Journey through the Endless Interior
Labyrinths from Piranesi to 'Piranesi'
I began writing this essay with the intention of tracing the line of influence that connects the historical Piranesi with the result which now surfaces when you seek him in the labyrinth called Google — Susannah Clarke’s 2020 novel. But as I advanced, what seemed near at hand often turned out to be unexpectedly distant. The route was not that I had intended, and I often found peculiar vistas opening up, onto modern architecture, information, simulation, the self. Only little by little, and with terrible slowness, was I able to find my way back out, into sunlight and fresh air…
You can listen to the first of our podcast episodes on Piranesi here —
i. Piranesi’s Labyrinths
We might say that Giambattista Piranesi, in his Carceri or Prisons series, invented a new image of the Labyrinth.
The Labyrinth is an ancient idea, guardian of mysteries, location of mythic trial and adventure. King Minos built a labyrinth to house his monstrous son; perhaps inspired by an earlier and even larger structure in Egypt.1
Within the labyrinth the image is typically imprecise — a few generic elements and an air of of disorientation. Descriptions of the Minoan labyrinth as architecture are sparse — almost all we hear about for certain is it had at least one door post, to which Theseus attached Ariadne’s thread. Labyrinths, when they are drawn at all, are shown as a plan or ideogram, a unicursal spiral of the kind that appears on certain Cretan coins.
For most of history labyrinths are less a type of space than its absence. The corridors below the Palace of Minos, winding sinuously like dancers, contain nothing in the way of rooms or spatial qualities. There is nothing, so far as we know, to differentiate the start from the end. An unknown duration of the corridor, the wide world reduced to the space illuminated by a torch or candle.
The labyrinth has a curiously ambiguous relationship to architecture, at once an utter failure state and moment of rapturous fulfilment. On one hand, it is a failure — of order, orientation and legibility. You normally aren’t meant to get lost in a building. Only the bafflement of tomb robbers, or the accommodation of a terrible monster can really justify it as a deliberate aim. The largest space in any large beaux arts building is a salle des pas perdus — literally ‘hall of lost steps’ — where wandering visitors can reorient themselves. The demand for formal hierarchy and a clear and legible diagram are a constant across styles and eras.
But to be truly lost is also to be truly immersed, to thus to surrender entirely to architecture as art and overwhelming experience. Peter Sloterdijk — reflecting on Paul Valéry’s Eupalinos — makes this point:
There are two art forms, says Valéry, which envelope man in man: in the medium of stone in architecture, in the medium of air in music.
It is in this immersion that we are most fully open to what surrounds us:
When one builds a house for oneself, one creates, as it were, the space-demon by which one will subsequently be possessed… Architecture’s totalitarianism is a totalitarianism of love, of the love of space, of being enraptured by that which not only stands over against us but which envelopes us.2
Piranesi’s Carceri series was released in two versions, first in 1750 and then in 1761. During his lifetime he was better known for his prints of antiquities — only posthumously did the Prisons become his most famous work. In the first edition, the images are still clearly related to the tradition of late baroque stage design, with a sense of space and openness which could be adapted for theatre.
A decade later, when he returned to the plates and reworked them, he severed their connection to these conventions. If the Prisons are stage designs, then they are uselessly dark and cluttered. As capricci, they are oddly brutal, substituting pulleys, banners, iron bars and clouds of smoke for classical detail and Arcadian allusion. As architectural fantasies, they commit bizarre and gauche errors — distortions of perspective and scale. They have become something else, discovering, through their own evolution, a new idea in the history of representation.
The individual plates do not have canonical names, but are known for their features — The Round Tower, The Lions, The Sawhorse, The Well. They use a form of composition called veduta per angolo, in which the space is viewed diagonally and slightly from below, creating an endless pattern of receding interpenetrations.
The plates are full of expressions of movement without resolution, stairs that lead to nowhere, spaces opening into unseen voids. The possibility of unseen depth is around every corner, behind a window. But when are rare deep view actually appears — as, for example, in The Arch with a Shell Ornament — it is inevitably closed by yet another unresolved perspective.
