Piranesi
Piranesi
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summaries & Analyses
Author Insights
Quizzes
NEWReading Tools
Susanna Clarke on Piranesi
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A world without a story for forty yearsThe image that became Piranesi arrived in Clarke’s twenties after an evening class on Borges somewhere in east London, and it sat unresolved for decades because she had a world but nothing to happen inside it.
In my twenties I loved the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges. They’re generally very short, very precise and very jewel-like. Some of the worlds he created are strange — worlds that pose philosophical questions and make you think in ways you’ve never thought before. One world, for example, is an endless library (The Library of Babel). So at some point in the 1980s I wrote a few pages about a Borgesian sort of world which consisted of a vast house in which an ocean was imprisoned. Two characters inhabited it; one character understood the house instinctively and could navigate it easily and the other character could only really increase his understanding of the house by studying the first character. So this story has been with me for almost 40 years, but for several decades I couldn’t work out how to write it or what the characters’ story was.
When Clarke finally returned to those pages, it was illness, not ambition, that made Piranesi the next project. The historical research that Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell had required, years of archival work Clarke conducted before dawn while employed as a cookbook editor in Cambridge, was no longer something her health could sustain.
My life has been spent largely housebound for many years. Yet I don’t think I realized, straightaway, all these resonances. As soon as I started working on it seriously, then I could see them.
The resonances she means are the ones between Piranesi’s situation and her own: a person confined, still finding knowledge and wonder within limits.
How she wrote it
Dictation from another roomChronic fatigue syndrome made sustained concentration impossible, and Clarke adapted her process to match what each day would allow. The method that emerged was unlike any conventional drafting routine.
I write a paragraph here and a sentence there – I don’t recommend this to anybody! It’s a bit like taking dictation from someone who’s down a corridor or in another room. And I have to piece it together.
Even the research was shaped by unpredictability. Clarke read about the history of clouds because the House contains clouds, and none of it made it into the book. The one source that did earn its place was Gary Lachman’s The Dedalus Book of the 1960s: Turn Off Your Mind, a history of the decade where psychedelia, the occult, and religion collide, which gave her the intellectual atmosphere of the villain Laurence Arne-Sayles. The statues, though, the hundreds of carved figures that line the halls of the House, proved harder to supply from imagination alone.
Thinking up all the statues was quite hard work. Some months after I finished the book, I went with a friend to see the Christmas decorations at Chatsworth and I realised that Chatsworth is simply stuffed with statuary. And I thought, ‘Why didn’t I just come here, and write down descriptions of all these statues? That would have been so much easier.’
The character who asked the least of Clarke was the Prophet, Laurence Arne-Sayles, who functions in the book as the obsessed scholar who first discovered the House and drew others into it. Clarke has described a pattern in both her novels where certain characters cease to feel written and begin to feel channeled.
When the Prophet appeared he waved me airily aside and then just wrote his own dialogue. I had to type really fast to keep up. And when he had finished, he looked round and smiled, like he was saying, ‘That’s the way it’s done.’ And then he strutted off.
After finishing the book, Clarke reread Borges’s story ‘The House of Asterion,’ which she had not looked at in two or three decades. She had not consulted it while writing Piranesi. What she found when she opened it again was disorienting.
I was astonished by all the parallels between the two, by details in the Borges’s story of which I’d no memory, but which resurfaced in Piranesi.
The personal thread
An invalid who rediscovered she was an authorClarke spent roughly fifteen years largely housebound after collapsing in 2004, six months after Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell’s publication. By 2015 she had stopped identifying as a writer. A reluctant visit to the Yorkshire set of the BBC miniseries adaptation of Jonathan Strange was the moment that reversed that.
I’d felt ‘I’m not an author, I’m just this invalid and I have been for years,’ but they treated me as an author and that made me feel it was a possible thing again.
When Clarke was writing the character of Piranesi, she expected him to mirror the frustration and resentment she felt about what illness had taken from her. The character that arrived on the page refused that expectation, and the gap between them surprised her.
I was expecting him to be quite a stroppy person but he turned out the opposite. That’s not necessarily me. I get resentful and frustrated by the physical limitations of my life.
Clarke wrote Piranesi while knowing, on some level, that she was describing from the outside a contentment she had not yet reached. The recognition of what she was doing came gradually, and she has been candid about the gap between the character’s disposition and her own during the years she spent writing him.
I was aware while I was writing it that I was somebody who’d become incapacitated by illness, who is to a large extent housebound and cut off from people. And I was writing a story about someone who lives largely alone, but in a vast house, in a house in which there are many, many things to explore and many avenues of exploration, and there’s still knowledge to be found and still wonders to be seen, and there’s still beauty to fill your eyes, even though you are cut off from a lot of other things.
What she wants us to sit with
Belonging to the world, not just living in itAt the center of Piranesi is a contrast Clarke constructed deliberately: two people inhabiting the same impossible building and experiencing it as entirely different places. The character called the Other, a scholar obsessed with extracting power from the House, became her model for a particular kind of modern relation to the world.
The Other is only interested in the House for what it can give him. He sees it as something he can use and exploit: an object. Because he wants something from the House (power) and because he can’t find it, he is endlessly frustrated. So, to him, the House is a dreary place; a great labyrinth full of desolate rooms and statues with bird shit on them. The world is meaningless to him until it gives him what he wants. If it were to give him what he wants, it would immediately become meaningless again, because he would have got what he needed and what remained would be like an empty skin.
The philosophical architecture behind Piranesi’s alternative mode of being came from Owen Barfield, a philosopher and close friend of C.S. Lewis, who wrote about a lost sense of participation in the world that modern consciousness had traded away. Clarke found in Barfield’s concept of original participation a name for what she was trying to dramatize.
Barfield described how ancient peoples did not experience the sort of alienation from the world that modern people feel. We live somewhere inside our head but… they felt a deep, deep sense of belonging. I was trying to suggest some of this way of feeling about the world is still available to us if we want it.
Clarke has said that readers have mapped Piranesi onto lockdown, chronic illness, and colonialism, and she welcomes each reading without claiming any of them as the intended one. She locates her own intentions somewhere closer to the zone of dreams than to argument.
Very often they find things in it that I didn’t necessarily think I put there. But I feel strongly that when you’re writing, you’re trying to connect with something that’s quite like a dream. I wanted to create something I hadn’t seen before, but which, at the same time, felt a bit familiar — like deja vu.
The ambition she names here is worth sitting with before book club: not to argue a position, but to engineer a particular sensation of recognition without precedent.
Clarke has been explicit that she did not want Piranesi read as a straightforward story of victimhood or confinement, and she connects that intention directly to how her own thinking about illness shifted over the fifteen years she spent inside it.
For me it was a story in which I tried to understand what it might be like not to feel this void between you and the world. We see ourselves as beings who live in our heads, and the world is out there. What I tried to convey with Piranesi was somebody who saw himself as part of the world and the world is part of him.