POSTAPOCALYPTIC_CURATING_CULT.pdf

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Carmen M. Méndez-García
Postapocalyptic Curating:
Cultural Crises and the Permanence of Art in
Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven1
In the first years of the twenty-first century, a number of American
authors2 have set out to discover (using environmental disasters, pan-
demics, nuclear wars, massive failures of technology, or fossil fuel scarcity)
what would define humanity if societies and civilizations were to collapse
in a planetary crisis. While most of these texts focus on the immediate
aftermath of civilization’s collapse, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven
depicts survivors of a pandemic catastrophe trying, twenty years later,
to cope with a new reality. In a world with no borders or countries, the
Traveling Symphony, a group of musicians and actors, brings music and
plays to scattered settlements in a humanist endeavor. At the same time,
in what used to be an airport, a former corporate consultant painstakingly
curates the Museum of Civilization, which tries to pass down a sense of
shared culture with its collection of donated, useless remnants of tech-
nology (credit cards, smartphones, laptops) and assorted objects found in
abandoned baggage.
The novel emphasizes the resilience of cultural objects in a brave new
world where Shakespeare and obscure science fiction comics apparently
coexist in terms of cultural importance. The troupe’s motto, “Survival
is not enough,” stresses the importance of a renewed idea of culture in
defining what is human. While in other postapocalyptic texts humanity
is defined through individual moral choices—such as those made by the
ones “carrying the fire” in Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 The Road—Station
Eleven suggests that, were humans to survive such an unprecedented crisis,
the only hope to escape being feralized lies in a communal, continuous
effort to recreate culture. Station Eleven stands out as a rare, hopeful posta-
pocalyptic text, underlining the importance of art and culture for our spe-
cies and the deeply moral individual and communal choices necessary to
recover from crisis by practicing and conserving culture.
Station Eleven was nominated in 2014 for the National Book Award, and
it was also a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. While it did not receive
either of these awards, it did win the Arthur C. Clarke Award, one of the
Studies in the Literary Imagination 50.1, Spring 2017 © Georgia State University

Cultural Crises & the Permanence of Art in Mandel’s Station Eleven
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most prestigious in science fiction. The Arthur C. Clarke Award has been,
in recent years, part of the controversy3 about what qualifies as “science
fiction” and what the boundaries of the genre are, and the committee justi-
fied the election of Mandel’s novel by defining the award as a celebration of
new books and new writers, but most of all … [a celebration] along-
side all the readers and lovers of stories who are given a unique
invitation to encounter something new, something strange and
something wonderful whenever a new shortlist is announced. The
love of books and the sharing of stories is the true legacy we should
aim to create. (Butler)
One of the reasons underlying the controversy about the boundaries of
science-fiction as a genre is the ascription to it of texts which occur in the
near future but which do not have that “scientific” approach that some
purists in the genre deem necessary. Veronica Hollinger has talked about
the “‘disappearance’ of science fiction as a separate generic enterprise at the
present time,” precisely because as a genre, science fiction could be consid-
ered to be “‘irrelevant,’ because, as discourse, it has become so significant”
(217). Hollinger concludes that “the fin-de-millennium, for science fiction,
spells the fin-de-genre”: the fin-de millennium, as the Arthur C. Clarke
controversy proves, seems to have extended into the early twenty-first
century (217). These musings about genre could be seen, indeed, as irrel-
evant, but the dominance of postapocalyptic narratives4 in the space that
was occupied before by the wider label of science fiction attests, as James
Berger has described, to a “pervasive post-apocalyptic sensibility in recent
American culture” (xiii).5 The Arthur C. Clarke committee highlighted,
when awarding the prize, how Station Eleven is
a novel that straddles the story of a global apocalypse … and its
survivors 20 years later. While many post-apocalypse novels focus
on the survival of humanity, Station Eleven focuses instead on the
survival of our culture, with the novel becoming an elegy for the
hyper-globalized present. (Butler)
In comparison to other postapocalyptic texts, Station Eleven is not quite
as concerned with the violence immediately following the apocalypse but
with a process of re-construction and rebirth: twenty years after the global
catastrophe, the survivors are aware that “the world was softening” and

