Paradisets vägar

by Peter Cornell

In his foreword to The Ways of Paradise, Peter Cornell presents this so-called found manuscript, the work of a now-deceased, obscure researcher who spent three decades in the National Library of Sweden working on his magnum opus. Upon his death, no trace of this work remains aside from this set of notes and fragments which form an enigmatic set of texts on the connections between art, literature, spirituality and the occult through history, with a particular focus on spirals and labyrinths. Ranging from the Crusades to Ruskin, Freud to surrealism, cubism, automatic writing, Duchamp, the Manhattan Project, Pollock and Smithson, this cult book, first published in Sweden in 1987, is translated into English for the first time by Saskia Vogel.

Genres: Fiction, Essays, Sweden, Philosophy, Contemporary

110 pages

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Katia N]

This is a fragment of the painting by Caravaggio’s ‘The supper of Emmaus’.



A question to the audience: what is in common between this man and Marcel Proust (a clue: something to do with a cake). The painting has not been mentioned in this book. However, i’ve realised this would be an ideal invitation into this ‘work that would reveal a chain of connections until then overlooked.’. The answer is in one of the paragraphs that follow.

What can i say? It is the one of those books that should not work risking being just a gimmick in the eyes of its readers. Amazingly enough, it does work in contrast with some other books that aspire to be serious and profound but end up more gimmicky. The one of those is still fresh in my mind: I’ve ploughed through endless sentences and chapters numbered by the Fibonacci sequence loosing any sense of joy or purpose in the process. This is fortunately the opposite. Ironically, Fibonacci sequence and its meaning is presented much more elegantly here. This book is actually not that much of a book: it is more akin to a literary object to play with.

It has been created in the 80s of the 20th century. The overall framing is quite common both now and then: the narrator is left with an incomplete manuscript by the author who is either dead or absent. And the readers have to make sense of this incompleteness. In this case, only stuff we are left with is a bunch of disparate notes to a manuscript that is missing. The narrator numbers and orders these notes, presents the readers with this pile and disappears from the pages of the book all together. A lot of things could go wrong with such a set up.

This is not something by Italo Calvino or Milorad Pavić when the text is specially designed for the one to chose the order of reading; it is not like Pale Fire or Infinite Jestwhere the footnotes play the crucial role; it is not like by Walter Benjamin, an attempt to use collage techniques in literature. Though all these ideas and techniques are present, to an extent. Mostly it has reminded me of the work of David Markson where a set of factoids somehow manages to instigate a quite emotional response. Here these little nuggets of true stories are often accompanied by an image as well.

There are so many ways of experiencing this object (‘reading’ does not seem to be a word encompassing enough in this case). Naturally, the initial impulse might to solve the mystery by imagining how this main body of the manuscript might look like. The notes are so varied that there is a lot of space to look for the patterns or a grand ‘common theme’, to create a big story with the beginning, middle and the end that would comfortably fit into the constraint of these notes. It might be an interesting and challenging task for some of more ambitious readers.

However, my brain, trained on numerous fragmentary narratives of the recent decades and likely excessive internet use, has not followed that route. Maybe it's a sign of the times. I feel a bit sad that i’ve stopped believing in existence of a grand comprehensive narrative. Or maybe it is simple: I’ve enjoyed more the impact of the kaleidoscopic affect: it like an ancient mosaic or an abstract painting that slowly reveals a pattern that might be slightly different each time one looks; an image that doesn’t necessarily stand for something grand, but the one that amazes you with its strange beauty and defamiliarises with well known objects.

Still, maybe inevitably i was looking for a way how to conceptualise my experience: to solve the mystery what is that i am actually dealing with; perhaps, to find a metaphor for this object as a whole reflected somewhere in its fragments.

One clue could have been Mallarmé’s The Bookhad. In the related note, the author pointed out:

radically new modes of reading are suggested. The reader was to abandon the rigidity of linear reading for 'a new way of reading, concurrent'. The reader could begin at the start or at the end of the work. And the pages, according to an intricate system, could be reordered so that new combinations and contexts of meaning would ever be arising. As such, The Bookhad neither a beginning nor an end, no fixed meaning, only perpetual circulation.

