The Comic Frustration of the Comedic in Hauptmann's Der Biberpelz

The relationship between the comic and the comedic is often obscured within the genre of dramatic comedy owing to the frequent conflation of the two terms. While the comic denotes a manner of portraying objects in order to evoke laughter, the phenomenon itself does not necessarily precipitate the comedic - a specific logic governing how incidents of action are arranged within a dramatic plot so as to provide a socially affirming, normalizing, or otherwise stabilizing resolution of the plot's conflicts. By investigating how comic elements and devices (as theorized by Henri Bergson) militate against resolution in Gerhart Hauptmann's 1893 comedy Der Biberpelz, this article argues that the work's structure allows us to explore the interaction and effects of the comedic and the comic within the discourse called comedy. This article concludes that the antagonistic interplay between the comic and the comedic within Hauptmann's comedy anticipates a postmodern sensibility.

Most of Hauptmann's comedy unfolds as if it were a straightforward exercise of genre: a quick-witted washerwoman, Mutter Wolff, steals both firewood and a beaver coat from a wealthy citizen in a Berlin suburb, while a transplanted state official, Wehrhahn, gains his executive bearings and appears on track to expose Wolff as a criminal. It would seem only natural for such a comedy to conclude with the perpetrator being exposed and punished. Such a resolution - which this article calls a comedic resolution - would thus clarify the uncertainties of the plot, reinstate the balance of justice within the mimesis, and reinforce the social norms within the drama. Twice the arrangement of the comedy's plot suggests such an impending conclusion. Twice the settings shift from Wolff's house to the official's court; twice the wealthy victim, Krüger, comes to report the crimes; and twice the official Wehrhahn seems close to exposing and prosecuting the thief or, as critic Gert Oberempt views it, "[z]weimal geht die Rechnung, daß die Diebin entdeckt werden müsse, nicht auf" (150). That is, twice the work seems to signal an impending comedic resolution featuring the indictment of Wolff as the perpetrator, which would consequently restore the social and legal order while relieving the tension the crimes precipitated. But this relief never arrives, leaving a palpable void in the comedic process. With its absence, though, the missing comedic resolution provides substantial insight into the (mal)function of the comic in dramatic comedy.

In the past, critics have analysed why Der Biberpelz fails to reach comedic resolution but not how it does so. In order to explain the work's deviation from the comedic tradition, critics have analysed its mimetic quality (Haida), its naturalist tendencies (Bartl; Martini), and the structure of its acts (Grimm; Vandenrath). The current study, however, takes a new approach, arguing from the perspective of comedy that Der Biberpelz exhibits the discourse of two rhetorical concepts, the "comedic" and the "comic." The former is here understood primarily in its relationship to the structure of the plot. Its debt to Aristotle, in the words of Preston Epps, is expressed as the "arrangement of the incidents of the plot" (13). Simultaneously, the comedic casts light on the logic (e.g. causal, associative, dialectic) governing the concatenation of these incidents and their interdependence. When the concatenation of scenes culminates in a socially affirming, normalizing, clarifying, or otherwise stabilizing resolution of the plot's conflicts, it builds what this article uniquely terms a conventional comedy. When, however, a concatenation of scenes exaggerates, resists, obscures, or otherwise problematizes a work's socially affirming resolution as well as the traditional dynamic between its audience and dramatic mimesis, then it builds what this article understands as radical comedy. Turning to the "comic," this article describes the concept as how a specific composition of elements defines a particular theatrical mise en scène, such as the verbal, the visual, or the musical. Our discussion of comedic discourse within the social institution of the theatre draws on Henri Bergson's theory of the comic, which identifies the concept as a social phenomenon. Bergson does not comment on Der Biberpelz, but his theory...