Even in 2014, I was sceptical that there would be such an appetite. 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. Manchester: Manchester University Press. London: Picador. But it wasnt part of his plan. You seem to get reborn almost every time you leave the house, says Arthurs best friend, Clark (David Wilmot, another mesmerising turn), after listening to a California female actor be an excessively California female actor over dinner for too long. | 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. She had ample experience to draw from. Mackenzie Davis, left, leads the sprawling cast of HBO Maxs (post-)apocalyptic series Station Eleven.. Tom's Guide's latest streaming news. TV Details It wasnt like that. Indeed, both Station Eleven and Player One emphasise how the teleological determinism and moral dualism of apocalyptic logic are self-referential narrative constructs which legitimise the oppressions and violence of those who articulate these narratives. Arthur C Clarke Award 2015 2015 Winner. Brennan: Look, Im not calling Station Eleven a failure, or a disaster, or even a half-assed genre entry. Maybe, though people appear to be living in small, mostly primitive communities and the fact that the story confines itself to the shoreline of Lake Michigan (at least I think its Michigan) serves the narrative both spiritually and logistically. 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. Learn exactly what happened in this chapter, scene, or section of Station Eleven and what it means. Station Elevens structure similarly articulates a critical temporality that complicates the sense of an ending. As one of the survivors puts it, Elizabeths [the prophets mother] a fucking lunatic (Mandel, 2014: 253). Open Library of Humanities In: Patrides, C A and Wittreich, J (Eds. 34268. According to Elana Gomel, plague narratives are structured by the logic of iterative mortality that undermines the teleological progression of the apocalypse. I hadnt read the book, so I had no idea what I was in for, but I certainly was not prepared for a very young Shakespearean actress trotting around snowy Chicago in her young Goneril costume as the world collapsed. 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]. And one that in its most poignant moments reaches the same depths of emotion as the greatest television dramas: as Beasts of the Southern Wild composer Dan Romers roadside jug-band score measures the heartbeat of the end of the world; as the camera catches the glimmer of tears in Tylers eyes during that final performance of Hamlet; as an impromptu rap song or homemade costume render the pain of the human condition at a single humans scale. Station Eleven, the HBO Max show whose finale airs Thursday, is something else entirely. Cameron, C 2014 Station Eleven Offers Suspense and Science Fiction, but It Is Undoubtedly a Literary Work. Boston: Beacon. Even in rural Pennsylvania, let alone Asia, you know your world becomes so small so quickly. 2nd ed. And during the montage of embraces between Jeevan and Kirsten near the end of Dr. The chaos of historical contingency chaos which is even more evident and dreadful at times of crisis, such as that of the devastating Georgia Flu is tamed through the recourse to apocalyptic determinism, namely, to the belief that everything happens for a reason, as the prophets mother repeats throughout the novel. But you know, here I am in Philadelphia this afternoon. Station Elevens plot itself consists of fragments from before and after the apocalypse, which challenges the teleological linearity of apocalyptic temporality. 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). 1. It received critical acclaim and was nominated for seven Primetime De Cristofaro, D., You know, it's interesting. And escape, I am tempted to tell you that whatever imperfections you felt you experienced in Station Eleven were deliberate, a kind of cinematic wabi-sabi to remind us that the quest for perfection is not only impossible it is the wrong quest. Foursquare City Guide. 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 Berkeley: University of California Press. McCarry, S 2014 I want It All: A Conversation with Emily St. John Mandel, 12 September. They were shown maps and globes, the lines of the borders that the Internet had transcended (Mandel, 2014: 262). You know, I think I'd want to save a globe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The Traveling Symphony is a troupe of actors and musicians dedicated to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. Lighter moments leaven the darkness, particularly when the irreducibly charismatic and off-kilter Lori Petty, as the troupes composer Sarah, is on screen, or when we flash back to pre-pandemic times. 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. Yet, she explains, it was important to me to not write that book [The Road]. 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. In the new HBO Max series Station Eleven, Davis plays the lead as a tough but vulnerable survivor of a pandemic. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. The first concerns the early days and years of the pandemic. Yet, significantly, [T]he road seemed dangerous. Clark speaks to himself in bed next to Miles. Nor did I want the kind of Theres Got to Be a Morning After survival celebration disaster stories so often rely on. I even caught myself asking a blasphemous question: If art were truly capable of saving us, wouldnt we already have been saved? Emily St. John Mandel. Station Elevens post-apocalyptic beauty is a far cry from The Roads ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. Cultural Dominant. This passage is a clear intertextual reference to McCarthys The Road, whose world is complete with travellers with shell-shocked expressions, children walking covered in blankets, people being killed for their backpacks contents, and a hungry dog. London: Routledge. The series creator explains why. We try to make the world make sense for a minute, she explains to young Kirsten. Consider the card games played belowdecks in the evenings on the ship carrying the containers across the ocean, a hand stubbing out a cigarette in an overflowing ashtray, a haze of blue smoke in dim light, the cadences of a half dozen languages united by common profanities, the sailors dreams of land and women, these men for whom the ocean was a grey-line horizon to be traversed in ships the size of overturned skyscrapers (Mandel, 2014: 255). It won several major awards, was an NPR Books Concierge pick, and it's just come out in paperback. 