Both Mallarmé and our author have not experienced internet. But for me this metaphor would be just that. The ‘book’ envisaged by Mallarmé does exist now for better or worse. And I was looking for something tighter and more intriguing. And i’ve found it:

The woodcut form the Middle Ages represents the ‘earthly Jerusalem, an imperfect transient copy of a heavenly Jerusalem that God created at the same time as paradise. In the centre we see Solomon’s Temple surrounded by several defensive walls. The city takes the shape of a spiral or labyrinth - the very function of which is to protect the centre.

Labyrinth as a phenomena has appeared for the first time in this fragment and never left these notes and my imagination since then. It has connected for me the ‘chain’ that might have been ‘until then overlooked’. The concepts and images recurring in the notes have suddenly become the links of this chain, something like this for example:

Labyrinth - Thread - Pilgrimage- Earthly paradise - Paradise - Centre/[-]

Broadly, the experience of interacting with this object is about about a search for the idea of an ideal, aesthetics, the scalability of patterns, objects and concepts between nature and art, history and geography. The object is brilliantly compact but also versatile. But the beauty of this experience is that one might come with a different view of this ‘about’.

Labyrinth as a concept, a symbol or a physical space, scales up and down spatially from the little spiral-shaped shells to the giant cities; but also figuratively and metaphorically. The book plays with these phenomena, but at the same time it is also a symbolic representation of it by itself.

I consider this object as a perfect example of a labyrinth or more exactly of a maze (its close cousin). One could conceive a point of entrance and this would sign post a thread through. For example, after the initial read, I would chose a name: ‘Ruskin’ and read all the fragments through the book referring to him. That would form a pattern and lead me on certain path through the whole thing. Then i would have picked up let’s say Breton or Nerval. And it would be a different thread. Or alternatively, i would have picked up an object, such as ‘a shell’ or a location. The overlaps of these threads would be quite revealing as well. The modern technology has made these experiments much easier as i could search my e-copy while holding the physical book and looking at the relevant images.

The following is just a few fascinating threads I’ve encountered (there might be infinitely more of course):

A labyrinth or a maze as folds and creases

In Rogier van der Weyden’s painting The Magdalen Reading, dating from the mid-fifteenth century, the eye follows, as if hypnotized, the meandering folds of Magdalen’s green dress. The costume, which is usually peripheral to literary motif, becomes central to the work. It creates space for a paradoxical element of free, abstract painting in the middle of the century’s meticulous Flemish realism.

Labyrinths as ‘creases and folds’ were also found by Mallarmé’s ‘in the mysteries buried in the folds of pamphlets.’ He imagined cutting the pages with the knife and finding Its closedness is both religious and erotic. Ruskin and Cezanne independently were looking for the meaning in the labyrinthian folds of the mountain rocks created by nature.

Labyrinth as a shell

There are a few iconic shapes of a shell. One of them is a little spiral: in a few of Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical drawings, of the womb shaped as a labyrinth or a spiral-shaped shell. - symbol of an emerging life.

But another one is like the man sporting on his shirt in Caravaggio’s painting above, a scallop shell. The man is a pilgrim. The shell is a symbol of journey towards the earthly paradise, many routes of a journey converge to a single point, a potential centre. And here comes a famous moment that nudged Proust’s memory:

Proust describes the madeleine’s shape: ‘short, plump little cakes called “petites madeleines”, which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell.’ Isn’t the narrator’s memory a kind of pilgrimage to the lost paradise of the past?

In this sense, perhaps, any person remembering her past is momentarily on a pilgrimage in case it brings a handful of new joy and self-knowledge. On a side note, a trip into a collective memory of a certain community might be less benign. Often this ‘memory’ is a carefully manipulated construct to affect people’s future decisions.

Proust has also made an actual pilgrimage. He has visited a cathedral in Rouen in a memory of another protagonist of this book, John Ruskin. He noticed ‘a grotesque little figure’ next to the North Door that Ruskin has sketched. It seems to me on the sketch, it look like the little figure and other creatures are struggling to get through a labyrinth with very narrow passages between the walls.



Painting techniques

Jackson Pollock was inspired by Navajo sand-paintings that often were in a shape of a spiral. So he literally walked in labyrinths by creating his art. Robert Smithson in his turn was inspired by Pollock in creating his Spiral Jetty. The spiral structure only becomes apparent from the air due to its enormous scale.. It is quite symbolic when people are walking within a labyrinth so big they do not even realise what they that are in it; and when they reach the end, there is nothing to find. Smithson took giddy pleasure that the viewer coming to the end of the Spiral Jetty finds nothing there’.

