10 - Missed meetings in Der Schwierige

Summary

For the time being I will leave aside the musical plays and Jedermann in favor of Der Schwierige. The present chapter is concerned with the structure of the play in an entirely concrete sense, with a kind of geometrical dance-figure created by meetings among the characters and with the arrangement of characters into a hierarchy of types. Such patterns are experimented with in Der Abenteurer und die Sängerin, where we have seen it is difficult to reconcile them with a sense of the theater as a model of actual society. But in Der Schwierige, though the element of ethical prescription is still evident, I will argue that the geometrical and hierarchical structures are made into the vehicle of a genuine social blossoming in the audience.

Mindful of Hofmannsthal's suggestion that Der Schwierige immediately succeeds the Chandos letter in a logical development beginning with Der Tor und der Tod and Der Kaiser und die Hexe, I have suggested affinities between that comedy and Chandos, and I have tried to explain the delay between the two works by arguing that Hofmannsthal, even after pulling himself together in 1907, is really neither as confident nor as clear-sighted about his future as he pretends. The tension between the lyrical and mimetic modes, for example, which had grown increasingly troublesome in his development through Theater in Versen, is by no means disposed of: the distinction between poetic forms that grow directly from their deeper meaning and forms that result from an imitative act which, in its concession to reality, is itself an ethically significant gesture.