The great house

Giovani Piranesi, Altra veduta interna dela Villa di Mecenate in Tivoli (Another Interior View of the Villa of Maecenas in Tivoli), 1767

While that my soul repairs to her devotion,

Here I intomb my flesh, that it betimes

May take acquaintance of this heap of dust;

To which the blast of death’s incessant motion,

Fed with the exhalation of our crimes,

Drives all at last.

 

(George Herbert, “Church Monuments”)

There is a haunting quality to the decaying classical architecture depicted by Giovani Piranesi. In part the enormous semi-subterranean spaces that he depicts invoke eerie feelings connected to the smallness of the humans who sparsely populate them, and the great but lost cultural riches that they entail, whose customs and wonderous knowledge seems to have long departed — at least for the small humans who remain to sparsely populate this decaying grandeur. For Mark Fisher, the feeling of eeriness is invoked by landscapes and spaces that have “been partially emptied of the human”; one asks of these abandoned spaces, Fisher suggests: “What happened to produce these ruins, this disappearance?” (11) Fisher places an emphasis on historical trauma in these remarks: the eerie is that which is marked by a human retreat from lost potential, a utopia in decay. One senses in the residues, traces or remains of an architectural complexity or grandeur a society of flourishing civil achievements, whose decay or declining conditions indicates some receding quality of the social grandeur. It is this quality of lost and decaying grandeur that Piranesi captures. There is perhaps even a form of beauty in the bemused smallness of the human inhabitants who populate Piranesi’s subterranean architectures. In Kant’s formula, beauty is to be perceived in “purposeless purpose”: organizations of form that are never fully reduceable to intellect, whose form suggests an organization that extends beyond comprehension, so that the observer is placed into the presence of the a regime or dynamic of order that exposes the limits of her own thought. The natural world whose complex totality evades us is Kant’s touchstone here, but this is also the condition that Piranesi’s bemused, lost, or merely backgrounded humans find themselves in, and to some extent also the observers of his work, who are often given the same viewing positions relative to the horizonal plane of the picture space, rendered small and semi-subterranean by the work, and so by implication who share the denuded and reduced state that these survivors after the fall of the utopia/ empire occupy.  Due to the endless entropic decay of time, we and Piranesi’s survivor humans exist in formal, architectural organizations of space that we nor they can replicate nor comprehend. If we see beauty in picturesque decay, Kant might argue, it is precisely because it touches upon the limits of our own subjective and social comprehension. The eerie beauty herein invoked suggests a failed utopianism, and a listless passive spectatorship whose upward gaze is, at the same time, turned back in time. So with regard to the semi-underworld status of these images, the present is positioned as buried under the accumulations of the ruined, decaying grandeur of the past — or, as Joyce describes it, “history is a nightmare from which I’m struggling to awake.” In another version of this topography, the present itself finds itself housed in the layered accumulations of imperialist and colonial impositions, as Derek Walcott describes the “Ruins of a Great House” (1953-4) of British culture which contemporary post-colonial Caribbean in the 1950s found itself still obliged to occupy, even taking a kind of eerie pleasure from its elegant yet ruinous memorialization of historical violence.

What is powerful and original in Susanna Clarke’s novel Piranesi (2020) is that her central protagonist Piranesi (who is otherwise known as Matthew Rose Sorensen) makes peace with Joyce’s nightmare, the great House of cultural loss, coming to love the greatness of its cavernous, labyrinthine interiors, and to perceive a benign even benevolent force at work within its great eerie decay: “The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.” As I want to suggest, this means the novel turns the eeriness of Piranesi’s artwork towards questions of a devotional and indigenous potential utopian futures.

The novel’s plot is slowly revealed. It is this: between 2012 and November 2018, the academic Matthew Rose Sorensen — while researching a book on transgressive thinking, and in particular the renegade and ethically compromised pioneer anthropologist Laurence Arne-Sayles — is imprisoned as research subject and slave of sorts inside a mysterious underworld labyrinth known as the “House” or “World.” He is trapped there by Valentine Ketterley, a disciple of Arne-Sayles — whose name references Uncle Andrew Ketterley, the cowardly magician of C.S: Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew. Ketterley jokingly refers to Sorensen as Piranesi, and as Rose Sorensen forgets every aspect of his past while in the House, he must accept this name. Piranesi knows Ketterley simply as “the Other,” as he is the only other person he meets for the six years that he spends inside the House. (One wonders if there a ironizing hint of Levinasian interlocution here: the source of transcendent alterity, the Other in Levinasian ethics, is for Piranesi in Clarke’s novel is the frankly evil Ketterley). Aping the discoveries of Arne-Sayles, Ketterley has discovered how to access the mysterious labyrinthine and underworld place, the House.