This brings me to the final discovery about this object i have been interacting with. It has solved for me the puzzle of the missing manuscript (as a part of this object). Following my ‘thread’ for Robert Smithson, I was mesmerised by the note 56:

The work of Robert Smithson occupies the field of tension between two poles: what he calls ‘site’ and ‘non-site’....a site, a kind of magical boundary zone facing the void, typically an inaccessible, godforsaken, peripheral place;... The nonsite was by its nature fragmentary, consisting of stuff ‘brought back from the original site ...along with certain topographical documentation of their provenance, i.e. their site.’... Smithson’s site was materially absent and not easily accessible to the public; on the other hand, the public could partake in the corresponding nonsite physically....Between these two poles reigned a tension; one might even call it a longing. ‘One is confronted with a very ponderous, weighty absence’.

However, in his final work Nonsite, Site Uncertain (1968), any contact with an existing original site is tenuous and left open; the referent, for which ‘nonsite’ is the signifier, is dissolved.

This fragment in its entirety has become a perfect metaphor for this literary object as whole. Like a Leibniz’s monad, it has uniquely mirrored the whole construction the author has designed with this book. In these terms, I was going through the materials of non-site. And it was me as a reader who was confronted with a very ponderous, weighty absence: the absence of the : the main manuscript that likely never was there at the first place. It was only an idea of unreachable ideal. I was left with the signifier of a ‘dissolved’ manuscript.

Another idea that this object conveys is that of a pilgrimage or more broader: a journey. A journey by itself might be arguably more valuable than its goal. The main tension in this work really is not the centre - periphery but centre - no centre [ - ]. The centre, the Site might be unreachable or even does not actually have to exist to make the journey worth it.

This has brought to mind a wondrous Sufi myth retold by Borges in one of his Nove saggi danteschi (Nine Dantesque Essays). It is a story of a bunch of birds who decided to go on a long journey in a search of The Simurgh, the birds king:

They embark upon the nearly infinite adventure. They pass through seven valleys or seas; the name of the penultimate is Vertigo; the last, Annihilation. Many pilgrims give up; others perish. Thirty, purified by their efforts, set foot on the mountain of the Simurgh. At last they gaze upon it: they perceive that they are the Simurgh and that the Simurgh is each one of them and all of them. In the Simurgh are the thirty birds and in each bird is the Simurgh.

Since this discovery, i’ve found more ‘monads’ scattered in the fragments supporting my theory of how this object works. For example, here:

(cf. Aragon’s words about Paris: ‘the labyrinth without a Minotaur’) (what an image!);

or in this one, an old Sicilian labyrinth is described: The corridors and passages are no longer unconditionally subordinate to the centre, but instead compose a sort of liberated yet incoherent domain, a stage set for fanciful tales.’. ;

and in this: how could the phantom of the centre not call to us?’ Questions posed by Jacques Derrida in ‘Ellipse’, in L’ Écriture et la différence, 1967.’

A human brain is designed that way that it just cannot stop making connections and looking for some sort of coherence. But it is a liberating, even exhilarating feeling to come across ‘a stage set for fanciful tales’ and to participate in making them. One does not need ‘the centre’ or an uniting manuscript.

When this book has been created, the computer imagery was not that advanced, but i believe the author would marvel this one. This is an image of a brain with the neurones actively making connections. What shape have you noticed?



PS
I've decided to add this quotation here as a reward for those who was patient enough to read the whole text. Roland Barthes on sashimi (or sushi):

the edible substance is without a precious heart, without a buried power, without a vital secret: no Japanese dish is endowed with a center...; here everything is the ornament of another ornament: first of all because on the table, on the tray, food is never anything but a collection of fragments, none of which appears privileged by an order of ingestion; to eat is not to respect a menu (an itinerary of dishes), but to select, with a light touch of the chopsticks, sometimes one color, sometimes another, depending on a kind of inspiration which appears in its slowness as the detached, indirect accompaniment of the conversation (which itself may be extremely silent).

