Platonesi: Susanna Clarke's "Piranesi" (2020)

 
Reviews of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi have been cagey about revealing too much of the plot, as if to say even rudimentary things about the novel would be to spoil it. I don’t see this, I must say. But perhaps you want to exercise caution.

Clarke's title character, narrating in first-person via his journal entries, is the only living inhabitant of a vast mansion—so vast that he can never find a way out of it, so huge an ocean washes tidally through the lower levels, and clouds float through the upper ones. The House consists of an endless succession of rooms and corridors, adorned everywhere with marble statuary past which Piranesi wanders, feeding on seaweed and fruits de mer from the ground floor, and tending the skeletons of thirteen previous inhabitants of the place. Piranesi is an unusually ingenuous, almost a child-like narrator, and we soon realise that the only other person in the House—a twice weekly visitor called ‘The Other’, whom Piranesi considers a friend—is probably not all he pretends, no matter how much Piranesi trusts him.

This is all well-evoked, the universe of the House neither mistily sketched nor over-rigorously delineated. The worst you could say is that it's more cool conceit than rigorous narrative, more a arrangement of striking images than a framework able to furnish all the satisfactions the novel as a form. I suppose those images refract (a) Clarke herself stuck largely inside her house since 2012 with her debilitating, chronic illness, (b) a Lewisian Narnia-style allegory by which the world is God's strange mansion—Magician’s Nephew supplies the novel’s epigraph—and (c) some manner of anxiety about climate change (the lower levels are dangerously flooded!) 

In all it is a good though not, I think, a great novel. I'm not sure it has the unexpectedness or baffling eloquence of particular image that defines the best surrealism (your mileage may, of course vary). Certainly it would be hard to claim it as on a par with Strange and Norrell, undeniably a major work of 21st-century fiction. But I enjoyed it very much, and its core idea has lingered with me since I finished it a couple of weeks ago. It’s an upholstered short-story rather than a novel, but that’s OK.

On the topic of spoilers, I’m a little puzzled by the reviewerish pussy-footing. Aspects of the way Clarke unfolds her story seem to me readily guessable, even from the basic summary of the premise I give here. Things go broadly how any reader who thought about the matter for five minutes would anticipate them to go. Piranesi wandering his strange megadomus would hardly fill two hundred and fifty pages, so of course there are complications. But perhaps you would prefer to stop reading now, if you haven’t yet picked up Clarke's novel, lest I taint your enjoyment. I mean, perhaps you never started reading this blogpost, in which case you obviously have no problem.

My point is that before I'd even cracked the covers of the novel, and just going on the reviews I'd read, I asssumed that Clarke was going to set her drafty, universe of oceanwashed inward marble halls against our world (after all, the epigraph is from the Magician’s stuffing Nephew) and that when I started reading it seemed obvious that the Other would prove to have come from the latter. And so it transpires: not just him but various others including, we soon discover, Piranesi himself. That P. cannot remember the other world is a function of the strange, memory-effacing effect the House has upon those who live within it for any length of time. The Other relies upon this amnesia (he ‘tests’ Piranesi by dropping words like ‘Battersea’ into conversation, to check that they strike him as meaningless). 

So, yes: the story brings in new characters from our world, and takes Piranesi on a path towards an understanding of his actual condition. This includes him encountering other texts and manuscripts, including ones he had himself earlier written but which he now has forgotten. In parallel with Piranesi's burgeoning awareness we, as readers, piece together an our-world-set story about an Aleister Crowley-type magus, called Laurence Arne-Sayles, who gathered a group of acolytes around him with promises that he could access miraculous dimensions, and who used his power over these people to indulge his various sadistic caprices. The twist is that where Crowley was a fraud, Arne-Sayles actually could do what he claimed. He had devised a ritual to open a portal from our world to Piranesi's House.

Arne-Sayles stranded Piranesi (we learn his ‘real’, our-world name about halfway through) in the House. The amnesiac quality of the place has meant he has forgotten this, and all his prior life as well. The story of the novel is really the story of him recuperating that lost knowledge.

That's not the main thing that interests me about this novel. Rather I'm struck by the extent to which Clarke's novel is Platonic. Very Platonic. Much Plato.   

In particular I'm interested in what it says about the state of contemporary Fantasy. Because what Clarke’s novel does is dramatize Plantonism—it takes Platonism, or Neoplatonism, seriously, just as Lewis does in his Narnia books. The final pages of The Last Battle are perfectly up-front about this: both Narnia and our world are revealed as inferior imitations of the Realm of the Forms, Lewis’s God, into which the Pevensies and other good Narnians (but not Lewis’s meshuggener dwarfs, nor his we-can-be-honest Muslim-caricature ‘Calormen’) are granted access. It's all in Plato, we're explicitly told. Lewis, steeped in medievalism, felt at home with a Neoplatonic folding together of the Realm of the Forms and the Christian God and I suspect Clarke does too. If there’s a twist at the end of this novel it is—unless I have misunderstood things—that the House is our world, Plato’s cave of deprivation and forgetfulness, and ‘our world’ figures in Clarke’s conception as the sunlit outside, which is quite a neat reversal. 

