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.