34268. Los Angeles, Whats on Khlo Kardashians face? Keller, C 1996 Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/olh.256. As Mark West points out in another article in this special issue, Clarks reflection addresses but rather miscasts the globalized trade networks in that it fetishizes the beautiful objects at the expense of the workers who make them, workers who are dehumanized into assemblies of working parts (note the emphasis on their hands) (2018: 19, 20). Born in the Boston area, educated at USC and an adoptive New Orleanian for nearly 10 years, he returned to Los Angeles in 2019 as the newsrooms television editor. Yet, significantly, [T]he road seemed dangerous. What would make life still worth living after the collapse of civilisation? Yes, an episode that aired in 1999. Miranda, Arthurs ex-wife, was unprepared for [the fleets] beauty. There are any number of access points for a comparison of these two shows. But series creator Patrick Somerville had her blessing to change it. Twentieth Century Literature, 46(4): 40533. 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. I admit that it probably says something about where I am at right now that I wanted more of the disaster and less of the hope. Zombies show no talent for climbing; is there no engineer or architect among them who could construct an elevated village? Washington Post, 15 October. I was very deliberate in the timing of the narrative: its set mostly fifteen and twenty years after the collapse, not during or in the immediate aftermath (Mandel, 2015: n.pag.). This [the cults community at St. Deborah by the Water] is a place of order. I mean, extra points for level of difficulty, no? If you can stick with it, you will be rewarded. 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. 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). This pattern comprises panic, dissolution of 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. Yet contemporary post-apocalyptic scenarios are predominantly dystopian. It's not that I don't think that there would be a period of absolute mayhem and chaos and horror. The following contains spoilers from the season finale of Station Eleven.. On the other hand, the key element of the novels final passage is the sense of possibility (see my emphasis below), rather than the totalising teleological determinism of apocalyptic logic: is it possible that somewhere there are ships setting out? The full Long Island Rail Road terminal in Grand Central Station opened Monday. Open Library of Humanities, 4(2): 8, 123. Hoberek, A 2011 Cormac McCarthy and the Aesthetics of Exhaustion. Among the 1% left Himesh Patel and Matilda Lawler in Station Eleven. 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. Because in stretches the first comes achingly close to being a masterpiece. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/olh.235. Ah, you say no. Clarks optimistic musings on the possibility of ships and life in the countries on the other side of the ocean stand in stark contrast to the fathers answers to his son: Do you think there could be ships out there? Here in the present, we play we play musical instruments at refugee camps. Huntley, K 2014 Station Eleven: Booklist Review, August. Bernstein, M A 1994 Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History. You know, it's no longer possible to set out as a pioneer and stake a claim and start a new life. Instead we got a department store turned into a maternity ward and an Oreo used to demonstrate a cervix dilated to five centimeters. The following is from Emily St. John Mandels novel Station Eleven which was a finalist for a 2014 National Book Award. Audience member Jeevan (Himesh Patel) tries to take her home, but they are overtaken by the collapse of civilisation and begin their new life navigating the disaster together. 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). That episode, which straddles the before and the after, was totally crazy and completely glorious; of course some female doctor would create a maternity ward in a place that once sold beds. Author Emily St. John Mandel was not involved in the adaptation of her hit novel. It seemed at least plausible to me that there would eventually be some kind of hope. 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. Cameron, C 2014 Station Eleven Offers Suspense and Science Fiction, but It Is Undoubtedly a Literary Work. 20 years later it the Traveling Symphony, a group that travels and performs for people, roams the wastelands. In: Patrides, C A and Wittreich, J (Eds. 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. Log In; How Station Eleven pulled off the impossible, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning. 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. If there are again towns with streetlights, if there are symphonies and newspapers, then what else might this awakening world contain? Martin Carr We Got This Covered. The prophets image of the pandemic as an avenging angel (Mandel, 2014: 60, 286) echoes Revelation 1516, where the seven bowls of gods wrath are unleashed on the Earth by seven angels. Notice, in this sense, Clarks musings on the snow globe housed in the Museum. Skrimshire, S (Eds.) He previously served as TV editor at Paste Magazine, and his writing has also appeared in Indiewire, Slate, Deadspin and numerous other publications. who dies of a heart attack onstage as he plays King Lear in Toronto. Clark lashes out at Arthur after a bender; the music scores the end of the episode at 00:56. But it wasnt part of his plan. 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. Derrida, J 1992 Of an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy. Yet Tylers apocalyptic narrative indicates not only the complicity of apocalyptic logic with violence and power structures but also how the appeal of this kind of narrative depends on its promise of a sense-making temporal order. So I would want a globe, just to remember that there was a world out there. The Road is a recurrent point of comparison for Station Eleven in academic analyses and reviews alike (Tate, 2017: 13233; Alter, 2014; Huntley, 2014). 