Like Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Topology of a Phantom City blends the state of dreaming with various ancient and modern urban settings. We’re shown a women’s prison, a crowded theatre, a town square, a housing-block and a temple, but we’re never told whether these are real, remembered or simply fantasised. Unlike those of Joyce, Robbe-Grillet’s landscapes are unmistakably post-war ones, full of broken colonnades and collapsed roofs, and whereas the death of Finnegan gives Joyce a cue for celebration, the murder of a young girl that occurs in several of Robbe-Grillet’s scenes (‘Repeatedly upon a time’ as one of the novel’s stories within a story puts it) is presented in a cold and brutal light.


Topology is ‘the scientific study of a locality’ and Robbe-Grillet stretches ‘scientific’ to take in modes that are cinematic (the scene in the prison is initially freeze-framed and then set in motion, the sound overlaid out of synch), archaeological (the story of the ancient city of Vanadium’s pillage is interpreted by an archaeologist from a set of engravings) and detective (French police investigate the death of a prostitute).


As scene is laid over scene like so many maps drawn on transparent plastic sheets, the emerging picture suggests that a figure who appears, although in several different forms, under the name of David is the perpetrator of the murder or murders that have taken place. David sometimes writes in the first person, which links him to the narrator, who himself appears in a destructive capacity in the novel’s opening passage, where he describes his writing as ‘a make-believe construction by which I name the ruins of a future deity.’ Is this the biblical David toppling the Goliath of — of what? God? Narrative convention? History? Set in the no-space of dream-writing, it can stand for all three — and also for the potential turmoil of human consciousness.

‘Before I fall asleep the city once more rears before my pallid face, my features marked by age and fatigue, rears high before me, far behind me, all around as far as the eye can see, blackened walls, mutilated statues, twisted iron-work, ruined colonnades whose giant shafts lie smashed amidst the debris. I am alone. Walking at random. Wandering, as if at random, among the unrecognizable fragments of what were palatial homes, public buildings, private residences, gaming houses and houses of prostitution, theatres, temples, and fountains. I am looking for something.’ p10