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Sauerlandpark Hemer, Germany.
Sauerlandpark Hemer, Germany. Photograph: Hans Blossey/Alamy
Sauerlandpark Hemer, Germany. Photograph: Hans Blossey/Alamy

Myths, monsters and the maze: how writers fell in love with the labyrinth

This article is more than 5 years old

From the ancient Minotaur myth to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining … why are mazes so powerful and comforting in confusing times?

I cannot navigate. My internal disorientation is mirrored by the world’s; perhaps it is even caused by it. We are surrounded by confusion. I am afraid of what will happen. Round every corner, down every false trail, there are monstrous dangers that threaten to consume us. Will we ever find a clear path to lead us through?

I have never been able to find my way. If I once possessed a sense of direction, I have long surrendered it to the reassuring blue thread of the map on my smartphone. But I never had one, really. Turn me loose in a city without a map and panic rises, as if I were a child who had lost the grip of a parent’s hand in a crowd.

Conversely, I cannot even lose myself effectively. One night in Rome, I set myself the task of trying to do it. I was living, for the month of February 2016, in a building in the Borghese gardens, and one evening, leaving behind my partner and his son, who were engaged in some task in which I played no role, I set forth with the express purpose of aimlessness. I would simply walk, I thought, taking random turnings when it felt right to do so. But all I did was wind round and around, covering no real ground, re-emerging frustratingly again and again on the straight and dreary spine of the Corso. Nothing was discovered. There were no revelations, only weariness. Having no destination in mind – no church, no gallery, no park or vista or bar, as we usually had on our wintry, twilit walks that month – I felt flat and dismal.

Eventually I turned a corner and came into a square in which stood a church, San Lorenzo in Lucina. Stepping inside, I came across the pale, restrained tomb of the painter Nicolas Poussin. On it was carved a likeness of his own painting, which hangs in the Louvre, of shepherds in some pastoral idyll stumbling on a sarcophagus on which is inscribed “Et in Arcadia ego”, meaning “I, too, was in Arcadia”. The phrase is ambiguous. Who is this “I”? The dead man, who once enjoyed all the pleasures of Arcadia? Or death itself, which haunts even the most beautiful landscapes? It felt, at least, that I had found an end to the walk.

On the path of my life, in the middle of my life, I know little about where I have been, and where I might go. The path that lies ahead of me is a riddle. But the path that lies behind is indistinct, too: its myriad and confusing turns already half forgotten, the significance of the landmarks encountered along the way misunderstood, misinterpreted.

Once upon a time, when I was a child, my parents took me to Crete. We went to Knossos, whose remains, discovered a little over a century ago, are not classical, but of the bronze age, traces of a civilisation a thousand years older than the busily literate Athens. The little writing the inhabitants left behind them, a script we know as Linear B, was deciphered in the early 1950s. It was found to consist mostly of lists of goods: the dull unromantic stuff of bureaucracy. It did not unlock the hearts and imaginations of the people who had lived surrounded by an exuberant luxury of faience and glass and crystal, dashingly elegant frescoes and a swirling vigour of painted pottery.

Cornerstones … the dolphin fresco in the palace of Knossos, Crete, where the labyrinth myth may have begun. Photograph: Photography by Jeremy Villasis/Philippines./Getty Images

I can recall moments of this trip with sharp clarity. I remember my father observing that the buildings had been heavily reconstructed, so that, he implied, our experience was a little compromised, less authentic than it might have been. I remember a huddle of giant pithoi, terracotta storage jars so tall that they loomed over me. I remember walking down a stairway into the heart of the building. Here was a bath to be filled with pure water where a queen might bathe, or so we were told. There was a stone throne with a narrow curving back that looked like something out of Narnia, standing in a room painted with gryphons and waving, coiling flower stems. Another room was painted with dolphins flipping through turquoise waters.

I can remember the guide saying that the myth of the labyrinth started here: the story that Minos, king of Crete, ordered the inventor Daedalus to build a labyrinth to house the half-bull, half-man Minotaur. That the Athenians were forced to pay the Cretans a regular tribute of seven boys and seven girls, who would be left in the labyrinth to be consumed by the monster. That one year, Theseus, the son of the king of Athens, came to Crete as part of this tribute. That with the help of King Minos’s daughter Ariadne, he killed the creature and found his way out of the perplexing building. That Theseus and Ariadne escaped over the sea, but instead of marrying her as he had promised, the Athenian prince left her behind as she slept on the island of Naxos. That when Theseus sailed within sight of Athens, he forgot to lower the ochre sail and hoist the white fabric that would signal to his father that he was alive, so the old king, in his grief, threw himself off the rocks and died. And that the god Bacchus came to Ariadne on Naxos, and fell in love with her.