The House as underworld

The House is the mysterious underworld place at the centre of the novel. It is a vast decaying classical building, with seemingly infinite rooms and courtyards, filled with possibly endless statues, where all is washed by the tides which periodically flow through it. Perhaps because it is the only thing that could maintain his happiness, perhaps because of his goodness (he is a loveable narrator), Piranesi comes to develop a deeply compassionate feeling for the House: “the Water lapping the Walls in a thousand, thousand Chambers. It is a sound that accompanies me all my days. I fall asleep to it every night, just as a child might fall asleep, safe on its mother’s breast, listening to her heartbeat.” As I want to suggest, the way the House establishes his dependence, oddly replicating the axis home/ mother means it might be associated with something like the Monica Sjöö’s theory of the “Great Cosmic Mother”: the idea of a primitive matriarchal nurturing Earth divinity common across pre-Bronze Age indigenous cultures around the globe.

Due to the fact the novel is narrated from Piranesi’s (and later, in the epilogue, Rose Sorensen’s) point of view, means the actual relation of the House to reality is never quite clarified. The characters seem to bodily occupy it, and yet it isn’t made quite clear how the simple ritual of words chanted over a candle is able to transport a person to this alternate reality. This makes the House and the manner of achieving passage to it very similar to the underworld space opened in the mythic shamanistic practices of “sinking into the Lowerworld” (Way of the Shaman, 92), described by Michael Harner following extensive field work.

There is also the suggestion that perhaps this is a mental space — perhaps the House allegorizing mind, or literalizing something like the imaginary worlds invoked by fiction (magic here allegorizes artistic space, rather as the absence of actually practicing magicians in Yorkshire in Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell might well seem to subtly satirize the systematic absence of actual literary writers from English Departments). One of Arne-Sayles’s early test subjects, James Ritter, is found locked in a cupboard in Arne-Sayles’s house, unaware where he is, believing he is in the House, but filthily standing in a pool of his own bodily fluids:

He insisted that he had only been at Arne-Sayles’s house in Whalley Range for brief periods; most of the time he had been at a different house, a house that contained statues and where many of the rooms were flooded by the sea. Most of the time he appeared to think that he was still there. On several occasions while he was in hospital he became very agitated, saying that he needed to go back to the minotaurs because the minotaurs would have his dinner.

This might suggest that the actual body remains in this world, unbeknownst to the mind of Ritter and Piranesi during their stays in the House. However, this solution is not quite satisfactory, not least because Piranesi’s occupation of the House is focused on the elemental functions of embodied existence: foraging for food, fashioning basic clothing, understanding the place in which one finds oneself. The House is, if anything, a stripped down embodied existence — physical being divested of distracting and superfluous concepts. Moreover, to posit the House as purely a mental space begs various questions, not the least being: where is Rose Sorensen’s body during Piranesi’s occupation of the House? Why does poor Ritter merely struggle with the transition to the space of the House in a way that Rose Sorensen’s abilities allow him more readily to overcome? A definite text to compare here is The City and the City by China Miéville, in which people learn not to see the side by side nature of two distinct places. Yet Piranesi apparently feeds himself for many years on fish supplied by the tides that wash through the House, and when he is saved by the police officer Raphael, she must enter the realm of the House — so we are somewhat poised in Clarke’s underworld between an imaginary and actual subterranean realm.

Cleansing, purging, forgetting

Since the World began it is certain that there have existed fifteen people. Possibly there have been more; but I am a scientist and must proceed according to the evidence. Of the fifteen people whose existence is verifiable, only Myself and the Other are now living.

The first quality of the House is the tendency it has to strip items of their essences, to wash away details of life outside the House. It induces a forgetting so profound it is dangerous to be in there for more than a short time. Ketterley is aware of this phenomenon, and mercilessly probes Piranesi’s forgetting in twice weekly meetings, seemingly — unbeknownst to Piranesi — to assess the success of his scheming. Piranesi describes how Ketterley, “never permits our meetings to last longer than one hour.” This is a precautionary measure. Ketterley it is revealed never stays in the House for longed than one hour at a time, for fear his memory will be erased. At one point he informs Piranesi: “Everything we’ve just said? We’ve said it all before… the labyrinth plays tricks on the mind. It makes people forget things. If you’re not careful it can unpick your entire personality.” The House scours personality from individuals, Ketterley fears. Piranesi is the presentation of this scoured form of identity. The fact that the scoured personality of Piranesi is so pleasant, and the cautious, defensive Ketterley so unpleasant is an important aspect of the novel’s philosophy. This is an underworld that is both fearful and eerie, yet which enables some kind of tendency to the good.

At one meeting Ketterley asks Piranesi about Battersea, the location of his house, the place where he first abducted Rose Sorensen, sending him with a ritual into the House. Piranesi has no inkling of the meaning, hearing the word as a describing a body of water: the Batter Sea, a place which he has never heard of and suspects is invented. What do you remember, asks Ketterley. “‘Well,’ I said. ‘I suppose the answer is everything. I remember everything.’” We see here that the House induces memory loss and also the loss of the memory of loss. Yet though we see the House from inside, via Piranesi’s perspective, we come to perceive that there is an outside, which he can no longer access. Though Piranesi states that the Batter Sea is meaningless, yet

an image rose up before me. I saw a black scribble against a grey Sky and a flicker of bright red; words drifted towards me – white words on a black background. At the same time, there was a sudden blare of noise and a metallic taste on my tongue. And all of the images – no more than fragments or ghosts of images really – seemed to coalesce around the strange word, ‘Batter-Sea’

