive limitations in painting, and the cultural defilement that results. According to Gustafson, “the task of masculine imagination is to preclude the corporeal monster, the fragmented, misformed body generated by the mother’s susceptible imagination and fragmented body. Beautiful bodies are created not by biological fathers and mothers but by cultural fathers—through the emulation of beautiful male imagos” (Gustafson, 1092).  

            Simon Richter builds upon Gustafson’s gender-focused logic, taking its implications to a new conclusion in his essay Intimate Relations: Music in and around Lessing’s Laocöon. While Lessing recognizes poetry as the unlimited and greater art form of the two he details in Laocöon, Richter quotes him in saying, “ ‘The highest poetic genre is the one that makes arbitrary signs completely natural. That is the dramatic genre, for here words stop being arbitrary signs and become natural signs for arbitrary things’ “ (Richter, pg. 162). To Lessing, the best art combines the physical and nonphysical—words with emotion, solid language with subjective soul. The visual arts are ‘feminine’ because of their purely spatial nature, and poetry ‘masculine’ because of its temporal nature, thus the one dominates over the other, and cannot reach a perfect balance of the “highest poetic genre.” However, music is also temporal by nature, and thus—by default—male. Richter comes to the conclusion of “a possible resolution of the crisis of materiality that does indeed depend on the abjection of the mother and maternal body but nonetheless results in the union of material and immaterial substance, the queer coupling of words and music in eighteenth-century opera” (Richter, 164).  In the realm of gender-specific art forms, Richter lights upon the fact that a “perfect art,” so to speak, was found in the “homosexual” pairing of poetry and music.

            That being said, is it really possible to assign genders to specific mediums of art? I do not think even Lessing (the apparently extreme-sexist scrutinizer against all things women) consciously belittled females in the insulting shadow of male supremacy. The purpose of his much-quoted sentence—“Only the apparent ceaselessness in the imitations of material art allows the cry to degenerate into feminine impotence”—is not to ask or answer the question of gender at all. In context, it addresses the reason why visual art should not be ugly: the unending pain in the subject of the painting alienates and turns away the eyes of the viewer, who cannot bare such a continually grotesque sight. As a woman, I am no doubt insulted that Lessing equates this grotesqueness and repulsion to “feminine impotence;” nonetheless, that does not incite me to decontextualize the point of his argument and assign to him a vengeful attack on my gender. Rather, his slur appears as a nothing more than a metaphor, used to enhance his otherwise completely inoffensive argument. That being said, the very fact of an oblivious intent sheds light on perhaps a greater evil: the idea that females are subordinate to males simply rests at the core of Lessing’s thought, as an assumed truth that needs no explanation, nor even conscious recognition—a fact that simply is, and from which he can logically assume all threads of deduction. It is in one sense a relief of blame, in another, a much more repulsive and condemning truth. Both Gustafson and Richter have merit to their gendered arguments, and Lessing no doubt held a twisted perception of women; however, the decontextualization of Lessing’s intent took their arguments to extremes that, when placed in perspective of simple actuality, are unstable.  Exploring the implications of gender-specific art forms fascinates me; entering into the realm of that reality demands acceptance of its terms, and then thought of their effects. But in the end, I must return to the fact that that is not our reality: that art does not assume gender, and Lessing’s bigoted slip is rather the exposing of a deeply embedded flaw of thinking—most likely unknown even to himself.