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it is likely that some of its younger inhabitants “would live out … [their
lives] without killing anyone” (133).
Station Eleven, as a postapocalyptic novel, tries to imagine a future
without the culture, the objects, the commodities we are used to.6 The suc-
cess of these texts is, to my mind, an indication of how we have problems
imagining a world without us—not only entirely without humans, but also
with “us” struggling to survive in an unimaginable environment, trying to
envision the so-called “human race” existing post-civilization as we know
it.7 These texts are a representation of crisis: we find, certainly, a crisis of
civilization, but also Station Eleven focuses on the struggle to find markers
of said civilization, and the crisis of representation in what we find to be
meaningful “remains.” It is also a text that stages America: the novel has
two main timelines, with its fulcrum being the apocalyptic event, a plague
known as the Georgia Flu “that exploded like a neutron bomb over the
surface of the earth” (Mandel 37). The action in year 0, when the Georgia
Flu8 that will kill 99% of the world population starts spreading, takes
place in Toronto and New York. The action in year 20, twenty years after
the apocalypse, is set in an area near what is now Northern Michigan
and “the territory once known as Virginia” (125). Since the emphasis in
my analysis is on the permanence of objects and cultural products, I will
mostly be focusing on the second timeline, that is, on the future use and
remembrance of objects from our present. The postapocalyptic world in
Station Eleven retains no international borders, since there are no coun-
tries, a fantasy that we could entertain under a more positive light in times
of the rise of nationalism(s), but which has caused billions of deaths and
the return to more “primitive,” less “civilized” times in the world of the
text. In the novel, we follow a traveling troupe of actors and musicians, the
Traveling Symphony, who stage Shakespeare and play classical music in
small settlements as a reminder of what was (and is, and supposedly will
be) good and beautiful about humanity, “supporting … [its] protagonists’
beliefs, proving that a future can be carved out of collapse and that survival
can be made beautiful” (Byrd 73).
Station Eleven is what we could call a postapocalyptic post-scarcity9 text,
as compared to other texts in the genre such as the aforementioned The
Road or the first seasons of The Walking Dead. The (very limited number)
of humans left seem to have their basic needs secured (food, a place to
sleep safely). Also, compared to the general bleakness of those two texts
I mentioned, Station Eleven walks the line between dystopia and utopia,
or rather between dark dystopia and what I would like to call “glimmer-
ingly hopeful” dystopia.10 There is often, in the postapocalyptic genre,11

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according to Philip Smith, a “promise of reconfiguration, of resetting and
rebuilding a society unencumbered by the problems of the world that was
destroyed” that is certainly present in Mandel’s text (291). Station Eleven
is a fantasy mostly about goodness and decency in human nature, and the
possibility of communal creation of little cells of camaraderie, a kind of
preservation of the best of culture, society, and previous models of civili-
zation. Even the mandatory evil cult leader, the Prophet, seems clichéd,12
in a move that I would argue does not only adhere to generic rules, but is
also intentional as it emphasizes the optimism of the text.
Twenty years after the deaths of seven billion people, the Traveling
Symphony is of course aware of the fragility of civilization, which crum-
bled down in a matter of weeks, but the Symphony’s existence and raison
d’être is also a celebration of the resilience of humanity. Their motto,
“Survival is not enough,” lifted from that not exactly Shakespearean text,
the TV series Star Trek: Voyager, emphasizes that surviving, being able to
eat and breathe, is not sufficient. Humans need living, and that includes
being able to enjoy beauty in the world and the company of others, and it
also entails, the text clearly indicates, a connection, fleeting as it may be,
to their past not just as a species but also as a civilization.
Mandel has indicated that to her, the text is a celebration of the many
things we take for granted: airplanes, running water, trash disposal, anti-
biotics. It is only when there are “no more pharmaceuticals … no more
countries … no more fire departments, no more police … no garbage
pickup.… No more Internet,” that we start to appreciate the objects, the
commodities, but also the order in society, the order we have created, been
taught to obey, and thus consider “natural” (31). Many of the objects that
are still in use in Mandel’s future are repurposed from objects that used to
serve a different function, such as the sandals that one of the characters
wears, “whose sole had been cut from an automobile tire” (35). There is,
however, in the whole text, a deep nostalgia for the role objects occupied
while there was still electricity and other technological “miracles” unthink-
able in year 20, and the end of the novel itself emphasizes the “return” of
electricity as the “return” to normalcy, as if the continual development of
technology had been only temporarily cut short by the catastrophe and
the world could be rebuilt, made better, exactly from where technology
stopped. In the following pages, I will try to describe what I see as a deep
contradiction at the heart of Mandel’s text, which has to do with the space
dedicated to curating objects and texts after the catastrophe in an attempt
to “retain” or recreate civilization. As a postapocalyptic, post-scarcity
text, Station Eleven celebrates modern technology, even in its lack of prac-

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ticality, and hopefully awaits its reappearance as a sign of progress and
civility, while at the same time the texts worth celebrating and preserving
are literary classics, not contemporary texts (especially Shakespeare in a
problematic re-enactment of the nineteenth century idea of the “universal”
Shakespeare as a marker of civilization). There is a disconnect in the novel
between how technology seems to work in Western civilization (continual
advancement) and how representative texts seem to work (peaking early,
with an Elizabethan author carrying the torch of the essence of humanity).
1. Our Universal Shakespeare?
It is at the basis of the humanities as a discipline that literature and
music as representative of a wider array of cultural products are strong
markers of civilization and that much can be learned about any society
not only by material objects that are representative of it, but also by its
cultural products. Inscribing herself in this humanistic tradition, Mandel
reflects on how “there’s something about art I think that can remind us of
our humanity. It could remind us of our civilization” (“Survival”).
Mandel pays lip service to the multiplicity of texts that could be con-
sidered artistic by making a TV series such as Star Trek or a comic book
central to the plot, and apparently intends to present all of them as equally
valuable, as I will analyze in the second part of this essay. This preoccupa-
tion with what cultural texts would survive the apocalypse and with the
catastrophe as a “purge” of “unworthy” cultural products has been high-
lighted by Philip Marchand, when he explains that
art and culture have always been a sore point of post-apocalypse
novelists—it is hard, it seems, for writers envisioning the future
to imagine what kind of art would characterize that future. In this
respect, Mandel’s post-apocalypse does not suffer in comparison to
the present, [which is] represented in her novel by Hollywood and
by celebrity culture.
However, I find the use of Shakespeare13 not only clichéd, but also
deeply problematic. Smith signals the “recurring narrative concerning
Shakespeare in science fiction and elsewhere, where he is presented as the
sole survivor of the catastrophe” (298). Smith mentions David Brin’s 1985
The Postman, where “the protagonist travels from town to town in a post-
apocalyptic wasteland performing Shakespeare in exchange for food and
water,” and Walter van Tilburg Clark’s 1950 “The Portable Phonograph,”

