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But if we're going to start anywhere that isn't linguistic quicksand, then I'm going to say that I as a reader approached The Marble Swarm as though it were a Gothic genre text, which was why I started off proposing genre. Qualifications: the narrator never shuts up about architecture, there's overwhelming emotion or melodrama, the past very insistently haunts the narrative, there's transgressive themes, and maybe there's magic. Disqualifications: This was not published between 1750 and 1930, it's not in response to collective wartime anxieties or traumas, and it lacks the wayward-wandering nightgown girl with the candelabra.

In the body of works that form this particular genre, note also the devices of metaphor (easy enough, we all learned this by 4th grade. If I say “I Wished by Dennis Cooper is an irradiated mushroom cloud of bereavement” that is not true, it is a book and not the cloud left by an atomic bomb, and bereavement is not a book nor is it a bomb, but I speak metaphorically to describe the emotional overwhelm that I Wished evokes as a text,) and metonymy (this is difficult for me to describe because as I understand it's kinda like a metaphor but with fewer steps, but I would argue The Marbled Swarm has more metonymy than it does metaphor. Conversationally, metonymy refers to a figurehead that is understood to include more than what it is: “the crown” to mean monarchy as a system of governance, for example. In literature, I suspect that metonymy is a continuous parallel between a character and/or idea in the story, and its parallel recurring motif/symbolism.)

In The Marbled Swarm, I think that Cannibalism is a metaphor for Incest at the same time that Incest is a metaphor for Cannibalism, therefore nothing is literal, it's all concentrated to this singularity of insularity. It becomes a metonymy for nothing but itself.

Unlike other novels in the Cooperverse there is no distance between people to angst about in The Marbled Swarm because there is no freedom.

Because “everything is a metaphor for everything else, and nothing is literal” it becomes metonymy that collapses into plain ol’ meta: legends of the serial killer who collected and hid the bodies at the narrator's newly-purchased château, the “prophetic” improv theater that Claude and Serge got put through... Stories open up a new world of imagination that might allow for some distance, but the imagination is limited by what the imaginer has already experienced of the world. This has turned the narrator's “escape” into a horrible place.

I think the anecdote at the very end, the one the narrator promised us readers would make us feel so sorry for him when we understand his personal trauma that led him to serial murder and torture and cannibalism and pederasty—the one that, (I think it's implied,) if we don't forgive him, at least we should understand from reading about it that this narrator is a tragic figure that couldn't have done anything else with his life because of that specific thing that happened to him—that might have been the only thing in this whole book that “‘really’ ‘happened’” to the character.

Because if that's what happened to him as a kid, and then he grew up and went on to do all that other horrible stuff, then by now it's awfully banal: all serial killers were one (1) hug deficient from some mother figure, all rapists were molested when they were too young to fight back, and blah blah pop-psychology blah.

But if that's what happened to him as a kid, and then he grew up and went on to imagine all that other horrible stuff and tell it as a story to us, then the metonymy of it all becomes metaphors for how violated and trapped this narrator felt as a child.