The Mundane as Revelatory and Extraordinary in Stag tshang ras pa’s Pilgrimage Account and Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi

What does a 17th-century Tibetan travelogue have to do with the novel Piranesi? Taktsang Repa (Stag tshang ras pa, 1574-1651) documented his arduous pilgrimage from Central Tibet to the land of Padmasambhava in Travel Account to Orgyen, the Land of Ḍākinīs: the Steps to Travel on the Path to Liberation, which brims with disarming straightforwardness, candor, and unexpected turns of poetry. In 2020, the British novelist Susanna Clarke, who was by then highly celebrated despite having only published one other novel, released a puzzling new work of speculative fiction entitled Piranesi that took critics and readers alike by surprise. This paper argues that both texts weave the simple act of documenting facts into a grand and startling narrative about the awe and agony implicit in the discovery of truth. Through juxtaposition with Clarke’s radical work of fiction, the narrative moves made by Taktsang Repa centuries earlier are brought into focus.