Codex Under Surveillance: Fiction, Interface, and Resistance in L’ombre et la lumière by Maxime Frantini, or Toward a Poetics of the Technopolar

Abstract

This article examines how contemporary fiction appropriates digital logics to reshape narrative structures, modes of enunciation, and critical functions. Drawing on Maxime Frantini's technothriller L'ombre et la lumière , we explore the ways in which the novel integrates coding practices, algorithmic surveillance, and interface-based thinking, transforming them into both aesthetic and political devices. At the center of the narrative, the hacker emerges as a figure of discreet yet persistent dissidence who disrupts data flows, sabotages systems of control, and introduces ruptures that unsettle both narrative continuity and technological order. Our analysis is structured around three complementary perspectives. First, an augmented narratological approach examines fragmented forms and interface-inspired modes of enunciation. Second, a semiotics of coded signs investigates scripts, logs, encrypted messages, and technical fragments as meaningful narrative structures. Third, a sociocritical perspective situates the novel within contemporary imaginaries of surveillance, datafication, and algorithmic governance. We argue that the text functions as a space of resistance in which opacity, discontinuity, and algorithmic glitches become productive poetic forces. By hybridizing the conventions of noir fiction with the dynamics of digital culture, L'ombre et la lumière proposes a reconfiguration of storytelling in the age of data. The novel transforms fiction into a site of critical engagement where technological systems are simultaneously represented, questioned, and symbolically disrupted. Through its aesthetics of fragmentation and uncertainty, the narrative invites readers to reconsider issues of agency, visibility, and freedom in increasingly data-driven societies.