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where “Shakespeare’s works are one of only four books saved from a global
apocalyptic event” (298). Smith also points out to the transmission of this
cliché connecting Shakespeare and survival, as in BBC Radio 4’s interview
program “Desert Island Discs” (1942–present) where every interviewee
gives a copy of the works of Shakespeare to the castaways (298). This
view of the centrality of Shakespeare’s works, their status as universal, the
recurrent idea of Shakespeare as our contemporary has been strongly ques-
tioned by postcolonial studies, and it otherwise corresponds to a view that
was commonly held in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, but which
I find today hard to accept as a given without questioning its origin and
implications. As Smith ponders, this idea of the universal Shakespeare is
tied to a problematic conception of an intrinsically Anglophone “survival”
of culture, which implies that “if all of English literary culture were to be
collapsed into a single point … that point would be Shakespeare, and from
Shakespeare the rest of English literature might be extracted and rebuilt”
(298). Through this exercise, which replicates the era when Shakespeare
was used as a civilizing force, Mandel also “avoids the problematic repre-
sentation of Shakespeare in the colonial encounter by presenting a world
conveniently free of natives—the towns where the Traveling Symphony
performs are peopled by those who have lost, and must regain, Western
models of civility” (301).
Even more problematic is that, in a novel about art as what brings
us together, what reveals our human emotions, our shared past and
present, nobody actually creates art. The clarinet player in the Traveling
Symphony14 tries to write something new and representative of her times
but gives up after just a couple of lines:
She wanted to write something modern, something that addressed
this age in which they’d somehow landed.… She began writing
the first act on the shore the next morning, but never got past the
first line of the opening monologue.… She thought of the opening
monologue often in the months that followed, weighing those first
words like coins or pebbles turned over and over in a pocket, but she
was unable to come up with the next sentence. (Mandel 288–89)
Also, we are told that the Symphony had “performed more modern plays
sometimes in the first few years, but what was startling, what no one
would have anticipated, was that audiences seemed to prefer Shakespeare
to their other theatrical offerings” (38).

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I would argue here, however, that meaningful art does not depend
necessarily on its intrinsic beauty or assumed universality but on how it
can be a response to specific circumstances, in the case of the novel to the
characters’ immediate, postapocalyptic reality, something that would be at
odds with the supposed “universality” of any given text. One could indeed
argue that representing Shakespeare is an act of creation, but there is in the
whole novel a suspicious intimation that the creative powers of humanity
reached their pinnacle with Shakespeare and the great symphonic com-
posers and that anything that is created in the context of year 20 can never
be as beautiful, as representative, as moving, as much a mirror to this new
society, as these pieces from the past are. There is, no doubt, something
romantic and appealing about a troupe going around in tattered carts led
by mules and setting up a makeshift stage to play Shakespeare by candle-
light every night. This is acknowledged by Mandel herself, who notes
that “perhaps it’s wishful thinking on my part, but I did like the idea that
a Shakespearean company might be able to make it” (“Survival”). While
the author also claims to be interested in thinking “about what survives”
and “in the randomness of what survives and what doesn’t,” Shakespeare’s
privileged place in a postapocalyptic canon never seems to be questioned.
Mandel claims to have described her idea for the novel to her husband,
who then replied, “People would want what was best about the world”
(“Survival”). Implying that Shakespeare, the canonical author par excel-
lence, is “the best in the world” requires much more effort and justifica-
tion than it maybe did forty years ago. On the other hand, as Christopher
Thurman asserts, in the text, Shakespeare and classical music are seen as
what will survive, implying a “lasting value” that “ignores the economic
and socio-political mechanisms that facilitate memetic (and mimetic) lon-
gevity” (58). I find, in a way, the premise in Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns,
a Post-Electric Play to be much more intriguing: in that postapocalyptic,
post-electric text, there is also a group of actors who relentlessly re-elabo-
rate and reenact a text. Not one of Shakespeare’s but the 1993 “Cape Feare”
episode of the TV series The Simpsons.
Literature is, indeed, a vital tool for understanding and questioning any
civilization. Reading novels and watching plays from another time help
us ascertain the mindset and culture of that time. Furthermore, literature
makes us ponder on what we, as a society, stand for and compels us to
consider where it is we may be falling short as a group. My problem with
the use of Shakespeare in Station Eleven is that even if his times were, as the
text maintains, equivalent to postapocalyptic reality in that he “also lived
in a plague-ridden society with no electricity,” one has to ponder how uni-

