Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry

"..succession in time is the province of the poet, co-existence in space that of the artist." This insightful and compellng excursion into comparative aesthetics led me to choose comparative literature as a graduate study and profession. It argues eloquently that the writer's ability to show events both simultaneously and in succession transcends in overall impact the painter's restriction of having to show objects that co-exist in space. In the "shield of Achilles" episode in Homer's Iliad, the poet is able to paint a "moving picture" that subsumes art into words at the same time that it praises the sculptor's work. The poet, moreover, can deal with both the visible and the invisible. All who have chosen the vocation of writing should take this book to a beach resort and read it in tranquility.

If you are of the notion that the tide is turning in aesthetics once again, and you're right, then G.E. Lessing's seminal Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry is once again a necessary starting point. Edward A. McCormick has finally given English speaking academians a satisfactory translation of this tricky and ultimately unrealized work. Lessing had originally planned to survey music and dance as well. Nevertheless, Laocoon commands a formidable position in the history of letters as a breakthrough vision in aesthetics and the turning point of our notions about Western art. The author's speculations about the origin of the masterpiece, for which the essay is named, throwing his hat in the ring with commentators from Pliny to Winckelmann, gradually gives way to an inspired meditation on Homer and the greater issues at hand: What are the distinguishing characteristics of art? of poetry? G.E. Lessing's investigations show that the answers to these questions aren't as self evident as they seem. Henceforth, each practice's direction since has been the gradual essentializing of the scope of the respective mediums, Mallarme and Mondrian for instance. Immpressively, in Laocoon Lessing turns out not only to be a forerunner of modernism but also a sophisticated semiotician long before Saussure. Edward A. McCormick's edition of Laocoon, with a short bio and extra bonus of a foreword by Michael Fried, is a keystone work for any canonical study in aesthetics and the art of the West. 7/9/00