This outside beyond the world of the House is also suggested when Piranesi approaches the Minotaurs in first vestibule, where there is “a draught that blows from somewhere, bringing with it a smell of rain, metal and petrol.“ (Are the Minotaur as the first step away from the world a nod at Greek mythic underworlds as constituting a first layer of the accreted under-history of the House?) However we read this apparent aversion to the outside in Piranesi, these hints are of an outside slightly less magical. We wonder what is the closeness here of reality, what is the possibility of escape, to what extent does Piranesi seem perhaps even to avoid the outside? He does not seem particularly interested in the first vestibule — one wonders if he avoids it for the dangerous porosity which might seem to threaten the integrity of the House. At one point Piranesi captures distinct sensory impressions of our world:

Suddenly I heard footsteps, followed by a voice, loud and indignant: ‘ … not what I was hired to do and I said to him, “You have to be joking. You have to be fucking joking, mate.”’ Another, glummer voice said: ‘People have no shame. I mean what goes through their heads when …’ The footsteps died away.

These parts are a little like the intrusions of Wales in Diana Wyn Jones’s novel Howl’s Moving Castle, signifying the banal, slightly horrible intrusion of reality on the fantasy space.  As in other classical depictions of literary fantasy zones, the portal here indicates something about the experience of reading (Narnia’s lamppost in the forest, Alice’s rabbit hole that leads to wonderland). Each of these works might seem to nod knowingly to their own construction of fantasy space as allegorizing the reader’s willing entry into the fiction (the protagonists in these tales at one level allegorizing the process of reading), and perhaps also — by extension — seeming to say something about the human negotiation of the various fictions and symbolic realms which we choose to inhabit temporarily or perhaps less wittingly make our long term homes. Like Orpheus going down, the literary in this sense is a self-conscious apperception of the inaccessible of the Real, the universal nature of symbolic realities, and the portal like proximity where the two worlds open one upon each other (the first vestibule, the lamppost, the rabbit hole) as expressing a movement between perhaps nothing more than the passage between two alternate fictions. With the endless statues, the House is continually associated with cultural production. In this respect the darkness of Piranesi’s eerie underworld architecture perhaps suggests the interior enclosure of consciousness in the structures that delimit its apperception.

Certainly, there is a way of reading the novel in which the House allegorizes a mental condition. This is how Rose Sorensen’s family understand his time there — and though he rejects this interpretation, he allows them to live on with their misapprehension. The tone of withdrawal from the greater world on the one hand also seems to derive of Clarke’s isolation and chronic fatigue condition that she suffered from during the writing of the novel, which caused her to be bedridden following the exhausting promotion of her previous novel. There also seems something addictive in the House itself. One wonders if Piranesi avoids leaving, and James Ritter also begs to be allowed to stay there when Rose Sorensen tracks him down at the novel’s close and offers to take him back. (Ritter begs has chosen to work at Manchester City Hall, it is suggested, merely because its architecture is suggestive of the House). Even the in control Raphael is drawn back to the House. Yet with Ritter this draw is somehow closer to addiction – the squalid conditions in which Ritter is found, effluence seeping under the door, even possibly suggests like “the worst toilet in Scotland scene in Trainspotting, in Irvine Welch’s novel, whose squalor denotes the paradisiacal for the addict Renton. Yet, beyond its psychological effects, one might also read a modelling of psychology in the forms of the House itself, as a representation of mind (Piranesi bounded in a space somewhat suggestive of Hamlet’s nutshell). “The Other believes that 16 may attempt to come here in order to disrupt our Peaceful Existence“ Piranesi reports – and one might also read the agencies here as parts of an ill mind, in something like psychoanalysis’s delineation of various psychic agencies perhaps, the Other (perhaps) as the superego, and the 16th person as suggesting dangerous contact with the outside…? (One wonders at all the submerged hint of numerology in all Piranesi’s numbered places/ people, this possibly echoing 16 Myers-Briggs personality types?) In a Platonic sense, too, the shafts of sunlight that pierce into the gloom of these subterranean spaces, in this reading, might suggest the way subterranean beauty or aesthetics grants insight into that which is beyond darkness. As in Plato’s allegory of the cave, the eeriness of these spaces is bound to their dialectical work of both enclosing existence and destabilizing our own notions of our own normative delimitations. And these themes of the loss worked upon thought by time, and the enclosure of perception within totalizing structures or reality are that which both certain modes of psychoanalysis, as well as Platonic philosophy, seek to exercise. In this sense, the novel Piranesi borrows from classical accounts of mental illness and mental constraint, devising a narrative of the inability of the subject to find there way towards a healthier reality: “Yesterday I could not think of the word for lamppost.”

