The present chapter treats what I will call the “submerged plot” of Der Schwierige, an extremely simple dramatic technique with disproportionately large consequences. Der Schwierige is Hofmannsthal's attempt to come to grips with several technical and philosophical problems in the practice of drama; but he does not employ radical innovations in form. His development, as always, is theoretical in the sense of being a reconsideration of existing conventions, a struggle to unlock what is already there in literary and artistic tradition. The plot of Der Schwierige is not exploded expressionistically, but rather its management shows a subtle reflection upon the whole relation of a dramatic fiction to the consciousness of an audience. The technique that emerges, interestingly, is also used by Kleist.

Der Schwierige is comedy at the brink of the abyss; and the abyss is simply reality, the reality of the war we know is in progress although it is hardly mentioned, and reality in the form of an intellectual process that will inevitably obliterate the society depicted. Critics have been disturbed in their dating of the play's fiction by Hofmannsthal's remark in 1917 that the aristocracy of Der Schwierige no longer exists “in der Realität.” But this is almost exactly what Neuhoff says to the professor, and is true only in a limited sense; Neuhoff himself is engaged in ingratiating himself with that supposedly non-existent society. The Viennese aristocracy depicted does exist in 1917 (at least for the purpose of Hofmannsthal's fiction), but in a world somehow separate from Neuhoff's world of “intellectual crises”; and it is the latter world that bears the title “Realität.”