Orphans with Parents: Robert Walser's Jakob von Gunten and the Modernist Novel

Abstract

Most scholarship has treated Robert Walser's Jakob von Gunten (1909) as a variation of the Bildungsroman. By contrast, this article examines Jakob von Gunten in order to theorize the genre of the orphan novel. The orphan emerges in the nineteenth‐century European novel as a self‐referential literary figure, a metaphor for the lone individual facing a modernizing industrial society. Unlike his fictional predecessors, Walser's Jakob is a self‐proclaimed orphan, who voluntarily abandons his living parents and aristocratic home to join a servant training school. Jakob von Gunten transforms the orphan from a vulnerable Victorian protagonist into a self‐determined modern character. This trajectory reflects the modernist novel's own “familial” rebellion against its epic inheritance. The orphan novel provides a new perspective on György Lukács's theory of the novel as a homeless genre, cut off from the familiarity and totality of the epic world. This Walserian analysis of Lukács grants the novel more agency and creativity than a Lukácsian reading of Walser's novella.