Yet if the novel draws from the situation horror enslavement within some kind of induced philosophical limitation/ psychosis, the happily eerie tone of the novel is vital – as is Piranesi’s niceness. Piranesi loves the House. He cares for it (cleaning up crisp packets, caring the bones of the dead) and respects it. He is bemused by the Other’s inability to care. He is so innocent he cannot see this definitively as a fault in Ketterley, though he suspects it is. He is also unable to perceive his deceptions: “one thing remained that I could absolutely rely on: the Other was honest, noble and industrious. He would not lie.” Piranesi is naïve, yet he is also a keen observer of the house. If Ketterley is more socially intelligent, he also has no ability to cope with the unknown interior of the House, eventually dying due to an unusual confluence of tides (that Piranesi has warned him about). The House, if it is bleak and poor in the totality of lived experience it offers, seems also somehow moral (at least, this is how Piranesi naively perceives it): it rewards sincere goodness, and punishes the evil machinations of Ketterley. This might even be read as part of the House’s purgation effect. The underworld purges Rose Sorensen of his inessential, his negative personality tropes. As Arne-Sayles states in his one meeting with Piranesi, “That letter you wrote to me. I thought you sounded an arrogant little shit. You probably were then. But now … Charming. Quite charming.” Though everything Arne-Sayles does is degraded and despicable, it is also the case that everything he says in the novel is true. He is a monstrosity, but also, as Piranesi recognizes, prophetic (“The Prophet” Piranesi names him). I believe we cannot help agreeing with Arne-Sayles that Piranesi is a charming central protagonist. The eerie charm of the novel is hinged on having such a delightful and peaceful guide to this dark purgatory.

And here Piranesi’s character echoes the wider cleansing purgation of the House’s tides. Piranesi’s care for the skeletons of previous victims of the House. The novel helps us understand that at least three of these are previous victims of Arne-Sayles’s experiments with the House: Stan Ovenden, Sylvia D’Agostino and Maurizio Giussani (known as “the Dishy Young Italian”– a philosophy student at the University of Perugia, fiancé to Elena Marietti). (There is also the suggestion that one of the skeletons is the prehistoric body taken from a university museum by Arne-Sayles in his earliest attempts to access the House: “The skeleton of the Fish-Leather Man was once displayed differently, its bones threaded together with thongs of fish leather, but over time the leather decayed.“) Each of these skeletons, in Piranesi’s eyes, is purged of human suffering — rendered perfect and beautiful by the cleansing work of the sea. There are perhaps some hints of Christian Baptism in the cleansing of the waters (Clarke herself is Christian).

Ketterley’s death, too is a function of purgation. After he drowns in the rare tide swell, Piranesi tells Keterley’s corpse, “Your good looks are gone.” Yet, he continues:

‘…you mustn’t worry about it. This unsightly condition is only temporary. Don’t be sad. Don’t fear. I will place you somewhere where the fish and the birds can strip away all this broken flesh. It will soon be gone. Then you will be a handsome skull and handsome bones.’

Removing the devious machinations from the House, the tides that drown Ketterley and the birds that will pick his corpse clean, and thus function, in Piranesi’s eyes, to return him to perfection. 

Indigeneity and death

Here at the fountain’s sliding foot,

Or at some fruit tree’s mossy root,

Casting the body’s vest aside,

My soul into the boughs does glide;

There like a bird it sits and sings,

Then whets, and combs its silver wings;

And, till prepar’d for longer flight,

Waves in its plumes the various light.

(Andrew Marvell, “The Garden”)

The House is a mini-death in the way that Marvell’s luscious garden gifts his speaker a Zen-like immersion in total greenness whose “green thought in a green shade” ultimately involves a dis-worlding of the soul, a stepping out of the flow of now, as a preparation for the longer flight of death. Similarly, Herbert’s church monumental involve a pedagogical semi-internment: “Here I intomb my flesh,” so that the church space rehearses and seasons one’s soul for own burial. In a closely aligned image, though rendered as beautiful lyrical desire and longing, a thanotopic God-love, Henry Vaughan longs to lose himself in the absolute dazzling darkness of God: 

There is in God, some say,

A deep but dazzling darkness, as men here

Say it is late and dusky, because they

             See not all clear.

    O for that night! where I in Him

    Might live invisible and dim!

Though the House’s classical architecture might seem to belie reference to early 17th century aesthetics, and neither Clarke’s style (like the architecture, Piranesi’s writing at times suggests an 18th century stylistics) nor the late 18th century setting of Jonathan Strange make explicit reference to devotional themes, nevertheless as a site of mini-death, Piranesi’s House has this same religious concern with the possibility extraction from the realm of life in the name of the purification of the soul.

Piranesi’s success in surviving in the House where others before him died perhaps rests on the way he sees the House as a benevolent force. In a sense his self-reliance and his journals make him a version of Robinson Crusoe, but Crusoe clings desperately to his western identity, and sees his success as a measure of western superiority. Whereas the House, unlike Crusoe’s island, takes a more active role in the creation of Piranesi. It washes him clean of modernity. Piranesi is is possibly the occluded recognition that modern life is alienation (Piranesi’s queasy glimpses of the outside certainly are: “For a moment I had an inkling of what it might be like if instead of two people in the World there were thousands.”) 

