Published by The Georgia Flu, the prophet claims, was our flood. 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). Basingstoke: Palgrave. Keller, C 1996 Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World. The beauty of it (Mandel, 2014: 247, 135). I confess I came to Station Eleven reluctantly. Last year, as we all scrambled to create some sort of context for the COVID-19 pandemic, Mandel got all sorts of what does it feel to have predicted the future? questions, which seemed very unfair. 2010 Future Ethics: Climate Change and Apocalyptic Imagination. Open Library of Humanities 4(2), 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. WebA pandemic show based on a pandemic novel airing two years into a global pandemic, "Station Eleven" may seem fatigue-inducing. WebRotten Tomatoes reports a 98% approval rating with an average rating of 8.1/10, based on 54 critic reviews. New York: Vintage. To take refuge in the art, dammit. (Only the Apple TV+ show See takes on the importance of myth and art, albeit in a more controlling, prophetic way, but that pandemic left everyone blind, which brings its own issues.). 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. The light we carry within us is the ark that carried Noah and his people over the face of the terrible waters (Mandel, 2014: 60). This [the cults community at St. Deborah by the Water] is a place of order. 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. 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. 2 De Cristofaro: Critical Temporalities 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 WebStation Eleven contains many explicit references to other works of art, and relies on them heavily for source material. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 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. 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). Tate, A 2017 Apocalyptic Fiction. Her previous novels were Last Night in Montreal, The Singers Gun, and The Lola Quartet. Mary McNamara is a culture columnist and critic for the Los Angeles Times. Montral: McGill-Queens University Press. 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. In part because the partnership of Jeevan and Kirsten was so odd and hypnotic that Goneril dress! If you can stick with it, you will be rewarded. In a way, Station Eleven is an interesting Rorschach test of apocalyptcisms appeal. 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). It's that I don't think that period would last forever everywhere on earth. People die alone, with their loved ones unable to be with them, and people grieve alone. For me, its what Ive taken to calling the series present the 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. You know because, mayhem is not a terribly sustainable way of life. Chute, H L 2016 Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Twentieth Century Literature, 46(4): 40533. Yet, she explains, it was important to me to not write that book [The Road]. 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). But Station Elevens apocalypse does not bring any sense-making order. 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. I have seen many, and characters are almost exclusively categorized as hero, villain, victim but never bard, never artist. 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). The final minutes of the Station Eleven finale reunite Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis) and Jeevan (Himesh Patel) after 19 years apart. Berkeley: University of California Press. The bulk of the series is set twenty years after a flu pandemic brought human civilization as we know it to an end. Station Eleven replicates what Gomel identifies as the plague pattern, where there is no place for millenarian rebirth. Confused? Thus, the critical temporalities of contemporary post-apocalyptic fictions challenge the hegemonic temporality of modernity: time as a neutral, homogeneous and teleological continuum. ", On what survives including a comic book treasured by several characters. 2nd ed. Available at: https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/38e15y/hi_im_emily_st_john_mandel_author_of_station/ [Last accessed 24 October 2018]. Yes, an episode that aired in 1999. Mary McNamara: Given the spiritual undertones of the series, and the repetition of the sentence I remember damage. Last year, as we all scrambled to create some sort of context for the COVID-19 pandemic, Mandel got all sorts of what does it feel to have predicted the future? questions, which seemed very unfair. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/olh.235. Alter, A 2014 The World is Ending, and Readers Couldnt Be Happier: Station Eleven Joins Falls Crop of Dystopian Novels. But it wasnt part of his plan. 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. This biblical passage contains a prophecy about the city of Babylon, symbol of the sinful Roman empire, being destroyed by plagues for mighty is the Lord God who judges her (Mandel, 2014: 259) an obvious parallel with the Georgia Flu and with the prophets argument that the pandemic targeted those who were found lacking by god. ow deeply strange it is, how deeply unsettling, to be able to compare and contrast a fictional pandemic with the real thing. Cultural Dominant. WebIn this video we take a deep dive, review, recap and explain the ending to HBO's adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel's novel STATION ELEVEN. 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). Because it seems like an improbable outcome, when I look back at the sequence of events (Mandel, 2014: 77, 157). Leggatt, M 2018 Another World Just out of Sight: Remembering or Imagining Utopia in Emily St. John Mandels Station Eleven. Confronted with Bertis preaching, the other characters of Couplands novel notice that the way Bertis talks is weird (Coupland, [2010] 2011: 187). What you call the present showcases people who are neither hero nor villain, except perhaps in their own minds, but they are artists. Traditional apocalyptic narratives are fictions of historical order (Zamora, 1989: 4) that flourish in times of crisis and, through his apocalyptic narrative, the prophet seeks to restore order in the chaotic post-pandemic world. He previously served as TV editor at Paste Magazine, and his writing has also appeared in Indiewire, Slate, Deadspin and numerous other publications. 