The guide said that out there on the broad terrace, Minos, or some Cretan king a shade more real, may have sat and watched acrobats twist and leap in the air, cascading over the horned heads of bulls, just like in the fresco of bull leapers here on the palace wall. (Though it turned out the fresco was a reproduction; the original was in the museum in the city.) Perhaps the bull acrobatics – if the frescoes showed us what really happened at Knossos – were the reason that stories began about the biformed Minotaur.

The guide admitted that there was nothing you could exactly call a labyrinth at Knossos, but that the intricacy and complexity of the building, with its winding corridors and bewildering floor plan, may have been the basis of the legend, as memory dimmed into myth in the centuries after the palace was wiped out by earthquake, fire and war. I remember how much I wanted these narrow rooms and passages to be labyrinthine, to trap and contain me, to be magical, to be a code, to be something that could be unlocked. I wanted to lose myself in them. This was where it began, my longing for the labyrinth. Even here it seemed just out of reach: a rumour, a trace, a clue.

We also went to the museum at Heraklion, the city on whose outskirts Knossos lies. I remember the guide who showed us around. She must have been about the age I am now, neatly dressed in a formal brown suit, while we sweated in short sleeves and sandals. At the end of the tour she turned to me and gave me a little envelope containing three postcards – my reward for being an attentive and interested child. One was of the bull leapers fresco. The second was of another fresco, this time of three beautiful women in blue dresses, gesturing to each other with infinite delicacy. The last was of an intricately worked golden pendant, of two bees curving around a drop of honey.

I never quite forgot about the guide and her gift to me. The postcards were, together, a talisman, a key to a certain place that became harder to visit, in my imagination, as I became older. One day, some years after I left university, I found the postcards again, quite by accident, hidden away in my bureau, in an old cedarwood box: the acrobats, the beautiful women, the bee pendant. In an envelope, too, a piece of paper bearing the name and address, in old, faded ink, of Sofia Grammatiki, who had guided us around the museum two decades before.

On a whim, I decided to send her a letter. I didn’t really expect a reply. Some months later, though, I got one. It turned out that her son was living in her old flat in the city. She had moved away into the island, to the Amari valley. It pleased her that her tour, and her small gift, had meant something and that I had gone on to study classics. She herself, she wrote, had studied classical philology in Athens many years ago, before returning to Crete and becoming a high school teacher of Latin and ancient Greek, often earning a little extra in the holidays touring visitors around.

Over the course of the long correspondence that followed, at first by letter and then by email, it turned out that we shared an obsession with labyrinths. Of course she knew all about the Knossian labyrinth of myth, but she was also knowledgeable about the labyrinths and mazes of later literature and landscapes, for she had walked the maze at Hampton Court and the great 13th-century labyrinth picked out in the stone floor of Chartres Cathedral. She used to speculate on why they appealed to her so. “The great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges has compared the labyrinth to the boundless ocean, the desert wastes and the disorienting wilds of the forest,” she wrote. “These are, yes, confounding and frightening places. And yet the labyrinth is never so terrifying. A maze or a labyrinth has always been designed by a person. This means that another person has always the possibility of breaking its code. To be inside a maze or a labyrinth is to be bewildered, confused or afraid. But it is, nonetheless, also to be inside a structure. It is to be lost, but only up to a point. It is also to be held within a design and a pattern.”

Finding patterns … Jorge Luis Borges. Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images

In one email I asked Mrs Grammatiki whether she had ever had the kind of recurring dreams that I’d had – in which a door would spontaneously appear in an apparently familiar building, usually my flat in London, or my childhood home. In these dreams, which I still have, I push open the door and wander through room after room of ancient stacked-up furniture and cobwebbed bric-a-brac, exploring spaces that cannot possibly exist within the flat’s footprint, and resemble the warehouse of some careless and untidy seller (or collector) of antiquities. Sometimes I dream of whole wings and enfilades of rooms, each leading to the next; or of a single twining, corkscrewing passage that winds round into a centre. In these dreams, I feel a mixture of pleasant surprise (so much space I hadn’t known about!) and dread. I was, therefore, less confident than her about the essentially benign nature of labyrinths. I think they have the capacity to terrify. The Minotaur lives there, after all.