This means, beyond or perhaps as an extension of devotional lyricism, at times Piranesi has what might be described as an indigenous and animist relation to the house – the conscious life that he associates with greater cyclical processes, and his trust that the universe will supply one’s needs recall accounts of primitive peoples in Marshall Sahlins Stone Age Economics: “When night fell, I listened to the Songs that the Moon and Stars were singing and I sang with them.” Robin Wall Kimerer writes on the fundamental significance of the language of animacy in native American culture. Likewise, condemning modernity, for Gregory Bateson, “The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between the way nature works and the way people think.” Piranesi is natural and simple like the cannibals of Montaigne’s famous essay, or the indigenous Guatemalans of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko. It is almost as if the purging of Piranesi’s character causes him to return to something like an indigenous relation to place (suggesting within the novel perhaps something like a theory of modern character as later, less permanent accretions atop a fundamentally indigenous psychology). This stripped back animism, imposed by the underworld, allows him to live there happily. “It is my belief that the World (or, if you will, the House, since the two are for all practical purposes identical) wishes an Inhabitant for Itself to be a witness to its Beauty and the recipient of its Mercies.” This place is associated with circular time, the circles of day and night, the moon, the stars, the tides. In one sense, in the House Piranesi loses all linear knowledge, as those accretions of historical knowledge outside the flow of cosmic revolution. Yet the House with its statues might also be read as the after-image of that linearity. It is the zone between linear progress and eternal forgetting — a space of history purged of the inessential. Not quite the true circularity of living in the world itself (the House is removed from nature, desolate and classical), its underworld rather seems shaped by the loss of that idea. It is a negative, a silhouette of indigenous existence. For this reason, one might also think of Adorno’s sense that the space of art as “non-identical” representation might enable contact with the kind of indigenous “living experience” as Nicole Shukin describes, “still glimpsed in its original, not yet disenchanted state in so-called primitive cultures, for which nature ostensibly continued to represent an otherness evading objectification and conceptual mastery” (Animal Capital, 56). Indigeneity in this reading comes of the House as allegory of the non-identical place of writing that strips back the disenchantments of modernity to re-enable “living experience.” This then is the impulse to primitivism repeatedly to be found in modernism, and importantly Shukin refutes as exploitative and dangerous fantasy this impulse to “primitivist fantasy of the ‘other’ of technological modernity. It was tinged, in other words, with the paternalistic aesthetics of a Europe sick unto death of its own technological sophistication and seeking a revitalization of experience through the contemplation and collection of the alterity of non-European cultures” (56-7). Can we say that the recent indigenous writing as a response to ecological catastrophe curtails the danger of this fantasy, by writing from the position of the other — and that Clarke, by denoting the devious modern Ketterley as “the Other,” indicates with a Piranesi the route of a necessary passage through the fantasy? 

So though there is something of a Crusoe in Piranesi’s active engagement with his place of entrapment, and his sincere science is also vaguely of the Age of Reason, and there is something too of Crusoe in his good natured faith in the rationality of others (and his use of noun capitalization): “I can talk to him and explain that you are a Good Person with many Admirable Qualities. I can demonstrate to him that the attitude of hostility he holds towards you has no reasonable foundation.” Yet, nonetheless, unlike Crusoe, he defers more to the House than Crusoe does to his island, trusts it, wishes to learn from it, and is humble before it in ways unlike Crusoe’s desire to bend his island to his will, to make it into an outpost of European civilization. There is a sense that the House even creates Piranesi as one well suited to live in it.

Arne-Sayles suggests the House strips away rational being, “How to go back to a pre-rational mode of thought. He said that when I’d done that, I’d see paths all around me and he told me which one to choose. I thought he meant metaphorical paths.” And this is connected to the way the House limits knowledge:

‘…the Other World has different things in it. Words such as “Manchester” and “police station” have no meaning here. Because those things do not exist. Words such as “river” and “mountain” do have meaning but only because those things are depicted in the Statues. I suppose that these things must exist in the Older World. In this World the Statues depict things that exist in the Older World.’

This purgation of modernity (Manchester, police station) in the House means reverses the realism of modern sensibilities:

What meaning could words such as ‘Birmingham’ and ‘Perugia’ possibly have? None. There is nothing in the World that corresponds to them…. The word ‘Birmingham’, for example, brings with it a blare of noise, a flash of movement and colour and the fleeting image of towers and spires against a heavy grey sky.

Whereas the pre-rational/ archetypal/ cosmic might be felt in a nebulous sense in the realism of modernity, in Piranesi’s view the nebulous insensible and unintelligible is to be associated with the structures and symbols that determine geographic and juridical meaning. Moreover, by contrasting the unlikeable realist Ketterley with the likeable indigenous Piranesi, the novel places an emphasis on the value of the House’s purgatory effects. Despite his professed respect for the Other (Ketterley), Piranesi cannot understand his indifference to the House, his lack of interest, the failure of his natural inquisitiveness:

I have known for many years that the Other does not revere the House in the same way I do, but it still shocks me when he talks like this. How can a man as intelligent as him say there is nothing alive in the House? The Lower Halls are full of sea creatures and vegetation, many of them very beautiful and very strange.