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versal or culturally contemporary Shakespeare would be to someone who
has grown up after the apocalypse and who remembers little of the cul-
tural significance that Shakespeare had (Mandel 308).15 There is first the
problem of the recurrence of what Smith calls “essentialist Shakespeare,”
with Shakespeare “effortlessly bridg[ing] historical and cultural gaps—to
unite past and future—because he speaks directly to the essence of what
is human” (298). Some members of the troupe and the audiences in the
settlements where they stage Shakespeare do not remember much of
the world before the apocalypse, so we can guess they would not under-
stand the antiquated (to us or to them) English used by Shakespeare. It
is a wonderful, romantic notion (especially to English professors),16 that
Shakespeare could speak like that to future sensibilities not educated in
recognizing the author as a cultural giant or icon, but it feels so forced
that I find it difficult to take at face value. It is also problematic in that it
also inadvertently aligns with “a colonial agenda in that the essentialist
Shakespeare has historically been mobilized as an affirmation of British
cultural and moral superiority in the wake of English imperial expansion,”
one where only Shakespeare “had the potential to impart British civility to
a local populace and to drive cultural development,” what Smith sums up
as the “absolute belief in the transformative power of Shakespeare” (298,
299, 299). Also, the idea that what the Traveling Symphony performs—
“classical, jazz, orchestral arrangements”—would be preferred by the
whole of a society focused on surviving to popular, folk music goes against
the whole history of popular music as we know it, and against its context
of creation and performance (Mandel 37).
One could argue that, as I mentioned earlier, the text is not exactly about
scarcity but about people not just worried with survival. But since the
necessary hardships of that reality are not developed, the world itself and
its perception of beauty do not feel fleshed out, and it is this excess of nos-
talgia and romanticization of certain beloved texts and music that I find
disturbing. It is precisely nostalgia in the text that I would like to examine
in the second part of this article, namely the obsession with finding and
keeping objects that the postapocalyptic genre usually contains, plun-
dering, discovering, hiding objects, passing them down, killing or being
killed for them, in ways that seem in Station Eleven to be post-materialistic
and have much more to do with the sentimental connection of objects to
the character’s past lives than with the real representativity or usefulness
of the objects.

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2. Curating the Museum of Civilization
Material culture is one of our Western obsessions, not just as academics,
but also as a society. Museum studies, anthropology, and art history see
material objects, artifacts, as a record of human endeavor. Objects sur-
rounding us are not just belongings and commodities, they are a record
of cultural memory, of private but also public actuality. Objects (and,
of course, texts) are tangible proof that civilization and humanity have
existed, that we have existed. The survivors in Station Eleven keep going
into buildings where they are not likely to find much of use “because
there isn’t much time left, because all the roofs are collapsing now and
soon none of the old buildings will be safe. Because we are always looking
for the former world, before all the traces of the former world are gone”
(Mandel 130).
Mandel has admitted that the obsession with objects in the text arises
from her “thinking about the secret lives that the objects around us have
led, before we see them” (qtd. In Lashbrook). In the text, the best example
of this secret life of objects is the aptly called Museum of Civilization, set
up in an airport terminal-turned-town, paradoxically curated by a former
corporate consultant. The museum starts when one of the characters,
Clark Thompson (whose boyfriend before the apocalypse had been a
curator), places his “useless iPhone” on top of a shelf in the Severn City
airport, which has been turned into a camp (Mandel 254). Soon, as if there
was a deeply human need to say “I was here, this was here, we were here,”
other objects get added to that shelf, as
there seemed to be a limitless number of objects in the world that
had no practical use but that people wanted to preserve: cell phones
with their delicate buttons, iPads … a Nintendo console, a selec-
tion of laptops … a number of impractical shoes, stilettos mostly,
beautiful and strange … three car engines in a row … a motorcycle
composed mostly of gleaming chrome … a stamp collection, coins
… the passports or the driver’s licenses or … credit cards. (258)
They are all objects that the characters highly cherished in the pre-apoca-
lyptic world, but that the virus and the subsequent collapse of society and
the electrical system have rendered useless.
The value of objects in other postapocalyptic texts is based on their
being practical (what I would call the useful object—a gun, a can of food)
or a direct connection to a personal past (what I would call the sentimental

