Grand Junction: A Bold Idea Hampered by Its Execution

Maurice Dantec ’s Grand Junction is a metaphysical cyberspace heroic ; a Dickian post - apocalyptical future tense that interrogate our reliance on simple machine as a metaphor for human preoccupation with the material . Or , at least , it ’s supposed to be .

The problem is Dantec himself . He is , in the first place , a shameless rhapsode , often going on at duration about whatever in the shot seems to catch his attention ; he spends , at one point , two pages appoint every undivided type of plant on a nearby hill . One of the characters ( Judith Sevigny ) can not appear in the narrative without Dantec dedicate at least one , more often two or three , paragraphs to how beautiful she is . There are time with this approach turns out some really astral turns of musical phrase , though it ’s unreadable how much that can be credited to Dantec , since the book was interpret from the French ; but here I ’ll give him the benefit of the doubt .

Dantec also apply a rum , repetitive technique that is , I think , meant to put forward epic literature . He ’ll make a narrative statement , ordinarily some shocking disclosure for the characters , and then repeat it in a more simplified descriptor .

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He emphasizes himself through studied reduplication and reduction .

simplify emphasis is the core of his technique .

Like this .

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It ’s not inherently uncollectible - nor , indeed , is there anything incorrect with waxing ecstatic from time to time - but the ability of the proficiency is sabotage by how often he deploys it : at least twice a chapter , at times every few pages . It ’s alienating and , take in concert with his flights into the latria of Judith Sevigny , kind of exhausting .

The bad part of all this is that , if one bring off to persist in the aspect of his epic verbosity , one finds that Grand Junction ’s core is a gooey center of Gallic Deconstructionalist philosophy somehow unite with 13th century Catholic theology . The pretence of “ scientific discipline ” is only dally with , and rapidly abandon , as the disease that the metastructure has become turns out to be … well , it ’s hard to say on the nose what . The fiend , maybe , in the pattern of terminology , trammel by its need to both down all of humanity but also to keep kill all of humankind . Dantec does n’t make the summons of understanding any easier , as he seems to strike new term and phrases , or else dig up older unity from the 13th century , for describe concepts that the characters in the book do n’t even think they can explain to each other .

high-risk than all of that is the fact that when it does come clock time to explain how a 13,000 mass library from the Vatican is going to help oneself fight a supercomputer that ’s turned into a psychic virus that attacks electricity , using theory developed by Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus , the relentlessly pragmatical Chrysler Campbell typically responds with something like , “ Well , of course . We knew that already . ” There ’s never any doubtfulness that the position in the book is anything other than what the Catholic theologians describe - a unexampled declivity , a spiritual Book of Revelation and , presumptively , a second coming . It ’s problematic for a narrative , when you ’ve set up your adversary as the devil and your booster as an analogue for Christ . There ’s something about such predestiny that saps the narrative of a certain dramatic tension .

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