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. The word beauty recurs in the descriptions of the post-flu world: the beauty of this world where almost everyone was gone, there was beauty in the decrepitude this dazzling world, It was very difficult, but there were moments of beauty (Mandel, 2014: 148, 297, 302). Herein lies its critical distance from the utopian teleology of the traditional apocalyptic paradigm. Just like the parallels between the stories, the conclusion emphasises the individuals agency to shape the future and the openness of actual time, as opposed to the closure of time in traditional plots. How deeply strange it is, how deeply unsettling, to be able to compare and contrast a fictional pandemic with the real thing. Quinby, L 1994 Anti-Apocalypse: Exercises in Genealogical Criticism. Station Eleven is going to struggle to find an audience this winter. 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). ), Station Eleven celebrates the beauty of the pre-apocalyptic world and mourns its loss. Station Eleven happened to be on a break in March 2020 when COVID hit, and by the time production started up again in February 2021, the world had changed. 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. Frankly I was grateful to skip all the store-looting and scavenging we are inevitably treated to in these kinds of tales. 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. (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. New York: Vintage. Yet Tylers apocalyptic narrative indicates not only the complicity of apocalyptic logic with violence and power structures but also how the appeal of this kind of narrative depends on its promise of a sense-making temporal order. 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). It seemed at least plausible to me that there would eventually be some kind of hope. Station Eleven. As I have argued, the critical temporalities of the contemporary post-apocalyptic novel debunk the apocalyptic conception of history at the core of western modernity as a narrative construct. HBO Maxs beguiling new mini-series is about a pandemic, but dont let that scare you off. WebA pandemic show based on a pandemic novel airing two years into a global pandemic, "Station Eleven" may seem fatigue-inducing. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1057/9781137430144, Munslow, A 2006 Deconstructing History. 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. 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. WebSee 15 photos and 3 tips from 556 visitors to 7-Eleven. How Station Eleven pulled off the impossible, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning. Cultural Dominant. Charles, R 2014 Sorry, Emily St. John Mandel: Resistance is Futile. Leggatt, M 2018 Another World Just out of Sight: Remembering or Imagining Utopia in Emily St. John Mandels Station Eleven. This dynamic is what Frank Kermode terms the sense of an ending: We project ourselves a small, humble elect perhaps past the end, so as to see the structure whole, a thing we cannot do from our spot of time in the middle ([1966] 2000: 8). The beauty of it (Mandel, 2014: 247, 135). American Literary History, 23(3): 48399. The full Long Island Rail Road terminal in Grand Central Station opened Monday. who dies of a heart attack onstage as he plays King Lear in Toronto. Station Eleven replicates what Gomel (2000: 408) identifies as the plague pattern, where there is no place for millenarian rebirth. The peculiarity of the novel is that all the stories with the exception of the sixth, the post-apocalyptic one, situated in the middle are interrupted in order to give way to the following one in a chronological order, and are then resumed in reverse order in the second half of the book. His co-stars can't remember if he had a family to notify. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/06/books/station-eleven-joins-falls-crop-of-dystopian-novels.html [Last accessed 24 October 2018]. Im calling it a partial masterpiece! 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). Zamora, L P 1989 Writing the Apocalypse: Historical Vision in Contemporary U.S. and Latin American Fiction. By Richard 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. They were shown maps and globes, the lines of the borders that the Internet had transcended (Mandel, 2014: 262). Miranda, Arthurs ex-wife, was unprepared for [the fleets] beauty. 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. 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. 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. Still, my sense that the series is too Pollyanna-ish for its own good that its conclusions about the uses of art in the world are ultimately unearned stems from the fact that these sections are often dramatically inert to begin with. In the very early days, for example, Jeevan and Kirsten go round a supermarket that is full of produce but empty of people. 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). Station Eleven and The Last of Us share one more very specific similarity: juxtaposing destruction with art. But I fear the social future Station Eleven imagines is implausible, if not disingenuous. Notice, in this sense, Clarks musings on the snow globe housed in the Museum. As for the issue of whether or not art has saved us, there is no way of knowing, though it certainly has functioned, at the very least, like the COVID-19 vaccinations incapable of eradicating evil but allowing more people to survive it. 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. West, M 2018 Apocalypse Without Revelation? But then why did the One Ring choose Frodo? However, as The Ringer's Alison Herman wrote, the show leverages our own experience of the pandemic to 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). In part because the partnership of Jeevan and Kirsten was so odd and hypnotic that Goneril dress! In: Derrida and Negative Theology, Coward, H and Foshay, T (Eds.). Yes, an episode that aired in 1999. Among the 1% left Himesh Patel and Matilda Lawler in Station Eleven. 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. The goal of traditional apocalyptic logic is to order time and make it intelligible, by disclosing that the whole course of human history is tending towards a final resolution which will make sense of everything that happened before. (Not to worry, I slogged through.). ), Moving Targets. the Prophet, reconciles with his mother (Caitlin FitzGerald); graphic novelist Miranda Carroll (Danielle Deadwyler) meets her fate; Sarah (Lori Petty) shuffles off this mortal coil; and, most importantly, Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis as a adult, Matilda Lawler as a child) reunites with Jeevan (Himesh Patel), capping off one of the most finely wrought love stories in recent TV history. 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. Toronto: Anansi. You know because, mayhem is not a terribly sustainable way of life. Available at: http://www.publicbooks.org/the-post-apocalyptic-present/ [Last accessed 24 October 2018]. 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. WebSee 10 photos and 3 tips from 190 visitors to 7-Eleven. Convenience Store in Sterling, VA. London: Bloomsbury. Station Eleven and The Last of Us share one more very specific similarity: juxtaposing destruction with art. Open Library of Humanities, 4(2): 8, 123. You know, I think I'd want to save a globe. Kermode, F [1966] 2000 The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Goes Out newsletter, with the week's best events, to help you explore and experience our city. The following is from Emily St. John Mandels novel Station Eleven which was a finalist for a 2014 National Book Award. 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. Events unfurl like a 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. [L]ife on earth is just a bus stop on the way to greater glory or greater suffering (Coupland, [2010] 2011: 152) and Bertis understands his murders as partaking in a divinely-sanctioned separation between the elect and the non-elect. Arthur C Clarke Award 2015 2015 Winner. In her study of contemporary Canadian apocalyptic narratives, Marlene Goldman writes that: Canadian authors introduce particular twists to the familiar myth of the end by challenging rather than embracing apocalypses key features, specifically, the purgation of the non-elect and the violent destruction of the earthly world in preparation for the creation of a divine one (2005: 6). Published in 2014 to critical and popular success, Emily St. John Mandels Station Eleven is part of a widely-discussed, growing corpus of post-apocalyptic novels written by authors who do not typically write science fiction.1 In what Andrew Hoberek (2011) identifies as the genre turn of contemporary fiction, the post-apocalyptic genre has moved from the margins (tacky science-fiction) into the mainstream (legitimate, widely-recognized and practiced speculative fiction) (Buell 2013: 9), so much so that Frederick Buell frames it as a cultural dominant.2 As Andrew Tate puts it, contemporary narrative is haunted by dreams of a future that is a place of ruin (2017: 2). Open Library of Humanities, 4(1): 7, 126. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajr019. What you call the present showcases people who are neither hero nor villain, except perhaps in their own minds, but they are artists. 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