M.C. Escher and R.F. Kuang’s Katabasis:
Why Ascending and Descending Is the Perfect Fit
R.F. Kuang’s Katabasis is the kind of novel that leaves you with images that linger long after you put it down. On the surface, it is a story about Alice Law, a brilliant and obsessive student who accidentally kills her mentor, Professor Grimes.
In her panic, she strikes a strange pact: she will descend into hell alongside her fellow student Peter Murdoch, determined to save him even as she risks her own soul.
What unfolds is dark academia taken to its extreme conclusion, a satire of scholarly ambition wrapped in mythic descent. But if you looked closely at the book’s cover, or paid attention to its sly references within, you might have noticed another presence guiding the novel. That presence is M.C. Escher.
Escher’s Ascending and Descending
The cover of Katabasis is not just a striking piece of design. It is a direct reinterpretation of Escher’s Ascending and Descending, the 1960 lithograph that shows figures endlessly climbing and descending an impossible staircase. Two lines of robed figures move in opposite directions, each convinced they are traveling upward or downward, yet neither going anywhere at all. It is a paradox rendered in stone and perspective, a loop without exit. The image has become one of Escher’s most recognizable works, standing as a symbol of his fascination with infinity, illusion, and the strange places where logic fails.
Escher’s Role in Katabasis
Within Katabasis, Escher is more than a reference point. Kuang credits him with the invention of “visual paradoxes,” a field of thought that magicians in her fictional world attempt to use for their spells. His art becomes not just metaphor but literal foundation, a way of bending perception until the impossible becomes real. In this light, Ascending and Descending is more than a clever cover choice. It is a symbol of the entire novel’s architecture: a world where students climb relentlessly, trapped in rituals of ambition and competition, unsure if they are rising or falling, saved or damned.
So who was Escher, really?
Born in the Netherlands in 1898, Maurits Cornelis Escher was not a mathematician, though mathematicians later embraced him. He trained as a graphic artist, producing woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints that explored symmetry, tessellation, and impossible structures. What made him unique was his ability to take abstract concepts and give them visual weight. His staircases, waterfalls, and interlocking creatures do not simply trick the eye. They ask questions about the nature of perception itself. Can infinity be seen? Can order and chaos exist together? Is logic as stable as it seems? For Escher, these were not academic puzzles but living paradoxes, shaped in ink and stone.
It makes sense, then, that Kuang would bring him into her infernal satire of academia. A story about students lost in endless cycles finds its perfect emblem in Escher’s staircase. The figures on Ascending and Descending walk forever, convinced they are moving, while in truth they are only circling. In Katabasis, Alice and Peter march through hell with similar futility, chasing salvation while bound to the structures that trap them. By drawing Escher into the novel, Kuang reminds us that paradox is not just visual play. It is a way of seeing the world, a recognition that sometimes our greatest efforts lead us back to the start.