![]() ![]() “The cubes of Le Corbusier never interested me,” he admitted on one occasion on another, he lamented the atrocities committed by Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. In the essay “The Flowering of an Art” Bustos Domecq acts as mouthpiece for Borges’s dislike of modernist architecture and of Le Corbusier in particular. On that cue, the book draws up alternative routes through the 20th century, including its architectural history. The ironic dedication, “To those three forgotten greats - Picasso, Joyce, Le Corbusier,” invites the reader to imagine a world in which these icons of modernism exerted no influence at all. In “Chronicles of Bustos Domecq” (1967), Borges and his co-author Adolfo Bioy-Casares created the character of Bustos Domecq, the fictional writer of a series of essays that aim to capsize accepted truths. In Borges’s world, the Piranesian edifice becomes an analogy of life itself. Even more devious than a building that has no exits, like a prison, is a building with exits that lead nowhere, like a labyrinth. The added dimension entails a subtle shift of architectural typology as well. ![]() Jorge Luis Borges in his office in the Biblioteca Nacional, Buenos Aires, with an etching by Piranesi on the wall behind him. To the infinite spatial sequence, which the “Carceri” seemed to codify, Borges adds an infinite temporal one. An architecture unfolding according to no coherent plan corresponds to a life that simply goes on and consequently has lost all meaning. Borges, however, adds a dimension that is crucial in the history of Piranesi in the modern age, and that Grau never addresses: In Borges’s interpretation, Piranesi’s labyrinths of stairs and passages indicate not only a space but also a time prolonged with no end in sight. After entering the palace, traversing its caverns, descending a ladder, and making his way “through a chaos of squalid galleries” the protagonist concludes: “I am not certain how many galleries there were my misery and anxiety multiplied them.” The emotional basis underpinning and generating such a structure derives from Piranesi, mediated through De Quincey, as the architect and writer Cristina Grau points out in her book on Borges and architecture. The Palace of the Immortals in Borges’s tale is a terrifying place, built by and for human beings doomed to live forever. In 1947 he published a short story, “The Immortal,” which evokes an ominous setting. And Piranesi - through De Quincey - is a progenitor of the compositional structures perfected by the Argentinian author.īorges, however, extracts a new and what may ultimately be called a modern dimension from the compositions. The thinking and storylines in Borges’s poems, short stories, and essays are structured by dreams enveloping dreams, to the point where new realities are produced. However, what interested Borges in general was not so much the content of dreams as the dream itself, as a kind of framework for a new and heightened existence. And although he also came to know the etcher through his prints, it was De Quincey’s visionary retelling of them as dreams that arguably secured Piranesi’s influence on Borges. “I met Piranesi through Thomas de Quincey,” Borges admitted in an interview a few years before he died. With the reference to the “Carceri” architecture as palaces - and not prisons - Borges, who was a student of English Romantic literature, inscribes himself into a tradition of literary emulations of Piranesi’s images.Įven more devious than a building that has no exits, like a prison, is a building with exits that lead nowhere, like a labyrinth. The “Carceri,” on De Quincey’s cue, came to occupy a domain beyond the finite and the rational and provide a scenery - a mental stage set - in a vast and varied literature of introspection from Joyce to Jung, from Baudelaire to Borges. Piranesi’s disconcerting prisons, recreated as captivating prose, enriched the fields of psychoanalysis, philosophy, poetry, and literary criticism as well as the history of art and architecture. De Quincey, with an arresting paragraph on Piranesi published in his drug memoir “ Confessions of an English Opium-Eater” (1821), largely reinvented Piranesi, pushing the limits of architecture, or, rather, extending its range to include also metaphorical realms Piranesi emerged as the architect of an entirely new conceptual landscape that spanned hallucinations, dreams, and memories. “Mighty palaces,” however, form an ensemble grounded less in Piranesi’s prints than in the English essayist and critic Thomas De Quincey’s romantic interpretation of them. ![]() This article is adapted from Victor Plahte Tschudi’s book “ Piranesi and the Modern Age.” ![]()
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