48 pages • 1 hour read
Susanna ClarkePiranesi
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Natural Elements
The enormous labyrinth mingles with the elements above (sky) and below (sea). Upper levels create a “Cloud-haunted World” (34) while in the lower levels, there is “Water lapping the Walls in a thousand, thousand Chambers” (58). Elements include celestial beings, such as witnessing the moon while “Night fishing [...] when the fish are drawn to play in spots of bright Moonlight and are easy to see” (35) and how “the Spray caught the Sun; it was as if someone had suddenly thrown a hundred barrelfuls of diamond into the Hall” (207). However, there is an absence of earthly elements. For instance, the narrator wonders “Do trees exist?” (17) when he spots a leaf, and his journals are evidence of trees in a dead, processed form.
While represented as powerful proper nouns, elements are also defined by their opposites and their mutable qualities. The elements are in constant conversation with architecture: “The wildness of the Water contrasted with the severity of the lines of the Doorway” (29). Water itself transforms through condensation: fresh “water [...] was delicious and refreshing (it had been a Cloud only hours before)” (163) and freezing: “Every statue with an outstretched Arm (of which there are many) held an icicle like a dangling sword or else a line of icicles hung from the Arm as if it were sprouting feathers” (27).
Overall, the water-bound world of the labyrinth echoes how England is an island. When the narrator returns to Sorensen’s life in London, it is said that he was found “at the seaside” or “at the side of the sea” (237) rather than in a labyrinthine portal world. This half-truth is easily accepted by Londoners who often go on holiday by the sea.
Calendars
Calendars are given special emphasis through the narrator’s dating of journal entries. Historically, calendars reflected religious concerns. For instance, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People includes a great deal of computing holy dates, such as Easter, which was controversial. Piranesi replaces the Gregorian calendar with his own method of marking time after his memory loss. He uses dates marked by changes in the labyrinth, such as “the Year that the Ceilings in the Twentieth and Twenty-First North-Eastern Halls collapsed” (14) and the “Year the Albatross Came to the South-Western Halls” (3). This annoys his jailer, Ketterley, who still uses the standard British calendar and tries to meet the narrator twice a week, reflecting historical debates over calendaring.
When the narrator needs to find another way to communicate time—to warn Raphael about the timing of the flood—he gives time based on the cycle of the moon (160). This implies that the moon he sees and the moon she sees are one and the same, despite the fact that they are in different worlds. Furthermore, this speaks to lunar calendaring being more consistent and harkening back to the pre-Christian world.
Capitalization
After he loses his memory in the labyrinth, the narrator begins to use stylized, archaic capitalization in his journal entries. Piranesi’s capitalization is reminiscent of how Romantic poets such as John Keats sometimes use capitalization. For instance, qualities and architectural features (like parts of statues) are capitalized: a reoccurring gorilla statue has “Powerful Arms and Fists. His Face fascinates me. His Great Brow [...] represents [...] Peace, Tranquility, Strength, and Endurance” (16).
Some words are written in all caps, such as dates at the beginning of journal entries and notes written in mediums other than pen and paper (such as pebbles or notes written on the pavement). These are set apart from the Romantic first-letter capitalizations of the narrator, who is even called “romantic” (143) by Ketterley. Piranesi’s use of capital letters implies that connecting with the ancient knowledge of the labyrinth is connected to a historical form of writing, an earlier way of living in times when barter (which the narrator also prefers) and hand-calculations were the standard.
Lists
The list format is utilized in various ways throughout the novel. There are lists within sentences, such as: “I am all too well aware of the consequence of lingering in this place: amnesia, total mental collapse, etcetera, etcetera” (91), where the repeated etc. points to the act of endless list making. Some journal entries are almost entirely lists, such as “A list of things the Other has given me” (52), which includes bullet points such as:
- 10 new notebooks
- various assorted items of stationary, including 12 large sheets of paper to make Star Maps, envelopes, pencils, a ruler and some rubbers
- 47 pens (53)
However, the most important lists to Piranesi are his “Catalogue of Statues” (13), which he continually adds to until the flood comes, and the “Index” of his journals, which is the list where he begins to find lost memories. These lists hold keys to understanding the world of the labyrinth and the world of London, respectively, and statues continue to inform how the narrator sees England after leaving the labyrinth. Also, the list of the dead is especially significant because cataloguing and identifying the bones of Arne-Sayles’s victims is part of the reason why the narrator feels obligated to remain in the House even when escape is possible.
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