The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Piranesi's Dream: A Novel by Gerhard KöphAllen Hibbard
Gerhard Köpf. Piranesi’s Dream: A Novel. Trans. Leslie Willson. George Braziller, 2000. 240 pp. $22.50.
Winds of disaster blow through this fictional autobiography of the eighteenth-century Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Calling to mind Browning’s crazed creative narrators, Piranesi, in a hermetically sealed voice, as though speaking from the crypt, rails against the Catholic church, against critics, against his wife Angelica who cuckolded him, and against his nemesis, the German aesthetic Johannes Winckelman, whose effete brand of Hellenism he denounces as a sham—a preposterous veil thinly concealing Winckelman’s pederasty. Piranesi’s unrelenting passion is to build. He characterizes architecture as “a sublime symbol for the tension between what you want to do in your mind and what you are able to do in reality.” Too fantastic, monumental, and unwieldy to be built, Piranesi’s architectural schemes find their sole form in drawings and engravings. Ironically, what Köpf’s Piranesi laments as a grand failure is transfigured into a marvelous triumph. The narrator does seem to realize (in a way reminiscent of Nietzsche’s description of the posthumous man) that while his work is scorned by his contemporaries, it will be understood by subsequent generations. Piranesi’s drawings and engravings, as he himself admits here, are reflections of a tormented soul. Certainly this can be seen in his towers, torture chambers, byzantine corridors, and shadowed archways. This narrative itself is claustrophobic. There seems to be no way out. Even when he wants to die, he finds that route of escape blocked. He is condemned to eternal life. Indeed, the story is told with an omniscience unconfined by history. Haunted by the compulsion of eternal return, Piranesi is left adrift in the Australian desert, still dreaming of reconstructing the ancient city of Rome. [Allen Hibbard]