The Critical Performance of Lessing's Laokoon

Abstract

The merest glance at a reproduction of the famous statue of Laocoon tells us that it is a question of three figures in a rather critical situation. Laocoon, whose words of warning about the Trojan horse meet with disdain, is punished, Virgil writes, along with his two sons for having . . . profaned the sacred image.' The three figures are bound together by a common adversary: it entangles their limbs, trips them up, while at the same time directing its viperous fangs at well-chosen points of the anatomy. To place Lessing in perspective, only a small displacement is necessary. This moving situation that we observe is also that of Lessing's Laokoon, for what is this essay about if not an attack on three figures, one major and two now minor. The textual situation of this essay Uber die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie evolves as a polemic against Winckelmann's Gedanken uiber die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke, Spence's Polymetis, and Caylus's Tableaux tire's de l'Iliade, de l'Odysee d'Homere et de l'Ene'iade de Virgil. What does it mean to confront a polemical text? To what end does one read it? Lessing himself comes to terms with this in 1769, several years after completing the Laokoon, in the preface to a text entitled How the Ancients Portrayed Death (Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet). The later essay was written as an attack on the classical philologist Klotz who had entered into an elaborate struggle