Setting up of an instant, from visual arts to literature: Lessing, Diderot and Flaubert

Abstract

To achieve an aesthetically relevant representation of an instant would seem, a priori, a challenge for visual artists, as their raw material is space rather than time. That was, in fact, Lessing´s opinion in his Laökoon (1766), the text which gave shape to the modern notion of “pregnant moment”. In this paper reviews Lessing´s formulation and suggests that it has a far greater scope than that the one envisaged by the German author. In order to do so, it first resorts to the aesthetic thinking of his contemporary, the philosophe Denis Diderot, for whom the artistic grasping of the moment is desirable not only in painting and sculpture but also in drama, for which he suggests to replace coups de théâtre with tableaux dans la scène. Moreover, we suggest that the challenge to represent the fleeting instant can be extended and address narrative genres. In this sense, we analyze the novelistic poetics of Gustave Flaubert as a literary project that makes the instant not just a phenomenon to be registered mimetically by language but a paradoxical effect of reading produced by the extension of prose.