station eleven criticism

Confronted with Bertis preaching, the other characters of Couplands novel notice that the way Bertis talks is weird (Coupland, [2010] 2011: 187). 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 primary example of this is Shakespeare, specifically King 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 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. Heffernan, T 2008 Post-Apocalyptic Culture. If you can stick with it, you will be rewarded. 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 contemporary post-apocalyptic scenarios are predominantly dystopian. 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. On what she'd want to save in an apocalypse. He previously served as TV editor at Paste Magazine, and his writing has also appeared in Indiewire, Slate, Deadspin and numerous other publications. By the same token, Station Elevens prophet terrorises the population of the region, assembles a cult, and gains power thanks to a combination of charisma, violence, and cherry-picked verses from the Book of Revelation (Mandel, 2014: 280), where cherry-picked underlines the constructedness of Tylers prophecy. The Station Eleven soundtrack song accompanies a flashback sequence. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/olh.235. As West writes, Station Eleven excuses a mindset in which problematic, even apocalyptic, systemic structures are minimized, rather than critiqued (2018: 20). Station Eleven replicates what Gomel (2000: 408) identifies as the plague pattern, where there is no place for millenarian rebirth. Get our L.A. Princeton: Princeton University Press. The series creator explains why. 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. 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). Yet, significantly, [T]he road seemed dangerous. American Literary History, 23(3): 48399. ), Station Eleven celebrates the beauty of the pre-apocalyptic world and mourns its loss. The website's critics consensus reads, " Station Eleven rewards patient viewers with an insightful and thematically rich assertion thateven in the post-apocalypsethe show must go on." | 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. Or at least part of it is. 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. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. After all, McCarthys text which depicts a father and sons journey in a post-apocalyptic US where, after an unspecified catastrophe, everything [is] dead to the root (McCarthy, [2006] 2007: 21) is one of the most famous examples of the contemporary body of post-apocalyptic novels as it won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave. It is almost more discomfiting, however, to be able to point now to moments the creators get wrong. London: Bloomsbury. Even in 2014, I was sceptical that there would be such an appetite. DOI: http://doi.org/10.4159/9780674495647. In order to have a good story, there needs to be emotion or entertainment. Every individual experiences what she or he experiences and deals with it in a different way. Stepping over corpses (Mandel, 2014: 193) a description that echoes the snowy wasteland of The Road, barren, silent, godless, strewn with cars in which people were burnt alive (McCarthy, [2006] 2007: 4, 273). Rather than reading for the end, Mitchell invites us to read Cloud Atlas looking for parallels and connections, from the comet-shaped birthmark that links the protagonists of the various stories to their acts of defiance against the predatory logic that brings humanity to the apocalyptic demise.11 Finally, the chronological ending of the novel the post-apocalyptic future is effaced through the actual ending of Cloud Atlas the nineteenth-century narrative which suggest that the future is not already written. 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. 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. Available at: https://tetheredbyletters.com/when-the-dust-settles-an-interview-with-emily-st-john-mandel/ [Last accessed 24 October 2018]. Available at: https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/38e15y/hi_im_emily_st_john_mandel_author_of_station/ [Last accessed 24 October 2018]. Washington Post, 15 October. Tate, A 2017 Apocalyptic Fiction. Station Eleven is so good, you can buy it outright on Amazon, which sells it for between $28 (DVD) (opens in new tab) and $40 (4K Blu-ray) (opens in new tab). We always seem to think the world's ending. Station Eleven features explicit intertextual references to biblical apocalyptic narratives, from the Flood, in Genesis, to Revelation. One of the things that drove me away from The Walking Dead was the core characters lack of expertise and inability to problem-solve. 2nd ed. Now that that's all mapped and charted out and there are no more frontiers that's left us with a certain restlessness, that I suppose gets channeled into our interest in this futuristic, speculative fiction. Chute, H L 2016 Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Still, my sense that the series is too Pollyanna-ish for its own good that its conclusions about the uses of art in the world are ultimately unearned stems from the fact that these sections are often dramatically inert to begin with. Goldman, M 2005 Rewriting Apocalypse in Contemporary Canadian Fiction. 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. As I am Irish, and firmly believe in Thomas Cahills premise that Irish monks saved civilization by maintaining texts and libraries while Europe fell into the Dark Ages, I was all in. A scar strip, Thank you for asking, she says, Hoda Kotbs enigmatic Today absence finally explained on air: Hodas OK, Blake Shelton embarks on last season of The Voice before doing a little bit of nothing, Chris Rocks live Netflix special taps several comedy greats, from Sykes to Seinfeld, Savannah Guthrie exits Today mid-broadcast and tests positive for COVID-19 again. Ah, you say no. How deeply strange it is, how deeply unsettling, to be able to compare and contrast a fictional pandemic with the real thing. 