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can't recall where the recommendation of The Ways of Paradise came from, but Fitzcarraldo Editions are always an easy sell with me. The subtitle 'Notes from a lost manuscript' tells the reader what to expect in terms of format: The Ways of Paradise is a literary homage to The Arcades Project which I happen to also be in the middle of reading. Indeed, it is mentioned several times, initially on page 15. The Ways of Paradise is much easier to impute a narrative to than Walter Benjamin's monumental work. The magic of The Arcades Project is that it's a massive database that never had the chance to become a non-fiction book. The Ways of Paradise cannot equal its scale and ambition, although it is intriguing and elegantly written. While reading I assumed it to be fiction, and that remains my arbitrary opinion because of the artificiality of its construction. However the Fitzcarraldo cover is white which denotes non-fiction, so I've tagged it as both.

The thread I discerned from the fragmentary notes is a search for the centre of a maze. As well as deliberately constructed mazes, whole cities, parks, books, languages, and artworks are framed as such. A little disconcertingly, my favourite phrase from the book was a misreading. Section III subsection 24 actually reads, 'A portion of the word has been torn away'. I initially read this as, 'A portion of the world has been torn away', which frankly I prefer. This detail is emblematic of my experience while reading The Ways of Paradise: it echoed something more powerful. I must return to The Arcades Project, which I haven't touched in a few months but am determined to finish reading this year.

[Gabriella Håkansson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kan vara den bästa bok som någonsin skrivits. Fotnotslitteraturens absoluta höjdpunkt.

[Joseflagerkvist]

Omöjligt att betygsätta och kanske ingen roman, men jag kommer att sakna att bläddra lite på måfå i den nu när jag maxat lånen på bibblan.

[Beth Richards · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOW
LOVE
Whilst I was reading it I was on a ferry………… and when I walked out onto the deck there was a singular spiral shell just lying there………………and there are so so so many spirals

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Ways of Paradise is a cryptic essay based on a series of allegedly found notes summarizing the contents of European references from across the centuries on the concept of “paradise” and its variations and influences on cultural history. Beginning with Eden as its center, paradise, after Adam and Eve’s forced exile, became something that needed to be kept secret, and thus the labyrinth was developed. The center of each labyrinth is a symbolic center of the heavens, which allowed persons during the Middles Ages to embark on representative pilgrimage to Jerusalem (where the Crusades were taking place), understood as God’s chosen place on Earth.

The development of symbolism also began as a notion of joining to disparate halves to form a complete whole (per Socrates regarding men and women as two halves of a former whole, cleaved apart by God). This practice quickly developed into a method for verifying the authenticity of documents that had been torn in half—each owner held a uniquely irregularly-edged fragment that became regular and whole once joined with the other half.

Labyrinths in public parks—or labyrinthine parks—are mimicked by labyrinthine arcades (cf. Walter Benjamin). The wandering encouraged by parks and arcades is reproduced in the automatic writing of the Surrealists. The Surrealists,believed that automatic writing brought forth what was buried by the subconscious, the territory of such psychologists as Freud and Jung. . . From there, we travel to the New World—the New Eden, as it was seen by Europeans—extending to Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty,” a 20th-century labyrinth.

It's a curious enterprise, The Ways of Paradise, making strange and unexpected historical connections (some more tenuous than others), but it shows (or tries to argue for) how certain ideas and practices can undergird a civilization for so long that those ideas and practices come to be understood as natural, as the way the world is. Revealing those ideas and practices becomes a sort of Jungian exercise in excavating the mythological tropes guiding our experiences.

For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...

[Ashley T · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 I liked this more in concept than in reality, I think. I love the idea of found fragments pointing to a bigger picture. Sometimes it felt almost too academic in writing style, which I get is the point because these fragments were gathered like research, but just is not a style that consistently holds my attention. I also loved the imagery, but when it got into comparing this idea of hidden paradise at the kind of cosmic center to a woman’s private region and got Freud involved I kind of rolled my eyes. As a woman I don’t really see a mystery in that like a man I guess might. I can’t believe I’ve made this comment for multiple books, but it has too much Freud for me.

I did love the inclusion of various artwork and photos and it is cool to see a thesis come together through gathered concepts.

[Jacob · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not really my cup of tea

[Bridget Bonaparte · Rating 3 out of 5]

Honestly, boring to read just the notes of an academic paper. That seems obvious?