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. Public Books, 15 June. 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. The sense of an ending and the deterministic foreshadowing it allows should pertain to the closure of time in traditional plots, not to the openness of time as lived, where the future is unwritten. Or, more precisely, it is half masterpiece, half not. WebRotten Tomatoes reports a 98% approval rating with an average rating of 8.1/10, based on 54 critic reviews. ", On what survives including a comic book treasured by several characters. Something that came up for me as I was writing this book was how incredibly local your world would become. Herein lies its critical distance from the utopian teleology of the traditional apocalyptic paradigm. Station Eleven is a slow burn. the Prophet, reconciles with his mother (Caitlin FitzGerald); graphic novelist Miranda Carroll (Danielle Deadwyler) meets her fate; Sarah (Lori Petty) shuffles off this mortal coil; and, most importantly, Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis as a adult, Matilda Lawler as a child) reunites with Jeevan (Himesh Patel), capping off one of the most finely wrought love stories in recent TV history. What I was really interested and writing about was what's the new culture and the new world that begins to emerge? The question of class distinctions (resource hoarding) is left mostly to an episodes worth of country-club symbolism and a ruinously miscast David Cross. People with chaos in their hearts cannot abide here (Mandel, 2014: 61). As the season unfurled, though, I found myself frustrated by a structure that, roughly speaking, toggled between the pandemics onset and a time, 20 years on, in which Kirsten and her Traveling Symphony have forged a new society through the cyclical performance of plays. Art and literature can, the series argues, offer some safety rails, some moments of connection. These gaps keep spaces of possibility open in the novels structure, indicating Mitchells intention to debunk apocalyptic determinism and narrative foreshadowing. Or at least part of it is. 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). 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. June 24, 2015. 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. This is the half of Station Eleven that persuades me, the half set in the realm of its Hamlet, its Lear: the half about human connection and isolation, about love, betrayal and, unavoidably, collapse. In order to have a good story, there needs to be emotion or entertainment. 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. Yeah, I was interested in the randomness of what survives and what doesn't. Just like Bertis, Tyler uses contrived rhythms and repetition in his speeches, so much so that Kirsten notes a suggestion of a trapdoor waiting under every word [of his] (Mandel, 2014: 59). Buell, F 2013 Post-Apocalypse: A New U.S. Post-apocalyptic ravaged aftermaths implicitly subvert the central element of apocalyptic discourse, that is, a sense-making utopian historical teleology. If you can stick with it, you will be rewarded. 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. How does this style of storytelling affect the emotional impact of the narrative? It won several major awards, was an NPR Books Concierge pick, and it's just come out in paperback. Whats on the other side? The full Long Island Rail Road terminal in Grand Central Station opened Monday. Somewhere around the time Jeevan, her accidental savior, managed to purchase and then bungie-cord together a train of loaded shopping carts and navigate them through many city blocks to his brothers apartment building, I realized I would either have to surrender to an epic quest and all its potential pitfalls, or not. 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). Station Eleven has been a best seller. The primary example of this is Shakespeare, specifically King In the very early days, for example, Jeevan and Kirsten go round a supermarket that is full of produce but empty of people. 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. The Book of Revelation, the final book of the New Testament and the central text of religious apocalypticism, is ultimately not about the catastrophic end of the material world, but rather the revelation of a utopian new world, the New Jerusalem, the divine kingdom which awaits the faithful at the end of history.3 This utopian teleology is central to the Western understanding of time, indeed, [the apocalyptic] vision of history gives rise to history as a theoretical production (Keller, 1996: 89) and the traditional apocalyptic paradigm lies at the very core of secular Western modernity.4 The age of discovery and colonialism is informed by apocalyptic beliefs, as suggested by the trope of the new world (Keller, 1996). But then why did the One Ring choose Frodo? People die alone, with their loved ones unable to be with them, and people grieve alone. Open Library of Humanities The second timeline takes us 20 years in the future, when Kirsten (now played by Mackenzie Davis) is part of a troupe of actors known as the Traveling Symphony, who tour the midwest putting on Shakespeare plays Hamlet, when we meet them to the scattered plague survivors. I remember describing the premise of the novel to my husband, and he said, "People would want what was best about the world. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Miranda curtly rebukes Elizabeths apocalyptic belief that everything happens because it was supposed to happen by saying Id prefer not to think that Im following a script (Mandel, 2014: 106). 