Throughout Claude Simon's novels, technology appears as an important thematic and metaphorical field. Montès, the main character of his early novel Le Vent, never parts from his camera, looking through it as through the window of ‘une auto, un tramway, un train, un véhicule en marche’ (V, 197); S., the protagonist and narrator of his 1997 novel Le Jardin des Plantes, is equally obsessed by technical media and by machines. In Simon's literary presentation of this field three different but often overlapping perspectives can be discerned. First, numerous references reveal a polemical critique of technology as totally exterior and therefore dangerous to man. This critique echoes the cultural pessimism articulated by Spengler and his romantic forerunners, who warn against man's submission to industrial machinery, claiming that instead of increasing his power, it actually usurps it. Thus, the members of the society in which Montès lives belong to a decadent ‘espèce nouvelle’, a species unable to survive without technical artefacts:

Although necessary, these artefacts always threaten to strike back against their inventors and users; in wartime, especially, they take revenge, unveiling ‘l'inflexible perfidie des choses créées ou asservies par l'homme’ (RF, 60). Second, however, a number of passages in Simon point rather to an anthropological assessment of technology as an indispensable extension of man. Parallel to some important trends in modern anthropology, they stress the supplementary character of technical inventions, suggesting that any human experience of the world is always already guided by them. Montès's camera, for example, is compared to a ‘troisième oeil, un organe supplémentaire’ (V, 23); like a third eye it enables insights that would otherwise be impossible. Paradoxically, this crucial role of instruments particularly comes to the fore when they do not work in a perfect way, when their functional ensemble gives play to the parts, for it is only then, as Simon observes, quoting Heidegger, that they attract the attention they ordinarily lack: ‘C'est dans ce découvrement de l'inutilisable que soudain l'outil s'mpose à l'attention’ (BP, 187).