Fictional Worlds as Systems: 3 Gormenghast — Architectural, Ritualised Worlds

Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast provides a striking counterpoint to Wonderland. Where Carroll’s world is mutable, paradoxical, and playful, Gormenghast is densely structured, ritualised, and architecturally constrained. Its intelligibility arises from stability, hierarchy, and repeated patterns, showing a different mode of world-making in fiction.

Architectural constraints

Gormenghast Castle is not merely a setting; it is a system that imposes constraints on behaviour, interaction, and narrative progression. The architecture — literal and social — defines what is possible, who can act, and which phenomena can emerge. Every corridor, tower, and chamber is a locus of rules that govern both character and event.

These constraints are layered and mutually reinforcing. Rituals, hierarchies, and inherited roles stabilise behaviour and predict outcomes, allowing the world to hold together over time despite the vast complexity of its environment.

Ritual and pattern

The ceremonial life of Gormenghast enforces systemic stability. Rituals codify relationships and actions, providing reliable markers for characters and readers. In a world of overwhelming scale and density, these patterns allow intelligibility: the repeated cycles of behaviour make phenomena comprehensible and expectations manageable.

This contrasts sharply with Wonderland, where rules shift unpredictably. In Gormenghast, rigidity and repetition produce coherence and depth, showing that stability in a system can arise from structure as much as from relational flexibility.

Lessons for relational ontology

1. Constraint as architecture: dense, layered rules shape the appearance and intelligibility of phenomena.

2. Stability through repetition: regularity, hierarchy, and ritual allow complex systems to hold phenomena consistently.

3. Partiality of perspective: even within a highly structured world, different characters experience the system differently, highlighting that intelligibility depends on position within constraints.

Gormenghast exemplifies how worlds can be held in place by rigorous structure, producing richness, coherence, and depth distinct from worlds that thrive on play and paradox.

Looking ahead

The next post will examine Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books, where constraints are performative and codified. Here, world-making is enacted through narrative and symbolic layering, showing yet another dimension of fictional systems.