A Platonic Framework for Readings of Piranesi
If you have not already read the book, reading my thoughts on it will ruin your first encounter with the Beauty and Kindness of the House. You have been warned!
Hast thou ever raised thy mind to the consideration of existence, in and by itself, as the mere act of existing? Hast thou ever said to thyself thoughtfully, It is!, heedless at that moment, whether it were a man before you or a flower, or a grain of sand? Without reference, in short to this or that particular mode or form of existence? If thou hast indeed attained to this, then thou wilt have felt the presence of a mystery which must have fixed thy spirit in awe and wonder . . . If thou hast mastered this intuition of absolute existence, then thou wilt have learned likewise, that it was this, and no other, which in early ages seized the nobler minds, the elect among men, with a sort of sacred horror. This it was which first caused them to feel within themselves a something infinitely greater than their own individual nature.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend, Essay IX
I. The House
Susanna Clarke’s 2021 novel, Piranesi, is a series of journal entries written by someone called Matthew Rose Sorensen, or “Piranesi,” or the Beloved Child of the House.
Dr. Sorensen “originally studied mathematics, but his interest soon migrated (via the philosophy of mathematics and the history of ideas) to his current field of study: transgressive thinking” (164). He was writing a book on Professor Laurence Arne-Sayles, “the transgressive thinker par excellence,” who had “convinced a group of highly intelligent people that there were other worlds and he could take them there” (175). His research brought him to the home of Dr. Valentine Ketterley, a former student of Arne-Sayles’, who, unbeknownst to Sorensen, was attempting to extend his teacher’s work and recover “the Great and Secret Knowledge.” Seizing the opportunity to force Sorensen into his service, Ketterley performed a ritual that transported him to another world.
This other world is a seemingly endless House with innumerable halls. And “no Hall, no Vestibule, no Staircase, no Passage is without its Statues. In most Halls they cover all the available space” (5). They are of gods, men, and beasts. The House has three levels: the respective domains of the tides, birds and men, and the clouds. Hence there are waters above and below. These have altered the House. Their destructive force has collapsed floors, ceilings, and walls. It has also damaged and defaced the statues. “Sometimes you will see a statue almost bisected by the Water that has splashed onto it for centuries.” Others have been broken or eroded by the waves, or “clothed in rags of seaweed or armoured with encrustations of shellfish” (35).
Under the influence of the House, Sorensen gradually lost any memory of his previous life. His new life consisted of exploring the halls, recording “the Position, Size and Subject of each statue, and any other points of interest” (6), studying the tides, and caring for the remains of the dead, as well as assisting Ketterley—whom he now knows only as the Other (the only other person in the House)—in his search for the great and secret knowledge. The Other called him “Piranesi.”
II. Plato’s Cave
There are, according to Plato, different degrees or levels of reality. This is perhaps clearest at the end of the Republic, in Socrates’ discussion of the three kinds of bed. There is (i) the form of a bed, (ii) a piece of furniture, and (iii) a bed in a painting. Imagine two paintings of a “furniturial” bed, one as it is seen from the foot, the other as it is seen from the side. Because the beds in the paintings look different, someone might conclude that they are not of the same piece of furniture. The one bed appears to be many. Now, consider two furniturial beds: two Ethan Allen, charcoal, king-size Quincy Beds.
One is in a bedroom in New York, the other in a bedroom in Los Angeles. Because these beds are in different locations, someone might conclude that they are not the same. But they are. They are the same model. According to Socrates, in a more general way, every furniturial bed is the same “model,” i.e. the same form—each is a bed, as opposed to a chair, or a giraffe. The furniturial beds are instances of the formal bed. Thus, again, one appears to be many.
