Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
Laocoön
2006
The Laocoön or Laocoön Group, a first-century BC sculpture attributed by Pliny the Elder to Agesander, Athenodoros, and Polydorus, shows Laocoön and his two sons in the midst of their strangulation by serpents. Mythology attributes this to Laocoön's attempt to expose the ruse of the Trojan Horse; Poseidon, on the side of the Greeks, took personal affront and laid his wrath upon the three. The statue is currently in the Vatican Museums of Rome.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, in his Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, offered the statue as an example of suffering as depicted in the plastic arts (painting and sculpture) and as depicted in the linguistic arts (poetry and drama). In painting and sculpture, the cry of the father is distant, frozen, "beautiful"; in poetry and drama, alive, terrifying, and I would venture to say sublime (in Schopenhauer's definition, a recognition of "the will's frail phenomenon, helpless against nature, dependent and vulnerable to chance"). Here, Lessing on the Laocoön:
Simply imagine Laocöon's mouth forced wide open, and then judge! Imagine him screaming, and then look! From a form which inspired pity because it possessed beauty and pain at the same time, it has now become an ugly, repulsive figure from which we gladly turn away. For the sight of pain provokes distress; however, the distress should be transformed, through beauty, into a tender feeling of pity.
Theatre, in its bodied cry, reaches for that sublime, a sublime which is only suggested by the beauty of this plastic art. For Schopenhauer poetic drama was second only to music in the hierarchy of the arts. Lessing's observation, which would seek to undermine the theatrical experience of the sublime, intimates why. (Lessing attributes the wisdom of this, in part, to the "more refined Europeans" of the eighteenth century; "courtesy and propriety force us to restrain our cries and tears." He also notes that a Laocoön is listed among the lost plays of Sophocles. "If only fate had saved this one for us!" he comments.)