A concrete example is Piranesi’s care for an Albatross pair which come to nest in the House. He sacrifices his own collection of fire seaweed to the nesting pair due to his joy at their arrival, and his selfless ability to rate that joy above his own physical needs: “But what is a few days of feeling cold compared to a new albatross in the World?” His attention to place, to the local, to the material nature of the world he inhabits also lead him to insightful philosophical ideas. The Albatross is a delight, but also figures the possibility of one body existing in different states: “In the Air he was a miraculous being – a Heavenly Being – but on the Stones of the Pavement he was mortal and subject to the same embarrassments and clumsiness as other mortals.” There is a touch of the metaphysical poet here. Just as the soul moving joys of the garden in Marvell’s eponymous poem suggest the flight of the soul in death, so too for the Albatross’s ungainliness in the House suggests the majesty of the Heavenly existence. Like Marvell’s garden, Piranesi’s House denudes existence (it is bereft of much of the sensory experiences of existence), but for this reason it reveals the archetypal beauty of the soul. It purges the inessential of modernity’s accretions, and like a Baptismal ritual, sets up a zone between two deaths in order to prepares for the longer flight of the soul.

Infinite archive

If there is truth in Sigmund Freud’s perplexing dictum—reminiscent of the law of energy conservation—that no dream and no thought is ever really forgotten… It might also be possible to wrest from the underworld the actions of countless lost races, if only one started to look for traces of them, in which case the truth, even that which has been suppressed or obliterated, recast as a mistake or consigned to oblivion, could not be denied and would remain ever present.

(Judith Schalansky, An Inventory of Losses)

“Without the journals I would be all at sea,” writes Piranesi. Archiving his own life, he keeps hold of essences of his experience and knowledge fundamental to reconstructing his life in the face of universal forgetting. And this way he echoes the duality of forgetting/ archiving of the vast House. The expeditions by which Piranesi comes to know the great house let us know of its vastness:

I have travelled as far as the Nine-Hundred-and Sixtieth Hall to the West, the Eight-Hundred-and-Ninetieth Hall to the North and the Seven-Hundred-and-Sixty-Eighth Hall to the South. I have climbed up to the Upper Halls where Clouds move in slow procession and Statues appear suddenly out of the Mists. I have explored the Drowned Halls where the Dark Waters are carpeted with white water lilies. I have seen the Derelict Halls of the East where Ceilings, Floors – sometimes even Walls! – have collapsed and the dimness is split by shafts of grey Light.

This is a place that recalls the Infinite space of Eco’s library in The Name of the Rose, or Borges “Infinite library,” and like those places it is also an archive of a sorts. Yet unlike archives of knowledge, this is a place that is the trace of a knowledge now departed. Unlike Judth Schalansky’s idea — which she carefully attributes to other unnamed sources — of “the human race itself, as is sometimes suggested, as the world-archiving faculty of a deity,” this is an infinite knowledge with no apparent audience in mind. As in the “disjecta membra of this Great House” that Derek Walcott’s poem “Ruins of a Great House” describes, the labyrinth is an after image of ideas now lost. Writing on the residues of slavery and plantation capitalism, whose traces linger as traumatic residues in the contemporary culture of the Caribbean, Walcott describes the ruined great house as gradually subsumed by the muck of everyday life: “Axle and coach wheel silted under the muck / Of cattle droppings.” The Great House built on the back of colonial plantation slavery and associated accelerated ecological metabolisms, its trace is slowly reclaimed by the homeostatic muck and dung of the island biosphere. Clarke is concerned with parallel but quite different socio-cultural remnants. Why a classical building? Surely because that is the passage from pre-rational to modernity. But it is also a ghost place, not of life but of death, of disconnection and the trace of a life that has gone. A place of death, skeletons and representations.

And socio-cultural remnants, observational science, the archiving of knowledge, are also vital to life. Piranesi saves himself and Raphael, and attempts to save Ketterley, from the tides that kill Ketterley because he has compiled a “table of tides” from his scientific observations of the sea. He is able to live effectively and understand his life despite the continual erasure of his memory (and eventually reintegrate to some extent with the life of Matthew Rose Sorensen after leaving the House) due to his journals. The epilogue’s narrator, “I,” states of Matthew Rose Sorensen, whose life he has resumed living, though he feels Rose Sorensen is not the same person: “I piece him together out of the objects he has left behind, from what is said about him by other people and, of course, from his journals. Without the journals I would be all at sea.” In the earlier parts of the novel, part of the excitement of the narration comes of observing Piranesi rediscover details purged from his memory by the House in his well-indexed diaries: “I was stunned. Here he was. Stanley Ovenden. Already in the Index.” The novel seems herein to suggest that Piranesi prospers in the House where others die, alongside his ability to achieve some degree of indigenous habitation of the House, due to his critical skills: “as a scientist and an explorer I have a duty to bear witness to the Splendours of the World.” Sorensen is not a likeable person (at least not to Arne-Sayles) but his work as a critic prepares him for the House. Piranesi is the suitable central protagonist to negotiate the House because his identity, prior to entering the labyrinth, Matthew Rose Sorensen, is somebody fully embedded in the world of discursive modern rationalism and its creation of reality (an academic who is on the brink of becoming a public intellectual, with articles in The Guardian and such like). The novel suggests to me Lacan’s Real, and the stepping beyond this symbolic realm. This is a kind of psychotic madness, which we see from the inside. But it has a shareable architectural reality, it involves being somewhere else. One’s body is no longer in reality, so this is clearly not merely psychological.