These three kinds of bed correspond to three classes of maker. The painter, the carpenter, and “a god.”1 Each makes his bed by looking toward a higher reality. The painter imitates the physical bed in one of its many appearances (from this or that perspective, under these or those conditions). The carpenter looks to the formal bed. And the god, to the Good.2
On Socrates’ view, the Good itself, which is beyond being, diffuses its reality into the forms, and through them, into their appearances, and most distantly, into the appearances of those appearances. It follows that imitation, the lowest level of reality, “is far removed from the truth, for it touches only a small part of each thing and a part that is itself only an image.”3 Thus, an imitator has neither “knowledge [epistēmē] of whether the things he makes are fine or right through having made use of them” nor “right opinion [orthē doxa] about them through having to consort with the one who knows . . . Therefore an imitator has neither knowledge nor right opinion about whether the things he makes are fine or bad.”4
In the middle of the Republic, Socrates gives a more elaborate picture of the levels of reality. “It is like a line divided into two unequal sections. Then divide each section—namely, that of the visible and that of the intelligible—in the same ratio as the line.”5 The lowest section consists of “images” (eikones)—“shadows” and “reflections”—which are perceived by imagination (eikasia); the one above is comprised of “the originals of these images”6—animals, plants, artifacts—which are apprehended with belief (pistis). Together, these images and things make up visible reality, which is the object of opinion (doxa). The next highest section concerns thought (dianoia), which treats of forms (eidē) or ideas (ideai), but without giving an account (logos) of them. In the highest section, “reason [logos] itself grasps [the forms] by the power of dialectic” (511b); this is the work of the understanding (noēsis). The forms make up intelligible reality, which is the object of knowledge (epistēmē). Finally, at the top, is the form of the Good—“not only do the objects of knowledge owe their being known to the good, but their being is also due to it, although the good is not being, but superior to it in rank and power.”7
Socrates uses the Divided Line as an introduction the Allegory of the Cave, which shows “the effect of education and of the lack of it on our nature.” The passage is worth quoting in full.
Imagine human beings living in an underground, cavelike dwelling, with an entrance a long way up, which is both open to the light and as wide as the cave itself. They’ve been there since childhood, fixed in the same place, with their necks and legs fettered, able to see only in front of them, because their bonds prevent them from turning their heads around. Light is provided by a fire burning far above and behind them. Also behind them, but on higher ground, there is a path stretching between them and the fire. Imagine that along this path a low wall has been built, like the screen in front of puppeteers above which they show their puppets . . . also imagine that there are people along the wall, carrying all kinds of artifacts that project above it—statues of people and other animals, made out of stone, wood, and every material.
The prisoners cannot see what is behind them. They see only the changing shapes cast on the wall by the firelight. Hence, they believe that the names they use apply to the passing shadows and “that the truth is nothing other than the shadows”.
Consider, then, what being released from their bonds and cured of their ignorance would naturally be like, if something like this came to pass. When one of them was freed and suddenly compelled to stand up, turn his head, walk, and look up toward the light, he’d be pained and dazzled and unable to see the things whose shadows he’d seen before. What do you think he’d say, if we told him that what he’d seen before was inconsequential, but that now—because he is a bit closer to the things that are and is turned towards things that are more—he sees more correctly? Or, to put it another way, if we pointed to each of the things passing by, asked him what each of them is, and compelled him to answer, don’t you think he’d be at a loss and that he’d believe that the things he saw earlier were truer than the ones he was now being shown?
And if someone compelled him to look at the light itself, wouldn’t his eyes hurt, and wouldn’t he turn around and flee towards the things he’s able to see, believing that they’re really clearer than the ones he’s being shown?
And if someone dragged him away from there by force, up the rough, steep path, and didn’t let him go until he had dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t he be pained and irritated at being treated that way? And when he came into the light, with the sun filling his eyes, wouldn’t he be unable to see a single one of the things now said to be true?
I suppose, then, that he’d need time to get adjusted before he could see things in the world above. At first, he’d see shadows most easily, then images of men and other things in water, then the things themselves. Of these, he’d be able to study the things in the sky and the sky itself more easily at night, looking at the light of the stars and the moon, than during the day, looking at the sun and the light of the sun.
Finally, I suppose, he’d be able to see the sun, not images of it in water or some alien place, but the sun itself, in its own place, and be able to study it.
And at this point he would infer and conclude that the sun provides the seasons and the years, governs everything in the visible world, and is in some way the cause of all the things that he used to see.8
Elsewhere, Socrates compares the cave-dwellers, the inhabitants of the visible world, to people living beneath the waves of the sea.9 Perhaps this explains his likening their souls to the sea god Glaucus,
whose primary nature can’t easily be made out by those who catch glimpses of him. Some of the original parts have been broken off, others have been crushed, and his whole body has been maimed by the waves and by the shells, seaweeds, and stones that have attached themselves to him, so that he looks more like a wild animal than his natural self. The soul, too, is in a similar condition when we study it, beset by many evils.10
Naturally, it would be good to shed these impediments and swim to the surface, to be set free and escape the cave. Socrates tells us that this is the work of education, the turning of the soul from becoming to being.
