Twentieth Century Literature, 46(4): 40533. 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. Station Elevens structure similarly articulates a critical temporality that complicates the sense of an ending. Emily St. John Mandel. 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. Gomel, E 2010 Postmodern Science Fiction and Temporal Imagination. Cultural Dominant. There is no emotion and it is not greatly 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. In: Atwood, M (Eds. 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). 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. If nothing else, its pleasant to consider the possibility. 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. "No cities," she tells NPR's Scott Simon. Toronto: Anansi. The same interplay of artificial lights and darkness can be found in the description of a shipping fleet permanently anchored off the coast of Malaysia due to the 2008 economic crisis. 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 Both texts expose how apocalyptic discourse is fabricated to push ideological agendas. 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. 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. Mousoutzanis, A 2014 Fin-de-Sicle Fictions, 1890s1990s: Apocalypse, Technoscience, Empire. But book awards and paperback releases are a thing of the past in the world Mandel has created. 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). Buell, F 2013 Post-Apocalypse: A New U.S. : 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. Time, Paul Ricoeur contends, becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative (1984: 3). Its one of the most profound meditations on love, loss, grief, and community Ive ever seen. [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. It is almost more discomfiting, however, to be able to point now to moments the creators get wrong. Mackenzie Davis, left, leads the sprawling cast of HBO Maxs (post-)apocalyptic series Station Eleven.. 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]. What would make life still worth living after the collapse of civilisation? 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). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berger, J 1999 After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse. Zamora, L P 1989 Writing the Apocalypse: Historical Vision in Contemporary U.S. and Latin American Fiction. 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. Station Eleven, the HBO Max show whose finale airs Thursday, is something else entirely. Feb. 26A BIG QUESTION keeps popping up on Manchester community groups on Facebook: What happened to the 7-Eleven gas stations on South Main and Maple streets? Station Eleven manages to find something different: beauty and meaning, most of it wrapped up in the pandemic's survivors, our main characters, and the way they manage to connect to others and find some joy even in a grim time and place. How deeply strange it is, how deeply unsettling, to be able to compare and contrast a fictional pandemic with the real thing. The dystopias of contemporary post-apocalyptic scenarios become all the more significant if one considers that they are set when the traditional apocalyptic paradigm posits the utopian resolution which makes sense of everything that happened before. But Station Elevens apocalypse does not bring any sense-making order. 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). Heffernan, T 2008 Post-Apocalyptic Culture. Aptly described as an elegy for the hyper-globalised present by Andrew M. Butler of the Arthur C. Clarke Award committee (ACCA, 2015: n.pag. WebStation Eleven Questions and Answers - Discover the eNotes.com community of teachers, mentors and students just like you that can answer any question you might have on Station Eleven Search this site As he puts it, if youre not plotting every moment to boil the carcass of the old order, then youre wasting your day (Coupland, [2010] 2011: 189). However, as The Ringer's Alison Herman wrote, the show leverages our own experience of the pandemic to But soon, within minutes, the death of one man playing Lear disappears into the vast, mass death of a worldwide plague called the Georgia Flu. The Swiss Family Robinson managed, and they were mostly kids! People with chaos in their hearts cannot abide here (Mandel, 2014: 61). 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. Yes, an episode that aired in 1999. 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. Cloud Atlas consists of six narratives set between the nineteenth century and a distant post-apocalyptic future. Even in rural Pennsylvania, let alone Asia, you know your world becomes so small so quickly. Secondly, the interruption of each story defers closure, and even the stories conclusions contain hints to the following narrative. ", On what survives including a comic book treasured by several characters. Washington Post, 15 October. Get Screen Gab for everything about the TV shows and streaming movies everyones talking about. Modern metanarratives are apocalyptic, in that they are totalising explanations of history based on utopian teleology. The only descriptions of the immediate aftermath Mandel gives her readers are through Jeevan, a paramedic who tries to help Arthur when he has a stroke on stage the night the pandemic begins. The primary example of this is Shakespeare, specifically King There are as is starting to feel mandatory with small-screen dramas two timelines. 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. WebSee 10 photos and 3 tips from 190 visitors to 7-Eleven. I have seen many, and characters are almost exclusively categorized as hero, villain, victim but never bard, never artist. | ISSN: 2056-6700 | Hoberek, A 2015 The Post-Apocalyptic Present. 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. 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. 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. There are any number of access points for a comparison of these two shows. ), The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature: Patterns, Antecedents, and Repercussions, pp. Stressing the role of contingency and chance in life, reflections of Arthurs include how did I get from there to here? and How have I landed in this life? And during the montage of embraces between Jeevan and Kirsten near the end of Dr. 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. She had ample experience to draw from. Snow and stopped cars with terrible things in them. It was about how art and culture can help people, and civilization, survive complete catastrophe. He previously served as TV editor at Paste Magazine, and his writing has also appeared in Indiewire, Slate, Deadspin and numerous other publications. I focus on three elements, which reflect central features of this body of writings the critical appropriation of religious apocalyptic logic, the critique of utopian teleology, and non-linear narrative structures and parallel Mandels novel with three other key texts of the genre, Douglas Couplands Player One (2010), Cormac McCarthys The Road (2006) and David Mitchells Cloud Atlas (2004). Station Elevens ending is key to the texts deconstruction of utopian teleology. This deliberate timing allows Mandel not to dwell on the horror and mayhem brought about by the Georgia Flu, horror and mayhem which are instead at the core of The Roads borrowed world (McCarthy, [2006] 2007: 130). Theres nothing you cant survive, because theres nothing that you will not do (Mandel, 2014: 139). London: Windmill. Furthermore, teleology entails determinism, which compromises the possibility of choices and ethics. Season 1 Review: Station Eleven is brilliant television. 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. Instead we got a department store turned into a maternity ward and an Oreo used to demonstrate a cervix dilated to five centimeters. 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. 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 (. "don't have any 7-eleven stores where I live so when I seen that there 7-eleven's my one" Convenience Store in Abrams, M H 1984 Apocalypse: Theme and Variations. 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. And I think it would be very easy to lose perspective and think that this was the entire world. 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). Berkeley: University of California Press. 20 years later it the Traveling Symphony, a group that travels and performs for people, roams the wastelands. The series creator explains why, Station Eleven, like the Shakespeare that sustains it, is something of a miracle, Unlike Andor, Mandalorian is going all in on Star Wars lore. 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. You are right about how the timeframe jumps from immediate crisis to a relatively established recovery. 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. Apocalyptic writings, ever since their religious origins, have flourished at times of crisis and [I]t is to this disquieting sense of disorder that the apocalyptic myth speaks, reasserting teleological design and cosmic meaning (Rosen, 2008: xviii). Hbo Max show whose finale airs Thursday, is something else entirely contain hints to the texts of. 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