The ships were lit up to prevent collisions in the dark, and when she looked out at them she felt stranded, the blaze of light on the horizon both filled with mystery and impossibly distant, a fairy-tale kingdom (Mandel, 2014: 28). Thirdly, while in the first half of Cloud Atlas the chronological order of the narratives encourages readers to look for clues foreshadowing an ending which will integrate, and make sense of, the various strands, there are gaps in the history traced by the novel and the shifts from one era to the other remain unexplained. Mandels novel thus exposes apocalyptic temporality as an artificial teleological order that one imposes on contingency, often with oppressive agendas in mind, as is the case of the prophet. Watching it from the perspective of our own existential crisis a devastating pandemic and a climate apocalypse, each worsened by the twilight of democracy I was struck by the notion that only those who come of age in a time of optimism can draw the conclusion that progress is our natural state; for others (hello, fellow millennials! Albeit more attentive to the materiality of labour, his tracing of the production process of this object conceals, and indeed, aestheticises, workers exploitation and alienation, as well as the inequalities of the global free market: Consider the mind that invented those miniature storms of snow, the factory worker who turned sheets of plastic into white flakes of snow, the hand that drew the plan for the miniature Severn City with its church steeple and city hall, the assembly-line worker who watched the globe glide past on a conveyer belt somewhere in China. Drawing attention to the dystopian aspects of traditional apocalyptic discourse, contemporary post-apocalyptic novels suggest that its totalising historical teleology is a narrative construct which serves oppressive ideological agendas, for those who posit an end to history, no matter how utopian this end is, also conceive of themselves as the only rightful interpreters and agents of this telos. On what she'd want to save in an apocalypse. This pattern comprises panic, dissolution of socioeconomic structures, and despair, succeeded by a makeshift return to normality once the disease has run its course. | Privacy Policy |, Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/06/books/station-eleven-joins-falls-crop-of-dystopian-novels.html, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/book-reviews/station-eleven-offers-suspense-and-science-fiction-but-it-is-undoubtedly-a-literary-work/article20577909/, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2014/10/15/sorry-emily-st-john-mandel-resistance-is-futile/, http://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2017.1369386, https://tetheredbyletters.com/when-the-dust-settles-an-interview-with-emily-st-john-mandel/, http://www.publicbooks.org/the-post-apocalyptic-present/, https://www.booklistonline.com/Station-Eleven-Emily-St-John-Mandel/pid=6862248, https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/38e15y/hi_im_emily_st_john_mandel_author_of_station/, http://www.tor.com/2014/09/12/a-conversation-with-emily-st-john-mandel/, Special Collection: Station Eleven and Twenty-First-Century Writing, For the sake of simplicity, in what follows contemporary post-apocalyptic novel refers to the subject of this article, post-apocalyptic fictions written by non-SF authors. Convenience Store in Sterling, VA. The apocalypse is such a gap: we do not know what happened, just as in The Road, and this in itself challenges the sense-making function of the end in both apocalyptic history and traditional narratives. ", On what survives including a comic book treasured by several characters. Zombies show no talent for climbing; is there no engineer or architect among them who could construct an elevated village? Chaudhary that stuck, as the series has it, to the surprises of just what happened, and so actualized our own collapsing civilization through burning houses and corpse jets and big box stores-turned-maternity wards. This [the cults community at St. Deborah by the Water] is a place of order. Indeed, as opposed to analyses of the contemporary apocalyptic imagination that interrogate its relationship with the current socio-historical conjunctures traumas and risks, especially environmental risks (Berger, 1999; Mousoutzanis, 2014; Skrimshire, 2010), I contend that to understand the contemporary post-apocalyptic novel we need to consider the very core of the apocalyptic imagination: time. This article examines Emily St. John Mandels Station Eleven (2014) in the context of the growing body of contemporary post-apocalyptic fictions and what I argue is their critique of the apocalyptic tradition. Further threads arise from the stories of other settlements one led by Clark and the female actor (Elizabeth, played by Caitlin FitzGerald, who ended up marrying Arthur after an affair they began while he was with Miranda) and begin to be woven together. If nothing else, its pleasant to consider the possibility. How Station Eleven pulled off the impossible, ALeague of Their Own review feelgood baseball drama still knocks it out the park, Point Break: Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze face off in surf-crime bromance, Orange is the New Black: season four will take over your life, without parole, ThePoint Break remake: Five rules to keep it young, dumb and you know, Emily St John Mandels bestselling Station Eleven. People die alone, with their loved ones unable to be with them, and people grieve alone. A finalist for both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner, Emily St. John Mandels best-selling Station Eleven is set in the eerie days of civilizations collapse. Just like Tyler, Bertis sees himself as the prophet of the new world to come, which is, however, not for everyone. The postmodern subversion of a realistic epistemology leads to the idea that there is no ultimate knowable historical truth, that our knowledge of the past is social and perspectival, and that written history exists within culturally determined power structures (Munslow, 2006: 27). Unlike with The Leftovers, Station Eleven was billed as a mini-series from the beginning, and Somerville doesn't seem interested in continuing the story. Nothing (McCarthy, [2006] 2007: 216). Writing with Intent 19822004, pp. Arthur C Clarke Award 2015 2015 Winner. The final season of Game of Thrones notwithstanding, I remain a big fan of the epic quest, so I chose surrender. Station Eleven replicates what Gomel (2000: 408) identifies as the plague pattern, where there is no place for millenarian rebirth. But I also know that if any survivor owned a snowplow, he or she would use it because snowplowing is a calling and an art form in itself. Therefore, the plot of pestilence is not so much a fiction of an end as a fiction of an end indefinitely postponed. These are elevated by the catastrophe to the status of artworks, beautiful objects which move Clark because of the human enterprise each object had required (Mandel, 2014: 255). (Sorry, it all always comes back to Lord of the Rings.) Because this is an epic quest and those kinds of stories make certain demands. The following is from Emily St. John Mandels novel Station Eleven which was a finalist for a 2014 National Book Award. It won several major awards, was an NPR Books Concierge pick, and it's just come out in paperback. 1. Perfect for acing essays, tests, and quizzes, as well as for writing lesson plans. Is a Disarmingly Hopeful Post-Apocalyptic Tale. Traditional apocalyptic narratives reveal a utopian teleology to history, a conception of time that deeply informs western modernity and its metanarratives. This structure articulates a critical temporality that undermines the apocalyptic sense of an ending and, more specifically, foreshadowing, which, with its view of the present as the harbinger of an already determined future, is at the core of the temporality of traditional plots and apocalyptic history alike (Bernstein, 1994: 12). Adult Kirsten is, per the Katniss Everdeen amendment to the Geneva Convention, a skilled knife thrower and general badass, but she is also the companys go-to Hamlet, surrounded by a group of people who survived without surrendering their belief in the power of making beautiful things. This pattern comprises panic, dissolution of Station Eleven is a slow burn. The Swiss Family Robinson managed, and they were mostly kids! By the same token, Station Elevens prophet terrorises the population of the region, assembles a cult, and gains power thanks to a combination of charisma, violence, and cherry-picked verses from the Book of Revelation (Mandel, 2014: 280), where cherry-picked underlines the constructedness of Tylers prophecy. NATIONAL BESTSELLER NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST A PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FINALIST Set in the eerie days of civilizations collapse - the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking They discuss both shows and recap the events of Station Eleven, then halfway into the podcast, set the two shows against each other in a head-to-head battle. This refusal to paint the old world as worthy of a destruction that paves the way for a utopian renewal articulates the novels critical temporality but is not devoid of issues, as Station Eleven ends up unquestioningly celebrating the current system. Get our L.A. The spectre of the 2008 economic crisis and ensuing recession does haunt the novel, in which 12 percent of the worlds shipping fleet lay at anchor off the coast of Malaysia, container ships laid dormant by an economic collapse (Mandel, 2014: 28). Martin Carr We Got This Covered. Goldman, M 2005 Rewriting Apocalypse in Contemporary Canadian Fiction. Mitchell, D 2004 Cloud Atlas. Tate, A 2017 Apocalyptic Fiction. The survivors are the elect who, as he puts it, were saved not only to bring the light, to spread the light, but to be the light. The following contains spoilers from the season finale of Station Eleven.. This reaction, of course, is a reflection of our own present, in which art seems to swim ceaselessly against the tide. Beauty features far more prominently in descriptions and memories of the pre-apocalypse. And during the montage of embraces between Jeevan and Kirsten near the end of Dr. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. Washington Post, 15 October. As Lee Quinby sums up, the apocalyptic metanarrative is a quintessential technology of power/knowledge, since its tenet of preordained history disavows questionings of received truth, discredits skepticism, and disarms challengers of the status quo (1994: xiii). Frame, 26(1): 929. 2010 Future Ethics: Climate Change and Apocalyptic Imagination. I read Emily St John Mandels bestselling Station Eleven shortly after it came out in 2014, when the tale of a mysterious flu sweeping the globe and laying waste to normal life lay wholly beyond the bounds of reality. June 24, 2015. The Georgia Flu, the prophet claims, was our flood. WebThe most problematic texts involve passages that are not directly from the Koran but rather contain the Saudi government’s particular interpretation of Koranic and other The scene in which a dozen women give birth was the before giving way to the future, just as all the scenes in which Miranda struggles to write Station Eleven were. This is the half of Station Eleven that persuades me, the half set in the realm of its Hamlet, its Lear: the half about human connection and isolation, about love, betrayal and, unavoidably, collapse. [Children] were told about the Internet, how it was everywhere and connected everything, how it was us. Perhaps it's wishful thinking on my part, but I did like the idea that a Shakespearean company might be able to make it. The apocalyptic distinction between the elect and the non-elect fuels the ruthless actions of the prophet and his followers from killing to raping and enslaving which they commit [A]ll the time smiling, so peaceful, like theyve done nothing wrong (Mandel, 2014: 273), because they see themselves as the only rightful interpreters and agents of the apocalyptic goal of history, the utopian renewal of the new world. We are the pure, working towards the advent of a new world, the divine plans for which were revealed to him in dreams (Mandel, 2014: 60; emphases in original). By Richard Having established its Miranda, Arthurs ex-wife, was unprepared for [the fleets] beauty. Mary McNamara is a culture columnist and critic for the Los Angeles Times. She has no expectation that anybody else will ever see her work. WebFull Review | Jan 12, 2022. The author has no competing interests to declare. Now I am more so, but beyond the practical, the questions posed by the book and the show about how much of a refuge art can provide, what we should work to preserve, what makes a civilisation and what, ultimately, makes life worth living, remain interesting ones. Because it seems like an improbable outcome, when I look back at the sequence of events (Mandel, 2014: 77, 157). There are as is starting to feel mandatory with small-screen dramas two timelines. I have seen many, and characters are almost exclusively categorized as hero, villain, victim but never bard, never artist. Both texts expose how apocalyptic discourse is fabricated to push ideological agendas. Station Eleven, the HBO Max show whose finale airs Thursday, is something else entirely. The series creator explains why. On the recent popularity of post-apocalyptic fictionA suggestion that I hear quite often is that our interest in post-apocalyptic fiction is a natural expression of the anxiety we feel. What if it's also a self-published comic book? Obviously, it is a narrative cheat to just slide on by all the work and infighting that went into creating those communities, but that isnt what Station Eleven is about. Thus, while the traditional apocalyptic narrative makes the conjunction of meaning and ending its theme, both in its expressed understanding of history and in its own narrative procedures (Zamora, 1989: 14), Station Eleven, as discussed, leaves readers with the sense of possibility, an open and unwritten future that challenges the closure and determinism of the sense of an ending and that, like the gaps in the fictional history of Cloud Atlas, allows space for human agency.13. Among the 1% left Himesh Patel and Matilda Lawler in Station Eleven. Station Elevens appropriation of