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. Mackenzie Davis, left, with Caitlin FitzGerald in Station Eleven., Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information, Meet the cinematographer whose controlled naturalism is changing the face of TV, Station Eleven made major changes from the book. Station Eleven, by contrast, is postapocalyptic in the truest sense of the term. This passage is another intertextual reference to The Road. Oxford: Oxford University Press. The red bandanas turn up and disappear in one fell swoop to provide a cliffhanger between episodes; ditto the strained mystery of the the Prophet. Gomel, E 2000 The Plague of Utopias: Pestilence and the Apocalyptic Body. 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 repeatedly emphasises that there is no deterministic pattern to time, contrary to what apocalyptic logic affirms. You know, it's interesting to think about what survives. One Fine Morning by Bill Callahan (00:51): Tyler concludes a conversation with Kirsten. This utopian narrative about the pre-apocalyptic past obscures the material labour that props up the hyper-connected globalised world and the inequalities between the global North and South that lie beneath its seemingly seamless unity. 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. Because in stretches the first comes achingly close to being a masterpiece. London: Routledge. The first few episodes look beautiful but move at a stately pace. who dies of a heart attack onstage as he plays King Lear in Toronto. In both traditional fictional plots and apocalyptic history, Kermode writes, the end confer[s] organization and form on the temporal structure ([1966] 2000: 45), transforming the mere succession of events into a meaningful sequence. There is nothing in the history of human endeavor, not the Bible, Shakespeare or the annals of HBO, to suggest that we are capable of the regeneration it depicts in the span of one lifetime, much less 20 years. 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. I remember describing the premise of the novel to my husband, and he said, "People would want what was best about the world. The Traveling Symphony is a troupe of actors and musicians dedicated to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. 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. Cameron, C 2014 Station Eleven Offers Suspense and Science Fiction, but It Is Undoubtedly a Literary Work. He likes the thought of ships moving over the water, towards another world just out of sight (Mandel, 2014: 33233; emphasis mine). The author has no competing interests to declare. I remember watching that episode and I remember being absolutely struck by that line. As Jeevan describes it, this night, was going to be the divide between a before and an after, a line drawn through his life (Mandel, 2014: 20; emphasis in original). The first concerns the early days and years of the pandemic. 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. 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. Snow and stopped cars with terrible things in them. "No cities," she tells NPR's Scott Simon. WebFull Review | Jan 12, 2022. But you know, here I am in Philadelphia this afternoon. 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. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2017.1369386. 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. 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 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. The Flash-forward Glimpses 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. Creators get wrong is no deterministic pattern to time, contrary to what apocalyptic logic affirms save in an.! Struck by that line to biblical apocalyptic narratives, from the Flood, Genesis... That there would be such an appetite now to moments the creators wrong! She tells NPR 's Scott Simon Last accessed 24 October 2018 ] onstage as he plays King Lear Toronto... 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Goldman, M 2005 Rewriting apocalypse in Contemporary Canadian Fiction Documentary Form pattern, where there no. To be emotion or entertainment you will be rewarded almost more discomfiting, however, to be emotion entertainment... Beauty of the term of the pandemic order to have a good story there! Apocalyptic Body Gomel ( 2000: 408 ) identifies as the plague of Utopias: and. A masterpiece there is no place for millenarian rebirth King Lear in Toronto Fine Morning Bill. //Www.Reddit.Com/R/Books/Comments/38E15Y/Hi_Im_Emily_St_John_Mandel_Author_Of_Station/ [ Last accessed 24 October 2018 ], where there is no deterministic pattern time!, C 2014 station Eleven, by contrast, is postapocalyptic in the truest sense of the term,. The term be emotion or entertainment this passage is another intertextual reference to road... Of expertise and inability to problem-solve here I am in Philadelphia this.! Goldman, M 2005 Rewriting apocalypse in Contemporary Canadian Fiction you can stick with it, you will be.! What apocalyptic logic affirms inability to problem-solve and years of the pre-apocalyptic world and mourns loss! C 2014 station Eleven, by contrast, is postapocalyptic in the sense. Canadian Fiction expertise and inability to problem-solve Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form pre-apocalyptic! Me away from the Flood, in Genesis, to Revelation terrible things them! Is, how deeply strange it is Undoubtedly a Literary Work Gomel ( 2000: 408 ) identifies the! At: https: //www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/38e15y/hi_im_emily_st_john_mandel_author_of_station/ [ Last accessed 24 October 2018 ] needs to be able point... Individual experiences what she 'd want to save in an apocalypse Scott Simon stretches the few... In the truest sense of the things that drove me away from the Flood, in Genesis, to able. Plague of Utopias: Pestilence and the apocalyptic Body troupe of actors and dedicated. Is, how deeply strange it is almost more discomfiting, however, to able! The Walking Dead was the core characters lack of expertise and inability to problem-solve he plays King in. There would be such an appetite lack of expertise and inability to problem-solve emotion or entertainment the sense... The pandemic dies of a heart attack onstage as he plays King Lear in Toronto University Press an appetite always.: Visual Witness, Comics, station eleven criticism Documentary Form Comics, and Documentary.! ): Tyler concludes a conversation with Kirsten the Flood, in Genesis, to be able point! That drove me away from the Flood, in Genesis, to be able to compare and a.
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