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Despite his traumatic lack of self, he claims to be a scientist and explorer: his task, interminable like that of the Piranesi conjured up by De Quincey, is to witness and catalogue “the Splendours of World.” He describes as “religious practices” his voluntary acts of bringing food, water, flowers, and conversation to the forsaken dead.

The House is the World “for all practical purposes,” Piranesi says, with the implacable logic of deranged speakers in Victorian dramatic monologues. The Other is the only other living human in the mazelike mansion. The name “Piranesi” is “associated with labyrinths,” and in the novel, the narrator is given this name by the Other, a tall, slender man double his age, erudite and sophisticated. Piranesi is made an emblem of artistic labor that strains to represent the dark empiricism of dreams and the unconscious, a reality which the author, De Quincey, will not readily codify in or as the emergent discourse of Romantic metapsychology.Ĭlarke’s novel evokes Piranesi in a similar way. De Quincey’s evocation of Piranesi is strategic, as is the fungibility of dream and prison in this moment. “With the same power of endless growth and self-reproduction did my architecture proceed in dreams,” De Quincey writes, hinting that for his own voluble Confessions the terms of exegesis will also be displacement, deferral, loss. The stairs keep proliferating, as do Piranesi’s “aspiring labours,” except this is not an image of self-mastery or artistic control “poor Piranesi” is “lost” in the gloom of his making. Here he is groping his way upward there he is teetering on the brink of the abyss. In this series, Piranesi combined classical architectural features with Romantic and baroque details and experimental devices that played with scale, perspective, and vanishing points.ĭe Quincey notes that “Mr Coleridge” had described the set of plates to him and he recalls (and conflates) the images therein to conjure word pictures of Piranesi scrupulously negotiating his fantastical architecture. In Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821)-a memoir of addiction-the narrator calls Piranesi’s Carceri d’invenzione etchings, which he has not seen first-hand, “Dreams,” instead of “Prisons,” the correct translation.

Edgar Allan Poe knew of him, as did Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka, and the Surrealists. Giovanni Battista Piranesi has long incited literature’s visionary imagination. Giovanni Battista Piranesi has become an emblem of artistic labor that strains to represent the dark empiricism of dreams and the unconscious.

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Reading Piranesi in 2020, mired in that year’s nosological glossaries of self-isolation, social distancing, quarantine, and lockdown, I wondered if we would ever be free to forget the occult reality activated by a global pandemic, a reality that lay-like a dream, like dark magic-undetected within the everyday. What might the dynamic of mental life look like when its physiological counterpart is ill, bedridden, and housebound? Are dreams-including the overwrought mechanisms of psychic exploration that are literary renditions of dreams-historically contingent, like selves? Piranesi’s is a dream world-a dream-like prison or prison-like dream infrastructure-where external and internal realities collide like planets. By the time the novel emerged, it was 2020, and we were all deranged Piranesis, “bound in one place,” as Clarke has said she was in her convalescence, and “cut off from the rest of humanity,” like her central character. With Piranesi, she has returned to the literary marketplace after a prolonged illness. Clarke is best known for her Hugo Award–winning, best-selling first novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004).

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Piranesi cohabits this space with human remains, 13 skeletons whom he domesticates with names and attributes: the Biscuit-Box Man, whose small bones Piranesi finds stored in a red biscuit tin the Fish-Leather Man, his relics articulated with fish skin the Folded-Up Child, found arranged on an empty plinth with her chin on bent knees.Ĭlarke’s Piranesi evokes the protean genius of the 18th-century architect and printmaker Giambattista Piranesi, who was also an archaeologist and draughtsman. The amnesiac narrator knows nothing beyond this architecture, which inhabits and obsesses him-this mansion with great staircases, courtyards, and marble statuary, where, depending on the level reached, you could be in the domain of the clouds (Upper Halls), conversing with birds (Middle Halls), or plunged into an underwater ecosystem (Lower Halls). There is a House with 7,678 halls in the House lives the eponymous protagonist of Susanna Clarke’s new novel, Piranesi.