Labyrinths of Memory in Susanna Clarke's Piranesi

The essay explores the themes of memory, identity, and trauma in Susanna Clarke’s novel Piranesi (2020) within the context of other postmodern and contemporary labyrinth narratives. As a singular space encompassing multiple forking paths, the labyrinth has offered postmodernity a stylistic paradigm for narratives that branch out to other texts, creating palimpsestic structures which may be explained in terms of Genette’s theory of hypertextuality. When such a labyrinthine text takes on the form of a journal, its exploration comes to stand for the narrator’s attempts to make sense of his own palimpsestic identity, made fragmentary by traumatic amnesia and the resulting loss of psychological continuity. The fantastic mode allows the novel to enact a metonymic shift between the exploration of space, the reading of text, and the reconstruction of personal identity through the process of remembering. The labyrinth becomes a spatialization of the protagonist’s post-traumatic inner space and, through metonymy, of the contemporary western psyche’s fraught relationship with memory.