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object—a doll, a photograph).17 An object that can be extremely useful
when living in what we understand as civilization (a cellphone, a com-
puter, a credit card) may stop being useful after its collapse. In Station
Eleven’s post-scarcity text, however, the objects in the museum are markers
of that lost civilization, either because they provide aesthetic pleasure or
because they work as an antidote against forgetting—not individually as
with the sentimental object but as a species. Emptied of their usefulness,
they are still reminders of the time communication was instant (cell-
phones), the storage of and access to information was almost unlimited
(laptops), and there was a working economy that could be based, at least
in the Western world, on something as simple as carrying a piece of plastic
(a credit card) in one’s pocket.
In many ways, the novel is a futuristic swan song of love for the modern
world, resonating through simple objects (Lashbrook). Many of them go
from being unassuming objects, forgotten in a drawer or on the corner
of a desk, to the shelves of the museum. The Museum of Civilization is
a celebration of small, normal, worldly things that we take for granted
because we can afford not to think about their not being there or one day
not being “usable” or “useful” anymore.18 In year 20, much (almost all) of
everyday reality has disappeared, as we see in chapter 6, an “incomplete
list” that includes pop culture: “No more screens shining in the half-light
as people raise their phones above the crowd to take photograph of concert
stages. No more concert stages lit by candy-colored halogens, no more
electronica, punk, electric guitars.” No more medicine and drugs we take
for granted, “no more certainty of surviving a scratch on one’s hand, a cut
on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite,” or of our
day-to-day mediated social life (Mandel 31):
No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams
and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and
expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with
heart icons whole or broken.… No more reading and commenting
on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in
the room. No more avatars. (Mandel 32)
In the absence of these activities, the survivors turn to the objects that
made them possible, not so much because of their personal connection to
the objects themselves, but because of what they represent, to avoid the
fragmentation of the memory of the past.
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But any collection, any archive, any museum, can fall prey to what
Jacques Derrida calls “archive fever.” Exploring Derrida’s analysis of the
archive in narrative, Rohy defines “archive fever” as “both [a] malady and
jouissance,… [that] marks the site where the archival project turns against
itself” (352). Derrida’s “Archive Fever” considers how the archive becomes
almost an animate object that collects other objects, as an unending project
that symbolizes “the violence of the archive itself” (7). Suffering archive
fever “is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably, from
searching for the archive right where it slips away. It is to run after the
archive, even if there’s too much of it, right where something in it anar-
chives itself” (91). In Derrida’s words, at some point a museum, as any
other archival effort, “always works, a priori, against itself” (12).19
As Rohy explains, to Derrida, “the rational intent to collect and to pre-
serve is inseparable from the blind pulsations of a human drive,” but he
warns that there is dark, even “deathly” side, as “each scrap added to the
archive both contributes to the goal of knowledge and, by multiplying the
avenues of inquiry, defers the accomplishment of that goal; the same activity
that produces the archive also threatens its ‘radical effacement’” (Rohy 27).
Hal Foster updates Derrida’s concept of “archive fever” by emphasizing the
“paranoid dimension of archival art,” which he connects to “its utopian
ambition” (22). The Museum of Civilization’s utopian impulse seems to
be doomed to failure: a museum that celebrates objects that were markers
of a civilization, but which are now unusable, just beautiful, empty signi-
fiers, is an institution that precludes the creation of new objects just as the
exclusive celebration of Shakespeare precludes the creation of new art. This
is the paradox of conservation: in conserving, the collection solidifies the
past and, while celebrating that past, it closes it off from the future. And
the museum can keep the past alive, through inanimate objects, only while
it has a curator that can explain that past.
This exercise in nostalgia only works for those who actually knew the
civilization that the museum celebrates, and the novel suggests that the
melancholia and the “need” for those objects is bigger the older the sur-
vivor is. When one of the older survivors asks the protagonist, Kirsten,
who has just turned eighteen, how she can stand going into old buildings,
she ponders on how “we stand it because we were younger … when every-
thing ended … but not young enough not to remember nothing at all”
(Mandel 130). To a child who has grown up in a world without electricity, a
smartphone, even with a thorough explanation of what could be done with
it, is little more than a plastic brick, an empty signifier. As one character
says, “you see the way their [the children’s] eyes glaze over when anyone
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talks to them about antibiotics or engines. It’s science fiction to them, isn’t
it? And it only upsets them” (270). Unless the real (perhaps subconscious)
intention of the museum is the hope that one day technology will be
somehow revitalized and the objects will be “usable” again, it is an exercise
in nostalgia for the civilization that made those objects possible as they are
recognized and celebrated in the museum—they do not represent civiliza-
tion itself but the advancements made possible by that specific civilization.
Observing the beginnings of the museum, Clark, the curator, “found
himself moved by every object he saw there, by the human enterprise each
object had required,” since he “had always been fond of beautiful objects,
and in his present state of mind, all objects were beautiful” (Mandel 255).
He looks at a snow globe, a paperweight (an object without much of a
practical use) and that makes him think of
the mind that invented those miniature storms, the factory worker
who turned sheets of plastic into white flakes of snow, the hand that
drew the plan for the miniature.… With its church steeple and city
hall, the assembly-line worker who watched the globe glide past on
a converter belt … the white gloves on the hands of the woman who
inserted the snow globes into boxes, to be packed into larger boxes,
crates, shipping containers.… The card games played below decks
in the evening on the ship carrying the containers across the ocean
… the cadences of a half dozen languages.… The secret hopes of the
UPS man carrying boxes of snow globes. (255)
In the years between its being delivered by UPS and its symbolic reap-
pearance in the Museum of Civilization, the object has “lived” much,
and it has been passed down from one character to another. Bought in a
museum shop by Clark (which may foreshadow his role as a curator), it
was a celebratory object given to a couple (Arthur and Miranda) as a gift,
then returned to Arthur by Miranda after their separation (a bad reminder
of their relationship), later only seen by Arthur as clutter in the minimalist
life he was trying to live right before his death, then given to Tanya, who
uses it to distract Kirsten as a child from Arthur’s death on stage. To child
Kirsten, the snow globe is “the most beautiful, the most wonderful, the
strangest thing anyone had ever given her. It was a lump of glass with a
storm cloud trapped inside” (15). The object is, in Kirsten’s hands, both
useless and extraordinary, a reminder that art and beauty are essential for
more than surviving.

