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
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