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. There are any number of access points for a comparison of these two shows. Confronted with Bertis preaching, the other characters of Couplands novel notice that the way Bertis talks is weird (Coupland, [2010] 2011: 187). 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. DOI: http://doi.org/10.13130/2035-7680/2987, De Cristofaro, D 2018 Time, no arrow, no boomerang, but a concertina: Cloud Atlas and the Anti-Apocalyptic Critical Temporalities of the Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel. Station Eleven, the HBO Max show whose finale airs Thursday, is something else entirely. It's that I don't think that period would last forever everywhere on earth. 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? 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). 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. 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. Open Library of Humanities 4(2), Station Eleven is a slow burn. Clark speaks to himself in bed next to Miles. 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. As she puts it, I assume that there would be a period of utter chaos immediately after an apocalyptic event, but I dont find it credible that that period would last forever (Griffith, 2015: n.pag.). 1. In the very early days, for example, Jeevan and Kirsten go round a supermarket that is full of produce but empty of people. Charles, R 2014 Sorry, Emily St. John Mandel: Resistance is Futile. Heffernan, T 2008 Post-Apocalyptic Culture. Station Eleven. Or more nuancedly, as Clark, a good friend of Arthurs, comments to Tyler: its not a question of having been bad or the people [who died] were just in the wrong place at the wrong time (Mandel, 2014: 260; ellipsis in original). 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). The Flash-forward Glimpses The following contains spoilers from the season finale of Station Eleven.. I very purposely set much of the action 15 and then 20 years after that flu pandemic. Station Eleven and The Last of Us share one more very specific similarity: juxtaposing destruction with art. Gomel, E 2000 The Plague of Utopias: Pestilence and the Apocalyptic Body. 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). 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). If one of the precepts of the series own holy text, a graphic novel, is show, dont tell, it seems to me indicative of the series strengths that its most moving moments feature spliced-in images, memories, of the characters former selves. Frankly I was grateful to skip all the store-looting and scavenging we are inevitably treated to in these kinds of tales. Rather, during the first traumatic months spent walking on the road after the catastrophe, Jeevans litany of biographical facts unravels and is replaced by strange fragments (Mandel, 2014: 194). The novels elegiac tone is encapsulated by the Museum of Civilization, where civilization refers to the bygone hyper-globalised world. By opening with the apocalyptic end that is foreshadowed by these sentences, Station Eleven highlights not only how the temporal order of the sense of an ending can be imposed on the randomness of time solely retrospectively, but also how this order ultimately implies a future that is already written. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/olh.256. Art and literature can, the series argues, offer some safety rails, some moments of connection. I focus on three elements: one, Station Elevens critical appropriation of religious apocalyptic logic, which I discuss in parallel with Douglas Couplands Player One (2010); two, the depiction of the aftermath of the Georgia Flu and Station Elevens critique of utopian teleology, which I discuss in parallel with Cormac McCarthys The Road (2006); and, three, Station Elevens non-linear narrative structure, which I discuss in parallel with David Mitchells Cloud Atlas (2004). It was about how art and culture can help people, and civilization, survive complete catastrophe. An uplifting pandemic drama? Instead we got a department store turned into a maternity ward and an Oreo used to demonstrate a cervix dilated to five centimeters. While The Roads passages signify the critique of utopian teleology through a hopeless dystopian scenario in which we find an entropic dissolution, Station Elevens ending subverts utopian teleology through speculations. Id long since grown skeptical of most topical art, often so calculated in its conclusions, but as Omicron surged and 2022 plans were suddenly canceled, Station Eleven began to feel like the first great screen fiction about the pandemic. If you can stick with it, you will be rewarded. Even the guy who auditions by reciting Bill Pullmans speech from Independence Day believes. Overall, Station Eleven can be initially read and understood as a very symbolic piece of literature, by emphasizing the meaning in objects from the past as a reminder and memory of life before the epidemic. Yet, significantly, [T]he road seemed dangerous. Ah, you say no. Griffith, C 2015 When the Dust Settles: An Interview with Emily St. John Mandel, April. DOI: http://doi.org/10.4324/9780203969908. Every individual experiences what she or he experiences and deals with it in a different way. His co-stars can't remember if he had a family to notify. The narrative moves literally and metaphorically away from the road the actual road of the first post-pandemic years as well as McCarthys The Road. Quinby, L 1994 Anti-Apocalypse: Exercises in Genealogical Criticism. The Station Eleven soundtrack song accompanies a flashback sequence. who dies of a heart attack onstage as he plays King Lear in Toronto. 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. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1057/9781137430144, Munslow, A 2006 Deconstructing History. It is almost more discomfiting, however, to be able to point now to moments the creators get wrong. 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 Museum, set up by Clark in the Severn City Airport, hosts everyday objects of the pre-apocalyptic society, such as a laptop, an iPhone, a credit card and a snow globe. 2nd ed. Coupland, D (2010) 2011 Player One. Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Twentieth-Century Novel. 