Tag Archive for: indice dei libri del mese

Stories to inhabit

Literary Intersections

Matteo Pericoli
IL GRANDE MUSEO VIVENTE DELL’IMMAGINAZIONE
Guida all’esplorazione dell’architettura letteraria
pp. 166, € 25, il Saggiatore, Milan 2022

by Luigi Marfè

“If the architecture of a novel were a building,” asks Matteo Pericoli in The Great Living Museum of the Imagination, “what shape would it take?” After Finestre su New York (il Saggiatore, 2019) and Finestre sull’altrove (il Saggiatore, 2021), in this new book the author questions, through the exploration of a series of spatial metaphors, the visible forms of narrative creativity: that “clear impression,” as we read, “of feeling immersed in a kind of construction that has its own functioning and structure.” After all, literary theories have often used architectural imagery to describe compositional processes, from the method of loci of classical rhetoric to the constructive functions of formalism. “The house of fiction has many windows, but only two or three doors,” James Wood wrote more recently in How Fiction Works (2008). An architect, writer and illustrator, Pericoli is convinced that metaphors like this are not just abstract formulations, but on the contrary capture deep elements of the cognitive processes by which the mind imagines narrative universes. Each story, in his view, can be understood as a kind of space to be explored: “there are no stories that cannot be inhabited and inspected from within.”

Il grande museo vivente dell'immaginazioneThe Great Living Museum of the Imagination is designed as a walk-through, a visit to an ideal museum about the creativity of architects and writers. “This is not just another book. It is a building,” the author writes: instead of different parts there are floors, instead of chapters as many rooms. Enriched with images, maps and photographs, the book is an iconotext, aiming to re-accustom the reader’s gaze to the observation of physical and mental spaces. Pericoli reflects on the relationship between narrative composition and architectural design, gives a visual reading of some narrative classics, and offers exercises in narrative creativity. Like the imagination of writers, the imagination of architects, he seems to suggest, does not follow objective rules, but is the result of subjective perceptions and intuitions. If there are “stories-that-are-spaces,” there are also “spaces-that-are-stories,” and orienting oneself in the world means trying to turn its pages: walking through a city, “we intuitively read paths, we are attracted by sudden, wide empty spaces, or by the light streaming in from the ceiling, or by a huge window.” The legibility of space is what allows the architect to give it form, composing the narrative surface on which to exercise his design: “The envelope of space is nothing more than the set of all those words, paragraphs and chapters, expressed in the language of architecture and used to articulate ideas, concepts, stories and aspirations.”

Every architect “tells a story.” Unlike those of writers, however, it is not configured as a “concatenation of events,” but of “spaces”: it is therefore an “architectural plot,” a “spatial narrative.” If architects have always fed on the imagery of writers, on the contrary the latter have sought in architecture a way to give visibility to their own narratives. Reading The Great Living Museum of the Imagination brings to mind Gaston Bachelard’s poetics of space, whereby words could be considered as “little houses” that the writer finds himself inhabiting, exploring, furnishing: “To climb the stairs of the house of the word means, from step to step, to abstract,” Bachelard wrote, “To descend into the cellar, means to dream, to lose oneself in the remote corridors of an uncertain etymology, means to search in words for unobtainable treasures.”

The “literary architectures” outlined by Pericoli concern works by Calvino, Ernaux, Vonnegut, Dürrenmatt, Conrad, Carrère, Saer, Ferrante, Tanizaki, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, and Fenoglio. His book is presented as an exercise in “arch-criticism,” if one can call it that, seeking in each text the visible form that best describes it. Pericoli is convinced that narrative imagination does not feed only on words: “There are in fact other thoughts – let’s call them intuitions – often made up of imagination or visualizations that are neither verbal nor causally produced by the reasoning we do.” Visual metaphors can be a gateway to this different dimension of creativity: “very often these thoughts or associations are triggered by metaphors which, if they work as such, are real engines of imagination and creativity that, literally, transport us elsewhere.”

Luigi Marfè teaches literary criticism and comparative literature at the University of Padua

What structure over there awaits the end?