Marguerite Yourcenar, in The Dark Brain of Piranesi, describes this odd sense of expansiveness and entrapment.
the artist succeeds in convincing us that this disproportionate hall is hermetically sealed, even on the face of the cube we never see because it is behind us. In the rare cases where an inaccessible opening gives onto an exterior itself imprisoned by walls, this sort of trompe l’oeil merely aggravates the nightmare… we almost never have the impression of being in the main axis of the structure, but only on a vectorial branch… this world without a centre is at the same time infinitely extensible. Behind these halls with their barred bulls-eyes, we suspect there are halls just like them, deduced or deducible in every direction… This world closed over itself is mathematically infinite.
The discovery of the Carceri, and its translation into wider culture, has its own peculiar and labyrinthine quality. In a famous section of Thomas de Quincy’s Confessions (1821), the Prisons exemplify the inward dreamscape of the romantic imagination:
Many years ago, when I was looking over Piranesi’s Antiquities of Rome, Mr. Coleridge, who was standing by, described to me a set of plates by that artist, called his Dreams, and which record the scenery of his own visions during the delirium of a fever. Some of them (I describe only from memory of Mr. Coleridge’s account) represented vast Gothic halls, on the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and machinery, wheels, cables, pulleys, levers, catapults, &c. &c., expressive of enormous power put forth and resistance overcome. Creeping along the sides of the walls you perceived a staircase; and upon it, groping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself: follow the stairs a little further and you perceive it come to a sudden and abrupt termination without any balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to him who had reached the extremity except into the depths below. Whatever is to become of poor Piranesi, you suppose at least that his labours must in some way terminate here. But raise your eyes, and behold a second flight of stairs still higher, on which again Piranesi is perceived, but this time standing on the very brink of the abyss. Again elevate your eye, and a still more aerial flight of stairs is beheld, and again is poor Piranesi busy on his aspiring labours; and so on, until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall. With the same power of endless growth and self-reproduction did my architecture proceed in dreams…
There are various obvious errors here — the name of the series is wrong, Piranesi doesn’t actually appear in any of his own prints, nor is there exactly specific image that exactly corresponds with the description given. Still, this whole act of description turns out to constitute a significant act of invention.
It’s worth noting that de Quincy is dreaming of a series of images that he himself has never actually seen. The idea of the Prisons is so terribly potent that it can spread by description alone.
And even if it is, in point of fact, false, the idea of Piranesi as the inhabitant of his own fantasy is undeniably powerful. Captive in a labyrinth of his own making — he and his ruinous surroundings speak to the seduction of nostalgia, melancholy, fatalism, irony. All the things which which might draw a person away from the well-lit ateliers of ‘Enlightenment,’ progress, shared endeavour, and into the catacombs of obsession and longing. And his labyrinth itself — built out of fragments of cultural detritus, recordings, information — will become an image of particular importance.
ii. Nightmares in the Universal Library
Posterity has found many uses for Piranesi’s infinite dungeon. In the 20th century, we find his shadow in the work of the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges, who (inevitably) called his collected stories Labyrinths. Borges’ study in the National Library in Buenos Aires was decorated with Piranesi’s prints — sadly the knowledge of which particular ones they were has been lost.
Borges’s stories take place in the new Piranesian labyrinth — sublime, ruinous, paradoxical. Where the ancient labyrinth imposed physical constraint, the new labyrinth permits eternal and pointless wandering. Where the old labyrinth is dark, enclosed and incomprehensible, the new one is expansive, full of false dawns and meaningless breakthroughs. If the labyrinth of old is about the loss of power, the new labyrinth is about the futility of endeavour. You can walk for hundreds of miles, or stay right in the same place — it makes no difference. It is the terror of infinity, of time and space, of the human soul in a Godless age.
Borges’ protagonists are marked by a certain lassitude or fatality. If the Minotaur, in The House of Asterion, can imagine an end to the pain of solitude, it is only through the coming of Theseus, his ‘redeemer’. In The Circular Ruins, a man visits a magical location where dreams can become reality, to create a man. Only in time does he realise, “with relief, with humiliation, with terror” that he himself is the dream of another. Even the hero of The Garden of Forking Paths — a spy, on his way to a vital rendezvous with a man called Stephen Albert, finds himself entrapped in an unsettling conversation about the nature of causality, in which the possible worlds of parallel universes seem to branch off the here and now like so many false perspectives. The road ahead, like that Minoan hieroglyph, is winding but unicursal, fated, inevitable.
