Piranesi discussion questions3/31/2024 (Though not entirely none I’ll return to this later.) Our narrator tells us that he is in his 30s-but he has the purity and guilelessness of a child, no apparent cynicism or distrust or suspicion of the Other, almost no sexuality at all. The reader is left asking: What is this scientific empirical rationalism doing in such a setting? Can empiricism function in a world of myth? What is objectivity when there are only two people in the world: when you’re in a snow globe and you can’t see the hand shaking you?Īs the book goes on, the limited nature of what Piranesi can see grows ever more apparent. He is attempting a post-Enlightenment kind of scientific observation in a clearly pre-Enlightenment setting. How many people can be known to have lived, which Halls of the House are flooded by the tides and at what times, which statues exist in which part of the labyrinth. In its absence, he methodically makes lists based on empirical evidence of what he can observe in the labyrinth. Considering another species, he hypothesizes that “the wisdom of birds resides, not in the individual, but in the flock, the congregation” (41). The Other’s obsession with the lost wisdom of some ancient magical past recalls Mircea Eliade’s idea that “sacred time” belongs to the ancients and their world. to free from whatever holds it captive in the world” (43). The Other believes that the ancients-only vaguely suggested, never specified-were closer to some “Great and Secret Knowledge,” and he intends to perform “ceremonial magic by which. In offering potential answers, Clarke creates characters who are each guided by a different type of knowledge source. Through them, we readers are always led to ask: Well, what do we truly know about our own world? And how do we know it? And what does the novel Piranesi think is the right way to know the world? These are the epistemological questions that dominate the novel. He believes wholeheartedly in his oft-repeated refrain, “The Beauty of the House is immeasurable its Kindness infinite” (5).īut is this true? What does Piranesi-so alone-really know about his world? And, crucially, how does he come to know it? He has his own peculiar system of labeling his entries, as in “the seventh day of the fifth month in the year the albatross came to the south-western halls.” He is a lively narrator, often quite funny, endlessly charming-above all, a true innocent. The book we are reading is Piranesi’s notebooks, so our understanding of this world is both delightfully filtered through and frighteningly limited by his uncanny ingenuousness and idiosyncratic voice. The enormity of this task sometimes makes me feel a little dizzy, but as a scientist and explorer I have a duty to bear witness to the Splendours of the World” (6). “I have begun a Catalogue,” he explains, “in which I intend to record the Position, Size and Subject of each Statue, and any other points of interest. He spends his days gathering seaweed, curing fish skins, caring for the skeletons of all the dead people who can be known to have existed (15 in number), and recording everything he can observe about his world in his notebooks. He meets once weekly with the only other person alive, referred to simply as the Other, and is otherwise left to occupy himself alone. The novel is the story of a man called Piranesi-not his real name, at least not as far as he can remember. Piranesi is a tour de force at a comparatively slim 245 pages, and it is a hybrid not only in setting but in genre: simultaneously patient philosophical meditation, action-adventure with heart-pounding action sequences, edge-of-your-seat unfolding mystery, and scientific/religious quest. Norrell, published in 2004, and her prowess has only grown. But this is Clarke’s first outing as a novelist since her 1,000-page, multimillion-copy bestseller Jonathan Strange & Mr. It is a hybrid set of worlds that would surely fail in lesser hands. Called the “House” by our narrator, it is a cross between the labyrinth of Greek myth and the Garden of Eden, in which the only two people in the world wander endlessly through the Middle Halls (“the Domain of birds and men”) situated between the firmaments of the Lower Halls (“the Domain of the Tides”) and the Upper Halls (“The Domain of the Clouds”) (6–7). Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi is set in “an infinite series of classical buildings knitted together” (179), a labyrinthine otherworld filled with an endless plenitude of classical statuary.
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