Aberrations of Mourning

2. The Fate Of A Daughter: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

CHAPTER TWO THE FATE OF A DAUGHTER (Gotthold Ephraim Lessing) If the plastic arts were put under psychoanalysis, the practice of embalming the dead might turn out to be a fundamentalfactor in their creation. The process might reveal that at the origin of painting and sculpture there lies a mummy complex. . . . The first Egyptian statue, then, was a mummy, tanned and petrified in sodium. But pyramids and labyrinthine corridors offered no certain guarantee against ultimate pillage. Other forms of insurance were therefore sought. So, near the sarcophagus, alongside the corn that was to feed the dead, the Egyptians placed terra cotta statuettes, as substitute mummieswhichmight replace the bodies if these were destroyed. . . . No matter how skillful the painter, his work was always in fee to an inescapable subjectivity.The fact that a human hand intervened cast a shadow of doubt over the image. . . . The personality of the photographer enters into the proceedings only in his selection of the object to be photographed and by way of the purpose he has in mind. . . . All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence. Andre Bazin, 'The Ontology of the Photographic Image" LOOK NO HANDS "A painter without hands who wanted to express the picture distinctly present to his mind by the agency of song," Nietzsche wagers in "On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense," "will still reveal much more with this exchange of spheres, than the empirical world reveals about the essence of things."1 Nietzsche summons here, from Lessing's Emilia Galotti, a painter's affirmationin spite of the always disfigured reach of artistic creation: 60 The Fate of a Daughter Ha! that we cannot paint directly with our eyes! On the long way from the eyes through the arm to the brush, how much is lost! But the way I say that I know what has been lost, and how it was lost, and why it had to end up lost: I am just as proud of this, indeed prouder than I am of all that which I did not let go. Because in the former I recognize more than in the latter that I am truly a great painter; but that my hand is not always one. Or do you not agree, Prince, that Raphael would have been the greatest painter, even if he had unhappilybeen born withouthands?2 What Lessing's painter calls the long way from eye to hand to brush, Nietzsche designates as a series of transferences (Ubertragungen ) from nerve impulse to image, from image to sound-shape, with each metaphorical transference representing a leap between alien spheres. Our relation to language is, accordingly, illustrated by the deaf artist who discovers the sound effect of tone by examining Chladnic sound shapes in the sand.3 By this "aesthetic relation " Nietzsche ultimatelymeans "an allusivetransference, a stammering translation into a completely alien language." The stammer alerts the ghostbuster that he now traverses friable ground; soon it will invade the name that summons it. A funerary structure emerges in place of these stammering translations: out of the residual remains of primitive, intuitive metaphors, mankind has erected a conceptual construct which can be compared now to a "cemetery of intuitions," now to a Roman columbarium, that tower of niches containing ashes of the dead.4 Friedrich Niche. Nietzsche opened his essay with yet another reference to the Lessing corpus. Lessing's dead infant son had already confirmed Nietzsche's view of the intellect: it inflates porter and philosopher alike "like a hose" and lands the blown-up creature on center stage where all eyes are "telescopically directed upon his actions and thoughts." Nietzsche concludes: "It is remarkable that this is accomplished by the intellect, which after all has been given to the most unfortunate, the most delicate, the most transient beings only as an expedient, in order to detain them for a moment in existence, from which, without that supplement, they would have every reason to flee as swiftly as Lessing's son."5 These allusions to Lessing haunting Nietzsche's work on metaphor center on the loss of creation or fatherhood. Upon his father's death Lessing returned to— resurrected—Emilia Galotti, which he had conceived as turning, thus at both ends, on the absence of the father. In Emilia Galotti, as Friedrich Schlegel observed, every trace of that Lessing so garru61 Aberrations ofMourning lously present...