In the Meno, Socrates explains that, because the soul is immortal, all learning is recollection.
As the soul is immortal, has been born often, and has seen all things here and in the underworld, there is nothing which it has not learned; so it is in no way surprising that it can recollect the things it knew before, both about virtue and other things . . . for searching and learning are, as a whole, recollection [anamnēsis].11
Socrates demonstrates this by helping one of Meno’s uneducated servants remember a geometrical truth. He asks him: If the area of a square with two-foot sides is four feet, how long are the sides of a square that is twice the area? “Obviously, Socrates, it will be twice the length.”12 That, of course, is incorrect. And, in response to Socrates’ questions, the servant quickly realizes his mistake. But he is then at a loss. This, the recognition that one does not know, is the middle of recollection.
You realize, Meno, what point he has reached in his recollection. At first he did not know what the basic line of the eight-foot square was; even now he does not yet know, but then he thought he knew, and answered confidently as if he did know, and he did not think himself at a loss, but now he does think himself at a loss, and as he does not know, neither does he think he knows.—That is true.
Have we done him any harm by making him perplexed and numb as the torpedo fish does?—I do not think so.
Indeed, we have probably achieved something relevant to finding out how matters stand, for now, as he does not know, he would be glad to find out, whereas before he thought he could easily make many fine speeches to large audiences about the square of double size and said that it must have a base twice as long.—So it seems.
Do you think that before he would have tried to find out that which he thought he knew though he did not, before he fell into perplexity and realized he did not know and longed to know?—I do not think so, Socrates.
Has he then benefitted from being numbed?—I think so.13
With some further questioning, Socrates draws the correct answer out of him: the side is the length of the diagonal of each quarter square.
Having finished this geometrical recollection, Socrates explains to Meno what has happened.
So the man who does not know has within himself true opinions [alētheis doxai] about the things that he does not know?—So it appears.
These opinions have now just been stirred up like a dream, but if he were repeatedly asked these same questions in various ways, you know that in the end his knowledge [epistēmē] about these things would be as accurate as anyone’s.—It is likely.
And he will know it without having been taught but only questioned, and find the knowledge within himself?—Yes.
And is not finding knowledge within oneself recollection?—Certainly.14
In the Republic, following the Allegory of the Cave, Socrates outlines a curriculum designed to lead students into the intelligible world: arithmetic, plane and solid geometry, astronomy, and harmonics. These mathematical subjects are important, but they are really only the prelude to dialectic: “whenever someone tries through argument [logos] and apart from all sense perceptions to find the being itself of each thing and doesn’t give up until he grasps the good itself with understanding [noēsis] itself, he reaches the end of the intelligible.”15 Thus, while it is fitting that Meno’s servant should begin with geometry, recollection’s higher aim is the top of the Divided Line. As Socrates explains in the Phaedo, what we once knew but have forgotten is “not only the Equal, but the Greater and the Smaller and all such things, for our present argument is no more about the Equal than about the Beautiful itself, the Good itself, the Just, the Pious and, as I say, about all those things which we mark with the seal of ‘what it is.’”16
Recollecting these, we lay hold of what is truely perfect, eternal, and not subject to decay.
Can the Equal itself, the Beautiful itself, each thing in itself, the real, ever be affected by any change whatever? Or does each of them that really is, being uniform by itself, remain the same and never in any way tolerate any change whatever?
It must remain the same, said Cebes, and in the same state, Socrates.17
III. The House as The Cave
In a conversation with Piranesi, the Prophet, Laurance Arne-Sayles, describes the House thusly.
This is what I call a Distributary World – it was created by ideas flowing out of another world. This world could not have existed unless that other world had existed first. Whether this world is still dependent on the continued existence of the first one, I don’t know. It’s all in the book I wrote . . .