biblical apocalyptic serves to foreground the violence inherent in apocalyptic logic.7 As Kirsten, a child actor with Arthur in the pre-apocalypse and a member of the Travelling Symphony in the post-apocalypse, muses, [I]f you are the light, if your enemies are darkness, then theres nothing that you cannot justify. As the season unfurled, though, I found myself frustrated by a structure that, roughly speaking, toggled between the pandemics onset and a time, 20 years on, in which Kirsten and her Traveling Symphony have forged a new society through the cyclical performance of plays. Station Eleven , the HBO Max show whose finale airs Thursday, is something else entirely. "don't have any 7-eleven stores where I live so when I seen that there 7-eleven's my one" Convenience Store in An uplifting pandemic drama? For me, its what Ive taken to calling the series present the I focus on three elements: one, Station Elevens critical appropriation of religious apocalyptic logic, which I discuss in parallel with Douglas Couplands Player One (2010); two, the depiction of the aftermath of the Georgia Flu and Station Elevens critique of utopian teleology, which I discuss in parallel with Cormac McCarthys The Road (2006); and, three, Station Elevens non-linear narrative structure, which I discuss in parallel with David Mitchells Cloud Atlas (2004). Different episodes concentrate on the experiences of different characters, but the through line is young Kirsten (an absolutely extraordinary performance from 13-year-old Matilda Lawler in her first substantial role), a child actor who is abandoned by her chaperone when a stage performance of King Lear is chaotically truncated by the death of the lead, Arthur (Gael Garca Bernal). Similarly to Player One, which features sections foreshadowing what happens in the next hour of the story narrated by the post-human Player One (the implication being that, when it comes to history, the apocalyptic perspective from after the end of time is manifestly impossible in human terms), sentences like The Georgia Flu would arrive in a year, Civilization wont collapse for another fourteen years, A year before the Georgia Flu, Two weeks till the apocalypse, just before the old world ended, the Georgia Flu so close now (Mandel, 2014: 40, 71, 110, 201, 217, 328) punctuate Mandels narrative. The first concerns the early days and years of the pandemic. I in fact stole it shamelessly from Star Trek: Voyager. DOI: http://doi.org/10.4159/9780674495647. Station Elevens post-apocalyptic beauty is a far cry from The Roads ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. London: Continuum. Id long since grown skeptical of most topical art, often so calculated in its conclusions, but as Omicron surged and 2022 plans were suddenly canceled, Station Eleven began to feel like the first great screen fiction about the pandemic. It's some sort of combination of pessimism or narcissism that it's almost as though we want to believe or living at the climax of the story. Herein lies its critical distance from the utopian teleology of the traditional apocalyptic paradigm. Quinby, L 1994 Anti-Apocalypse: Exercises in Genealogical Criticism. Station Eleven is so good, you can buy it outright on Amazon, which sells it for between $28 (DVD) (opens in new tab) and $40 (4K Blu-ray) (opens in new tab). Why in his life of frequent travel, had he never recognized the beauty of flight? Or at least part of it is. Yet beyond this cursory reference to the economic crisis, the novel remains curiously silent on the issues of the neoliberal order, including anthropogenic climate change, which represents the flip side of, and a significant threat to, capitalisms fundamental premise. Ah, you say no. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/olh.256. Open Library of Humanities 4(2), This is a reference to Revelation 20:1115: during the Last Judgment, people are judged according to their deeds, which are written in books, and only those whose name is in the book of life will be allowed to dwell with god in the new heaven and earth of the New Jerusalem. Station Elevens ending is key to the texts deconstruction of utopian teleology. Every individual experiences what she or he experiences and deals with it in a different way. Atwood, M 2004 Writing Oryx and Crake. Why, I kept asking myself, are they still living on the ground? Born in the Boston area, educated at USC and an adoptive New Orleanian for nearly 10 years, he returned to Los Angeles in 2019 as the newsrooms television editor. Available at: https://www.booklistonline.com/Station-Eleven-Emily-St-John-Mandel/pid=6862248 [Last accessed 24 October 2018]. Yet, just like The Road, Station Eleven articulates a critical temporality that subverts the utopian teleology of apocalyptic logic. Hoberek, A 2011 Cormac McCarthy and the Aesthetics of Exhaustion. ), entropy reigns. His co-stars can't remember if he had a family to notify. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 59(2): 24357. Charles, R 2014 Sorry, Emily St. John Mandel: Resistance is Futile. HBO Maxs beguiling new mini-series is about a pandemic, but dont let that scare you off. Finally, when the prophet is killed towards the end of the novel, people find in his bag A copy of the New Testament, held together with tape nearly illegible, a thicket of margin notes and exclamation points and underlining (Mandel, 2014: 303), which further confirms the profound influence of biblical apocalypses, and of Revelation in particular, on the prophets worldview. Set in the days of civilization's collapse, Station Eleven tells the story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the Tom's Guide's latest streaming news. "No cities," she tells NPR's Scott Simon. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/06/books/station-eleven-joins-falls-crop-of-dystopian-novels.html [Last accessed 24 October 2018]. Station Eleven repeatedly emphasises that there is no deterministic pattern to time, contrary to what apocalyptic logic affirms. There is nothing in the history of human endeavor, not the Bible, Shakespeare or the annals of HBO, to suggest that we are capable of the regeneration it depicts in the span of one lifetime, much less 20 years. If there are again towns with streetlights, if there are symphonies and newspapers, then what else might this awakening world contain? who dies of a heart attack onstage as he plays King Lear in Toronto. In addition to the texts discussed in my article, other examples of this growing body of twenty-first-century writings include: Louise Erdrichs, Despite the genre turn, Hoberek points out a persistent prejudice against genre fiction central to what Mark McGurl has dubbed the program era of post-World War II fiction (2011: 484). As she puts it, I assume that there would be a period of utter chaos immediately after an apocalyptic event, but I dont find it credible that that period would last forever (Griffith, 2015: n.pag.). Station Eleven and The Last of Us share one more very specific similarity: juxtaposing destruction with art. Her previous novels were Last Night in Montreal, The Singers Gun, and The Lola Quartet. The beauty of it (Mandel, 2014: 247, 135). Even in 2014, I was sceptical that there would be such an appetite. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Just like Bertis, Tyler uses contrived rhythms and repetition in his speeches, so much so that Kirsten notes a suggestion of a trapdoor waiting under every word [of his] (Mandel, 2014: 59). Importantly, these hours of miracles [are] visible as such only in hindsight (Mandel, 2014: 223), that is, the deterministic teleological pattern of apocalyptic logic, with its distinction between the elect and the non-elect, is always constructed retrospectively, after the end, be this a future projection or a past event that is perceived as an end of something, as is the case of the Flu with the survivors. Station Eleven has been a best seller. If I lived in Philadelphia, I would have no idea what was going on. Public Books, 15 June. Station Eleven has been a best seller. Here in the present, we play we play musical instruments at refugee camps. 32830. At first, Station Eleven is bewildering, all discombobulating cuts between the present and what seems to be a desolate, sparsely populated future. Instead of examining all the light/dark political dynamics of rebuilding a post-catastrophe society, it concedes that capturing mass trauma is impossible and potentially unhelpful. DOI: http://doi.org/10.4324/9780203969908. We tend to think about the apocalypse as a catastrophe of enormous proportions and overwhelming consequences, something which, then, brings about a dystopian post-apocalyptic scenario. What the readers find in Mandels novel is not the destruction of the corrupt old world and subsequent ushering in of a utopian new world but, rather, a lament about the lost wonders of technology and the splendours of the former world (Mandel, 2014: 288, 231) which undermines apocalyptic sense-making. But I fear the social future Station Eleven imagines is implausible, if not disingenuous. Read full review Chicago: University of Chicago Press. West, M 2018 Apocalypse Without Revelation? The concluding chapter seemingly adheres to the apocalyptic pattern of end and rebirth, for the depiction of Arthurs and Mirandas last hours is followed by Clarks musings on another world just out of sight (Mandel, 2014: 333). Mandel self-reflexively plays with the determinism of the sense of an ending by deploying apocalyptic foreshadowing as a narrative device that connects the various sections. 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