Just like McCarthys father and son, Jeevan and [A]lmost everyone was moving south in a silent landscape. The series creator explains why. WebA pandemic show based on a pandemic novel airing two years into a global pandemic, "Station Eleven" may seem fatigue-inducing. 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). Clarks optimistic musings on the possibility of ships and life in the countries on the other side of the ocean stand in stark contrast to the fathers answers to his son: Do you think there could be ships out there? The first few episodes look beautiful but move at a stately pace. 37. Art and literature can, the series argues, offer some safety rails, some moments of connection. 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. Every individual experiences what she or he experiences and deals with it in a different way. "No countries, no internet, no more Facebook, no more email. Station Eleven self-reflexively emphasises this difference between traditional and contemporary apocalyptic imagination. In particular, progress, the modern metanarrative par excellence, represents the main example of the secularization of apocalypse and of its utopian telos (Keller, 1996: 6). We were saved because we are the light. What I was really interested and writing about was what's the new culture and the new world that begins to emerge? That episode, which straddles the before and the after, was totally crazy and completely glorious; of course some female doctor would create a maternity ward in a place that once sold beds. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 59(2): 24357. doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.206, Download XML The concluding discovery of a town with a functioning electrical grid (Mandel, 2014: 311) suggests not the advent of a radical new world and the revelation of a sense-making pattern to history, but, rather, that civilisation might slowly revert to its pre-apocalyptic state and given the positive and optimistic tone of the conclusion, reinforced by the way in which electricity and lights are repeatedly described as beautiful, this, too, indicates the novels problematic celebration of the current system. Why in his life of frequent travel, had he never recognized the beauty of flight? Los Angeles, Whats on Khlo Kardashians face? Perfect for acing essays, tests, and quizzes, as well as for writing lesson plans. Frame, 26(1): 929. Jeevan avoided it, stayed mostly in the woods. Bearing the unmistakable mark of The Leftovers, the masterful apocalyptic fiction on which Somerville cut his teeth, these installments felt alive to me in a way the others never did. Station Eleven , the HBO Max show whose finale airs Thursday, is something else entirely. The second timeline takes us 20 years in the future, when Kirsten (now played by Mackenzie Davis) is part of a troupe of actors known as the Traveling Symphony, who tour the midwest putting on Shakespeare plays Hamlet, when we meet them to the scattered plague survivors. He previously served as TV editor at Paste Magazine, and his writing has also appeared in Indiewire, Slate, Deadspin and numerous other publications. Station Elevens plot itself consists of fragments from before and after the apocalypse, which challenges the teleological linearity of apocalyptic temporality. The Georgia Flu, the prophet claims, was our flood. Yet contemporary post-apocalyptic scenarios are predominantly dystopian. Emily St. John Mandel. Author Emily St. John Mandel was not involved in the adaptation of her hit novel. As he claims, when we speak of the light, we speak of order. The dazzling power of electricity floodlights, porch lights, candy-coloured halogens, screens shining, the points of glimmering light that are towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows populates Mandels incomplete list of what is lost in the catastrophe (Mandel, 2014: 312). It won several major awards, was an NPR Books Concierge pick, and it's just come out in paperback. So I would want a globe, just to remember that there was a world out there. The following is from Emily St. John Mandels novel Station Eleven which was a finalist for a 2014 National Book Award. The first concerns the early days and years of the pandemic. 