Lessing's "Laocoon": Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason by David E. WellberyReview by: Michael MortonThe German Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 2 (Spring, 1986), pp. 311-312Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Association of Teachers of GermanStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/407437 .

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BOOK REVIEWS 311

overview at the end of the collection; it comes second last, with Siegrist's article functioning de facto-and disappointingly-as the book's conclusion.

Its shortcomings notwithstanding, so long as it is taken on its own terms this little volume has much to recommend it. It is perhaps best seen as an "Auffrischungs- kurs," a modest undertaking to be sure, but also something from which one can certainly profit. University of Virginia THOMAS G. SAUER

WELLBERY, DAVID E. Lessing's "Laocoon": Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason. Anglica Germanica Series 2. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.

Press, 1984. ix + 275 pp.

Declaring his intention to treat Lessing's Laokoon "as if it presented a global theory of aesthetic signification" (p. 110), David Wellbery embarks on an intriguing experi- ment. Employing what J. P. Stern aptly terms a method of "calculated anachronism, " Wellbery attempts to view one of the central works of eighteenth-century aesthetics through the lens of an analytical idiom- the language and conceptual framework of contemporary semiotics - largely foreign to the intellectual atmosphere of that era.

Two preliminary chapters stake out the ground on which the discussion of the Laokoon will take place. In the first, Wellbery outlines, chiefly by reference to the philosophy of Wolff, what he takes to be the important features of a general Enlighten- ment theory of signs. He sees that theory, in turn, as the key, in particular, to the rationalist aesthetics of Baumgarten and others, which is the subject of chapter two. In his final chapter (by far the longest, comprising about half the entire text), Wellbery then presents the Laokoon as the exemplary realization of the "aesthetic semiotics" (p. 68, passim) adumbrated at the level of abstract theory by Lessing's predecessors.

For his analysis of the Laokoon Wellbery, adapting a schema developed by Hjelmslev, distinguishes, first, the "planes" (or "functions") of "expression" and "content" (corresponding roughly to the notions of signifier and signified) and then, within each of these, the "aspects" of "material," "form," and "substance" (p. 110). The schema thus posits "six components of the global sign function," to all of which, it is asserted, "Lessing's general semiotic approach . .. attends" (p. 111). In addition, "since it is a question in the Laocoon of aesthetic signification, the signs analyzed are subject to aesthetic constraints as well as purely semiotic constraints" (p. 111). That the discussion thus introduced is not of a sort to be digested at a single sitting is not entirely surprising.

Semiotic criticism, though frequently jargon-ridden, typically avoids the obscuran- tism of some other critical approaches that have attracted attention in recent years, and, despite an occasional close call, Wellbery also succeeds, for the most part, in skirting that abyss. It remains true, however, that making out what he wants to say is by no means easy. (Wellbery's cause is not helped by a large number of relatively minor but irritating stylistic quirks, for example, his penchant for rendering undeutlich as, in Heideggerian fashion, "con-fused" (p. 14, passim). In view of this, it is natural to ask, first, does an analysis of the Laokoon have to be this abstruse? and, secondly, if it does not, does it nonetheless have advantages that compensate for that difficulty?

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312 THE GERMAN QUARTERLY Spring 1986

The answer to the first question is surely no. The Laokoon is, in one respect, as Wellbery says, a "complicated text" (p. 109), but that is, as he also notes, because of the number and variety of topics that Lessing pursues without troubling to integrate them all to a single line of exposition. The central argument of the treatise, however, that part to which it owes its place in the history of aesthetics and with which alone Wellbery is concerned, is, though brilliant, not especially complicated at all, and much less so than Wellbery's discussion of it. Moreover, after negotiating a thicket of such statements as that the "materiality of the plastic arts' expression material is a legitimate distinctive feature of these arts from a comparative semiotic perspective if it is presumed that the expression material of poetry is immaterial" (p. 122), most readers will in the end find that, beneath the elaborate terminology, what Wellbery presents as the burden of Lessing's argument does not differ fundamentally from what they always thought it was: to show how literature and the graphic arts, properly understood and practiced, pursue a common end - the highest possible degree of illusion in representation--through entirely different means.

What, then, of the second question? Does Wellbery's semiotic approach, despite its recondite quality, nevertheless provide a significantly new way of thinking about his topic? Here the answer varies, depending on where one looks in the text: sometimes yes, sometimes no. To take an extreme example of the latter category, the obvious point that a painter or sculptor cannot depict at the same time a cloak and the body it covers is not improved by being recast as: "The two content units 'cloak' and 'body' are mutually exclusive in the plastic arts because of the syntactical relation of covering that their respective expression tokens entertain" (p. 126).

Notwithstanding the all-too-frequent occurrence of this sort of thing in the text, however, there is also a good deal here that is both insightful and suggestive of further research. Examples include what Wellbery calls the "Enlightenment myth of the sign" (p. 40), and the related ideal of "progressive semiosis" (p. 41), in which is envisaged an eventual transformation of arbitrary into natural signification and thereby of symbolic into intuitive cognition. His typology of aesthetic theories (per- formance, representational, and expressive), though in need of refinement and elab- oration, is also of much more than passing interest. If this study is unlikely to change many minds with regard to the Laokoon itself or to provide a more useful way of speaking of its contents than we have already, it nonetheless offers much that should stimulate further reflection on eighteenth-century aesthetics, its place within the overall matrix of philosophical and artistic concerns of the period, and the relationship of that body of thought to the corresponding concerns of our own time. Duke University MICHAEL MORTON

OSINSKI, JUTTA. Uber Vernunft und Wahnsinn: Studien zur literarischen Aufkldrung in der Gegenwart und im 18. Jhdt. Bonner Arbeiten zur deut- schen Literatur, 41. Bonn: Bouvier, 1983. 338 pp.

Osinski seeks to illuminate the current debate on reason and madness in various fields of endeavor by exploring its antecedent in society and politics, philosophy and religion, and literature and aesthetics from around 1700 to about 1835, a delimitation

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