Do we see here the suggestion that this is a readerly space, an allegorical horror depiction of the space of culture, or of fictional reality, in actual space — thus a place rather like Danielewski’s House of Leaves. A description of a documentary film made by one of Arne-Sayles’s associates, D’Agostino, also has a rather House of Leaves feeling to it:

D’Agostino’s other surviving film is even odder. It is untitled, but usually referred to as The Castle. It is shot on Betamax and the quality is very poor. The camera meanders around various enormous rooms, presumably in different castles or palaces (we cannot be seeing one building; it is simply too vast). The walls are lined with statues and puddles of water crowd the floor. According to the people who believe such things, this is a record of one of Arne-Sayles’s other worlds, possibly the one described in his 2000 book, The Labyrinth.

It is also important to note that Piranesi’s journals echo the House’s statues. The House is an index too — so that, perhaps, Piranesi prospers because he acts like the House. His note taking, his systematic nature (his science) purged of ambition and egotism, is ideally suited to habitation in a place that scours all memory, but also replicates the archetypal memorialization of ideas from the over ground reality in the House’s statues. Arne-Sayles delivers the most developed conceptualization of what this might mean:

Before I had seen this world, I thought that the knowledge that created it would somehow still be here, lying about, ready to be picked up and claimed. Of course, as soon as I got here, I realised how ridiculous that was. Imagine water flowing underground. It flows through the same cracks year after year and it wears away at the stone. Millennia later you have a cave system. But what you don’t have is the water that originally created it. That’s long gone. Seeped away into the earth. Same thing here.

The House is like an underground caverns carved by long departed water, except is it carved by long departed ideas from reality, and its statues, like physical manifestations of Plato’s forms, memorialize personality types that have long departed the Earth above ground. Piranesi is an enthusiastic student of the House’s statues, detailing odd resonances and references: the Woman carrying a Beehive, Statue of a Faun, a creature half-man and half-goat, with a head of exuberant curls (Narnia: I dreamt of him once; he was standing in a snowy forest and speaking to a female child), Statue of a Gorilla, the Young Boy playing the Cymbals, the Elephant carrying a Castle, the Two Kings playing Chess. Ketterley is not interested. But Piranesi has nothing but the statues so he looks at them. And what does he learn? Just what is shown to stunning effect in the novel’s epilogue, when Piranesi describes his attempts to return to over ground reality:

People were walking up and down on the path. An old man passed me. He looked sad and tired. He had broken veins on his cheeks and a bristly white beard. As he screwed up his eyes against the falling snow, I realised I knew him. He is depicted on the northern wall of the forty-eighth western hall. He is shown as a king with a little model of a walled city in one hand while the other hand he raises in blessing. I wanted to seize hold of him and say to him: In another world you are a king, noble and good! I have seen it!

The underworld is here the realm of archetypes in Plato – or perhaps some physical remnant of that (some sense that maybe classicism was after that, and we have lost that goal: that their statues are precisely this record of lost ideas which are now illegible to us). But remade into active knowledge by Piranesi, the archetypes, or there physical remnants, record the way identities could have been different, that alignments could have radically remade lives, that each human is only a limited version of what they might be… in short, that reality is not the most Real: that reality is a suffocating forgetting of the real potential of human life.

Again we see the traumatized reaction of Piranesi/ “I” to the imprisonment from the inside. He has made sense of it and lost himself – this is a tragedy when told from the outside. He is shell-shocked, traumatized, broken as an individual – incapable and not interested in his previous professional concerns – distanced from his family, able only to recall his previous life by reading his diaries (his diaries are in fact lost ideas – an underworld of sorts. Yet they are not genuine or weighty enough to form an archetypal realm). To a degree this makes the novel Jungian – distinct of people there exists the forms. Yet from the third identity of “I” at the end of the novel, this is a growing experience. He has learned to see – to see Platonic ideals in faces in the street. One might see this as his inability to escape – that the underworld is always in him. But tonally this is not horror, but philosophical. He now has access to the realm of ideas. Plato looms large. If only others could see this too, could go down into the House, then they might rise from the prisons of their self-enforced reality. And this makes the House a zone of politics — a utopian politicization of Platonic forms that connect lived experience to the ideal, in order to render it transformable; an apperception of the potential that resides inside each human encounter.

