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Action as the Essence of Poetry: A Revaluation of Lessing's Argument

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Victor Anthony Rudowski
Victor Anthony Rudowski*
Affiliation:
University or Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio
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Extract

In terms of its effect on subsequent literary-theory and practice, the proposition that actions constitute the true subject of poetry is the most important aesthetic principle advanced in Laokoon. At the opening of the sixteenth chapter, Lessing attempts to derive this proposition deductively by arguing:

Doch ich will versuchen, die Sache aus ihren ersten Gründen herzuleiten.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 82 , Issue 5 , October 1967 , pp. 333 - 341
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1967

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References

Note 1 in page 333 Lessings sämtliche Schriften, Dritte Auflage, ed. Karl Lachmann and Franz Muncker (Stuttgart and Leipzig, 1886–1924), ix, 94–95—hereafter referred to as L-M.

Note 2 in page 333 Herders sämtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan (Berlin, 1877–1913), iii, 139. The italics are those of Herder; all italicization in future citations will be restricted solely to that found in the original source.

Note 3 in page 333 L-M, vii, 429 (Von dem Wesen der Fabel).

Note 4 in page 333 Reflections on Poetry, trans, and ed. Karl Aschenbrenner and William B. Holther (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1954), p. 62 (sec. 68). Without the interconnections of which Baumgarten speaks, arts like poetry and painting could never achieve the aim attributed to them by Lessing in the drafts for Laokoon, where he states that “beyder Endzweck ist, von ihren Vorwürffen die lebhaftesten sinnlichsten Vorstellungen in uns zu erwecken” (L-M, xiv, 343).

Note 5 in page 334 Robert Graves, trans. The Anger of Achilles: Homer's Iliad (Garden City, N.Y., 1959), p. 89 (Bk. iv, ll. 112–126).

Note 6 in page 334 Graves, p. 87 (Bk. iv, ll. 1–4).

Note 7 in page 334 L-M, xiv, 371–372. See n. 7, p. 371, for discussion of the date of composition.

Note 8 in page 335 Cf. xiv, 371–372, 380, 381, 383, 414.

Note 9 in page 335 See below for an explanation concerning Lessing's reason for returning to his earlier terminology.

Note 10 in page 335 L-M, ix, 106–107. Implicit throughout the above criticism of Der Frühling is Lessing's bias against the representation of nature as a subject in its own right either in painting or in poetry. For this reason alone he would find it difficult to approve of a poem which devotes itself to the evocation of the glories of nature to the extent that Kleist's poem does.

Note 11 in page 335 Ll. 71–76. Although the above citation corresponds to the text of the 1756 revision, the remarks below apply equally to the earlier versions of the poem.

Note 12 in page 336 The Classical Ideal in German Literature (Cambridge, Eng., 1939), p. 57.

Note 13 in page 336 Lessings “Laokoon” (Weimar, 1959), p. 179.

Note 14 in page 337 L-M, xiv, 411. A similar argument is to be found on p. 168 of the Anmerkungen (zu Teil 1 bis 7) of the J. Petersen W. von Olshausen edition of Lessing's works (Berlin, 1925–35): “Dieser Entwurf ist das erste der Fragmente, die mit ziemlicher Sicherheit nach der Vollendung des ersten Teils zu datieren sind: Beweis dafür ist die Numerierung der Kapitel.”

Note 15 in page 337 It should also be noted that those who support the above argument with respect to the date of the draft have an additional discrepancy to overcome; namely, in the two sections of the draft immediately following the one on collective actions (L-M, xiv, 414 [sees. xliv and xlv]), the word Bewegungen is still employed in a context in which the final version of Laokoon would require the use of the term Handlungen.

Note 16 in page 338 Lessing's Laokoon (Lancaster, Pa., 1940), p. 83.

Note 17 in page 338 Nolte, p. 91. The word bequem in the bracketed expression should be translated as “appropriate” rather than by its more usual lexical alternatives.

Note 18 in page 338 Nolte, p. 25. Cf. Emil Staiger's position on pp. 103–104 of his Grundbegriffe der Poetik (Zürich, 1961). Here Staiger maintains that Lessing exhibits a propensity for imposing a dramatic standard on epic poetry. Citing Lessing's description of “action” as a series of movements aiming at a final goal, Staiger interprets this definition in a manner which brings it into conformity with his own belief that all action in drama should be subordinated to the aim of creating suspense concerning the outcome. He therefore concludes that static description is dramatically unfeasible: “Da wird das Gegenständliche bloßes Mittel zum Zweck, während der Epiker doch sich des Gegenstandes um sein selber willen erfreut.”

Note 19 in page 338 Staiger, p. 102.

Note 20 in page 339 Geschichte der deutschen Poetik (Berlin, 1956), ii, 193.

Note 21 in page 339 L-M, ix, 93. Since Lessing has stated in the drafts that painting is not capable of reproducing the sublime, at least those aspects of it which are associated with large dimensions (see xiv, 386–387, 424), it would appear that this aesthetic category also falls outside the visual sphere common to poetry as well as painting and hence does not come within the scope of his argument. Because the aesthetics of the sublime were apparently excluded from the formulation of Ch. xvi by design, it is unfair to criticize these propositions for not applying to this category. In a review of Uvedale Price's An Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful (1794), Henry Fuseli, e.g., writes: “The futility of such mutual inroads of poetry and painting on each other has been shown by a late german [sic] writer of great acuteness and some taste, though on a tame principle, and without drawing the inferences that obviously derive from his rules.” See p. 259 of the Analytical Review, XX, iii (Nov. 1794).

Note 22 in page 339 L-M, ix, 130 (Ch. xxi). The lines from the Amor es referred to above run as follows: “I saw her shoulders and her arms and marked their loveliness; / I touched the apples of her breasts made for a fond caress; / I gazed upon her bosom and the smooth white plain below, / Her rounded flanks and slender thighs with youthful strength aglow. / But why say more, when every part alike was passing fair?” Cited from F. A. Wright's translation of the Amores entitled The Mirror of Venus (London and New York, n. d.), p. 47 (i.5,19 ff.).

Note 23 in page 340 Lessing does not specify to which part(s) of the Iliad he is referring here; the description from the Odyssey is, however, identified as occurring in the seventh book.

Note 24 in page 340 L-M, xiv, 413. Lessing writes: “Er wollte bloß den Begriff der Größe dadurch erwecken.”

Note 25 in page 340 See p. 363 of Eric A. Blackall's The Emergence of German as a Literary Language (Cambridge, Eng., 1959) for a discussion of this point.

Note 26 in page 340 Orlando Furioso vii. 11–15.

Note 27 in page 340 L-M, ix, 125 (Ch. xx). Lessing's exact words are “ein Exempel eines Gemähides ohne Gemähide.”

Note 28 in page 340 On p. 268 of his Aesthetic (New York, 1922), Benedetto Croce remarks: “At the bottom of his heart Lessing dislikes colour.” Croce's statement is corroborated by a passage in the drafts for Laokoon in which Lessing discusses the advantages that drawings enjoy over oil paintings and concludes his argument by asserting: “Ja ich möchte fragen, ob es nicht zu wünschen wäre, die Kunst mit Oelfarben zu mahlen, möchte gar nicht seyn erfunden worden” (L-M, xiv, 397).

Note 29 in page 341 Staiger, p. 103.

Note 30 in page 341 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, Part Five, Sees, iv and v.