Zombies show no talent for climbing; is there no engineer or architect among them who could construct an elevated village? 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. 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. 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. : Shakespeare, Salvagepunk and Station Eleven. 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. London: Continuum. 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). Theres nothing you cant survive, because theres nothing that you will not do (Mandel, 2014: 139). I remember watching that episode and I remember being absolutely struck by that line. Tyler reunites with his mother. The author has no competing interests to declare. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. I remember describing the premise of the novel to my husband, and he said, "People would want what was best about the world. But series creator Patrick Somerville had her blessing to change it. 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. 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. Whats on the other side? The mere existence of a character like the Conductor, played with bug-eyed, Emmy-worthy brilliance by Petty, made my heart sing. Is a Disarmingly Hopeful Post-Apocalyptic Tale. This passage is another intertextual reference to The Road. Griffith, C 2015 When the Dust Settles: An Interview with Emily St. John Mandel, April. And, as a sniper, he believes he is clearing the way for gods new utopian order, for [T]he people [he] shot bothered God. Cultural Dominant. 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. 21:1), frames the apocalyptic origin of the distinction between the elect and the non-elect at the core of the cults credo when fervently claiming that the survivors names are recorded in the book of life (Mandel, 2014: 286). 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). "No countries, no internet, no more Facebook, no more email. A Pulitzer Prize winner in 2015 and finalist for criticism in 2013 and 2014, she has won various awards for criticism and feature writing. Why in his life of frequent travel, had he never recognized the beauty of flight? DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/olh.235. 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. Huntley, K 2014 Station Eleven: Booklist Review, August. The Traveling Symphony is a troupe of actors and musicians dedicated to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. After all, McCarthys text which depicts a father and sons journey in a post-apocalyptic US where, after an unspecified catastrophe, everything [is] dead to the root (McCarthy, [2006] 2007: 21) is one of the most famous examples of the contemporary body of post-apocalyptic novels as it won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. 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). 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. People with chaos in their hearts cannot abide here (Mandel, 2014: 61). The refusal of this transition, I argue, is at the core of contemporary post-apocalyptic novels be they about pandemics or not for in these texts the aftermaths of the cataclysmic destruction of the world as we know it are preponderantly dystopian.8 In this section, I compare Station Elevens more nuanced and hopeful version of the aftermath with The Roads univocally ravaged and hopeless post-apocalyptic world to discuss how, notwithstanding varying degrees of dystopian scenarios, contemporary post-apocalyptic fictions consistently articulate critical temporalities that reject the traditional apocalyptic notion of a utopian teleology active in history. According to Elana Gomel, plague narratives are structured by the logic of iterative mortality that undermines the teleological progression of the apocalypse. The Georgia Flu, the prophet claims, was our flood. Published by The critical temporalities of the contemporary post-apocalyptic novel not only expose the apocalyptic conception of history as a narrative construct enmeshed within power structures through their critical appropriation of religious apocalyptic tropes and the subversion of utopian teleology, but, through their structures, these fictions challenge what is an essentially apocalyptic model of narrative dominated by the end and invite us to conceive of history beyond the determinism of the sense of an ending. The following contains spoilers from the season finale of Station Eleven.. It won several major awards, was an NPR Books Concierge pick, and it's just come out in paperback. Princeton: Princeton University Press. [18] Station Eleven , the HBO Max show whose finale airs Thursday, is something else entirely. 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. Told in a relentless stream of disclosure, the story swirls around two troubled siblings, an addict named Paul and his absurdly gorgeous half sister, Vincent. 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). You know, it's interesting. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Someone suggested to me that it has to do with economic inequality. In this podcast, PSR Versus podcast hosts Josh Wigler ( @roundhoward) and LaTonya Starks ( @lkstarks) compare episode 7 of The Last of Us and Station Eleven. Oxford: Oxford University Press. How Station Eleven pulled off the impossible, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning. However, Station Elevens post-apocalyptic scenario is very different from McCarthys and, signifying the shift away from The Road, not only does Jeevan keep out of the road, but Kirsten cannot, and does not want to, remember anything about the traumatic year she spent on the road immediately following the catastrophe (Mandel, 2014: 195, 295). The first few episodes look beautiful but move at a stately pace. 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. There is no emotion and it is not greatly who dies of a heart attack onstage as he plays King Lear in Toronto. On the Traveling Symphony's motto, "survival is insufficient"It is not from Shakespeare. As Mandel muses, Its almost as if The Road gave more literary writers permission to approach the subject [of the post-apocalypse] (Alter, 2014: n.pag.). 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). Emily St. John Mandel. Why Netflix is dabbling in livestreaming, Stranger Things play that may hold key to the end taking 1959 Hawkins to West End, NBCs Chicago series have strong showings but CBS wins weekly TV ratings race, Before and after photos from space show storms effect on California reservoirs, Dramatic before and after photos from space show epic snow blanketing SoCal mountains, The chance of a lifetime: Five friends ski the tallest mountain in Los Angeles, Best coffee city in the world? I loved Station Eleven because it is the first post-apocalyptic show that revolves around its own holy text, in this case the hypnotic, possibly prophetic, graphic novel Station Eleven. We see its origins as, in flashback, Miranda (with Deadwyler in an equally devastating performance), turns her own experience with trauma and loss into a sort of universal language that connects the past with the future and literally helps save civilization. 34268. Therefore, the plot of pestilence is not so much a fiction of an end as a fiction of an end indefinitely postponed. It could remind us of our civilization. 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. 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. New York Times, 5 September. 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). We begin, really, to care, to wonder, to ask more questions. Villainry arrives (via the most frightening performance Ive ever seen, from Daniel Zovatto as the stranger who insists on joining the Traveling Symphony otherwise your friends are going to start to disappear), along with the secret community known as the Museum of Civilisation. 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. 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