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The snow globe is also a reminder that once a world existed where
some privileged people had everything they could possibly need to sur-
vive and could therefore think about beauty, about art—a world where
there was enough food and safety that some might specialize in “unprac-
tical” things. The nostalgia of this world, coming back to my argument
about Shakespeare, feels privileged and Western-centric, and while, as
Hay signals, it is indeed “tempting to think that the Western canon is so
resilient,… global disaster should not be understood as improving the
demand for dramatic classics” (4). In the book’s beautiful prose, in the
compelling characters, in the perfectly plotted structure of flashbacks and
flash-forwards, we may sometimes lose sight of how Western-centric this
postapocalyptic fantasy is, how questions of race and gender are rarely
touched upon. It feels as if the blank slate created by the Georgia flu for
humanity had solved such problems, and universal human values—even
with the deeply problematic idea that values may be universal—can be cel-
ebrated in harmony but through very specific objects, texts, and artifacts.
Akin to the Museum of Civilization, there is at least one attempt in
Station Eleven to collect pre-collapse printed texts. There is a newspaper
“published irregularly out of New Petoskey … [with] announcements of
births and deaths and weddings. A column for bartering: a local man was
seeking new shoes in exchange for milk and eggs; someone else had a pair
of reading glasses that she was hoping to trade for a pair of jeans, size 6”
(Mandel 263). Whenever there is empty space in the newspaper, it is filled
with pre-collapse texts. The choice of samples that are deemed worthy to
be kept and published in the newspaper, however, harken back to many of
the caveats I voiced when analyzing the use of Shakespeare in the novel.
The texts that are seen as a record of human knowledge and which are
used as an escape from the horror of the post-collapse world are selected
by François Diallo, who used to be a copywriter, “from his collection …
an Emily Dickinson poem … an excerpt from a biography of Abraham
Lincoln” (263).
The one possible exception to this celebration of canonical culture is a
comic, Dr. Eleven, a pre-collapse graphic novel created by Miranda, one of
the protagonists, which Kirsten tries to collect whenever she is exploring
abandoned buildings and which she holds on to until she gives a copy to
Clark to keep in the Museum of Civilization, at the very end of the novel,
“to ensure that at least one of the comics would be safe in case of trouble
on the road.… That way, at least one book will always be safe” (332). This
is one of the few instances in the novel where we are, indeed, given the
apparent mixture of high and popular culture that was promised by the

124
“Survival is not enough” motto. The comic,20 however, is not really impor-
tant as art or as representative or symbolic of the post-collapse world; it is
important because of its personal connection to several of the characters,
of the personal stories being told, not because it has previously been rec-
ognized as a valuable work of art. It is, therefore, a sentimental object, not
given the representative value of other canonical texts that are the focus
of the novel.
The kind of wishful thinking that is the spirit of the museum (the return
of civilization) is fulfilled at the end of the novel, when we learn that a
nearby city seems to have recovered or resurrected electric light. This
recovery of electric light, as a symbol of advanced technology, implies
for the characters the return to a safer, less savage, more civilized world.
Civilization may be ready to start anew, but it also feels like it will be a civi-
lization very much based on the past, on the objects, the art, that existed
previously. So, the Georgia Flu and the death of seven billion people did
not exactly bring a blank slate. Or maybe the deeply nostalgic communal
impetus in humanity is so fixated on recreating models unproblematically
assumed as universal that some issues (such as gender, or race, which are
largely not addressed in the text) can be ignored in rebuilding society, and
we can instead focus on beauty and technology.
3. Coda: Hope after the Apocalypse
Station Eleven is not different from other texts in the genre of posta-
pocalyptic fiction, in that by showing the collapse of civilization, it makes
us want to appreciate it, and maybe celebrate it more. But it is a deeply
romanticized postapocalypse, one where characters can sit around the
fire at night, look at the stars, listen to music, watch a play, and reminisce
about the past, while “fireflies were rising from the tall grass on the riv-
erbank … in the company of … friend[s],…wine … the gentle music of
the river, cicadas in the trees, the stars above the weeping willows of the
far bank” (Mandel 270). It is an uplifting future world but not one that
is necessarily realistic. Furthermore, Station Eleven is a text that, unlike
other postapocalyptic texts, does not concern itself directly with politics or
global problems, but rather takes as its center an abstract idea of humanity
and life (albeit a limited slice of said life in terms of representativity), and
thus refuses to analyze “the international geopolitical forces that threaten
social stability across the planet” (Hay). Station Eleven seems to be conser-
vative, both in its approach to the canonicity and conservancy of certain
cultural products and in how technology seems to be what will bring

125
humanity back into civilization. We are indeed given a post-national world
with no borders, but any analysis of the political situation pre-collapse is
conveniently ignored, and while we could argue that the world in year
20 is one that has been eradicated of global capitalism, this specific form
of economic and political domination is not challenged, transcended, or
analyzed in the novel.
There is also a deeply contradictory constituent at the basis of that
deeply humanistic world: while it is a nostalgic celebration of modern,
recent technology, at the same time the texts worth celebrating and
preserving are literary classics, not new texts that speak directly to the
characters’ contemporary experience. There is a disconnect between how
technology seems to work, as a story of continual progress, cut short by the
apocalypse but that can be continued at any point where it was left, and
how representative art works—having “peaked” early, humanity will never
quite reach those artistic heights again.
All in all, however, no matter what my objections to the text are, Station
Eleven is a rare, hopeful postapocalyptic text, about how life goes on—
specifically human life, since we may not be ready to imagine a world
without humans in it just yet. It is also an ode to what is good and repre-
sentative of humanity, even if the texts it glorifies, or rather their celebra-
tion throughout history, are problematic, as I have attempted to show.
These bastions of humanity are presented as to be preserved only through
communal effort, not through individualistic forces that often drive the
protagonists in this kind of text. The text celebrates all those “taken-for-
granted miracles that had persisted all around” (Mandel 233). In the end,
while not perfect, the novel stands out from other postapocalyptic fiction
in how it “parodies aspects of our catastrophe-fixated times” while cel-
ebrating “the beauty of the present, flawed world,” urging us to appreciate
everyday objects by imagining their sudden vanishing as a symbol of the
disappearance of reality as we know it (Tate 234).
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Notes
1 Research for this article was funded by a Santander-Complutense grant for the research
project “Pensamiento y representación literaria y artística digital ante la crisis de Europa y
el Mediterráneo,” PR26/16-6B-2.
2 The following list does not intend to be exhaustive, but rather as an indicative sample,
across genres and media, of the interest in postapocalyptic narratives in America. In lit-
erature, these narratives range from Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011) to Max Brooks’s

