The End of Laocoön: Pain and Allegory in Goethe's "Über Laokoon"

SIMON JAN RICHTER The End of Laocoön: Pain and Allegory in Goethe's "Über Laokoon" Ut PICTURA POESis, the phrase tifted from Horace's Ars Poética, refers to a centuries old debate about the nature of the relationship between painting and poetry, the visual and the linguistic sign. A classical topos of the debate has been the statue known as the Laocoön. When Winckelmann describes the sculpture in his Gedancken über die Nachahmung (1755), he also compares it to the passage in Virgil's Aeneid which describes the same scene.1 While Virgil's 'late Roman' Laocoön screams in pain, Winckelmann's 'classical Greek' Laocoön barely utters a sigh. Laocoön's "große und gesetzte Seele," representative of classical antiquity, is the reason given for his admirable restraint. Lessing, of course, took issue with Winckelmann on this point in Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und der Poesie (1766). He argued that the difference between the Greek sculpture and Virgil is essentially generic, the difference between the visual arts and a poem, and unrelated to history. He arrived at an elegant, if schematic formulation for expressing this difference: painting represents bodies through natural signs, i.e., figures and colors arranged nebeneinander (simultaneously ) in space; poetry represents actions using artificial signs, i.e., articulated tones that follow nacheinander (sequentially) in time. Painting may imitate poetry only by suggesting action through bodies, just as poetry may imitate painting by suggesting bodies through action. Since painting, more than poetry, is under the restrictive rule of beauty, it is far more limited in the choice of its subjects. The principle of the fruchtbarer Moment should guide its selection.2 Even though Goethe first saw a copy of the Laocoön in Mannheim in 1769, and the original in Rome in 1786, it was more than thirty years after Lessing's Laokoon, in 1798, that Goethe first wrote publicly about the statue. His essay, called simply "Über Laokoon," appeared as the initial article after the introduction in the first issue of the short-lived journal Die Propyläen, jointly edited by Goethe and his friend Heinrich Meyer. The immediate context for Goethe's essay was an article by Aloys Ludwig Hirt, whom Goethe first met in Rome, published in Schiller's Die Horen in 1797. Addressing the perennial question as to whether the 124 Simon Jan Richter Laocoön in the statue screams, Hirt contends that Laocoön is unable to because he is physically overcome by the snake's poison and on the verge of death. Hirt employs a decidedly medical vocabulary, furnishing a description that more resembles a pathologist's report than an arthistorical treatment: Laokoon schreiet nicht, weil er nicht mehr schreien kann. Der Streit mit den Ungeheuern beginnt nicht, er endet: kein Seufzen erpreßt sich aus der Brust, es ist der erstickende Schmerz, der die Lippen des Mundes umzieht, und der letzte Lebenshauch scheint darauf fortzuschweben. Der Kampf hat die äußersten Kräfte des Elenden erschöpft: nicht der Biß der Schlange tötet ihn langsam, mächtiger schon als das Gift wirkte das Entsetzen, das kraftlose Widerstreben, der Anblick seiner ohne Rettung verlorenen Kinder. Das Geblüt, welches mit voller Empörung gegen die äußern Teile dringt, und alle Gefäße schwellen machet, stocket den Umlauf, und verhindert das Einatmen der Luft: die Lunge, durch die Häufung und gedrängte Zirkulation des Blutes wird immer gedehnter; das ätzende Gift von dem Bisse der Schlange hilft die heftige Gärung beschleunigen; eine erstickende Pressung betäubt das Gehirn, und ein Schlagfluß scheinet den Tod plötzlich zu bewirken.3 The precise and explicit details of his description are in the service of what Hirt calls "Charackteristik," an incipient theory of realism. Goethe's "Über Laokoon" does not refer to Hirt by name, though it does directly address issues raised by him; nor does Goethe consider him a serious rival — indeed, a later contribution to Die Propyläen, "Der Sammler und die Seinigen," has him appear on the scene as an impolite, dogmatic and somewhat stupid individual, no match for the arguments of Schiller and other admirers of Goethe. Nonetheless, it...