I don’t know how common it is to ‘believe’, genuinely, in Plato nowadays. Perhaps lots of folk do, though if so I’m not among their number (I've heard it said that mathematicians are more liable to be Platonists than other kinds of people). But I am interested in the way there seems to have been a little cluster of strictly ‘Platonic’ fantasy novels lately: Stephenson’s Anathem for one, Jo Walton’s Socratic trilogy for another. If I’m right that Clarke is styling the House as a version of Plato’s Cave, with statues and fragmentary graffiti rather than shadows, then the pervasive sea-swell, the scent of salt, the dangerous rising tides, the albatrosses and other oceanic fauna, become an interesting addendum to the parable as originally told in The Republic. Or perhaps not, for according to Marie-Élise Zovko when Plato wrote of a cave it was a sea-cave that he most likely had in mind:

Plato’s Sicilian voyages may have influenced his formulation of the central analogies which form the axis of the Republic, in particular the Analogy of the Cave. The characteristics of Plato’s cave are reminiscent of caves inhabited or in regular use from prehistoric times to Classical antiquity, which lie along the ancient seafaring routes across the Adriatic. A great concentration of these caves are located on the islands and coastline of central and southern Dalmatia in present-day Croatia, as well as in Apulia … Both shores were inhabited by Illyrian tribes in the period when the Mycenaean Greeks first colonized the region, and the Illyrians continued to be a significant presence after the establishment of the Greek colonies of the Eastern Adriatic and Southern Italy. Syncretistic ritual practices of which there is evidence in the caves of Southern and Central Dalmatia appear to have had their roots in a mixture of older Illyrian rituals and Greek mysteries or hero worship. [Marie-Élise Zovko, ‘Of Caves, Lines, and Sea Travels: Plato’s Syracusan Voyages and the Central Analogies of the Republic’, in Heather L. Reid, Davide Tanasi and Susi Kimbell (eds) Politics and Performance in Western Greece Book Subtitle: Essays on the Hellenic Heritage of Sicily and Southern Italy Book (Parnassos Press 2017)]

I suppose Clarke’s cave is filled with neoclassical statuary because, taking inspiration from the artist whose name supplies the novel's title, she conceives not an Ancient Greek house but a later, Renaissance or Early Modern one. And, because Neoplatonism exists in the shadow of its Platonic origins. And I suppose her protagonist lives in the House alone because one of the ways the Early Modern era ‘read’ its duties towards this more perfect form of the divine was in terms of seclusion: eremites, anchorites, hermits living in their cells and so on.

One thing that particularly fascinates me in this novel is the way, as I see it, it styles apocalypse in architectural terms. It’s not just that Piranesi is, as it were, living in the ruins after the cosmic catastrophe, or that the ruins are the world, its that the ruins are interiorised architectural spaces. I’m not sure I can think of another work that figures apocalypse this way—though there are, of course, a great many verbally-rendered apocalypses, from John of Patmos’s Biblical vision through ten thousand religious or science-fictional ends-of-the-world; and we’ve seen an increasing shift in the centre of gravity in the apocalyptic imagination from words to images, from John Martin’s enormous canvases in the nineteenth-century to the plethora of big-screen cinematic renderings of world-ending disaster of modern times. But this move to architecture is interesting, more so (I think) than the story Clarke is actually telling. I wonder if this is also Neoplatonic, or at least inflected by Clarke’s Lewisian interest in older modes of thinking or apprehending the world:

Neoplatonic thought has no concept of the ‘sign’, in which words denote things by representing or standing for them, and in which the sign and its referent are distinct registers. This absence enables us to comprehend the intellectual centrality of the key Neoplatonic doctrine of the interpenetration and respective mirroring of microcosm and macrocosm. That doctrine was ‘influential’ beyond identifiably Neoplatonic thinkers. In this episteme the entire universe, from its smallest to its largest parts, from the humblest animal to God, consists in a series of resemblances, similarities and sympathies. There can be no concept of an arbitrary relation in which one thing, a sign, stands for and represents another. All relations are real relations, and all connections between aspects of existence reflect their respective natures. Hence symbolic relations both have significance and are real relations, or connections in nature. There is no space for the ‘classical’ gap between signs and existence. Renaissance thought is hyperrealist. The world presented to knowledge consists of emblems, traces, signatures and resemblances. These are the marks of that network of spiritual-real interconnections whereby the whole tissue of existence is held together.

I’m quoting here from an essay by Paul Hirst, who moves from this to a meditation on what we might call the ‘architectural Imaginary’:

For Renaissance thought a central question is how to present those traces of harmony and cosmic order—not to represent them but to make them immediately present to human subjects. In such presentation geometry has a privileged position as the fundamental mirroring of the natural order, since it is both an elaborated science of ordered forms and the present and manifest form of the order of the world. The figures of geometry correspond to the constitutive proportions of the world. The two fundamental proportional relations accessible to experience are those of the human body and those of the harmonic scale. Such devices provide traces and resemblances whereby man can be put into immediate contact with the divine. Hence the familiar Vitruvian figure has a philosophical significance belying the fact that it is a commonplace. Such figures and proportions are supra-intentional: they present the cosmic order, even if those who draw them do so merely from convention. For the Neoplatonic architectural theorist the order of the world could best be revealed through conscious purpose, through the rationally planned design of the architect-adept. This systematizes experience, putting it at the service of intellect and the superior perception of cosmic order. Hence the philosophical and practical significance of an architecture that links science, art and spiritual concerns. Proportions in structures are the visible resemblances of the order of man and the universe. [Paul Hirst ‘Foucault and Architecture’, AA Files 26 (Autumn 1993), 54]

I wonder if something along these lines is going on with Clarke’s vision in this novel? And, having started down this line of thought, I'm wondering if there is something similar going on not only in the original engravings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi himself, in all their proliferating ur-fractal architectural splendour and terror—but also in the tendency of my beloved genre to render its worldbuilding in quasi-architectural terms: vast cathedral-like spaceships, floating cities, whole planets smothered with buildings. There's a lot to think about, here.