On Piranesi

Piranesi is a remarkable text. I had been meaning to read it for quite some time, but I kept putting it off. I’d heard, many times, that it would likely resonate with me, but I didn’t really know what it was, and I’d prioritized other books — and I hadn’t taken nearly as much time to read this year as in the previous few. When I finished Gilead, I decided this would be the next best bet, suspecting it would be lighter and move a bit quicker, without really knowing what it was.

Piranesi was a pleasant surprise. On its surface, the book is about a man in a labyrinth. But as the reader makes their way through the first section, we’re left with the gnawing feeling that the labyrinth is not of our world at all. The narrator, Piranesi (who asserts that “as far as I can remember it is not my name”), finds a leaf in the tides beneath “the House” and speculates on whether trees exist. With Piranesi, the plot is almost beside the point. There is a compelling narrative, but the power of the book lies wholly in the narrator’s engagement with the world around him. He thinks of himself as a scientist, in the pre-modern sense: the world is not made of inert matter, it is vital, it is alive. The House, though made entirely of stone, has a will that it exerts over its inhabitants — Piranesi and his companion, the Other; the birds that share the main level with them; the fish that swim the depths beneath the labyrinth. At no point does Piranesi see the House as a place of malice; one refrain of the text is instead: “the Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.”

Moreover, the House is timeless. As I began to read, I thought it was meant to take place in the mid- to late eighteenth century — in his journal, Piranesi capitalizes nouns mid-sentence, as had been done previously, though not following the early-1700s practice of capitalizing every noun (like German), with some adjectives capitalized too. It’s unclear where this comes from, but the textual conventions sit alongside commodities like multivitamins, colorful plastic bowls, cardboard boxes, and modern sneakers, which appear in the list of gifts the Other has provided to Piranesi. Piranesi is particularly attentive in his writing habits, which are a lot like mine. He writes by hand, filling notebooks and cross-referencing them with an additional notebook he uses as an index. While my own practice lacks an index — it’s chronological, not thematic — his discussion of writing matches mine, and his statement as to why is especially telling: “I write down what I observe in my notebooks. I do this for two reasons. The first is that Writing inculcates habits of precision and carefulness. The second is to preserve whatever knowledge I possess for you, the Sixteenth Person.” In fact, his attentiveness extends far beyond his writing — he notes everything: he annotates the tides, which he memorizes; he remembers each statue that lines the halls; he remembers exact pathways through a labyrinth that extends some twenty kilometers from the center; he pays attention to the birds, communicating with them; he refuses to disturb the birds’ nests until the chicks have grown; and he finds beauty in fallen stones, which provide an opening that lets him fish (nutrition!) and collect seaweed (fuel for warm fires!). Stumbling on the remains of the dead, of which he finds thirteen, he takes care of them, bringing offerings and ensuring that they are at peace. He enumerates fifteen people who have ever lived in the world: the Other and he are the only two alive, and the youngest remains belonged to a girl of about seven.

Susanna Clarke’s attention to small detail is enough to draw the reader in closely, but the book is at its greatest when it deals with themes, which are fed by the very attention Clarke cultivates. The intellectual stakes are held around the immanence/transcendence dialectic. Midway through we learn of an anthropologist, Laurence Arne-Sayles, and his acolytes. Arne-Sayles is an outsider academic, and his thesis can be stated simply: premodern, and especially prehistoric, peoples lived a vitalist ontology; the world of these peoples was not cognitive — it must be taken literally. Let me give an example. We all know how premodern peoples inhabited a world of spirits and divinities, believing the world teemed with life beyond the material, biological, and physical — the spiritual world a basic fact of existence. We tend to think of this as wholly about the way these peoples saw the world: when a coincidence occurred, they believed it was a message, or a gift, from God, the cosmos, or any number of lesser divinities. That, in itself, isn’t controversial; most of us recognize that this was once the case, and that such a way of thinking has been lost. Arne-Sayles pushes the argument further, saying that premodern “vitalist” spirituality (my term — I don’t know what else to call it) is not merely a cognitive phenomenon but an actual fact of existence we are no longer able to recognize. Because we no longer see it, the world itself has stopped responding to us; or, alternatively, we might read it as the world pushing back.