His most literally architectural story is The Library of Babel.
The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. In the center of each gallery is a ventilation shaft, bounded by a low railing. From any hexagon one can see the floors above and below one after another, endlessly. The arrangement of the galleries is always the same: Twenty bookshelves, five to each side, line four of the hexagon’s six sides; the height of the bookshelves, floor to ceiling, is hardly greater than the height of a normal librarian. One of the hexagon’s free sides opens onto a narrow sort of vestibule, which in turn opens onto another gallery, identical to the first—identical in fact to all. To the left and right of the vestibule are two tiny compartments. One is for sleeping, upright; the other, for satisfying one’s physical necessities. Through this space, too, there passes a spiral staircase, which winds upward and downward into the remotest distance.
This is not a story where anything ‘happens’ but rather one in which we explore a thought experiment and its implications. Inside the endless beehive of the Library is every book that ever existed and every text that ever could exist. It contains every possible combination of characters in a near-infinite set of books of uniform size and length. You could find a copy of The Garden of Forking Paths with one wrong letter, or a description of your entire life and everything that happened. Mostly, there are untold billions of books full of pure noise, nonsense, with just an intelligible word or line here and there.
The speculation is literalisation or satire of the infinite monkey theorem proposed by Émile Borel. The theory is a meditation on the laws of statistical improbability — a million typing monkeys would be unlikely to produce a library of cogent texts — but the outcome is not impossible. Given sufficient time, it might eventually occur. The Library imagines the ultimate manifestation of this thought experiment and then spends a little time there, marinating in a little light cosmic terror.
And like any good imaginary labyrinth, the Library also laid a trap or two for its creator. In his first version of the story, Borges’ gave the cells shelves on five sides and only a single door. When drawn out, this configuration turns out only to support a small cluster of rooms, not the infinitely extensible network that the story seems to image. The Library would be only an endless vertical tunnel (drawn by Cristina Grau, above). This problem was pointed out to him, and in later editions this detail was partially corrected to suggest two openings per cell. This does allow movement in all three dimensions, although only via a sinuous and rather laborious route that — though surely inadvertent — seems, somehow, familiar? Inevitable? Even when he doesn’t intend to create one, a labyrinth appears.
If the Piranesian labyrinth is a monster of the Enlightenment, then Borges’ Library is a nightmare of the dawning information age. It is a dark reflection of real projects, with genuine and utopian ambitions to create and maintain a ‘universal library’.
During the first half of the 20th century, and until their deaths during WWII, the Belgian lawyer-bibliographers Paul Otlet and Henri Lafontaine worked to bring about a Universal Library and City of Knowledge known as the Mundaneum. In its earliest incarnation, from 1894, the Mundaneum was a card catalogue of useful information, which could be consulted, like a sort of steampunk search engine, by post. As time went on, this vision expanded — first, to a global network of interlinked catalogues connected by telegraphy, and then, in the outbreak of internationalist feeling that succeeded the first world war, to a vast World Palace and centre of all knowledge to sit alongside the League of Nations in Geneva. As Otlet later wrote
Mankind is at a turning point in its history. The mass of data acquired is astounding. We need new instruments to simplify it, to condense it, or intelligence will never be able to overcome the difficulties imposed upon it or achieve the progress that it foresees and to which it aspires.3
The 1929 design for a World Museum, Library, University, Temple of Ethics and other associated institutions, was awarded to avatar of modernity nonpareil Le Corbusier. His famous disqualified scheme for the League of Nations itself had been a strictly rational play of transparent cuboid slabs. No doubt they anticipated something along similar lines. But at that very moment, some peculiar incubus seemed to take hold of the architect. In the face of the project of total knowledge synthesis, he suddenly started dreaming of ruins.
