Lessing's Gendered Aesthetics-Gustafson and Richter

Gustafson, Susan. “Beautiful Statues, Beautiful Men; The Abjection of the Feminine Imagination in Lessing's Laokoon.” PMLA, Vol 108, no. 5. Modern Language Association. Oct., 1993.

Richter, Simon. “Intimate Relations; Music in and Around Lessing's Laokoon”. Poetics Today, Vol. 20, No. 2. Lessing's Laokoon: Context and Reception. 1999.

    Gustafson's overarching argument claims that Lessing's Laocoon project involves the rejection of both female body and feminine imagination cultural formation. The crux of Lessing's hierarchy of poetry and visual arts (with poetry representing the higher order) to Gustafson lies in the representation of the ugly and the abject. The poetic representation of ugliness, through its segmented/sequential state through time (in math terms, it would have a time derivative), is permissible (or at least more permissible) because the fragmentation diminishes the repulsiveness of the ugly subject. The poetic representation turns away from the repulsive body through its attempt to break it. The visual arts however, can never represent ugliness because of its simultaneity in time (though it would have a position derivative) which amplifies its effect. Furthermore, and most interestingly to me, the elongation of the repulsive through time (in literature) mixed with pleasurable effects (from style and structure) creates the ultimate pleasurable experience whereas this “mixture” in the visual arts proves too transitory to create a noticeable effect on the viewer. In essence to Lessing, the reader holds a certain degree of control over the dose of receiving both the pleasurable and the repulsive (and Gustafson makes the point that the repulsive also induces pleasure through an effect of magnetism; we are also drawn to the “deviant”) whereas the viewer has no such control. The literary masks the repulsive through a pleasurable presentation of fragments so as to lose sight of the corporeal reality of the hideous whereas the visual arts confronts the reader with this reality. Therefore the visual arts must always represent beautiful bodies, and Gustafson specifies, beautiful male bodies. Whereas the male body represents unity, the female influence (and specifically the maternal) manifests itself as monstrous and fragmented. Crucially the scream of Laocoon, as symbolic of both the fullness and void of language, threatens the emasculation of the male subject through the scream's association with “feminine impotence”, and Gustafson further notes that if the female is not fully impotent, she is the progenitor of the monstrous and deformed. Lessing's notion of “the most pregnant moment” lies in the moment just before dismemberment of the male body (as in the Laocoon statue and Medea slaughtering her daughters). The male imagination (through its conception of beautiful and whole male bodies) must direct the imaginations of pregnant women lest they produce monsters from the independence of the female imagination. Gustafson argues that ultimately, it is the female imagination and the female body that are devoured by the gaping mouth of Lessing's Laocoon essay. Gustafson notes the significance of the devouring of Laocoon's sons (in terms of devouring the feminine) but I wonder if instead this could be reversed into a performance of perverse maternity, that instead of Laocoon devouring the feminine, he performs the role of the “mother” where the stomach replaces the womb. Therefore, it is the suggestion of a perverse masculine attempt at parodying femininity that incites anxiety, and that the monstrous creature nursed in the mock womb had been fragmented at its conception-by the male imagination, just as the Laocoon essay itself is a fragment.

      Richter responds to the feminist criticism of Gustafson and others (Wellbery, Mitchell) by expanding Lessing's Laocoon to the realm of music, specifically opera. The introduction of our book notes that Lessing's Laocoon is incomplete; he had intended to write a full critique of other arts (music, dance, pantomine) as well and his discussion of the Laocoon only serves as the first part of the work. If Gustafson highlights the binary of temporal variance as masculine and the visual (temporal stasis) as feminine, Richter suggests the queering of this theory through a marriage between of two temporal (male) elements, music and text, in opera. Richter speculates (and he openly acknowledges the necessarily speculative nature of his article) that opera “perfectly instantiate[s] the effort to achieve [the unification of masculine completeness]” (159). Richter's interpretation of the primal, void scream of Laocoon becomes the basis for music. Lessing believes that “there really was a time when both poetry and music together were a single art” (161). Furthermore extending Gustafson's interpretation of the scream as one originating from and symbolizing castration, Richter interprets this in the context of the castrato. Therefore, the “primal” scream (associated with the feminine) is transformed into one of a carefully studied and controlled projection of a beautiful note. 

     I find Richter to be incredibly vague in that he hints at the implications of the queer nature of opera but doesn't quite follow through. What exactly does it mean for the scream of the Laocoon to be transformed into song in terms of Gustafson's gendered theories? What does it mean that primal instinct becomes changed into the product of carefully manicured social forces (and Richter notes that castration at the time would have been a calm, structured surgical process made through careful decision)? I also just noticed that the previous post also discussed these two articles. Shannon raised the excellent question of “is it possible to assign genders to mediums of art” and noted that Lessing may not have consciously been making these assignations. However, I would say that consciously or unconsciously, there is the implication of the assigned genders in his hierarchy of poetry above the visual arts. Namely, I would say that the gender assignations comes from the notion of control; the reader is in control of his/her consumption of the text in a way that the viewer is not in control over his/her consumption of the painting. The associations Lessing makes with the feminine is associated with this lack of control: the involuntary cry and the monstrous birth. I do agree that this assignation may be “arbitrary” (in the sense of a triple bar equality) stemming from the rooted idea of female subordination. I think another question here would be: is it productive for Gustafson and Richter to so specifically delineate gendered aesthetics in their discussions of Lessing?