Before I had seen this world, I thought that the knowledge that created it would somehow still be here, lying about, ready to be picked up and claimed. Of course, as soon as I got here, I realised how ridiculous that was. Imagine water flowing underground. It flows through the same cracks year after year and it wears away at the stone. Millenia later you have a cave system. But what you don’t have is the water that originally created it. That’s long gone. Seeped away into the earth. Same thing here. (89-90)
In response to Piranesi’s question—“Do the statues exist because they embody the Ideas and Knowledge that flowed out of the other world”—he adds, “Oh! I never thought of that! . . . What an intelligent observation! Yes, yes! I think that highly likely! Perhaps in some remote area of the labyrinth, statues of obsolete computers are coming into being as we speak!” (90)
A fuller account of the “distributary world” is given in Sorensen’s notes on Arne-Sayles’ theory of other worlds:
when knowledge or power went out of this world, it did two things: first, it created another place; and second, it left a hole, a door between this world where it had once existed and the new place it had made.
Picture it, said Arne-Sayles, like rainwater lying on a field. The next day the field is dry. Where has the rainwater gone . . . some has seeped down into the earth. This happens over and over again. For decades, centuries, millennia, the water, seeping down, makes a crack in the rock under the earth; then it wears the crack into a hole; then it wears the hole into a cave entrance – a kind of door in fact. Beyond the door the water keeps flowing and it hollows out caverns and carves out pillars. Somewhere, said Arne-Sayles, there must be a passage, a door between us and wherever magic had gone. It might be very small. It might not be entirely stable. Like the entrance to an underground cave it might be in danger of collapse. But it would be there. And if it was there, it was possible to find it. (151)
So, the House is a like an underground cave that contains statues of men and beasts. The resemblance to Socrates’ allegory is hard to miss.
If the House corresponds to the upper cave, where is the world of Matthew Rose Sorensen, the world of Manchester and Perugia? Is it outside in the sunlight or down in the shadows? Clearly, for Arne-Sayles, it is the former. He believes that the knowledge and power he had sought were originally in his world. It was only when ancient man had ceased to converse with that world that the magic departed and created the House. Thus, his world is primary, and the halls of statues are derivative. But is that right?
Piranesi certainly didn’t think so. In a conversation with Raphael, he objects to her description of the House, which parallels Arne-Sayles’.
‘Yes,’ said Raphael. ‘Here you can only see a representation of a river or a mountain, but in our world – the other world – you can see the actual river and the actual mountain.’
This annoyed me. ‘I do not see why you say I can only see a representation in this World,’ I said with some sharpness. ‘The word “only” suggests a relationship of inferiority. You make it sound as if the Statue was somehow inferior to the thing itself. I do not see that that is the case at all. I would argue that the Statue is superior to the thing itself, the Statue being perfect, eternal and not subject to decay?’ (222)
Here Piranesi describes the statues using language that Socrates reserves for the forms. Admittedly, he’s mistaken about their incorruptibility. Throughout his journal entries, he describes statues as damaged and defaced. Indeed, in the first entry, he recounts a close call with the tides, after which he opened his hand and “found a marble finger from some Faraway Statue.” (4) Nevertheless, he thinks of the statues as superior to the things in Raphael’s world. He also seems to deny that they are representations of those things, and hence to suggest that the priority runs the other way: the things are representations of the statues.
This is supported by his belief that the names of the statues give meaning to words from the other world, e.g. “garden.” There are statues that include flowers, ivy, or trees. “It is from these things that I deduce the idea of a garden. I do not believe this happens by accident. This is how the House places new ideas gently and naturally into the Minds of Men. This is how the House increases my understanding.” (121)
There is also the Beloved’s awareness that, despite being “reunited” with Sorensen’s family and friends, England is not his real home. In a dream, he sees the gorilla statue come to life. “I flung my arms around his massive neck and told him how happy I was to be home. When I awoke I thought: I am not home. I am here.” (243)
Finally, even after he returns to England with Raphael, he continues to see that world as false. In a park, he is passed by an old man.
