Looking for a greater understanding of Lessing's semiotics

Richter, Simon. "Intimate Relations: Music in and around Lessing’s ‘Laokoon’.” Poetics Today 20.2 (1999): 155-173.

Schneider, Matthew. “Problematic Differences: Conflictive Mimesis in Lessing’s ‘Laokoon’.” Poetics Today 20.2 (1999): 273-289.

Reading Lessing’s Laocoön, I was most intrigued by the introduction of semiotics into his comparison of poetry and painting (perhaps better labeled visual arts?). According to Lessing, the semiotics of poetry includes the ability to describe ugliness; the inability to effectively describe beauty (which is overcome by explaining its effect); the non-necessity of including those symbols, which painting requires, to identify their characters; and time and action. The semiotics of painting, on the other hand, includes the ability to depict beauty and the inability to depict ugliness (which is repulsive and counter to the purpose of painting); the use of symbols to identify the figures depicted; and space.

After reading a few of the blog posts, it would seem that Lessing’s arguments are a bit dated in a number of aspects, not least his ideas of acceptable gender-specific behavior, like crying in public. However, his discussion of time and space as representing the dividing line between poetry and painting, respectively, struck me as rather contemporary. I hadn’t read anything predating Lessing that similarly engaged in distinctions between time and space, and was eager to gain some context in my secondary reading. David Wellbery’s book, Lessing's Laocoon: semiotics and aesthetics in the Age of Reason, published in 1984, appears to be the authority on the subject of semiotics, but a few articles have been published since that time concerned with the same topic. Matthew Schneider’s “Problematic Differences: Conflictive Mimesis in Lessing's ‘Laokoon’”, for example examines Wellbery’s ideas on semiotics and further cites Simon Richter as having some authority on the subject. Unfortunately, Schneider’s article was unable to provide the analysis of Lessing’s argument I was looking for.

Schneider’s article was one of the closest matches investigating Lessing’s semiotics when I ran my search. True to his title, Schneider focuses more specifically on mimesis, but his article reveals this phenomenon as leading up to the eventual development of the sign. Summarizing René Girard and Eric Gans’ arguments, Schneider reveals mimesis, the ultimate driving force behind poetry and painting, as that characteristic which separates man from animal and the impetus for the creation of a system of signs. This system, language, developed out of the necessity to preserve man from imitation’s power to arouse, at times even fatal, conflict.

Perhaps to somehow link this violent tendency of man’s early mimesis to Lessing’s essay, Schneider then delves into an exploration of the imitation of violent acts within Lessing’s examples. In the third section of his article, Schneider briefly summarizes Wellbery’s critique on Lessing’s semiotics. Because Lessing is unable to provide a clear definition of semiotics throughout his essay, Wellbery all but discredits the use of this term deduce any distinctions between poetry and painting.

I was rather disappointed by this article in general, because I felt Schneider concerned himself more with briefly summarizing authorities on mimesis and Lessing and undertook very little analysis himself. While his section on the origins of mimesis was quite interesting, I feel his second section on depictions of violence in poetry and painting was misguided. His third section, which also served as his conclusion was also frustratingly brief and unhelpful.

Throughout his article, Schneider repeats that Lessing very conclusively places poetry in a place of distinction above painting. However, in my reading of the essay, I found Lessing to be much less concerned with which of the arts was superior as opposed to finding a way of distinguishing between the two. For example, in Chapter 20, Lessing investigates poetry’s insufficient resources for depicting beauty, whereas painting has the resources to depict this effectively. Further, Lessing acknowledges another advantage of painting, that it is able to present the sum of its parts simultaneously, whereas poetry must present them in succession.

While Schneider’s article was itself disappointing, it served to point me in the direction of another Lessing scholar, Simon Richter, whose article titled, “Intimate Relations: Music in and around Lessing's "Laokoon"”, while considerably more entertaining, was also much more helpful in understanding Lessing’s understanding of semiotics.

Drawing considerably on a number of supplementary texts from both Lessing and Lessing’s contemporary and friend, Moses Mendelssohn, Richter makes a convincing argument about the unfinished parts of Lessing’s Laocoön essay. Following Lessing’s example, and acknowledging Mendelssohn’s own decisive work establishing a clear understanding of semiotics, Richter also grounds his article within semiotics. While Lessing indicates poetry as being diametrically opposed to painting with regards to temporality and spatiality in the first section of his essay, Richter makes the case that, had Lessing eventually finished the essay, based on Mendelssohn’s suggestions, he would have indicated that it was in fact music, that was diametrically opposed to painting. Lessing explained in his essay that whereas poetry consisted of arbitrary signs, painting consisted of natural signs. Poetry, however, was to raise these arbitrary signs to natural ones, and this was best done through the various aspects of music. The marriage of these, poetry and music, was deemed opera.

Richter’s article offers a queer understanding of this union, arguing that both poetry and music are understood by Lessing, in modern readings of his texts, to be masculine. The resulting union is thus to be understood as a homosexual one. In defense of his own argument, Richter carefully examines the arguments relating Laocoon’s open mouth and cry to the abjection of the mother and the maternal. He finds this understanding incongruous with the 18^th century, and backs up his own argument with incidents of homosexuality and castration throughout Lessing’s works.

In concluding his article, Richter returns to semiotics with a discussion of tempo. Tempo is a characteristic of recited poetry and of music and refers to the timing of the performance; in fact, Richter writes, “the key to combining words and music is timing” (171), itself. While this only slightly increases my understanding of Lessing’s semiotics by extending it to further examples, the article as a whole was an intriguing read.