Secrets of the Picaresque

Trump delivers levels of dissonance that scramble the most entrenched and loyal parts of the American psyche. It's a nightmare, but it's in keeping with how radical change occurs.

Jan 15, 2025

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“Chaos demands to be recognized and experienced before letting itself be converted into a new order.” —Hermann Hesse

TODAY, I’M GOING TO WRITE about a term borrowed from literature.

The picaresque.

I will attempt to suggest why—in our electronic age—the picaresque narrative is turning everyone and everything upside down. And why this is most likely a good thing.

The dictionary defines picaresque as “an episodic style of fiction involving the adventures of a rough and dishonest but appealing hero or heroine.”

Once Donald Trump is re-ensconced in the presidency, we’ll start living through another version of the picaresque.

But how?

Aside from Trump’s generic awfulness, what made his first term as president so maddening was the constant clash Americans experienced as the picaresque narrative overcame and replaced their old tragicomic narrative.

Why? Because the tragicomic narrative is the one most Westerners were raised on (and have lived their entire lives through.)

Jumping In

The founder of social dreaming, W. Gordon Lawrence, wrote in his mind-bending book Tongued with Fire: Groups in Experience that the salient experience of life at this moment is “…discontinuous, a series of near-chaotic events for which people can find no shape.”

Lawrence lays much of our mania on computer technology and what he calls ‘electronic events.’ And yes, we’ve all heard this before. But wait:

He asserts that because we figuratively exist everywhere and nowhere, we are falling deeper and deeper into a picaresque approach to life.

He borrows this term from the Jungian psychologist James Hillman.

Lawrence writes:

[Hillman] understands some analysands to be living in what he calls the ‘picaresque mode’. This metaphor comes from the ‘picaresque novel’ in which the protagonist lurches in a discontinuous fashion from happening to happening, event to event, but never experiences his experiences. The principal character, the ‘picaro’, is a bit of a rogue, or knave, likeable but feckless. He does not develop, improve, or indeed deteriorate.

Hillman hypothesized that people have different fictional styles and noted that the picaresque individual’s narrative “…ends abruptly without achievement, for there is no goal, so the denouement can neither be the resolution of comedy nor the fatal flaw of tragedy.”

As mentioned, individuals living through this modality experience a decline in the traditional Western arcs of tragedy and comedy. Their pressing question then becomes: Can I continue to live like this? My suggestion is YES, YOU CAN.

The Reappearance of Flow (Which was Never Gone)

The picaresque perspective concerns a cultural mutation rather than an individual failing. Our technological enmeshment was made doubly alarming during COVID-19, and with that forced investment of time came more of the picaresque.

In my understanding, the old ascend/descend oscillation of the tragicomic (which defines Western culture’s manner of assigning meaning) is falling away. What’s established now is more akin to the experience of flow—or at least the opportunity (or mental requirement) to embrace it.

Undulations—as opposed to the classic ascend/descend arcs—have given way to the ever-present ‘just this.’ These are the exact mechanics of flow, as underscored in Taoist teachings. And the bare-bones simplicity of the Tao feels like a much-needed moderator to manage our manic moment.

Rascal: A Mischievous Person

If we shed the derogatory associations of the picaresque (the knavery and fecklessness, etc.), we are left with G.I. Gurdjieff’s description of ‘The Rascal.’ In essence, the rascal responds to life from her wits and, more importantly, as Gurdjieff saw her, through her conscience.

Traditional rules or laws don’t apply and are readily manipulated to assist one’s wits—but never to the point of ending up in jail or harming another. Those were significant distinctions for Gurdjieff.

Gurdjieff claimed conscience was an innate human quality that had nothing to do with cultural conditioning. Thus, conscience could be depended upon, like one depends on one's stomach to digest food. Gurdjieff saw conscience as part of our biology, not our psychology.

Aquarian Intimations

The Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in Aquarius in December of 2020 earmarked our grand shift into the flow—and the uprising of The Rascal.

In a recent post, I wrote about the ongoing Jupiter-Saturn square. I detailed how the manifestation of the square, as we’re experiencing it now, relates directly to the ‘big deal’ Aquarius conjunction that arrived at the end of 2020.

That conjunction marked the first time in 200 years (except for a one-off conjunction in Libra—back in 2000) that the Jupiter/Saturn cycle will play out through the air sign triad.

Air signs are picaresque by nature. The fire, water, and earth signs play the game of life along traditional Western arcs. You rise, you fall, you gain, you lose, you merge, you sink and disappear, etc.

The air element is everywhere simultaneously. The air signs’ narrative is expressed through airy attributes like diplomacy and fairness, trickery, and humor. Air signs are never pinned to any one path.