L’Indice dei libri del mese

review by Francesco Gallo

Matteo Pericoli
Il grande museo vivente dell’immaginazione
Guida all’esplorazione dell’architettura letteraria
168 pp, 25 €
Il Saggiatore, Milan 2022

January 30, 2023

Who knows where Italo Calvino would have placed a book like this: among the Books That Are Missing To Put Next To Others On The Shelf, or the Novelties Whose Author Or Topic Attract Us? We like to think that the author of If One Winter’s Night a Traveler would have placed The Great Living Museum of the Imagination among the Books That Inspire Sudden, Frantic And Not Clearly Justifiable Curiosity.

More than a book, in fact, it is a guidebook; a Guide to the Exploration of Literary Architecture. There are Maps (Ground Floor, First and Second Floor), a Legend of Spaces (Entrance, Rooms 1 and 2, and Inner Courtyard). And there is a guide, of course: the author himself – speaking in a voice that is not his, but ours (but we will understand this as we read on…). A guide who, instead of escorting us along a series of obligatory steps, as a first thing wants us to feel free; free to go where we please, observe what we please, and, most importantly, imagine what we please. He is quick to reiterate, in fact, that “museum” comes from “mūseóon,” meaning the place sacred to the daughters of Zeus where one could contemplate and imagine in full autonomy.

But what is literary architecture? It is an ongoing discovery. Not only that: an attempt to increase our awareness when we relate to spaces (and the void). More: a series of educational workshops that, over the past twelve years, architect, designer and author Matteo Pericoli has held around the world; from Turin (where it all began) to New York, via Dubai.

Inspired by the discovery of a lexicon common to both architecture and literature – how many times have we heard, about a story endowed with uncertain logical connections, that it “lacks structure,” “wobbles,” or “doesn’t stand up”? -, Pericoli has traversed the history of architecture as an attempt to narrate; at first simple, then increasingly complex.

What is the impulse that unites the first hut – when the basic idea was that of a “roof-over-the-head-so-I-don’t-get-wet” – to the first “house-with-a-window” – an “architectural element that connects what is tangible (the frame itself) with the intangible (the view, the outside) and thus the real with the imaginary, the everyday with the absolute” – if not a narrative impulse, the incipit of a story destined irrevocably to complicate itself?

Alice Munro writes: “A story is not like a road to follow … it’s more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows.”

By stripping architecture of its least relevant elements – the style, the name of the person who designed a certain project, its historical value – Pericoli shows us the spot where the essential lurks; that which “can neither be touched (the space) nor read (the architecture of a story).” Removing the walls, ceilings, windows, etc., removing the envelope, in short, what is left but a void, the void? And setting aside the words, sentences, punctuation and paragraphs of writing a story, what is left but an essence that “can only be intuited and deduced,” as when we confront the ghostly voice of Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, or try to intuit the subject matter of the dialogue between the girl and the American in Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants.

Having delved into these reflections from a theoretical point of view – Room 3 contains an enlightening lecture on creative writing; Room 4 reiterates the importance of reading as a wonder-generating activity -, Pericoli, with his characteristic lucidity and politeness, invites us on a tour of the Great Hall where it is possible to view no less than twelve interpretations of literary architecture. Then, a moment before the bookshop (unfailing: as in any museum), he gives us instructions for making our own literary architecture so as to display it in our own, very personal living museum of the imagination. (And reminds us, too, that in architecture it makes little sense to distinguish between “expert” and “non-expert” people, since we all experience our relationship with space.) The only rule in this game – because there are no games without rules – is to always maintain a literary approach, never a literal one. What are we to do with a model of a lighthouse if what we are actually excited about is the dense web of relationships that governs the behavioral dynamics of the Ramsay family during a famous trip to the Isle of Skye? Why not give it a try, then? In between reflections, we may be able to free ourselves “from the inevitable burden given by preconceptions and preclusions due to the judgments and interpretations of others,” and discover something new about the mysterious relationship between architecture and literature. And, why not, about ourselves.

https://www.lindiceonline.com/letture/matteo-pericoli-il-grande-museo-vivente-dellimmaginazione/