He looked sad and tired. He had broken veins on his cheeks and a bristly white beard. As he screwed up his eyes against the falling snow, I realised I knew him. He is depicted on the northern wall of the forty-eighth western hall. He is shown as a king with a little model of a walled city in one hand while the other hand he raises in blessing. I wanted to seize hold of him and say to him: In another world you are a king, noble and good! I have seen it! But I hesitated a moment too long and he disappeared into the crowd. (244)
Which is more real, the one sad and tired or the one noble and good? The desire to seize hold of him and tell him that he is a king presumes the latter. The Beloved wants to help this man by telling him who he is (contrast this with Raphael’s attempts to help Piranesi by telling him who he is): You are not this downcast, weary person, not really; you are a good and noble monarch, who blesses his subjects. That is the man Piranesi knew, and who the Beloved knows, the one he met years ago in the forty-eighth western hall. The poor soul in the park is a corruption.
If we prefer this to Arne-Sayles’ view, we will recognize the world of Manchester and Perugia, which is reached by entering “the Shadows between the two statues” of Minotaurs in the First Vestibule (79), as below the House. It corresponds to the lowest section of the Divide Line. Above the House, outside of it, is the world of direct sunlight. This corresponds to the upper half of the Divided Line. It is, no doubt, significant that Piranesi never sees the Sun. He sees its beams and light through the windows, but not “the sun itself, in its own place.” This indicates that there is a higher reality as yet unencountered. This, the intelligible world, must be the actual source of the House: “the statues exist because they embody the Ideas [ideai] and Knowledge [epistēmē] that flowed out of the other world.”
This higher reality is likely the natural domain of the albatross.18 In the air, it is “a miraculous being – a Heavenly being – but on the Stones of the Pavement he was mortal and subject to the same embarrassments and clumsiness as other mortals.” (31) Here are two worlds, air and pavement, and the transition between them. The bird has descended to the ground, so that Piranesi might ascend to the heavens: “perhaps the albatross and I were destined to merge and the two of us would become another order of being entirely.” (30)
The path upward is that of recollection (anamnēsis). Recall the beginning of the novel. Arne-Sayles is quoted as saying that he is neither a philosopher, a scientist, nor an anthropologist. “I am an anamnesiologist. I study what has been forgotten.” His studies were a partial success. He did manage to enter the House. There “he [was] a bit closer to the things that are and [was] turned towards things that are more—he [saw] more correctly.” But like the prisoner of the cave, he did not accept this new perspective: “he believe[d] that the things he saw earlier were truer than the ones he was now being shown.” In other words, he did not allow himself to forget, so he could not properly remember: “I must not stay long. I am all too aware of the consequences of lingering in this place: amnesia, total mental collapse, et cetera, et cetera.” (91) Ketterley was the same. They were like Meno’s servant when “he thought he knew, and answered confidently as if he did know.” Piranesi, on the other hand, lived in the House. Consequently, he had forgotten the shadows and remembered their immediate sources. In response to the Other’s question, “What do you remember,” he answered: “I suppose the answer is everything. I remember everything.” (22)
This turn from becoming toward being is marked in his journals—themselves an instrument of memory—by the change in dating. The numbered years give way to those of his invention, especially, the Year the Albatross came to the South-Western Halls.
Someday, when he finally leaves the world of Manchester and Perugia for good, taking poor James Ritter with him (240), he will be able to further explore the House and continue his recollection. Perhaps one day he will notice a light between two statues of gods, and a passage that leads out into the sunlight, where the really real (to ontōs on) lives, and moves, and has its being.
We must realize what [the soul] grasps and longs to have intercourse with, because it is akin to the divine and immortal and what always is, and we must realize what it would become if it followed this longing with its whole being, and if the resulting effort lifted it out of the sea in which it now dwells, and if the many stones and shells (those which have grown all over it in a wild, earthy, and stony profusion because it feasts at those so-called happy feastings on earth) were hammered off it. Then we’d see what its true nature is.19
Republic, 597b.
Cf. Republic, 601d-e.
Republic, 598b.
Republic, 602a.
Republic, 509d.
Republic, 510a.
Republic, 509b.
Republic, 514a-516b.
See Phaedo, 109c.
Republic, 611d.
Meno, 81d.
Meno, 82e.
Meno, 84b
Meno, 85c-d.
Republic, 532a.
Phaedo, 75c.
Phaedo, 78d.
For an excellent discussion of the albatross etc., listen to Joy Clarkson’s conversation with Malcolm Guite.
Republic, 611e.