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. Now the television adaptation by Patrick Somerville (known for Maniac and The Leftovers) for HBO, streaming in the UK on Starzplay, is here and resonating. The acknowledgment section explains Mandel took this statistic from Simon Parrys 2009 Daily Mail article Revealed: The Ghost Fleet of the Recession Anchored Just East of Singapore. 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. McNamara: As a nonmillennial Im not going to dive into those murky generation-defined existential waters, debate the historical nature of progress or try to predict the fate of democracy, though I think we can agree any television show that sparks debate about those things is a damn good television show. McCarry, S 2014 I want It All: A Conversation with Emily St. John Mandel, 12 September. Survival is never sufficient. London: Routledge. And I think it would be very easy to lose perspective and think that this was the entire world. Skrimshire, S (Eds.) Station Eleven has a nonlinear storytelling style: The story doesn't begin at one point and then progress through time to an ending; it often flashes forward or back in time. 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. 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. 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. Available at: https://www.booklistonline.com/Station-Eleven-Emily-St-John-Mandel/pid=6862248 [Last accessed 24 October 2018]. Israeli police lobbed hundreds of stun grenades, fired water cannons and arrested at least 40 people in response to Wednesdays demonstration in Tel Aviv against a judicial overhaul. 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. But I fear the social future Station Eleven imagines is implausible, if not disingenuous. 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). 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. Thirdly, while in the first half of Cloud Atlas the chronological order of the narratives encourages readers to look for clues foreshadowing an ending which will integrate, and make sense of, the various strands, there are gaps in the history traced by the novel and the shifts from one era to the other remain unexplained. Importantly, these hours of miracles [are] visible as such only in hindsight (Mandel, 2014: 223), that is, the deterministic teleological pattern of apocalyptic logic, with its distinction between the elect and the non-elect, is always constructed retrospectively, after the end, be this a future projection or a past event that is perceived as an end of something, as is the case of the Flu with the survivors. Even in 2014, I was sceptical that there would be such an appetite. Flawed but engrossing, the craft of HBO Maxs post-post-apocalyptic tale masks its narrative imperfections: As in the Bard, plot gives way to poetry. How deeply strange it is, how deeply unsettling, to be able to compare and contrast a fictional pandemic with the real thing. Berger, J 1999 After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse. 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. On what she'd want to save in an apocalypse. 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? HBO Maxs beguiling new mini-series is about a pandemic, but dont let that scare you off. Despite the tidy conclusion, I can only hope creator Patrick Somerville and HBO Max are in negotiations for a second season. Because in stretches the first comes achingly close to being a masterpiece. Available at: https://www.clarkeaward.com/2015-winner/ [Last accessed 24 October 2018]. Among the 1% left Himesh Patel and Matilda Lawler in Station Eleven. This staunch rebuttal of apocalyptic determinism through the emphasis on the role that chance plays during the pandemic is echoed when Clark describes the period of contagion as a choreography of luck, the hours of near misses, of coincidence[s] (Mandel, 2014: 223, 224). People die alone, with their loved ones unable to be with them, and people grieve alone. Maybe, though people appear to be living in small, mostly primitive communities and the fact that the story confines itself to the shoreline of Lake Michigan (at least I think its Michigan) serves the narrative both spiritually and logistically. Mandels list (2014: 312) of what is lost in the disaster is incomplete first and foremost because, in its elegiac harkening back, Station Eleven ignores present systemic problems, offering merely a few jabs at celebrity culture through Arthurs storyline, the dependence on technology see the iPhone zombies the joylessness of corporate work and the meaninglessness of corporate jargon (Mandel, 2014: 160, 1624, 2768). Yet, just like The Road, Station Eleven articulates a critical temporality that subverts the utopian teleology of apocalyptic logic. Someone suggested to me that it has to do with economic inequality. 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. This [the cults community at St. Deborah by the Water] is a place of order. In Player One, Bertis justifies his murders through a similar self-righteous moral dualism and teleology. Tate, A 2017 Apocalyptic Fiction. 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. Further threads arise from the stories of other settlements one led by Clark and the female actor (Elizabeth, played by Caitlin FitzGerald, who ended up marrying Arthur after an affair they began while he was with Miranda) and begin to be woven together. We put on plays in warzones. She has no expectation that anybody else will ever see her work. Notice the singular civilization of the Museums name: it encapsulates the neoliberal dream of a unified globalised world in which all difference is erased under the global free market. Alter, A 2014 The World is Ending, and Readers Couldnt Be Happier: Station Eleven Joins Falls Crop of Dystopian Novels. 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. Tyler reunites with his mother. 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. This critique of teleology is reflected in Station Eleven s narrative structure. Time, Paul Ricoeur contends, becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative ( 1984: 3 ). For the thing with the new world is its just horrifically short on elegance (Mandel, 2014: 151). Boston: Beacon. It's not that I don't think that there would be a period of absolute mayhem and chaos and horror. 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