Triptyque: Topography or Topology?

Abstract

Triptyque is arguably Claude Simon’s most accomplished work; the product of the author’s masterly sense of formal control and literary innovation. Its crystalline structure, a source of infinite pleasure for the reader who pursues its internal echoes and vibrations, will surely earn Triptyque recognition as a landmark in the evolution of the modern novel. Yet to call it a ‘landmark’ is already to adopt a critical terminology which has the unfortunate effect of implying that a work of language is a topographical object.

Long before there were people on the earth, crystals were already growing in the earth’s crust. On one day or another, a human being first came across such a sparkling morsel of regularity lying on the ground or hit one with his tool and it broke off and fell at his feet, and he picked it up and regarded it in his open hand, and he was amazed.

M. C. Escher, ‘Approaches to Infinity’