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. 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. 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. 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. Griffith, C 2015 When the Dust Settles: An Interview with Emily St. John Mandel, April. You had to be impressed by that at least. Station Elevens structure similarly articulates a critical temporality that complicates the sense of an ending. For the thing with the new world is its just horrifically short on elegance (Mandel, 2014: 151). Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Are you ever surprised? De Cristofaro, D., Station Eleven. In addition to the texts discussed in my article, other examples of this growing body of twenty-first-century writings include: Louise Erdrichs, Despite the genre turn, Hoberek points out a persistent prejudice against genre fiction central to what Mark McGurl has dubbed the program era of post-World War II fiction (2011: 484). Now, as HBO Maxs tale of a pre-, post- and post-post-apocalyptic society much like our own concludes, senior editor Matt Brennan and columnist and culture critic Mary McNamara have it out about whether the series was truly great or something less. Clark lashes out at Arthur after a bender; the music scores the end of the episode at 00:56. Get our L.A. 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.). The theory that I found the most interesting was suggested to me by a bookseller in England last year: she thought perhaps our interest in these futuristic narratives had to do with the fact that there are no more frontiers. 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. 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. 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. The final minutes of the Station Eleven finale reunite Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis) and Jeevan (Himesh Patel) after 19 years apart. Writing with Intent 19822004, pp. 2nd ed. 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. 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? These gaps keep spaces of possibility open in the novels structure, indicating Mitchells intention to debunk apocalyptic determinism and narrative foreshadowing. In: Patrides, C A and Wittreich, J (Eds. Los Angeles, Whats on Khlo Kardashians face? Because it seems like an improbable outcome, when I look back at the sequence of events (Mandel, 2014: 77, 157). DOI: http://doi.org/10.4159/9780674495647. 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. We always seem to think the world's ending. Backstories are filled in notably of Miranda (Danielle Deadwyler), Arthurs lover and the author of the graphic novel (called Station Eleven, but dont let the meta-ness put you off) that has been Kirstens lifeline over her 20 years of post-apocalyptic wandering. 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. 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." 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. Buell, F 2013 Post-Apocalypse: A New U.S. 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). (2018) Critical Temporalities: Station Eleven and the Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel, This pattern comprises panic, dissolution of Keller, C 1996 Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World. The great modern revolutions, from the American, to the French, to the Russian, rely on the apocalyptic faith in radical renewal after violent cleansing (Abrams, 1984). What you call the present showcases people who are neither hero nor villain, except perhaps in their own minds, but they are artists. Because in the now, the before is all we have. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. Twentieth Century Literature, 46(4): 40533. As Rachel explains, the sniper is deploying poetic devices, such as rhythm and regularity of speech, in order to have a stronger impact and to quickly and effectively indoctrinate (Coupland, [2010] 2011: 1878). We start to plumb the depths of Kirstens soul, forged by suffering, saved by the Symphony and ready to save it, too, by any means necessary. Ah, you say no. Station Eleven features explicit intertextual references to biblical apocalyptic narratives, from the Flood, in Genesis, to Revelation. If you can stick with it, you will be rewarded. 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. NATIONAL BESTSELLER NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST A PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FINALIST Set in the eerie days of civilizations collapse - the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking Indeed, Mandel glosses over the blood-drenched years just after the collapse, the first unspeakable years which were, tellingly, spent on the road, travelling (Mandel, 2014: 48, 37). 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. 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. 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). People die alone, with their loved ones unable to be with them, and people grieve alone. Huntley, K 2014 Station Eleven: Booklist Review, August. As Lee Quinby sums up, the apocalyptic metanarrative is a quintessential technology of power/knowledge, since its tenet of preordained history disavows questionings of received truth, discredits skepticism, and disarms challengers of the status quo (1994: xiii). So yeah, there is a comic book that's drawn by a character in the present day. 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. Perhaps it's wishful thinking on my part, but I did like the idea that a Shakespearean company might be able to make it. Read full review The mere existence of a character like the Conductor, played with bug-eyed, Emmy-worthy brilliance by Petty, made my heart sing. At first, Station Eleven is bewildering, all discombobulating cuts between the present and what seems to be a desolate, sparsely populated future. I even caught myself asking a blasphemous question: If art were truly capable of saving us, wouldnt we already have been saved? 2nd ed. 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. 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. In a way, Station Eleven is an interesting Rorschach test of apocalyptcisms appeal. 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