It is his proposals for the new World Museum, to contain the whole history of mankind, that revealed this atavistic turn. Le Corbusier’s contemporaries (and even his own staff) were unsettled by the form of the project, a huge pyramid with a gradually downward sloping ramp, an abstract image of continuity but also unmistakably also a monument, an image from antiquity, the kind of backward and superstitious reflex which the modern movement was supposed to have abolished. And, looking at the plan, we discover (perhaps with a certain sense of fatality) the spiralling corridors of the labyrinth.
The labyrinthine spiral is a recurring image in Corbusier. The Mundaneum went unrealised, but the spiral museum was proposed again and again — in the Musée d’Art Contemporaine in Paris in 1931, in a project for the expo in 1937, for a ‘Museum of Limitless Growth’ in Phillipville (now Skikda), Algeria, in 1939 and finally realised, in partial form, in museums in Ahmedabad and Tokyo (1957 + 59).
By then his departures from the strict spirit of functionalism, his lapses into mysticism, were no longer controversial in the way they had been in the 1920s, when the Czech critic Karel Teige accused Corbusier of having placed mystic historicism over rigour and science, of having abandoned his principles in the pursuit of ‘vain wish.’
In Corbusier’s Museum labyrinth you generally begin in the place of the Minotaur. In the Mundaneum scheme you would have started at the peak of the pyramid and wound gradually downward. In later versions of the idea, you enter from below in the centre of a flat spiral, and cycle outward. He imagines the museum continuously expanding, absorbing the cultural production of future ages by adding more galleries at the end of the spiral, endlessly extending the enfilade. The museum of the whole of history is an ever lengthening worm.
It’s not surprising that most of these weren’t build. They sound like an idea from Borges. The museum grows and grows, becoming ever larger and stretched out.
As the fidelity and precision of its curation increases its growth would have to accelerate. Eventually the centre would lose contact with the periphery altogether, collapsing into forgetfulness while the present spirals ever outward. The rooms fall into disrepair, the lights stop working, the cases are ransacked.
This Labyrinth is the vain wish to capture the informational totality. It is as if, in the attempt to model the whole world, the model somehow collapses. In its attempt to represent perfectly, it falls apart; like the country sized map, in Borges’ On Exactitude in Science, once the apotheosis of cartography, but now only “Tattered Ruins… inhabited by Animals and Beggars.”
In 1936, years after the failure of the World City, Otlet made a series of drawings for an unpublished Atlas Monde. Among them is a Cellula Mundaneum, a spatial exemplification of the ideals of the project. It seems unlikely Borges ever actually saw these images, so their resemblance to the cells of Library of Babel can only be… well, let’s call it fate.
iii. Horror Vacui
Today the Library of Babel is just a banal capacity of computation. An infinity of meaningless texts was bizarre speculation in 1941 — in the era of LLMs it’s simply a day to day reality. You get a little of its vertiginous scale of the original idea in the occasional factoids that appear on the growth of digital media — a tenth of all photos ever, were made last year. Half of all new writing is now by AI… etcetera, and so on. They might hold your attention if you aren’t already too jaded.
The endless interior has an obvious cultural currency — contemporary but not exactly new. The Matrix is now significantly older than most of my students. The labyrinth as a mental construct, certainly isn’t new but has a certain resonance in the era of computer simulation. I have no mouth but cannot scream. The forthcoming Backrooms movie. A thousand procedurally generated digital works of one kind and another. Your favourite internet platform.
Before Susannah Clarke, the definitive modern ‘Piranesi novel’ was Mark Z Danielewski’s House of Leaves (1990). It’s a fascinating and genuinely challenging novel, more referenced, I think, than actually read.
Here’s a summary. The Navidson family make a video about moving into their new, very ordinary house in a Virginia suburb. Little by little, things start to get strange. A room seems to be larger on the inside than the outside. An odd hallway, which was never there before, suddenly appears. When they eventually venture inside, they discover a vast undercroft filled with endless and impossible spaces. Stairs that descend endlessly downward, peculiar and unsettling hallways.
The spaces in House of Leaves substitute the rich and semantically cluttered vistas of Piranesi for an alienating, ash-grey blankness. The spaces are empty and silent, but for a very occasional, very faint, growling. This is a haunted house, but it is the house itself that is the monster, a mysterious and capricious wonder which first tolerates, and then persecutes its explorers.
