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.