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. To believe that the series is guilty of doubtful creative choices is not to spurn art its to know what its capable of and to expect more of it. 1. Huntley, K 2014 Station Eleven: Booklist Review, August. I have seen many, and characters are almost exclusively categorized as hero, villain, victim but never bard, never artist. However, on the one hand, the novel is far from adhering to the radical utopian renewal of traditional apocalyptic discourse. It may become antiapocalyptic in its refusal of the transition from the tribulation to the millennium (2000: 410, 412). McCarry, S 2014 I want It All: A Conversation with Emily St. John Mandel, 12 September. As one of the survivors puts it, Elizabeths [the prophets mother] a fucking lunatic (Mandel, 2014: 253). You know, it's interesting. The theory that I found the most interesting was suggested to me by a bookseller in England last year: she thought perhaps our interest in these futuristic narratives had to do with the fact that there are no more frontiers. You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Both Tyler and Bertis exhibit traits of what Catherine Keller identifies as the apocalypse pattern (1996: 11): the faith in historical determinism, the inclination to think in terms of clear-cut polarities of good versus evil and the identification with the good that purges the evil from the old world and is worthy of the imminent utopian renewal of the new world. WebStation Eleven Questions and Answers - Discover the eNotes.com community of teachers, mentors and students just like you that can answer any question you might have on Station Eleven Search this site I admit that it probably says something about where I am at right now that I wanted more of the disaster and less of the hope. London: Windmill. Berger, J 1999 After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse. Whats on the other side? Nor did I want the kind of Theres Got to Be a Morning After survival celebration disaster stories so often rely on. Just like Tyler, Bertis sees himself as the prophet of the new world to come, which is, however, not for everyone. 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. 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. Despite the tidy conclusion, I can only hope creator Patrick Somerville and HBO Max are in negotiations for a second season. The beauty of it (Mandel, 2014: 247, 135). : Shakespeare, Salvagepunk and Station Eleven. The Museum soon becomes a sanctuary where people go to pray, for Station Elevens post-apocalyptic characters clin[g] to the hope that the world they remembered could be restored (Mandel, 2014: 213), just like the people of the Undersea in the comic Station Eleven, penned by Miranda, the title of which signals its status as a mise-en-abyme text.9 Thus, children at school are taught about the way things were, although these are just abstractions and essentially science fiction to them (Mandel, 2014: 269, 262, 270). "don't have any 7-eleven stores where I live so when I seen that there 7-eleven's my one" Convenience Store in In both traditional fictional plots and apocalyptic history, Kermode writes, the end confer[s] organization and form on the temporal structure ([1966] 2000: 45), transforming the mere succession of events into a meaningful sequence. What if it's also a self-published comic book? As Jeevan describes it, this night, was going to be the divide between a before and an after, a line drawn through his life (Mandel, 2014: 20; emphasis in original). DOI: http://doi.org/10.2307/827840. The acknowledgment section explains Mandel took this statistic from Simon Parrys 2009 Daily Mail article Revealed: The Ghost Fleet of the Recession Anchored Just East of Singapore. I found it hopeful. I focus on three elements, which reflect central features of this body of writings the critical appropriation of religious apocalyptic logic, the critique of utopian teleology, and non-linear narrative structures and parallel Mandels novel with three other key texts of the genre, Douglas Couplands Player One (2010), Cormac McCarthys The Road (2006) and David Mitchells Cloud Atlas (2004). If there are again towns with streetlights, if there are symphonies and newspapers, then what else might this awakening world contain? At first, Station Eleven is bewildering, all discombobulating cuts between the present and what seems to be a desolate, sparsely populated future. I mean, extra points for level of difficulty, no? The Road is a recurrent point of comparison for Station Eleven in academic analyses and reviews alike (Tate, 2017: 13233; Alter, 2014; Huntley, 2014). An uplifting pandemic drama? It was about how art and culture can help people, and civilization, survive complete catastrophe. Time, Paul Ricoeur contends, becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative (1984: 3). 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 Overall, Station Eleven can be initially read and understood as a very symbolic piece of literature, by emphasizing the meaning in objects from the past as a reminder and memory of life before the epidemic. Available at: https://tetheredbyletters.com/when-the-dust-settles-an-interview-with-emily-st-john-mandel/ [Last accessed 24 October 2018]. Station Eleven, a ten-part limited series from HBO, is adapted from Emily St. John Mandels bestselling 2014 novel of the same name, which won the Arthur C. Clarke award and has sold more than 1.5 million copies. And the novel skips forward 20 years to a young woman who was just eight when she was on stage with that actor and is now trying to make her way in a world that's been shorn of most of what we call civilization. Station Eleven has been a best seller. It won several major awards, was an NPR Books Concierge pick, and it's just come out in paperback. 