Like many gothic tales, we are distanced from people to whom this actually happened. We never really meet the Navidsons. We hear their story at several removes. The participants in the drama are not those assembling the narrative, and the assembler of the narrative is not the person writing the book.
The first interlocutor is a mysterious Borges-analogue called Zampanò, the second an author-surrogate called Johnny Truant. Truant is assembling Zampanò’s notes and adding more of his own — thus the events in the house are framed by layers and layers of text and mediation. The videos are described in precise and evidential terms, but in a narrative interrupted by endless footnotes and marginalia, which range from the scholarly to the bizarre and nonsensical. Le Corbusier makes an appearance in a non-existent academic text; at one point the author shows the text to Jacques Derrida.
The effect of all this is paradoxical. The fact that we never exactly met Victor Frankenstein (he’s talking to a ship’s captain whose letter to his sister we read) created a pleasing element of doubt and fantastic possibility. But in House of Leaves this effect is heightened beyond any reasonable degree. The very multiplication of the house through text, reference, imaginary bibliography has a monstrosity of its own. Towards the end of the book, Truant suspects he has blundered into the Labyrinth himself — he hears the Minotaur coming. That same peculiar contagiousness that moved from Piranesi’s print, through Coleridge’s description and into de Quincy’s dreams has captured him. There is no escape.
There are moments, reading the book, where you might be leafing through the pages of the Library of Babel. There are gripping moments, and passages that are a genuine ordeal to actually read. Amid the absurd circumlocutions that wind like so many Piranesian bridges, it is as if the monstrous excessiveness of the house were manifesting through the book itself.
… I meant to finish the essay weeks ago. I’m supposed to be trying to grow this Substack. I meant to say something about computer games, whose form is innately labyrinthine. But I’ve already gone on far too long now. If I start on that I’ll never get out of here… It can’t be much further… Somehow every time I think I’m getting near the end, a new vista opens up, revealing the same strange and familiar images…
The forthcoming Backrooms A24 movie is a distinctively weird 21st century media product — a 4chan meme which became an anonymous collective fiction, and eventually a feature debut for a well-known Youtuber. The story comes ab initio from a peculiar failure mode of 3D video games — where the physical and visual worlds become disaligned and the player character ‘clips through’ the terrain into infinite space. In the Backrooms, what lies beyond the real world is are impossible warrens of corridors and peculiar spaces, with the decor of weird and abandoned malls, hospitals or business parks.
The movie, which I haven’t seen, not least because it isn’t out,4 exists as one of hundreds of works in this genre. To an outsider there is something strikingly conventionalised about them, a repetition of the same creepy tropes and locations. The strange tiled passageways of an 80s leisure centre. A children’s ‘soft play’ centre. The drop-ceilinged passageways of an out of town office. There are tropes which even Piranesi would have been familiar with — the melancholy heaping up of random ephemera, even if the grotteschi here are built of desks and stop signs rather than fragments of stone and trailing creepers.
At times the experience of reading Susannah Clarke’s Piranesi felt surprisingly like playing a computer game. Or rather, it felt like watching someone else play a computer game, wandering in a desultory way from place to place, picking things up and putting them down again, making a occasional remarks on the mise en scene. We need to talk to a few NPCs, fulfilling a simple quest or two to trigger a cinematic conclusion, and that’s all until next time.
The book is a strange and occasionally frustrating experience if you come to it with any real interest in the real Piranesi. Clarke’s book draws remarkably little on the rich and incredibly suggestive work of the original. Rather, it draws on a version of Piranesi already multiply consumed and digested by a human centipede of literary interpretation. He is, like Coleridge’s dream, a prisoner in a prison of illusions. In true Gothick style, he’s an amnesiac. He’s a beachcomber in the endless halls of statues and stairs. Clarke’s engagement with titular referent has an odd overemphasis on marginalia — the sea (present in only a handful of the thousand or so prints in the œuvre), shells (likewise), narrative statues. That isn’t necessarily a demerit but it means that (not for the first time) we’re conscious of reading a work through multiple layers of intermediation — more de Quincy’s imagined Piranesi than the artist himself.