After this, she wrote back: “You are right to make this connection between the labyrinth and the world of dreams. For me it is very strong. Borges wrote that a library is a labyrinth. This is also true – the rows of bookshelves running on for miles, with paths and passageways between them, the classification of the texts working as a kind of cipher that the reader must decode in order to find what she wants. That is only the superficial idea, however. Borges meant that literature is itself a labyrinth, and that every library contains the possibility of infinite places and infinite existences. Open a book in a library and you can disappear into a world, its cities, and its landscapes. All books, in turn, are labyrinths that express the winding shapes of their writers’ imaginations. Each writer builds the labyrinth, and then leads the readers through the myriad possibilities of their tale with a thread like that of Ariadne, guiding them down the paths of their story, wherever it might take them.”

For Sigmund Freud, the unconscious resembled the dark corridors and hidden places of a labyrinth. Navigating the chaos of that maze – achieving mastery over it, mapping it, finding one’s way out of it – was the work of psychoanalysis, he told an interviewer in 1927. “Psychoanalysis simplifies life. We achieve a new synthesis after analysis. Psychoanalysis reassorts the maze of stray impulses, and tries to wind them around the spool to which they belong. Or, to change the metaphor, it supplies the thread that leads a man out of the labyrinth of his own unconscious.”

The Minotaur’s lair in Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women is “crinkled to and fro”, and “shapen as the mase is wroght”. To find his way through it, Theseus must use the “clewe of twyne” that Ariadne gives him. The word “clewe” derives from Old English cliwen or cleowen, meaning a rounded mass, or a ball of thread. Eventually it became our word “clue”. It lost its material significance, and retained only its metaphorical meaning. But still, there it is, hidden but present: the clewe is in the clue (and the clue is in the clewe). Every step towards solving a mystery, or a crime, or a puzzle, or the riddle of the self, is a length of yarn tossed us by the helping hand of Ariadne.

In Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining, Jack Torrance, his wife, Wendy, and their son, Danny, move to an isolated hotel, the Overlook, so that Jack can take up a job as its caretaker when it closes for the winter. There is an enormous hedge maze in the hotel’s grounds, and a model showing its complex design on display inside. In one spine-tingling sequence, Kubrick transports the viewer from watching Wendy and Danny rushing joyfully towards the maze, to an image of Jack, inside the hotel, glowering balefully over the tabletop model, in which his wife and child can be seen as curious miniaturised figures. Watching these few seconds of the film, one has the destabilising sensation of being simultaneously above and within the structure. There is a third labyrinth: the hotel itself. It is “such an enormous maze”, says Wendy anxiously, when the couple first arrive, “I feel like I’ll have to leave a trail of breadcrumbs every time I come in”. Breadcrumbs, as we learn from the story of Hansel and Gretel, are not the most effective signs to leave in the confusing expanses of a maze or forest.

In The Shining, young Danny is a true labyrinth-walker – he discerns the hotel’s hiding places and haunt­ings. Photograph: Allstar/Warner Bros.

Young Danny, however, is a true labyrinth-walker. There are famous tracking shots of him riding his trike in loops through the various floors of the hotel, the wheels smooth on the rich rugs of the palatial halls and then bumping and rasping on the parquet. He explores the building’s every inch and discerns its hiding places – as well as, it turns out, its bitter memories and hauntings. Ariadne-like, Danny is alert to the dangers of the place, and at a crucial moment gives his mother a knife, in the same way that the Cretan princess gives Theseus a sword. Danny and his mother will need it, because Jack has become a monster. The boy will finally outwit his murderous father in the snow-filled hedge maze by faking his own footprints, walking backwards into them, allowing them apparently simply to stop, then darting into a side alley and covering his tracks. His deranged father, by now a wild Minotaur, is deceived by these false clues. In his last moments, trapped and defeated in the maze, he simply bellows.