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). Time, Paul Ricoeur contends, becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative (1984: 3). But book awards and The red bandanas turn up and disappear in one fell swoop to provide a cliffhanger between episodes; ditto the strained mystery of the the Prophet. If traditional apocalyptic discourse is about time, contemporary post-apocalyptic discourse is also about time more specifically, it is about critical temporalities, constructions of time that critique a hegemonic temporality. Station Eleven requires audiences to pay attention, offering up a dramatic tapestry of considerable depth. Station Elevens ending is key to the texts deconstruction of utopian teleology. If one of the precepts of the series own holy text, a graphic novel, is show, dont tell, it seems to me indicative of the series strengths that its most moving moments feature spliced-in images, memories, of the characters former selves. How? Kermode, F [1966] 2000 The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. June 24, 2015. As I am Irish, and firmly believe in Thomas Cahills premise that Irish monks saved civilization by maintaining texts and libraries while Europe fell into the Dark Ages, I was all in. Notice, in this sense, Clarks musings on the snow globe housed in the Museum. Perfect for acing essays, tests, and quizzes, as well as for writing lesson plans. On the other hand, the key element of the novels final passage is the sense of possibility (see my emphasis below), rather than the totalising teleological determinism of apocalyptic logic: is it possible that somewhere there are ships setting out? Get our L.A. 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). Quinby, L 1994 Anti-Apocalypse: Exercises in Genealogical Criticism. 2nd ed. Station Eleven. She has no expectation that anybody else will ever see her work. Yes, an episode that aired in 1999. Available at: http://www.tor.com/2014/09/12/a-conversation-with-emily-st-john-mandel/ [Last accessed 24 October 2018]. 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. WebA pandemic show based on a pandemic novel airing two years into a global pandemic, "Station Eleven" may seem fatigue-inducing. As time passes through the night the world starts to crumble. It seemed at least plausible to me that there would eventually be some kind of hope. I dont [sic] think so. Of course you hope in a scenario like this, what would survive would be the Beethoven symphonies, the Shakespeare plays, the things that we think of as the highest and most exalted expressions of our culture. It is almost more discomfiting, however, to be able to point now to moments the creators get wrong. While it is my argument that this challenge to traditional apocalyptic discourse and its model of history is key to contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction, in this section I focus on Mandels novel in conjunction with another Canadian text, Couplands Player One, which takes place in a Toronto cocktail lounge over five hours while the price of oil quickly escalates and a violent post-apocalyptic scenario ensues.5 Both novels subvert the distinction between the elect and the non-elect, bringing to the fore the self-righteous violence of apocalyptic discourse and how this distinction, as well as the apocalyptic historical teleology it founds, are narrative constructs which serve the interests of those who articulate them. ), The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature: Patterns, Antecedents, and Repercussions, pp. 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. Someone suggested to me that it has to do with economic inequality. You had to be impressed by that at least. 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. And, as a sniper, he believes he is clearing the way for gods new utopian order, for [T]he people [he] shot bothered God. 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. but mainly because it quickly became obvious, from the running references to Shakespeare and the (fictional) graphic novel Station Eleven, that this story was not about how to survive a pandemic. Read full review 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. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Best American Mystery But book awards and paperback releases are a thing of the past in the world Mandel has created. These fictions also target the nexus between narrativity and apocalyptic logic captured by Kermode through the notion of the sense of an ending. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. It could remind us of our civilization. Now the television adaptation by Patrick Somerville (known for Maniac and The Leftovers) for HBO, streaming in the UK on Starzplay, is here and resonating. 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. Emily St. John Mandel, 12 September of station Eleven '' may seem fatigue-inducing to me there. On the snow globe housed in the new HBO Max series station Eleven Suspense! 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