‘Piranesi’ writes in a declaratory and oddly emphatic manner that reminds one at times a little too much of Borges’ House of Asterion.
‘The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite’
So runs a cryptic and oft pull-quoted early passage, after describing a conjunction of tides running through the statue’d halls. I caught at least an echo of Borges’ Minotaur:
I know that I am accused of arrogance and perhaps of misanthropy, and perhaps even of madness. These accusations (which I shall punish in due time) are ludicrous. It is true that I never leave my house, but it is also true that its doors (whose number is infinite’) stand open night and day to men and also to animals. Anyone who wishes to enter may do so. Here, no womanly splendors, no palatial ostentation shall be found, but only calm and solitude. Here shall be found a house like none other on the face of the earth. (Those who say there is a similar house in Egypt speak lies.)
This need not be a demerit. On the contrary, Clarke’s facility for period appropriate pastiche was one of the great pleasures of her first novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. But here it’s rather hard to see what it’s adding. Borge’s Minotaur’s testimony is curiously poignant — he’s a passionate, self reflective, intelligent metaphysician, living in an inverted world. The labyrinth is a prison fitted to his deformed understanding. Filled with love, longing for companionship; so great is his desire for freedom that he welcomes his own death. The awful monster is terribly innocent.
Every nine years, nine men come into the house so that I can free them from all evil. I hear their footsteps or their voices far away in the galleries of stone, and I run joyously to find them. The ceremony lasts but a few minutes. One after another, they fall, without my ever having to bloody my hands.
By contrast, Clarke’s ‘Piranesi’ is just a normal nice confused man. Eventually a hardworking policewoman appears, who tells him some useful platitudes — there are people who care about you. You have a family and a normal life to return to. We never learn anything about them. They are more of a general promise. There is a normal life outside. Why not give it a rest and come out of the labyrinth? The Minotaur is animated by a terrible naivety. ‘Piranesi’ is more or less fine, getting some work done, exploring things. It’s a lazy Sunday vibe. He’s spent too long looking at the statues. Why is he even there, other than as a rather vindictive experiment? Why is he even called Piranesi? It seems to be a joke by his nasty but rather thinly drawn antagonist, who (like Clarke I guess) must have read a lot of de Quincy.
Is that really the end? I spent all this time getting here? No conclusion? Well, in a manner of speaking isn’t all 21st culture labyrinthine, curled impossibly inward, quoting-recycling, recycling-quoting? No? If only I had a little longer, I suppose we could go into it but who knows where we might end up… if I spend any longer here, I’ll never leave…
Herodotus visited this earlier maze, or at least something he thought was it — he mentions a vast and incomprehensible complex, with twelve courtyards, three thousand rooms, and wavy corridors filled with pillars and figures of white stone, though it seems the structure described may be a misreading of a much larger complex as a deliberate strategy of confusion.
Peter Sloterdijk Architecture As an Art of Immersion translated by A.-Chr. Engels-Schwarzpaul, originally published as Sloterdijk, P. (2006). Architektur als Immersionskunst. Arch+, 178
Treatise on Documentation (1934)
Even from the trailer it looks like it’s taken inspiration from a few well-chosen House of Leaves bits.
Lovely, thank you, a lot of very valuable stuff here for me.
I think it's important to recognise that Minos only built the labyrinth as a prison for his monstrous son in the stories of the culture who conquered the Minoans. The Greeks had all sorts of reasons to find ways to assert the barbarity of those they usurped, and to demonise their culture and spirituality; there are many parallels with the denigration of the wild Dionysian rituals, and other strands of Greek development, away from the woods, into the cities... not least the pushing under the earth of powerful wild beings with horns, slowly turning them into what eventually becomes the Christian devil. To me this feels a lot like a process of subjugation and control of masculine desire. The foundations of the western worldview have in many places been very well hidden, often with a lot of violent trauma; it requires some very deep digging to uncover them, but if we want a good secure house this is unavoidable!
And if through this the labyrinth can revert from prison to a spiritual tool (which implies a pathway to liberation), then something in this mirrors the structure of the labyrinth itself...