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). London: Picador. In the new HBO Max series Station Eleven, Davis plays the lead as a tough but vulnerable survivor of a pandemic. June 24, 2015. This adaptation of the astonishingly prescient 2014 bestseller is deeply unsettling, even in the bits it gets wrong. Leggatt, M 2018 Another World Just out of Sight: Remembering or Imagining Utopia in Emily St. John Mandels Station Eleven. Available at: http://www.tor.com/2014/09/12/a-conversation-with-emily-st-john-mandel/ [Last accessed 24 October 2018]. It wasnt like that. Globe and Mail, 12 September. Even the guy who auditions by reciting Bill Pullmans speech from Independence Day believes. Ricoeur, P 1984 Time and Narrative, 1. They were shown maps and globes, the lines of the borders that the Internet had transcended (Mandel, 2014: 262). Set in the days of civilization's collapse, Station Eleven tells the story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the Where the book felt stylized, more like poetry or a fable, the : Shakespeare, Salvagepunk and Station Eleven. And escape, I am tempted to tell you that whatever imperfections you felt you experienced in Station Eleven were deliberate, a kind of cinematic wabi-sabi to remind us that the quest for perfection is not only impossible it is the wrong quest. 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. This critique of the sense of an ending is particularly important because, while it may be innocuous in narratives, if we construct history according to a teleological narrative model, we subscribe to determinism and a totalising explanation of the flow of time that risks justifying oppressions as part of a necessary pattern tending towards betterment. 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). Yeah, I was interested in the randomness of what survives and what doesn't. A Pulitzer Prize winner in 2015 and finalist for criticism in 2013 and 2014, she has won various awards for criticism and feature writing. The generation gap between those born before and after is gestured at but scarcely plumbed. If you can stick with it, you will be rewarded. Im calling it a partial masterpiece! 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. Log In; 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. 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.). 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 contemporary fiction, the post-apocalyptic genre has moved from the margins (tacky science-fiction) into the mainstream (legitimate, widely-recognized and practiced speculative fiction) (Buell 2013: 9), so much so that Frederick Buell frames it as a cultural dominant.2 As Andrew Tate puts it, contemporary narrative is haunted by dreams of a future that is a place of ruin (2017: 2). 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. I did find it hilarious that, during the winter flashback, the roads were plowed, a sleight of hand Somerville admits was necessary for production to continue. 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. Mary McNamara: Given the spiritual undertones of the series, and the repetition of the sentence I remember damage. It is almost more discomfiting, however, to be able to point now to moments the creators get wrong. There is no emotion and it is not greatly Station Elevens plot itself consists of fragments from before and after the apocalypse, which challenges the teleological linearity of apocalyptic temporality. Furthermore, teleology entails determinism, which compromises the possibility of choices and ethics. Station Eleven, the HBO Max show whose finale airs Thursday, is something else entirely. This is, of course, how apocalyptic logic works, with the end ushering in a perfect new world which makes sense of everything that happened before. 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). Survival is never sufficient. Rosen, E K 2008 Apocalyptic Transformation: Apocalypse and the Postmodern Imagination. American Literary History, 23(3): 48399. WebStation Eleven contains many explicit references to other works of art, and relies on them heavily for source material. 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. Bernstein, M A 1994 Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History. Previously she was assistant managing editor for arts and entertainment following a 12-year stint as television critic and senior culture editor. 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). 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. Available at: https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/38e15y/hi_im_emily_st_john_mandel_author_of_station/ [Last accessed 24 October 2018]. Like Hicks, I argue that the contemporary post-apocalyptic novel addresses the nature of modernity (2016: 4); unlike Hicks, I argue that these fictions do so to critique, rather than to salvage, modernity, and specifically, to critique the apocalyptic understanding of time underlying Western modernity through what I term critical temporalities. 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. 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). 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. Cultural Dominant. Station Eleven is going to struggle to find an audience this winter. 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. 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). 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? Charles, R 2014 Sorry, Emily St. John Mandel: Resistance is Futile. Season 1 Review: Station Eleven is brilliant television. But both in terms of content and, as we shall see in this articles fourth section, narrative structure, Station Elevens critical temporality questions the idea of a historical pre-determined pattern, emphasising its constructedness. 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. 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). 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. Both texts expose how apocalyptic discourse is fabricated to push ideological agendas. These fictions also target the nexus between narrativity and apocalyptic logic captured by Kermode through the notion of the sense of an ending. (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.). Nor did I want the kind of Theres Got to Be a Morning After survival celebration disaster stories so often rely on. And though I admire HBO Max for releasing a show about a fictional deadly pandemic in the middle of an actual pandemic (after the shows production was shut down for months by same), I was not interested in any kind of survival guide. But I fear the social future Station Eleven imagines is implausible, if not disingenuous. 32830. Mandel, E S J 2015 Ask Me Anything. Altre Modernit, 9: 6680. WebSee 15 photos and 3 tips from 556 visitors to 7-Eleven. "Virginia Lottery tickets are available for purchase here!" For me, its what Ive taken to calling the series present the The series creator explains why. 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. Station Eleven. I read Emily St John Mandels bestselling Station Eleven shortly after it came out in 2014, when the tale of a mysterious flu sweeping the globe and laying waste to normal life lay wholly beyond the bounds of reality. Keller, C 1996 Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World. Even the Georgia Flu, Jeevan notes, has a disarmingly pretty name (Mandel, 2014: 17). He likes the thought of ships moving over the water, towards another world just out of sight (Mandel, 2014: 33233; emphasis mine). This pattern comprises panic, dissolution of socioeconomic structures, and despair, succeeded by a makeshift return to normality once the disease has run its course. 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