Archaeology of lost futures — eerie utopias & the beyond of totalizing structures

I realised that the search for the Knowledge has encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unravelled, a text to be interpreted, and that if ever we discover the Knowledge, then it will be as if the Value has been wrested from the House

How to account for an outside that does not fit a total system? This was the question that launched the post-structuralist beyond that sought to question totalizing structures. Much more clearly needs to be said here about the relation of Derrida’s analysis of the traumatic repression of all structuralist systems to the hauntological foreclosure of the future by capitalist realism, of the possibility of the Baroque fold in Deleuze’s ahistoricist reading as initiating finite modality within infinite expanses, of the possibility of the aesthetic or psychanalytic opening of a crack in the overarching totalizing surplus utilitarianism of market logic, and also the way entering the sacred space is a movement into temporary death for the good of the soul in seventeenth century devotional poetics… Notably, this is maybe also a fundamental feature of classical ethics — the platonic beyond cave as that which does not fit reality, that in fact refutes reality because it cannot be accommodated within reality, is the representation of a politicized zone beyond as the basis for building a better future. To return to the eerie utopias of Fisher, this locates in Clarke’s House an aspect of the underworld as a destabilizing of life lived tight against reality. Like an inverse Platonism, the House is a the shadowy remnants of the world (a sublunary tidal space, not Plato’s Heavenly realm of forms): not the abstraction exactly but its after-image, that one must go down into the better appreciate the potentiality residing in lived reality.

One might consider the House as against the use value of knowledge, in the way that Marx took joy in the 5 pounds Milton was paid for Paradise Lost. This meant for Marx that great literature was outside use value and the liquifying universal solvent of money could not quite get a grip on Milton. Likewise, the House cannot generate surplus value because it is not the world, but rather an after-image of the world that has gone. As an allegory of the alternative spaces, alternative realities that reside as dreams continually in every mind, the House refutes the systematic limitations imposed by juridical, symbolic, capitalist reality (Piranesi is saved, pulled back into the world above by a police officer). The answer, perhaps, is not to seek to linger forever in the House, as does James Ritter (perhaps as does Piranesi, in his evasions of the 1st vestibule), but rather to use the experience of the House as alternative space to inflect on the politics of capitalist reality — to politicize the fantasy space.  

One might also consider the animist knowledge that Piranesi takes from the House. As Piranesi sees, Ketterley’s apperception of the House is flawed. Whenever he attempts to tell Ketterley (the Other) about the tides, or other aspects of the House’s architecture, “The Other can never seem to keep this important information in his head.” The concern with his own reality, his mendacious plans, and his career, prevents Keterley from seeing the beyond of the House. So Ketterley’s devious intelligence is also stupidity, as Lacan put it: “Les non dupes err” (“The cunning are deceived”) (Is the broken ego of Piranesi’s final subjectivity also reminiscent of Lacanian technique?) The tradition of the holy fool in Christianity also expresses this idea, or the truths given to the Fool in Shakespeare’s King Lear. In this sense, the House exposes flaws and choices necessary in the relation to knowledge of the world. In an ironic reversal, the erasure of knowledge that the House works can be seen to be a central part of Ketterley’s inability to adapt to the House. It is as if the House not only inverts but also illustrates a flaw in Ketterley’s occupation of reality: his inability to see outside his own preconceived structures of reality. This is (again) like an inverse of Plato’s cave: madness comes by getting out of reality. This might then be seen as an undergirded/ underworlded version of Plato’s cave. Ketterley, that is to say, occupies reality as a total structure (the reality of the cave, his life) — whereas Arne-Sayles and Rose Sorensen’s interest in “transgressive thinking” renders them more capable of facing the outside beyond everyday reality and drawing meaning from the House. 

As Arne-Sayles states in an important passage, the House expresses an archaeology of the lost, that which has been abandoned:

My contemporaries did not understand this. They were all enamoured with the idea of progress and believed that whatever was new must be superior to what was old. As if merit was a function of chronology! But it seemed to me that the wisdom of the ancients could not have simply vanished. Nothing simply vanishes. It’s not actually possible. I pictured it as a sort of energy flowing out of the world and I thought that this energy must be going somewhere. That was when I realised that there must be other places, other worlds. And so I set myself to find them.

As in Zielinski’s media archeology as a historical investigation of lost utopias, the House is the eerie record of the process of cultural and technological upheaval. As Arne-Sayles states, “Perhaps in some remote area of the labyrinth, statues of obsolete computers are coming into being as we speak!” Expressing an archaelogy of lost futures, where archetypal expression of history purged of the inessential are archived in infinite classical halls, Clarke’s underworld expresses an outside beyond the totalizing structure of contemporary modern political reality, and the utopian-Christian possibility of change.

And, importantly, that is why Clarke’s underworld expresses the need to effect change in our world. Rather than a refuge in which we might hide from reality (such as the Platonic realm of Forms, Renton’s heroin addiction in Trainspotting, or Ritter’s desire to remain forever in the House), Piranesi’s reconstituted relation with the House, after he leaves it, describes the space of possibility. As “I” perceives, the House demands a movement away, into the underworld so that we might better come back to our own reality. This we can see in Piranesi’s apperception of Raphael:

Of all the billions of people in this world Raphael is the one I know best and love most. I understand much better now – better than Piranesi ever could – the magnificent thing she did in coming to find me, the magnitude of her courage. I know that she returns to the labyrinth often. Sometimes we go together; sometimes she goes alone. The quiet and the solitude attract her strongly.

By coming back to the world from the House, Rose Sorensen is able to better understand the depths of courage involved in care, and in the eerie work of moving towards those futures we do not yet remember having lost.