126
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006) and a number of young adult series,
such as The Hunger Games trilogy (Suzanne Collins, 2008–2010), the Divergent trilogy
(Veronica Roth, 2011–2013), or The Maze Runner series (James Dashner, 2009–2016). All
of these novels, except for Whitehead’s, have been turned into successful films. When it
comes to TV series and film, the reimagined Battlestar Galactica series (Glenn A. Larson and
Ronald D. Moore, 2004–2009), the most recent installment of the Mad Max franchise, Mad
Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015), or the adaptation of 12 Monkeys as a TV-series (Travis
Fickett, Terry Matalas, 2015–present) could be mentioned. Further examples can be found
in graphic novels, such as Y: The Last Man (Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra, 2002–2008),
or Frank Darabont’s The Walking Dead (Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore, 2003–present),
also adapted into a TV series, now in the middle of its eighth season. Finally, in videogames
we could highlight The Last of Us (2013), the adaptation into an interactive drama of the
The Walking Dead series by Telltale Games (2012), Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 (2008, 2015),
Dying Light (2015), or DayZ (currently in early alpha testing, coming out of alpha in 2018).
3 The Arthur C. Clarke award, started in 1987 and quite probably the most prestigious
British science fiction prize, is open to any novel in the field of science fiction with a UK
publication date that falls within the year preceding each ceremony. The award has been
controversial from the onset, mostly because, just like the Man Booker Prize, it is a juried
award and the interpretation of what “science fiction” means is left to the jury appointed
each year. Paul Kincaid, one of the founders of the award, emphasizes that the potential for
controversy was there from the onset, since “at no point did we decide what was meant by
‘best,’ by ‘science fiction,’ or even by ‘novel.’ Consequently, the jury meetings I’ve taken part
in have featured some very lively debates on each of these topics—and no two juries have
ever arrived at precisely the same definitions” (12). Kincaid goes on to claim that what “the
first jury was doing … is something that has been a surprisingly recurrent practice of juries
since then: they were not looking in towards the heart of the genre, but outwards from the
genre” (12). To illustrate this “looking outwards” and its influence on what is considered
science fiction nowadays, consider how Margaret Atwood’s 1985 The Handmaid’s Tale was
the winner for that first year or how the award was given in 2017 to Whitehead’s The
Underground Railroad. Notably, in St. John Mandel’s year, all six shortlisted novels were texts
about the end of the world, which foregrounds the importance of postapocalyptic texts not
only in our culture in general but also in the genre of science fiction in particular.
4 Although the postapocalypse as a genre is obviously not exclusively American or even
Western (the Epic of Gilgamesh, 2100 BCE; or the doomsday prophecies of the Mayan
Calendar, 3144 BCE, are obvious counterexamples), there seems to be indeed an extraordi-
nary interest in this kind of text reflected in their dominance over the present Western and,
specifically American, cultural discourse. I would connect this dominance to specific anxi-
eties heightened by the US political and historical situation in national and global events, as
covered (and amplified) by the now ever-present US media. Global concerns such as climate
change, the dangers of nuclear warfare, the displacement of human labor by technology,
biological research and pandemics, and religious and scatological apocalypses are conflated
with specifically American events that have taken place in the second half of the so-called
“American century” and the beginning of the twenty-first century, such as a large number of
magnicides and political assassinations, nuclear terror during the Cold War, or recent ter-
rorist attacks such as 9/11. It could be even argued that many American foundational myths
such as the notion of the promised land, the city upon a hill, the Manifest Destiny doctrines
of expansion into the West and across the continent, or the foregrounding of America as the
locus for new beginnings, provide America as a nation with a sense of eschatological sig-