Such a view today would be considered irrational, superstitious, even anti-intellectual, and the same is true within the novel. Arne-Sayles resorts to increasingly eccentric means of accessing the power of the spiritual world, ultimately turning to the remains of the first-century Celtic king (chieftain?) Addedomarus and to ceremonial magic. Over time he concludes that this is hardly necessary — all that is required to touch that vital thing flowing through the world is a childlike sense of wonder. And so he reaches the labyrinth, a world outside our own. Nobody believes Arne-Sayles except his students, and escalating scandals dog the professor and his acolytes: the kidnapping of a man, the disappearance of another, four years in prison, homosexuality at a time when it was unacceptable, and so on. Eventually he spends years in prison for crimes the police only know the surface of, and nobody really believes in the labyrinth’s existence, despite one student filming it and a kidnapped victim speaking extensively of it. This reveal also changes our understanding of the remains of the seven-year-old girl Piranesi treats with such care: was she kidnapped? was she murdered? what happened to her?

The Other, we learn, was one of Arne-Sayles’s students, Dr. Valentine Ketterley. While Arne-Sayles moved on from his initial research, Ketterley continued his search for “the Great and Secret Knowledge,” relying wholly on ceremonial magic to access it. Initially Piranesi helps him, but he soon concludes that there is no such thing as the Great and Secret Knowledge: all of the knowledge in the world is right in front of him, waiting to be studied and analyzed. The big question in all of this is: who is Piranesi, anyway? How did he get to the labyrinth? Well, he’s Matthew Rose Sorensen, a journalist who had begun investigating Arne-Sayles and his students. Meeting Ketterley at his home, just across from Battersea Park in London, Sorensen is brought to the House and made to conduct research on the place for Ketterley’s own ends, and as time passes he forgets himself, and Piranesi emerges, a new man permanently tied to the existence of the House. While the reveal that Piranesi is actually Rose Sorensen is a major plot turn that moves the story along, it doesn’t actually affect the big question the novel is asking: to what extent is Arne-Sayles correct?

When we see the world through Piranesi’s eyes, we’re left with the sense that he is absolutely, in every way, correct. Piranesi’s world is vital, the House is alive, the statues do protect him from negative emotions as he reads old journal entries he’s forgotten, the birds do leave messages for him. All of this, from his subjectivity, is wholly true. Where Matthew Rose Sorensen was a modern rationalist, Piranesi relies on a vitalist ontology. What the book does not answer — and cannot answer, given that it’s written from one man’s perspective — is whether Piranesi’s or Rose Sorensen’s view of the world is objectively true. But what Clarke does remarkably well is force us to leave the question open, to take seriously that there are alien worldviews fundamentally different from ours. This is no small task, and the question is fundamental to epistemology as such. It is also not neatly a temporal question: many people around the world continue to believe in djinn, kami, nature spirits, and a truly immanent world. From my standpoint, the idea of the divine as either transcendent or non-existent seems to be the exception for humanity as a whole across the long durée. What, then, does it mean for us to take this seriously? What does it change? These are open questions that neither I nor anyone else has been able to resolve.

I want to leave this essay with a final note on identity. Even after Piranesi remembers his identity as Rose Sorensen, Rose Sorensen does not return. According to Piranesi’s interpretation, he is decidedly not Rose Sorensen; instead, Rose Sorensen awakens, in anguish, when he sees his name, and afterward continues to sleep. In Piranesi’s words:

Then the House in its Mercy had caused him to fall asleep — which was by far the best thing for him — and it had placed him inside me. But the sight of his name written in pebbles in the Twenty-Fourth vestibule had caused him to stir uneasily and the revelation of what the Other had done had only made matters worse. I worried in case he woke up completely and his anguish began all over again. I placed my hand on my chest. Hush now! I said, Do not be afraid. You are safe. Go back to sleep. I will take care of us both.

I think we all understand what it means to forget — perhaps intentionally — difficult and even hostile experiences. Normally we associate this with trauma, and we tend to think of it as the production of a fragmented self. Piranesi does not do that. Instead, we see a layered self. When “Piranesi” re-enters the world we know at the end of the text, the person who inhabits it is neither Piranesi nor Rose Sorensen: it is someone else entirely, who goes unnamed. The narrator refers to both Piranesi and Rose Sorensen living inside, although Rose Sorensen remains dormant while Piranesi responds with agency:

Piranesi has a strong dislike of money. Piranesi wants to say: But I need the thing you have, so why don’t you just give it to me? And then when I have something you need, I will just give it to you. This would be a simpler system and much better.

This is a humane way of thinking about trauma. The response is not something to be undone, but to be protected. There is nothing to treat here, no pathology, no major issue. We grieve for Matthew Rose Sorensen’s fate, but we know that he is protected by the “him” — Piranesi — who emerged instead, and we know that Piranesi is housed in a third man, protected but not patronized. Piranesi forces us to sit with how we might see the world, over how we do see it. Sometimes it’s necessary to remember, quite simply, that “the Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.”