The film itself is a labyrinth, for it attracts interpreters who wish to decipher its apparently arcane and secret meanings. There are those who believe that it is an allegory of the Holocaust, others who contend it is really about the genocide of the Native Americans, others who believe it is an occluded confession by Kubrick that he faked footage of the moon landings, others still who say that it contains references to the precise date of the Mayan apocalypse. It is not hard to see why. Kubrick loads his scenes with details, with “clues”: there are significant-seeming objects and numbers and curious visual anomalies (disappearing pieces of furniture, changing props). I find it striking how similar the Overlook appears in its decor, its stately halls and long corridors, to Knossos as reimagined by its 20th-century excavator, Arthur Evans: all those geometric friezes and lofty pillars; all those deep‑red chambers.

The Stuttgart library, in Germany. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

The narrator of Henry James’s story “The Figure in the Carpet”, a critic for a literary journal called The Middle, is convinced that a novelist, Hugh Vereker, has buried an “exquisite scheme”, a “little trick”, in all his works. If only he tries hard enough, he believes, it can surely be decoded. In an encounter between the novelist and the critic at a country-house party, Vereker teasingly tells the young man: “To me it’s exactly as palpable as the marble of this chimney.” The critic asks: “Is it a kind of esoteric message?” Vereker replies: “Ah my dear fellow, it can’t be described in cheap journalese!”

His expression reminds me of an exchange at the start of James’s novella The Turn of the Screw, which begins, like Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, with a prologue that claims the story has been transcribed from an old manuscript. In this case, the narrator remembers an occasion, many years earlier, when friends of his at a country house party were in the mood for telling chilling stories. One of their number, Douglas, recalls that at his home in London is a manuscript, written by a governess he used to know, detailing certain disturbing events that occurred while she was caring for two children on behalf of their absent guardian. It is this story, written “in old, faded ink”, that will form the main narrative of the novella. One of the friends asks whether the governess had been in love with the guardian. “The story will tell,” the narrator says. But he is sharply contradicted. “The story won’t tell,” says Douglas, “not in any literal, vulgar way.”

The scheme can’t be described in cheap journalese. The story won’t tell – not in any literal, vulgar way. The warning, in both cases, is against a reading of a story that attempts to smooth out mystery or ambiguity. You can appreciate the design of James’s subtle spirals, his lovely labyrinths, but don’t expect them to translate into some glib meaning, to be delivering “an esoteric message”. As Borges remarked of the ambiguities of meaning in The Turn of the Screw, “People shouldn’t know [the explanation], and perhaps he didn’t know himself.”

In “The Figure in the Carpet”, the narrator and his friends become consumed by the project of discovering the “secret” of Vereker’s books. One of them claims to have cracked the code, and is about to write an article that will “trace the figure in the carpet through every convolution”, but he dies before he is able to do so. The narrator finds himself trapped in Vereker’s puzzle, “shut up in my obsession for ever – my gaolers had gone off with the key”. Vereker’s last novel is called The Right of Way: the artist forges ahead, leaving the interpreters flailing around in the labyrinth.

Borges once said, of James and Kafka, “I think that they both thought of the world as being at the same time complex and meaningless.” For them, no pattern. The story will not tell.

You are, on the whole, with James and Kafka. But still, is it not possible to live in the complex and meaningless world? The labyrinth is something that you cannot help entering. Once inside it, you have no idea where you are, you feel lost, you are robbed of a sense of direction, but perhaps that does not matter. You will never see the whole design, but you can live with that. There are terrors within the labyrinth but there is also love. The centre may not be where you think it is or where you want it to be. But humans desire pattern and shape and design. They spin thread, they tell stories, they build structures. There is meaning to be made, meaning to be excavated.

In her last email to me, Mrs Grammatiki wrote this: “I sometimes imagine that Daedalus, when he designed his labyrinth, must have re-created the ridges and convoluted folds of his own brain in the form of a building, as if it were a self-portrait. Do you not find that an image of the human brain resembles a labyrinth? And if Daedalus’s labyrinth is a diagram of the brain, it is therefore also a symbol of the imagination. It represents the manner in which humans make associations, one thought following another in a long procession, from the edge to the centre to the end. Stories have this comfort to them: they have a beginning and an end. They find a way out of the labyrinth.”

  • Charlotte Higgins’s Red Thread: On Mazes and Labyrinths is published by Cape. To order a copy for £20.49, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.

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