I pick out a book from my shelf, a thin slip perfect for an afternoon’s adventure, the Labyrinth of Rooms: An Architectural Allegory by architect and Assistant Professor of Architecture at Kuwait University, Ali AlYousefi. Leafing through it, I chance upon the afterword where he writes, the book I hold contains “a story about how the shape of architecture can change the way we think, and how the shape of our thoughts can change the way we see architecture…Human, the story’s protagonist, can be any one of us, and their journey from the first room to the last room is the journey of a lifetime: it has its ups and downs, moments of clarity and moments of confusion, but overall it bends towards greater knowledge and wisdom.”

The act of reading anything is submitting to this journey, waking up in the in-between: between representation and reality, text and image, narrator and reader. It is a negotiation of what the story is trying to tell us, and what we read in it. “Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge,” writes Argentino-Canadian novelist Alberto Manguel in A History of Reading (2014). Here, the simple Cartesian geometry of the graphics and the snake-like logic of the labyrinth’s path seem to suggest what is to unfold. To walk the corridors along with the main character, Human, is to read the grain of the figure-ground plan, the text; to become acquainted with its architecture and in turn the story, that is the labyrinth. Jorge Luis Borges in comparing a library to a labyrinth perhaps meant that all of the literature was a labyrinth, stories, in fact, worlds that readers can disappear into, guided by the thread of the writer’s narration. In-between dreamscapes toe the line between representation and reality because while holding a book, we are reading the world mirrored. On the one hand, the architecture of the labyrinth, what most consider the original act of human ingenuity created by the original architect Daedalus, conveys pattern and order to life. Like stories, the labyrinth imposes a structure on our existence. On Human’s existence within this book, I hold.

As Manguel goes on to disclose in his History of Reading, “experience came to me first through books,” a sentiment most readers would identify with. Stories not only order our lives, but they often lead to moments of reflection, of discovery. Manguel’s analysis of the act of reading is a personal one, as much about how humans first started reading as it is about a reader’s relationship with their books. As I continue reading through the fictional architecture of the text, I find myself as confounded as the character, moving simply from corridor to room to corridor, each suggesting something new to be uncovered. In the alcoves, where we are often told WISDOM resides, the narrator and I, the reader are told “Each room is a Universe, and the Universe is a room.” So, is the book trying to tell us that we move through rooms alone all our lives? That, in every way, we are bound by structures? If the universe is a room, what’s outside it? As the narrator goes on to say, “Then, they considered a possibility: perhaps these rooms are beyond answers and truth; perhaps they are machines for asking beautiful questions.” Perhaps the labyrinth is a machine to discover meaning.

What truths do we seek when we are reading? For me, I have always tried to find in the books I pick something to relate to, a sense of hope. The book I hold starts with that sense, literally with HOPE, and the promise of an adventure. In the influential psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols (1964), the 'primordial image' of the labyrinth was paralleled to the unconscious mind. As he elaborates, “In all cultures, the labyrinth has the meaning of an entangling and confusing representation of the world of matriarchal consciousness…it can be traversed only by those who are ready for a special initiation into the mysterious world of the collective unconscious.” Using the image of the labyrinth, Jung shows us how the process of individuation or becoming who we are, a journey of self-knowledge and discovery through the collective unconscious is initiated.

Similarly, here, the journey is through the mind, with the reader navigating text, image, and objectivity filtered through the lens of the memories and hence the associations we make. I’m tempted to ask the Human, how do you know any of this is real and not just a representation? The Cartesian logic of the labyrinth’s narration that constantly seems to be pitting my experience against what I am seeing, or what the Human is seeing makes me question the associations I make when I read. How can I tell if a courtyard is a courtyard or a flower a flower through its representation alone?

Coming back to the question of reading, it’s fascinating to think about how we make connections to things outside of a given volume when we are reading it, because of our experience of the world. As Manguel says, we make a book ours, “book and reader become one.” The simplicity with which AlYousefi treats his work allows for such an interactive experience, where walls in the book speak back to the character, and so they speak back to the reader. A parallel could also be drawn here between how critical theorist Walter Benjamin speaks of cities as labyrinths and the possibilities that space offers. They allow one to stray, to get lost within their structure, a sort of liberation for Benjamin.

Before the text begins, in the foreword, the question of knowledge is underscored. “Must knowledge necessarily be gained from personal experience, or can it be gleaned from disembodied representations? Or, for that matter, is representation simply considered a form of mediated experience?” Does the experience of strolling then amount to knowledge? This question is most pronounced in BLUR. While I am interacting with the text, I am also inclined to pay attention to the images. Here the snake, which for Jung suggested a crossing of the boundaries between conscious and unconscious worlds. Much like the negotiation between physical and mental space that the book brings to the fore through the surrealism of the text and the liminal space we as readers occupy. Not only here, but throughout the text, the relationship between humans and symbols, and how we know what we know is pronounced.

Labyrinths are strange spaces, not quite there except when we move through them when we perceive the space we are moving through as an entanglement. On and on, the narrator acclimatises the reader to the text’s built environment. Just as in reading, the texture of a work becomes familiar as we follow the story. First through a sense of COERCION by the architecture of the work. A demonstration of the fact that while we may strain against the binds of space, it will remain the thing that grounds us. As the narrator becomes more self-aware, the shapes of the rooms change. I encounter ziggurats hiding in the chapter SEQUENCE, a dread engendered by the Panopticon in ITCH, a hypostyle hall that exudes POWER, stairs that lead to KNOWLEDGE. Through the representation of architecture, the book is guiding me, influencing how I read it.

All the action, all the movement, all the magic of architecture happened as Human passed through the portals that led from one space to another.

In the end, the book left me wondering about the constraints our environments place on us. How do we know what we know? How can we read something? How do we determine the experience of a space, and what determines this? How I read something and what has conditioned me to are both entangled entities, part of an unconscious and embodied feeling. The book is structured almost like a game universe, where new layers are unlocked every chapter. It may make you ask the next time you are in a large hall, do I feel powerful or does it feel like I am being watched? Perhaps, as AlYousefi writes, “Human complained: All these shapes, doing their little tricks, acting profound, as if they had something to say, while desperate to hide the truth; they are all meaningless, every single one of them. The Human was tired and did not want to play this.”