Lessing's Laocöon

        On first reading Lessing’s Laocöon, I gained the impression of most other readers: it is an interesting critical work on aesthetics—simply on, as the title suggests, “the limits of painting and poetry.” However, looking at other responses (posed by those much brighter than me) forced a re-examination of the text in light of cultural and personal gender connotations, which Lessing may have revealed through his analysis. In her article, Beautiful Statues, Beautiful Men: The Abjection of Feminine Imagination in Lessing’s Laocöon, Susan Gustafson insists that at the heart of his writing, Lessing colors women as weak and degraded, nostalgically hinting towards the return of an Ancient Greek-like culture, which properly places men at the center of art and society.  His bias manifests in the assertion that poetry is far less limited than painting— temporal rather than spatial, and therefore the stronger (and less susceptible to the repulsion of ‘ugly’) of the two art forms. Women are painting; men are prose.

Her line of thought rests on the idea that, “For Lessing, physical beauty in the visual arts is equated with physical unity and harmony. The visual arts play a unique and seminal role in physical, spiritual, and cultural formation” (Gustafson, 1086). The individual (and by extent, the culture) identifies to a beautiful ideal, in order to displace the schism that is otherwise felt in the fragmentation of one’s own body. (She compares this to Lacan’s “mirror stage,” in which a child for the first time unifies the external image of his physical body with his subjective consciousness.) Visual art is now seen as both influential and precariously vulnerable. Gustafson uses Lessing’s quote that in modern art, “ ‘the susceptible imagination of mothers seems to express itself only in monsters’ ” (Gustafson, 1087). In essence, Lessing cites fault in modern visual art for falling below the standards of the identifiably beautiful, and then blames this descent on the “susceptible imagination of mothers.” However, not only does he imply that women are the cause of visual art’s modern decline, but that they are also the very essence of its abjection, while the masculine image is that of the beautiful: “ ’Even if a man of the greatest firmness and steadfastness screams, he does not do so incessantly. Only the apparent ceaselessness in the imitations of material art allows the cry to degenerate into feminine impotence’ “(Gustafson, 1091).  A perpetual scream will physically mutilate the otherwise perfect beauty of man’s face, and degrade him to the antithesis of that beauty: “feminine impotence.”  The feminine embodies the repulsive limitations in painting, and the cultural defilement that results. According to Gustafson, “the task of masculine imagination is to preclude the corporeal monster, the fragmented, misformed body generated by the mother’s susceptible imagination and fragmented body. Beautiful bodies are created not by biological fathers and mothers but by cultural fathers—through the emulation of beautiful male imagos” (Gustafson, 1092).  

            Simon Richter builds upon Gustafson’s gender-focused logic, taking its implications to a new conclusion in his essay Intimate Relations: Music in and around Lessing’s Laocöon. While Lessing recognizes poetry as the unlimited and greater art form of the two he details in Laocöon, Richter quotes him in saying, “ ‘The highest poetic genre is the one that makes arbitrary signs completely natural. That is the dramatic genre, for here words stop being arbitrary signs and become natural signs for arbitrary things’ “ (Richter, pg. 162). To Lessing, the best art combines the physical and nonphysical—words with emotion, solid language with subjective soul. The visual arts are ‘feminine’ because of their purely spatial nature, and poetry ‘masculine’ because of its temporal nature, thus the one dominates over the other, and cannot reach a perfect balance of the “highest poetic genre.” However, music is also temporal by nature, and thus—by default—male. Richter comes to the conclusion of “a possible resolution of the crisis of materiality that does indeed depend on the abjection of the mother and maternal body but nonetheless results in the union of material and immaterial substance, the queer coupling of words and music in eighteenth-century opera” (Richter, 164).  In the realm of gender-specific art forms, Richter lights upon the fact that a “perfect art,” so to speak, was found in the “homosexual” pairing of poetry and music.

            That being said, is it really possible to assign genders to specific mediums of art? I do not think even Lessing (the apparently extreme-sexist scrutinizer against all things women) consciously belittled females in the insulting shadow of male supremacy. The purpose of his much-quoted sentence—“Only the apparent ceaselessness in the imitations of material art allows the cry to degenerate into feminine impotence”—is not to ask or answer the question of gender at all. In context, it addresses the reason why visual art should not be ugly: the unending pain in the subject of the painting alienates and turns away the eyes of the viewer, who cannot bare such a continually grotesque sight. As a woman, I am no doubt insulted that Lessing equates this grotesqueness and repulsion to “feminine impotence;” nonetheless, that does not incite me to decontextualize the point of his argument and assign to him a vengeful attack on my gender. Rather, his slur appears as a nothing more than a metaphor, used to enhance his otherwise completely inoffensive argument. That being said, the very fact of an oblivious intent sheds light on perhaps a greater evil: the idea that females are subordinate to males simply rests at the core of Lessing’s thought, as an assumed truth that needs no explanation, nor even conscious recognition—a fact that simply is, and from which he can logically assume all threads of deduction. It is in one sense a relief of blame, in another, a much more repulsive and condemning truth. Both Gustafson and Richter have merit to their gendered arguments, and Lessing no doubt held a twisted perception of women; however, the decontextualization of Lessing’s intent took their arguments to extremes that, when placed in perspective of simple actuality, are unstable.  Exploring the implications of gender-specific art forms fascinates me; entering into the realm of that reality demands acceptance of its terms, and then thought of their effects. But in the end, I must return to the fact that that is not our reality: that art does not assume gender, and Lessing’s bigoted slip is rather the exposing of a deeply embedded flaw of thinking—most likely unknown even to himself.