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. 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.). We begin, really, to care, to wonder, to ask more questions. I confess I came to Station Eleven reluctantly. Keller, C 1996 Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World. Someone suggested to me that it has to do with economic inequality. I certainly did not quite understand why Jeevan chose to take Kirsten out into the Chicago winter rather than do a bit more exploring in that very large apartment building. 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). 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). 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. Yet, significantly, [T]he road seemed dangerous. She is the author of the Hollywood mysteries Oscar Season and The Starlet. She lives in La Crescenta with her husband, three children and two dogs. Notice the singular civilization of the Museums name: it encapsulates the neoliberal dream of a unified globalised world in which all difference is erased under the global free market. Aptly described as an elegy for the hyper-globalised present by Andrew M. Butler of the Arthur C. Clarke Award committee (ACCA, 2015: n.pag. Station Eleven. Emily St. John Mandels fourth novel Station Eleven recently made the National Book Awards shortlist for fiction. This ambitious story tackles a post-apocalyptic world in which a super flu has wiped out the majority of the population. Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Twentieth-Century Novel. After a discussion of traditional apocalyptic temporality as it informs modernity and a theorisation of the notion of critical temporality, my article turns to Station Eleven, drawing comparisons with other contemporary post-apocalyptic novels to illuminate key features of this body of writings and the critical temporalities they articulate. London: Picador. Leggatt, M 2018 Another World Just out of Sight: Remembering or Imagining Utopia in Emily St. John Mandels Station Eleven. 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. [Children] were told about the Internet, how it was everywhere and connected everything, how it was us. Station Eleven and The Last of Us share one more very specific similarity: juxtaposing destruction with art. As Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth (1992) emphasises, if modernity is about the belief in the epistemic neutrality and objectivity of our representations, postmodernity is ultimately about foregrounding the constructedness of our representations and of neutrality itself. 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. 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. But book awards and paperback releases are a thing of the past in the world Mandel has created. Ermarth, E D 1992 Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time. This passage is another intertextual reference to The Road. I read, If you want the girl next door, go next door: Lori Petty on Station Eleven and surviving Hollywood, Anuplifting pandemic drama? DOI: http://doi.org/10.1057/9781137430144, Munslow, A 2006 Deconstructing History. Station Eleven repeatedly emphasises that there is no deterministic pattern to time, contrary to what apocalyptic logic affirms. But Station Elevens apocalypse does not bring any sense-making order. Similarly, Bertis, a fanatic sniper in Player Ones peak oil post-apocalyptic scenario, believes that the pre-apocalyptic world is dying and corrupt and about to be renewed through divine intervention (Coupland, [2010] 2011: 129). It is in the context of what Heather J. Hicks, in her study of the twenty-first-century post-apocalyptic novel, discusses as an unprecedented outpouring of fully developed post-apocalyptic narratives by major, critically acclaimed anglophone [sic] writers (2016: 56) that my article situates Station Eleven. The bulk of the series is set twenty years after a flu pandemic brought human civilization as we know it to an end. Gomel, E 2000 The Plague of Utopias: Pestilence and the Apocalyptic Body. Skrimshire, S (Eds.) "Virginia Lottery tickets are available for purchase here!" In the new miniseries "Station Eleven," it's two decades after a deadly flu pandemic, and global civilization has nearly collapsed. The mere existence of a character like the Conductor, played with bug-eyed, Emmy-worthy brilliance by Petty, made my heart sing. You know because, mayhem is not a terribly sustainable way