Duras in space.

Marguerite Duras, the French novelist and film maker whose work inspired Bientôt l’été, has nothing to do with science fiction or space travel whatsoever. Her work is about real modern day people in either France or colonial Asia. It’s about love, desire, loss, class, gender, madness.

Framing the story of Bientôt l’été in a holodeck on a remote space station is entirely our own invention. I’m sure it will be considered in bad taste by many Duras lovers, Duras work being well respected high literature and science fiction a staple of pulp.

Yet it feels right to me. There’s something about Duras’ writing that invokes a certain distance towards the characters. Despite of the clearly autobiographical aspects of her work, we always look at these characters, as other people, strangers, outside of us. The emotional effect of this, at least on me, is a heightened sense of empathy. It is precisely because these characters are not you, and not known to you, that you can love them so blindly.

Walking on the holodeck in Bientôt l’été with the avatar who doesn’t look at you, and when suddenly seeing through the illusion the enormity of outer space, it is no longer you looking at this story but the cosmos looking at you. And the cosmos looks at you with the benevolence one can only feel for strangers, for creatures other than yourself, or your friends or your family.

So while you might be playing a Duras story, outer space starts to represent the reader of that story. You are being watched, by your creator, by the writer of your story. And since he has written you, there is nothing you can do to disappoint him. All your quirks and doubts and fears and desires are fine by him. There is only love here.

Duras loved her characters. She lived with them. And since they were fictional and thus, in some way, perfect, her love for them was unconditional and infinite.