What was I thinking? Well. I think it went a little like this:
I’d been constructing a web-based narrative subplot with visuals stolen from Piranesi when I became aware of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi novel. Which led me to cobble together an absolutely top-of-mind collection of vaguely related material. Gothic literary labyrinths, I suppose, though Narnia doesn’t entirely fit that bill.
Which led me in turn, perhaps in seeking to justify the whole exercise, to attempt a bizarre hit-and-run excursion into ill-considered aesthetic speculation. Yes, maybe there was and is a kernel of truth buried somewhere here; but the irony of course is that I don’t for a minute believe in supernatural phenomena... while being all too well aware that readers expect, whether they acknowledge it or not, supernatural phenomena to play a part in all narratives. At the very least I am talking about notions of destiny.
There’s an added dimension when we’re considering evocations of a topology of which (arguably, should one be so inclined) the Jungian mandala is such a potent distillation. Or, let’s couch this in simpler terms, stripped of mystical mumbo: For some reason the labyrinth is an evocative concept.
In purely functional storytelling terms, the added dimension is related to a notion that the labyrinth is a celebration of complexity. At an abstract level, all lengthy narratives are labyrinths. And having induced us, as a reader, to take on the challenge of a labyrinth, it is no great leap to infer spiritual reward, befuddlement ceding to clarity, darkness implying the ultimate promise of light.
So, absolutely, yes, I’m curious as to how this works... and ultimately about what it tell us not just about the art of fiction but more broadly about the human condition. What makes us tick.
But, I say it again, I don’t actually believe. I don’t believe in superior powers. Of any sort. I believe instead that all God games are at best infantile, at worst horribly cynical. I believe that all forms of supernatural phenomena, not just magic and ghosts and things that go bump in the night but notions, as I have said above, of pre-destination, are generated as a quirk of the dreaming mind.
There is, I will insist, a counterfeit currency in circulation here but, seemingly, we all love playing with it. That's why I suppose I keep returning to the words below, written in an earlier age, an age that knew not quack psychology, no, nor too-clever-by-half aesthetic theory:-
THESEUS
More strange than true. I never may believe
These antique fables nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold:
That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven,
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination
That, if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy.
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!
HIPPOLYTA
But all the story of the night told over,
And all their minds transfigured so together,
More witnesseth than fancy’s images
And grows to something of great constancy,
But, howsoever, strange and admirable.
A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1595, Act 5 Scene 1
