SpongeBob, Meme Laocoön

• Published in: Representations (Berkeley, Calif.) Vol. 168; no. 1; pp. 115 - 124
• Main Author: Hobbs, David B
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berkeley University of California Press Books Division 01.11.2024
• Subjects: Poetry
• ISSN: 0734-6018; 1533-855X
• DOI: 10.1525/rep.2024.168.7.115

The 1506 CE recovery of the Laocoön and His Sons statue group provoked a crisis of interpretation. In The Aeneid, Vergil had described Neptune punishing the Trojan priest—for drawing attention to the possible treachery of the Greeks’ Horse—by summoning “two huge coiled snakes” to bite and crush him and his sons: “His shrieks of agony rose to the sky, / As when a bull escapes the altar, shedding / The ax that was half-buried in his neck.”1 But the statue group, which was determined to have been sculpted roughly contemporaneously with Vergil’s poem, renders the snake-draped Laocoön’s mouth half-opened with downturned sides, suggesting not “shrieks of agony” so much as a moan of discomfort.2 For centuries following the statue’s recovery, according to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the question was: why? In Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), Lessing resists the received idea that