It is possibly (a key word here) significant that Robbe-Grillet's phantom city [in Topology of a Phantom City] should have a topology and not a topography and that the reader should be required to accept the arbitrariness of the writer's perceptions and imaginings, while being expected to attend scrupulously to the single bar of a prison window which would be rectangular rather than spherical in cross-section. No doubt (another key phrase), we are wrong to rely on the author/voyeur, who may see variously or inaccurately, misunderstand what he sees, and wish, as well, to deceive us…. The invitation to participate in the construction and construing of the "text" may be genuine, but as soon as we accept it we find ourselves to be flailing amateurs, dangerously prone to confusing genres and predicting outcomes from internal evidence. The novel is certainly not, according to the famous Barthesian distinction, culpably lisible. What about illisible?…
As a technical exercise designed to demonstrate what a dodgy business reading is, especially if we've been schooled to depend on some notion of a writerly purpose, the novel is predictably (prediction, like expectation, being discouraged, of course) adroit. It is unlikely that the allusions to artefacts: painting, forms of script, mirror images, will be lost on the alert reader, whose wish that the Piranesi townscape might remain static long enough for its features to be examined will, of course, be frustrated…. Pity the obliging reader, dutifully attentive to clues to which all usefulness must be denied, conceding readily his crassness and limitations as a novel reader, and all for some only fairly tantalizing glimpses of artfully positioned and possibly bloodstained (it could in the end be melon juice) nighties and their temporary occupants.
Jane Miller, "Watching the Girls Go By," in The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd (London) 1978; reproduced from The Times Literary Supplement by permission), No. 3982, July 28, 1978, p. 838.
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