The German Picaro and Modernity: Between Underdog and Shape-Shifter (review)

One thesis of Bernhard Malkmus’s study of modern German picaros in works by Kafka, Walser, Mann, Hildenrath, and Grass, holds that the picaro, two centuries in abeyance since the Spanish Golden Age, reemerges as a prominent figure in the modernist writing of the last century. Rather than assuming the simple availability of a picaresque archetype for all writing since the Golden Age, Malkmus’s thesis raises the sociological issue of a special affinity linking the eras in which the picaro thrives. The argument recalls Helmut Lethen’s treatment of the Weimar Republic’s calculating personae with their antecedents in the manuals of courtly conduct of the Spanish baroque. For Malkmus, the key to understanding the connection lies in examining how the later figure does not just repeat an initial baroque archetype, but selects, varies, and intensifies its features. These changes are key to understanding “the human condition in modernity” (8). The new, psychoanalytically inflected facets of the picaro—his guilt, narcissism, infantilism and multiform family romances—describe what is distinctive about modernity even in its affinity to a pre-bourgeois era. While certain features of the modern picaresque may reflect autonomous developments in formal technique—for example, the adaptation of the psychological realism of Kafka’s erlebte Rede to a seemingly incompatible picaresque narrative situation (42)—Malkmus is more concerned with what a phenomenon like the profusion of psychological terminology without corresponding psychological depth might indicate about the mindset of modernity. Or alternatively, while he follows the metaphoric logic of monetary circulation in Kafka and Mann, Malkmus does not link it to a picaresque development per se, but to a sociological feature of modern capitalism disclosed in the insistent metaphorical recourse to “the protean adaptability of money” (95) offered by Georg Simmel, the era’s quintessential diagnostician.

From its emergence as an archetype of the individual as such, arguably inaugurating the novel as a literary form, the picaro turns into an emblematic figure of the self-seeker in meritocratic societies who makes his way forward without wider solidarities, histories, or trust, often flipping into the successful social climber’s opposite, the victim of anonymous social suspicion. The picaro is, in Malkmus’s account, the consummate bourgeois anti-hero, incapable of the internal moral synthesis achieved by the heroes of the nineteenth century’s novels of manners or education. When Enlightenment ideals still held sway—or, as Walter Benjamin put it, when “the bourgeoisie conquered its great positions”—its heroes integrated their interior and exterior worlds, drawing plot lines together into closed forms, even into a closed historical epoch whose end Benjamin dates to 1883. That interval—in which the novel assumed the characteristics of psychological depth that lent it its classic form as the bourgeois epic—turns out to have been but a phase. The re-emergence of the picaro, along with the related antiheroes of modernism, is thus a return to the roots of the novel genre. The picaro becomes an allegory for the failures of the intervening bourgeois ideal; above all, its failure to cohere into a consistent social protagonist. What some critics at the time, Lukács not least, considered the decadence of modernism—or even just the decadence of the hustlers and con men populating the work of Döblin, Fallada, Hesse, Serner—is, in Malkmus’s reading, actually a return to form. The novel, after all, was the genre born with the outsider.

Hans Mayer characterized Weimar’s literary outsiders as symptoms of the Enlightenment’s failure to encompass all humanity. Demonstrating the pluck of the weak, such outsiders drew Mayer’s humanist sympathies. But while the outsiders in Malk-mus’s account share antecedents—above all, in the Spanish Jewish converso—his modernist picaros are only “half outsiders” (8, 159), alternately pariahs and parvenus (as Arendt characterized tenuously assimilated bourgeois Jews) or “underdogs and shapeshifters.” They are not in any case touchstones for our moral sympathy, as they are for Mayer. Here, the baroque...