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.
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