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). Ive spent the entire season trying to reconcile the above with my deep and abiding affection for the episodes Hurricane, The Severn City Airport, Goodbye My Damaged Home, Dr. 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. The contemporary post-apocalyptic novel, instead, is not only predominantly dystopian but articulates temporalities critical of the apocalyptic model of history to make space for unwritten futures which are key to agency. Instead of examining all the light/dark political dynamics of rebuilding a post-catastrophe society, it concedes that capturing mass trauma is impossible and potentially unhelpful. Station Elevens structure similarly articulates a critical temporality that complicates the sense of an ending. 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). Season 1 Review: Station Eleven is brilliant television. It began to read to me as a tacit acknowledgement that its vision of the future is not as immersive as its vision of the present or past. The Georgia Flu, the prophet claims, was our flood. WebRotten Tomatoes reports a 98% approval rating with an average rating of 8.1/10, based on 54 critic reviews. 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. Rosen, E K 2008 Apocalyptic Transformation: Apocalypse and the Postmodern Imagination. 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. In: Atwood, M (Eds. One of the things that drove me away from The Walking Dead was the core characters lack of expertise and inability to problem-solve. A scene depicts Tyler as a child reading Revelation 18 to the victims of the Flu sealed forever in a quarantined plane (Mandel, 2014: 259). The prophet believes that everything that has ever happened on this earth has happened for a reason (Mandel, 2014: 59), including the Georgia Flu, which he sees as a perfect agent of death [that] could only be divine (Mandel, 2014: 60). 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. The first few episodes look beautiful but move at a stately pace. Because in the now, the before is all we have. 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). Art and literature can, the series argues, offer some safety rails, some moments of connection. Kermode, F [1966] 2000 The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. They angered Him (Coupland, [2010] 2011: 134) although, it turns out, he is also motivated by a much more mundane reason: he wants to kill his father, who ran off with his wife. While Station Eleven does not fall into the traps of the utopian teleology of traditional apocalyptic logic, which risks, in its determinism, legitimising oppressive power dynamics, the novel is too complicit with the current system and its exploitations. 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. It won several major awards, was an NPR Books Concierge pick, and it's just come out in paperback. If I lived in Philadelphia, I would have no idea what was going on. On the Traveling Symphony's motto, "survival is insufficient"It is not from Shakespeare. West, M 2018 Apocalypse Without Revelation? 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. | 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. 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. Events unfurl like a runaway train: Jeevan (Himesh Patel), an anxiety-ridden mess, is attending a performance of King Lear when an onstage tragedy prompts him to intervene. 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. 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. Thus, after a paragraph foreshadowing Mirandas divorce from Arthur and ensuing life a future that in Station Eleven is, literally, already written at the start of the novel, when we are informed of Arthurs many ex-wives (Mandel, 2014: 134) Mandel pauses to remind the readers that first theres this moment (Mandel, 2014: 107), a moment in which, in life unlike narratives, we take decisions that shape an unwritten future. Brennan: Look, Im not calling Station Eleven a failure, or a disaster, or even a half-assed genre entry. ", On what survives including a comic book treasured by several characters. It's some sort of combination of pessimism or narcissism that it's almost as though we want to believe or living at the climax of the story. 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. 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. Heffernan, T 2008 Post-Apocalyptic Culture. 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. 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. 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). 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. Through their content and narrative structure, contemporary post-apocalyptic novels take issue with the apocalyptic delirium of destination of Western modernity (Derrida, 1992: 53), that is, with the closed and deterministic conception of time at the core of apocalyptic logic and its equally closed and normative utopian visions, which leave no space for agency and for alternative visions of the future. The bulk of the series is set twenty years after a flu pandemic brought human civilization as we know it to an end. TV Details This adaptation of the astonishingly prescient 2014 bestseller is deeply unsettling, even in the bits it gets wrong. Zombies show no talent for climbing; is there no engineer or architect among them who could construct an elevated village? 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). Though their plague is much more devastating than ours (it has a 99% fatality rate), it is still quite something to see people coughing in enclosed spaces while those nearby bristle, and others wonder about masks or gather supplies so they can hunker in apartments until the virus has burned itself out. 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. Station Eleven. Indeed, as opposed to analyses of the contemporary apocalyptic imagination that interrogate its relationship with the current socio-historical conjunctures traumas and risks, especially environmental risks (Berger, 1999; Mousoutzanis, 2014; Skrimshire, 2010), I contend that to understand the contemporary post-apocalyptic novel we need to consider the very core of the apocalyptic imagination: time. 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. You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times. Drawn from Emily St. John Mandels novel, the seriess speculative future edges up, in its most ill-conceived moments, to a kind of Walking Dead-meets-Terrence Malick self-indulgence, and it rarely convinced me, or held me by the throat, the way its speculative present did; I even weighed whether to skip the episodes set along the Wheel, the Great Lakes circle the Symphony traced. 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). Gomel, E 2010 Postmodern Science Fiction and Temporal Imagination. 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. And, as a sniper, he believes he is clearing the way for gods new utopian order, for [T]he people [he] shot bothered God. Traditional apocalyptic narratives reveal a utopian teleology to history, a conception of time that deeply informs western modernity and its metanarratives. [18] 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. If you can stick with it, you will be rewarded. Yeah, I was interested in the randomness of what survives and what doesn't. What I was really interested and writing about was what's the new culture and the new world that begins to emerge? Berger, J 1999 After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse. See, for instance, the state propaganda in Colson Whiteheads, There are varying degrees of dystopian post-apocalyptic scenarios: from, The world of the comic has suffered an apocalypse of its own: the space stations artificial sky was damaged during a war with the aliens that have taken control of the Earth so that Station Eleven has been in a state of perpetual twilight for fifteen years (, A similar alternation between pre- and post-apocalypse, which troubles the teleological linearity of apocalyptic history, can be found in Selfs, In this sense, it is interesting to note Hillary Chutes reflections on the form of comics in terms of their spatial gaps that subvert linearity: through its spatial syntax [of gutters, grids, and panels], comics offer opportunities to place pressure on traditional notions of chronology, linearity, and causality as well as on the idea that history can ever be a closed discourse, or a simply progressive one (. 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