Even a Saturn-ruled sign like Aquarius can be as maddeningly discursive as Gemini (the most picaresque of the air signs.)

Escape From Infoglut

In much of my work with clients during the past seven years, I have noticed the picaresque claiming more and more of their life’s narrative. The tragic and comic experiences are waning, primarily because people are confused.

This confusion has resulted in people attempting to unplug from the very mainframe that started this maddening world spinning.

The techno-promise of greater and faster and more consolidated and modern and innovative has to reach a point of collapse, not for itself but for the individual who attempts to anchor her life to its inhuman pace. The individual can’t comply, so two options emerge:

Go insane by attempting to keep up with it all, or fall off the grid into the picaresque.

This is why you see the people who have accrued all their money by mastering the tech matrix—people like Jeff Bezos and Elmo Musk—setting their sights on outer space and planetary colonization.

The old tragic/comic narrative arcs are burned out, but these compulsive, robotic souls must continue to prevail, lest their tragicomic arc collapses: “Look, Ma! I can be a winner on Mars!”

Tragedy depends on failed intentions. And comedy, through surprise and a coming together of opposites, offers resolutions and release (the release of laughter).

But more existentially, comedy happens at the end of one’s life, where we see that all of our striving and grasping was for naught—which delivers the biggest laugh.

Some schools of Buddhism claim that this is the moment when most people become enlightened, right during those final five seconds of their death rattle.

Why Not See All of That Now?

Traditionally, the narrative arcs of tragedy and comedy require a commitment to a specific path for a certain amount of time to meet a climax or denouement. But who has the time or energy anymore?

Why not drop those narratives and simply see what happens? Why not unplug from controlling every step and breath we take?

King Lear planned tirelessly for a peaceful close to his life and, in trying to arrange for his golden years, created mayhem and fatalities with his daughters—a real tragedy.

Lawrence again:

“The well-known armatures to a life, which were installed by capitalism and industrialization, have melted in the post-modern heat of electronic events. In such circumstances, people become pressed into the picaresque mode, which is essentially to be manic.”

Chaos As An Opening

Herman Hesse wrote that chaos must be acknowledged first before being converted to a new order. This could apply to the mania that Lawrence suggests.

It’s important to realize another component of the picaresque is that moral qualities are mostly non-existent. This is why you keep hearing so much bitching nowadays about, “It was never like this in the old days.” Or “I can’t believe what Donald Trump is doing now.”

You read the word ‘mania’ or ‘manic,’ and immediately, negative connotations arise. But the picaresque character might see mania as something new and exciting, worth trying and walking away from.

Perhaps mania is simply a step forward on the way ‘out’ and into the unknown, which, if we’re honest with ourselves, is where we are headed every moment of the day.

Half of the population is medicated because they are trapped in the mania of trying to maneuver the tragicomic life path. This becomes complicated when our sense of destiny and fate collapses. Both notions are usually associated with the tragicomic and how one derives ‘meaning’ and ‘direction.’

Hillman said that the protagonist of a picaresque novel lurches discontinuously from happening to happening, event to event, but never experiences his or her experiences, destiny or fate. Uh oh.

The psychologist Christopher Bollas writes that a sense of destiny allows a person to:

“…feel he is moving in a personality progression that gives him a sense of steering his course. People who have a sense of destiny also invest psychically in the future. This involves a certain necessary ruthlessness and creative destructiveness, of the past and the present, in order to seek conditions necessary for futures.”

This makes me consider the classic American ideal of Manifest Destiny—one of the most brutal and destructive forces in world history. The recent Pluto return for the US has revealed the curse of this ideal in exacting detail.

Hillman argued that the picaresque offers a wider range of narrative possibilities, including the tragic and the comic. The goal is not to choose one model over the other but to have them equally available for exploration—or to partake of none.

“For even,” wrote Hillman, “while one part of me knows the soul goes to death in tragedy, another is living a picaresque fantasy, and the third engaged in the heroic comedy of improvement.”

Where Lies One’s Fate?

Lawrence notes that our sense of fate and destiny is shifting into the global environment. Or, as I see it, through the Aquarian lens, as a movement from the personal to the collective. Meaning—what I used to think was ‘my fate,’ ‘my destiny’ is an outworn concern.

Perhaps this is where the picaresque journey leads us; the much-vaulted and lauded individual is simply another cog in nature’s expression of flow.

Which, when you think about it, is what electronic media has been preparing us for during the past 25 years or so, especially with the invention of the internet, which, as foretold by Marshall McLuhan, is a literal expression of the collective’s nervous system.