of life. Indeed, the passages beautiful writing and imagery sublimates and glosses over a production process that relies on the exploitation of cheap labour from the global South, something Mandel merely hints at through the mention of workers somewhere in China and the cadences of a half dozen languages. This is, of course, how apocalyptic logic works, with the end ushering in a perfect new world which makes sense of everything that happened before. His co-stars can't remember if he had a family to notify. It seemed at least plausible to me that there would eventually be some kind of hope. In this section, I compare Station Elevens narrative structure with that of Mitchells Cloud Atlas.10 Both texts complicate the teleological linearity of apocalyptic narratives to make space for unwritten futures which are key to agency. You are right about how the timeframe jumps from immediate crisis to a relatively established recovery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. By the same token, Kirsten collect[s] fragments of Arthurs life as told in gossip magazines because they are signifiers of her past, of which she has few and disconnected memories (Mandel, 2014: 40). Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2014/10/15/sorry-emily-st-john-mandel-resistance-is-futile/ [Last accessed 24 October 2018]. 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. Since its debut last month, Station Eleven has drawn both acclaim (from critics including our own Robert Lloyd) and criticism (from fans of the novel on which its based, which it changes in key ways). Station Eleven is a slow burn. However, as The Ringer's Alison Herman wrote, the show leverages our own experience of the pandemic to I in fact stole it shamelessly from Star Trek: Voyager. Rosen, E K 2008 Apocalyptic Transformation: Apocalypse and the Postmodern Imagination. As children learn in, The critical appropriation of apocalyptic tropes to foreground their complicity with oppressive power dynamics is typical of contemporary post-apocalyptic novels. Open Library of Humanities The silence (McCarthy, [2006] 2007: 274), an irrecoverable ecosystem that indicates the lack of a utopian renewal after the end indeed, the lack of post-apocalyptic futurity tout court and the collapsing of the sense-making order the traditional apocalyptic paradigm projects onto history through teleology. Yet, she explains, it was important to me to not write that book [The Road]. The final minutes of the Station Eleven finale reunite Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis) and Jeevan (Himesh Patel) after 19 years apart. Hardly by chance, schooling in the post-apocalypse insists on transports and communications that create a hyper-connected world in which borders are meaningless: Satellites beamed information down to Earth. London: Sceptre. Indeed, one criticism of Station Eleven the novel was that it made surviving the apocalypse look too easy, with Sigrid Nunez writing in the New York Times in 2014 Chaudhary, it finally clicked: Station Eleven soars when it rejects the mantra There is no before when it acknowledges that the future is a science fiction. Ah, you say no. Even in rural Pennsylvania, let alone Asia, you know your world becomes so small so quickly. If nothing else, its pleasant to consider the possibility. London: Continuum. Rather, during the first traumatic months spent walking on the road after the catastrophe, Jeevans litany of biographical facts unravels and is replaced by strange fragments (Mandel, 2014: 194). Rather than stressing the end, the emphasis is on the present and its ethical value, as the moment in which individuals take choices that inform the future. As Rachel explains, the sniper is deploying poetic devices, such as rhythm and regularity of speech, in order to have a stronger impact and to quickly and effectively indoctrinate (Coupland, [2010] 2011: 1878). Ultimately, Station Elevens critique of apocalyptic temporality as a self-referential narrative construct is particularly effective because the prophets fanatic apocalyptic fabrication is an attempt at making sense of history in the wake of an apocalypse that, as typical of the contemporary post-apocalyptic novel, failed to bring about the expected utopian renewal. Arthur C Clarke Award 2015 2015 Winner. Addressing this nexus, and through it the power dynamics and determinism embedded in teleology, the narrative structures of the contemporary post-apocalyptic novel articulate critical temporalities that invite us to conceive of narrative, and therefore of history, beyond the sense of an ending. Yes, Station Eleven is wildly optimistic and unapologetically sentimental, but I appreciated the problem-solving we did see the airport community, as you mentioned, and the golf resort, even the Symphonys decision to stay within the Wheel for safety reasons.