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
-Izzy
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