2nd ed. Available at: https://www.booklistonline.com/Station-Eleven-Emily-St-John-Mandel/pid=6862248 [Last accessed 24 October 2018]. I found it hopeful. Buell, F 2013 Post-Apocalypse: A New U.S. 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. Instead we got a department store turned into a maternity ward and an Oreo used to demonstrate a cervix dilated to five centimeters. I definitely had some questions in the end the Prophets use of children as suicide bombers was never really addressed but I was frankly astonished that Somerville was able to keep so many balls themes, characters, flashbacks, contexts, relationships in the air, never mind land them with such optimism and grace. In order to have a good story, there needs to be emotion or entertainment. 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). DOI: http://doi.org/10.1057/9781137430144, Munslow, A 2006 Deconstructing History. We try to make the world make sense for a minute, she explains to young Kirsten. Ermarth, E D 1992 Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time. You know, it's interesting to think about what survives. Station Eleven is going to struggle to find an audience this winter. One of the things that drove me away from The Walking Dead was the core characters lack of expertise and inability to problem-solve. The first few episodes look beautiful but move at a stately pace. In this sense, it is interesting to note that, just like another winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction, Margaret Atwood (, On the essentially temporal nature of traditional apocalyptic logic see also Kermode (, See also the prototype of the Western concept that history has an intelligible and end-determined order, whether fideistic or naturalistic, is the scheme of the course of earthly affairs from genesis to apocalypse which is underwritten by a sacred text (, Indeed, it is my contention that, in its critique of the apocalyptic understanding of history, the contemporary post-apocalyptic novel addresses aspects of Western modernity that transcend national borders, which in any case become irrelevant after the catastrophes depicted by the texts. 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. Both texts expose how apocalyptic discourse is fabricated to push ideological agendas. Station Eleven. Goldman, M 2005 Rewriting Apocalypse in Contemporary Canadian Fiction. A life, and therefore actual, rather than fictional time, is made up of a number of loose ends (Mandel, 2014: 27) that resist the retrospective patterning of the sense of an ending. WebFairfax County Fire And Rescue Department Station 31 - Fox Mill 2610 Reston Parkway Herndon, VA. Fairfax County Fire And Rescue Department Station 36 - Frying Pan 2660 In this altered world, there is a traveling Shakespearean theater company and symphony orchestra touring the small and fairly isolated communities in the Midwest.". Perhaps vessels are setting out even now, travelling towards or away from him, steered by sailors armed with maps and knowledge of the stars, driven by need or perhaps simply by curiosity: whatever became of the countries on the other side? Yet, significantly, [T]he road seemed dangerous. How deeply strange it is, how deeply unsettling, to be able to compare and contrast a fictional pandemic with the real thing. 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. 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. For the profound influence of apocalypticism on modernity can also be qualified as a chronic disease of the Western politics and poetics of temporality, a disease characterised by what Derrida called the disorder or delirium of destination (Gomel, 2010: 121). The road was all travellers walking with shell-shocked expressions, children wearing blankets over their coats, people getting killed for the contents of their backpacks, hungry dogs (Mandel, 2014: 1934). London: Bloomsbury. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ricoeur, P 1984 Time and Narrative, 1. Globe and Mail, 12 September. Firstly, Times Arrow bec[o]me[s] Times Boomerang (Mitchell, 2004: 149), that is, the linear and teleological development of traditional plots and apocalyptic history the arrow of the novels first half is complicated by the boomerang of the second half. She has no expectation that anybody else will ever see her work. Station Eleven features explicit intertextual references to biblical apocalyptic narratives, from the Flood, in Genesis, to Revelation. 37. This utopian narrative about the pre-apocalyptic past obscures the material labour that props up the hyper-connected globalised world and the inequalities between the global North and South that lie beneath its seemingly seamless unity. The improbability of it, muses Clark, who is echoed by Kirsten reminiscing about the urban landscape seen from a plane at night: clusters and pinpoints of light in the darkness, scattered constellations linked by roads or alone. 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). Station Elevens plot itself consists of fragments from before and after the apocalypse, which challenges the teleological linearity of apocalyptic temporality. 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). Matt Brennan: With its emotional finale, Unbroken Circle, Station Eleven ties off the loose ends in its sprawling narrative: Tyler (Daniel Zovatto), a.k.a. While the novels prophet holds on to a religious understanding of apocalypse in which the end is followed by utopian rebirth, the Georgia Flu, the pandemic that kills 99% of the worlds population, is termed apocalypse by the television newscasters in the sense of dystopian catastrophe rather than utopian revelation, and the apocalyptic narratives referred to in the text are disaster movies, with the dangerous stragglers fighting out for the last few scraps (Mandel, 2014: 243, 256). Station Eleven and The Last of Us share one more very specific similarity: juxtaposing destruction with art. There is no emotion and it is not greatly 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). 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