Lawrence frets that our falling into the picaresque mode is problematic. He considers this movement a defense against the depressive position precipitated by losing the old tragicomic—the loss of fate and destiny.

He writes:

“In the psychic state of a picaro the individual's preoccupation is with survival. While there is an element of the comic present in their lives, they have no access to any available myths to account for the tragedy that they are not experiencing.”

Tragedy, he felt, imparts a sense of destiny and fate in one’s life. He concludes with this, a key part of this thesis: There are no available myths to account for the sense of mania that we are experiencing.

In our current cultural moment, the emergence of the picaresque narrative has found its most durable myth in Donald Trump, who manifests the very worst of the Rascal or Trickster archetype.

But if we scrape away the man from the impulse that conjured Trump into existence, we’ll see many themes at play; themes that involve an extreme disruption of the status quo—rampant knavery, unfettered fibs and lies, vulgar humor, and like a giant blob of Mercury—that you press on with your finger—an inability to pin anything down.

With Trump, we experienced high-octane dissonance that scrambled the most entrenched and loyal parts of the American psyche. A nightmare for sure, but this is in keeping with how radical change first asserts itself in life.

I mean, this is not uncommon—that our first experience of a new modality arrives through the grotesque. There are the frogs, trolls, ogres, dragons, hags, and witches that disrupt and disturb the hero and heroine’s tragicomic narrative, so a new impetus, a new direction, a new character might arise as the prince or princess—the king or queen.

The difference now is that this new prince or princess would embody characteristics described by Lao Tzu.

The Other Thing About the Picaresque

Abandoning the narrative arc we were trained to believe in brings surprising opportunities. If you study the relationship between who you are and who you are trained to believe you are supposed to become, you will discover a lot of unnecessary tension and suffering.

The tragic and comic are propelled on their arc by the cracking whip of what Freud called ‘the ego ideal.’ Somewhere in your upbringing, an invasion happened—usually first by a parent and then later, perhaps by a teacher, coach, or minister.

These adults admired some of your natural proclivities and convinced you that to be lovable, successful, or influential, those proclivities should be developed and exploited. This situation then places a person, at a very young age, into the tragicomic’s narrative arc.

This also courts confusion and undue pressure, primarily because a child shouldn’t be saddled with shit like this at an early age. What child is possibly interested in commodifying herself while in kindergarten?

I remember when a friend who had just given birth to a baby girl asked another wise friend what goals she should instill in her child as a new mother. Our wise friend paused and said, “Why not just demonstrate how she can like herself?”

Striving and struggling to bring the ego ideal into fruition is, of course, part of the tragicomic arc because, for the ego ideal, there is never enough reward, satisfaction, or love.

It’s tragic because we ultimately fail, and it’s comic because somewhere inside us, we knew all along we’d fail, and so WTF was I doing? Cue Peggy Lee’s Is That All There Is?

The Picaresque Offers More Latitude and Relaxation

This is because the pressure is off. The grind of ‘being yourself,’ ‘living your authentic self,’ or ‘being your truth’ falls away once you’re free from the tragicomic narrative.

The picaresque style allows for curiosity. One devotes thought to each moment and circumstance as it arrives, then moves on to see what appears next—and then—you’re dead.

It means being ‘less of oneself’ because what I consider to be myself is usually tied up with the ego ideal and its driver—what Freud called ‘the superego’—another fancy psychological term for the inner critic. That niggling voice that never lets up, never lets us be in the flow.

One of my clients recently said, “I don’t understand how any of this would work. How will I accomplish anything?”

And I said it’s like taking a shit. “When you’re ready to go to the bathroom, you get up and go. You don’t need to believe in shitting to take a shit.”

The picaresque story ends with no denouement, no earth-shattering epiphany, no ‘a peaceful and quiet end’, no ‘ascent into heaven or hell.’ The picaresque ends just as it started, best typified by The Tarot’s card for The Fool.

Those Final Moments

A friend of mine who works as a hospice assistant told me that it’s the people who are filled with different ideas and beliefs about what will happen after death that have the most challenging time slipping into their closing moments, letting go into their death. “They really struggle,” she told me. “It’s so sad.”

They were still caught up in their tragicomic narratives.

Writing this was a picaresque experience.

Several times I stopped myself and said, “This needs to change here, you rambled here, oh, and that isn’t clear, and I need to say more about this here.”

Finally, I said, “Fuck it,” and trusted the part of me curious about fleshing out some of my notions about the picaresque for you. That was enough, and then I started reading about Cate Blanchett’s new movie.

Love,