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. Station Elevens ending is key to the texts deconstruction of utopian teleology. At first, Station Eleven is bewildering, all discombobulating cuts between the present and what seems to be a desolate, sparsely populated future. One of the prophets followers, who dies revelling in Revelations promise of a new heaven and a new earth (Rev. In the new miniseries "Station Eleven," it's two decades after a deadly flu pandemic, and global civilization has nearly collapsed. DOI: http://doi.org/10.4159/9780674495647. 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. It wasnt like that. Nor did I want the kind of Theres Got to Be a Morning After survival celebration disaster stories so often rely on. 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. Frame, 26(1): 929. There was no place on Earth that was too far away to get to. Just like Tyler, Bertis sees himself as the prophet of the new world to come, which is, however, not for everyone. Questioning the passivity of apocalyptic determinism, Adam, the protagonist of the nineteenth-century narrative, reminds us that history admits no rules; only outcomes and encourages us to believe in the possibility of a better world than one culminating in an apocalyptic dystopian future (Mitchell, 2004: 528). Ermarth, E D 1992 Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time. Having established its Serious Credentials, it gains confidence and begins to move away from the elegiac tone that threatens to overwhelm it. Available at: http://www.tor.com/2014/09/12/a-conversation-with-emily-st-john-mandel/ [Last accessed 24 October 2018]. 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. "No countries, no internet, no more Facebook, no more email. Station Eleven replicates what Gomel identifies as the plague pattern, where there is no place for millenarian rebirth. 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. Station Eleven has been a best seller. It won several major awards, was an NPR Books Concierge pick, and it's just come out in paperback. One of the things that drove me away from The Walking Dead was the core characters lack of expertise and inability to problem-solve. 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). Both Tyler and Bertis exhibit traits of what Catherine Keller identifies as the apocalypse pattern (1996: 11): the faith in historical determinism, the inclination to think in terms of clear-cut polarities of good versus evil and the identification with the good that purges the evil from the old world and is worthy of the imminent utopian renewal of the new world. Station Elevens plot itself consists of fragments from before and after the apocalypse, which challenges the teleological linearity of apocalyptic temporality. The series creator explains why. West, M 2018 Apocalypse Without Revelation? The Flash-forward Glimpses If traditional apocalyptic discourse is about time, contemporary post-apocalyptic discourse is also about time more specifically, it is about critical temporalities, constructions of time that critique a hegemonic temporality. But book awards and 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. The novels final paragraph consists mostly of questions, while the hypothetical ships move towards another world just out of sight (Mandel, 2014: 333; emphasis mine), that is, towards a future that, contrary to the normative and prescriptive utopian visions of apocalyptic logic, remains undefined. 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. Albeit more attentive to the materiality of labour, his tracing of the production process of this object conceals, and indeed, aestheticises, workers exploitation and alienation, as well as the inequalities of the global free market: Consider the mind that invented those miniature storms of snow, the factory worker who turned sheets of plastic into white flakes of snow, the hand that drew the plan for the miniature Severn City with its church steeple and city hall, the assembly-line worker who watched the globe glide past on a conveyer belt somewhere in China. This critique of teleology is reflected in Station Elevens narrative structure. You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times. The apocalypse is such a gap: we do not know what happened, just as in The Road, and this in itself challenges the sense-making function of the end in both apocalyptic history and traditional narratives. 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). 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. doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.206, Download XML London: Picador. 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. WebA pandemic show based on a pandemic novel airing two years into a global pandemic, "Station Eleven" may seem fatigue-inducing. With the grown Kirsten serving, when necessary, as something like a one-woman militia, Station Eleven is not without its effective, if sometimes tonally jarring, genre thrills. The narrative continuously moves between the pre- and the post-apocalypse without any regular pattern, and, what is more, even in these two distinct periods, the narrative keeps shifting between different times, from the night Arthur dies and the pandemic begins, to various moments in his life and that of people that are connected to him, from the catastrophes immediate aftermath, to fifteen and twenty years after it.12 Just as in Cloud Atlas, Station Elevens structure encourages us to read for connections between pre- and post- apocalyptic fragments, rather than for an end that integrates the various moments. 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. The first few episodes look beautiful but move at a stately pace. 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). So that line became almost the thesis statement of the entire novel. 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). 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. How deeply strange it is, how deeply unsettling, to be able to compare and contrast a fictional pandemic with the real thing. In: Atwood, M (Eds. 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