[Madeleine · Rating 4 out of 5]

strangest thing i’ve ever read but will be thinking about this for a while !

[gabe · Rating 5 out of 5]

stumbled across it in a bookshop coincidently, read the blurb and thought 'it's like someone wrote a book for me'. free associations of the non-site, circling like drain-water around an indeterminate plug-hole, each shape suggesting a further dimension that may or may not arrive, landscapes sartorial in their folds and crevices, ...runs through various circles, which constantly convey a series of alternate connections, retreats, old paths with new credibility, a demonstration "in spiral fashion". a joke, a fruition, a path we walk and walk and walk

[Lola Stocking · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 this was primed to be a big hit for me but didn’t get there. Some interesting notes and references but it didn’t work as a whole book. At times it felt too disparate and some of the points too isolated

[Camille · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked the idea of this: a mysterious manuscript of a deceased researcher brought to light. However it felt too disjointed for me, and I simply could not get into it.

[Andrej · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The Lord proceeded to show him the ways of paradise and said to him, ‘These are the ways that men have lost by not walking in them.’”
—Pseudo-Philo, Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum, ca. 100 CE

[Catherine Corman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy…it was said that the Archangel Michael appeared there in the year 708.

-Peter Cornell, The Ways of Paradise

[Matthew Roche · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very, very unusual book, and it is not going to appeal to everyone. It caught my eye this morning at a bookstore on Marylebone in London and for some reason I had to buy it. I am so glad I did.

First off, this is an astonishingly creative non-fiction book. Let that sink in.

The conceit is that a Swedish author spent 3 decades in their national library preparing their life’s work. Upon their death, only the notes were found, a compendium of comments structured like footnotes and commentary for a book that does not exist.

If reading 140 pages of endnotes referring to nothing seems unappealing, let me say that I read it in a single sitting, then picked it up and read it again in the same sitting. It was like a drug.

What is it about? At its core, it is about layers and knowing. Layers of consciousness, of gneiss, and of geological strata, what sits atop and lies beneath. It is a wide-ranging exploration of symbol and referent, of complements and pairings. It explores Gaugin and the geology of his beloved mountain, and of Freud (not shocking).

It delves into the tension between mysticism and inspiration: is that which emerges unconsciously from internal or mystical sources? He plays with surrealist automatic writing and the ramblings of an early 20th century mystic.

In a way it is a masterpiece of epistemological (non-)fiction. Since there is no text, we have to presume it is real, though we can only know anything about it by secondary references, the notes. We have a sense of the text, but only a sense.

All of this explanation, however, obscures the cleverness of the book. The author tells us that each of the notes, which are organized into chapters and numbered by entry, are independent, that they are not formal footnotes and perhaps are even on the incorrect order. But his reliability is suspect (is there such thing as an unreliable nonfiction narrator? Like Sebald?).

We experience them as footnotes, likely because he liberally deploys the notation of annotation - ibid., cf., etc. , and Cornell takes full advantage. Some of the notes could stand alone as essays or historical vignettes, others as short as “43. 4 October 1926.”

The best of them are genuinely, if subtly, funny. 99 pages into the book, after developing themes of maps, mystical, labyrinths, and peripatetic observers, a note states, “Utterly superfluously the author conducts a systematic survey of the theme in Joyce, Kafka, Borges, Robbie-Grillet, et al.” He is thumbing his nose with his tongue firmly in cheek - if you didn’t pick up the references, he is saying, he is not going to waste time explaining it.

That is the genius of the book. He is going to explain some things, and he expects you to know some things. Either you are going to play along or not. He doesn’t care. Cornell is going to explore the texture and fabric of knowing, the responsibility that the conscious has the unconscious, and whether it is better to be Chateaubriand, the one who knows and seeks reinforcement from the world, or Nerval, who wanders in a spiral, a flaneur, and is often disappointed when reality doesn’t match his imaginings.

This is an immensely clever book. It was originally written in the 1980s, and this translated volume has been around for two weeks now. It is fresh because it is so profoundly original, but it is firmly a 20th century book, more comfortable in the world where postmodernism was still productive. It demands a lot of the reader intellectually, but more importantly it demands that they have a sense of fun.

Note: the pub date on Goodreads is incorrect. The Fitzcarraldo paperback edition was released late November 2024.