127
nificance embedded in a national and historical destiny that paradoxically enables the inter-
pretation of any threat to said foundational myths as a sign of the coming of the end times.
5 Yet another example of this postapocalyptic sensibility in literary texts from the early
twenty-first century would be Edan Lepucki’s California, published like Station Eleven in
2014. Both novels are strikingly similar in their interest in the physicality of objects as
nostalgic symbols of life before the apocalypse, something that I will examine in depth in
Mandel’s text in the second part of this article.
6 Williams states that culture is “one of the two or three most complicated words in the
English language” due to its having “now come to be used for important concepts in several
distinct intellectual disciplines and in several distinct and incompatible systems of thought”
(76). It would be beyond the scope of this article to provide a stable definition of culture,
but I would align with Eagleton’s definition of it as “a body of artistic and intellectual work
of agreed value, along with the institutions which produce, disseminate and regulate it,”
and even “just everything which is not genetically transmissible” (21, 34). In my analysis of
the Museum of Civilization as an attempt to create an archive of culture (section 2), I will
emphasize the museum’s reliance on objects and artifacts to the detriment of the processes
that created them, a question that is addressed directly in the novel by indicating that the
processes themselves may be lost when people who still remember them die (see the cre-
ation and distribution of the snow globe paperweight, also analyzed in section 2).
7 The social and cultural scope of Station Eleven is markedly Western-centric: while the
pandemic flu is noted to have reached all of the globalized world, the focus of the narra-
tion is on survival in a very geographically limited area. Also, since part of the premise for
the novel is that all world communications ceased a few weeks after the first deaths, no
examples or analysis of postapocalyptic civilizations that are not Western and specifically
American are found in the text. While I do understand that the circumscription to Western
culture and society as a model makes sense in the context of this fictional world, I find
the celebration of a certain kind of Western “high” culture, and specifically Shakespeare,
deeply problematic, as I will try to show in this article. Further references to civilization in
my text are, therefore, meant to imply Western civilization, which is the one Station Eleven
dwells on.
8 The Georgia Flu seems to replicate the panic caused by recent cases of the H1N1 virus
(swine flu) and the H5N1 virus (avian flu). The Georgia Flu has a very quick incubation
rate, is highly contagious, is airborne, and causes death in forty-eight hours. While the
symptoms are the same ones that can be seen every flu season, “aches and pains. A sudden
high fever. Difficulty breathing,” the incubation period is so fast that “if you’re exposed,
you’re sick in three or four hours and dead in a day or two” (Mandel 235).
9 Post-scarcity as an economic theory is usually portrayed in fictional societies where
goods, services, and information are extremely cheap or free, since they can be produced
abundantly with almost no human effort needed. Many recent US science fiction texts
use the notion of post-scarcity that way, such as most instances of the Star Trek universe
(1966–present), Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy (1993–1996), or Neal Stephenson’s
The Diamond Age (1995). In my discussion of postapocalyptic economies, however, I will be
using the notion of post-scarcity in a radically different way: I refer to the stable moments in
postapocalyptic narratives after a period of scarcity (of food, of natural resources as water,
sunlight, or fuel), such as the one portrayed in Station Eleven. While postapocalyptic scar-
city economies would be dominated by raiding, scavenging, and even killing so as to obtain
scarce goods, post-scarcity provides an opportunity to go beyond a time-consuming need
for absolute control of scarce material resources, into the (comparatively leisured) preoc-

128
cupation with the creation and recreation of culture and the definition and preservation of
cultural markers.
10 For a short introduction to the entrance of the word “dystopia” in the public sphere
in London and Dublin, see Budakov. While the first use of the word is usually attributed
to John Stuart Mill in 1868 in a speech before the UK Parliament, Budakov traces its use
much earlier, in the eighteenth century. Thanks to the reviewer and editors for suggesting
Budakov’s article.
11 Smith identifies how Station Eleven combines earlier models of British science fiction,
focused on the end of British imperial power with what he calls an “American post-apoca-
lyptic rhetoric of renewal” (302).
12 A staple of the genre, the cult leader’s strong hold on his people, is based on “a com-
bination of charisma, violence, and cherry-picked verses from the Book of Revelation”
(Mandel 280). The turn to the Book of Revelation as a guide for apocalyptic narratives has
been documented. See, among others, Heffernan and Hicks. In Station Eleven, the Book
of Revelation is used to explain not the apocalypse but the postapocalypse. For a spirited
defense of the clichéd (and maybe unnecessary) nature of the Prophet as a cult leader, see
McDermott and Mond.
13 Smith develops a convincing analysis of how Station Eleven seems to indicate “a thematic
continuation of Elizabethan apocalyptic works into the post-apocalypse genre” (289). Smith
points out the similar decontextualization of “religious, civil, and biological apocalypse,”
and what he refers to as “Shakespeare’s preoccupation with ephemerality in text and perfor-
mance, and the possibility of survival through written and physical records” (289). Smith
also notices that the whole frame for the novel, in the first chapter, is a representation of
King Lear, “a fitting play for the end of the world” (290).
14 The Traveling Symphony, of course, also seems to be a recreation of roaming troupes
from the Elizabethan era. Mandel justifies this choice by affirming that “it was pleasing
to think of a world in which a traveling company might once again set out onto the road,
performing by candlelight in small towns” (McCarry; emphasis mine).
15 Smith emphasizes the connection between Shakespeare’s concern with plagues and
disease—the word “disease” is mentioned over sixty times and the word “plague” appears
one hundred five times in his plays—and the insistence on the Georgia Flu as a “plague” in
Station Eleven (294). The text itself is aware of this, as Shakespeare’s existence is defined as
a “plague-haunted life” (Mandel 308).
16 This idea that Shakespeare will appeal to people with no previous exposure to his works
seems to be common in other postapocalyptic fictions, as Hay indicates: “the notion that
the popular value of the arts and humanities will re-emerge among the ruins of modern life
is an old one that remains oddly persistent [in the genre]” (4). Hay goes on to acknowledge
that “Jeremiads about the ‘Crisis in the Humanities’ are often buttressed by a silent faith that
demand for the liberal arts will rise in times of extreme scarcity—that, counterintuitively,
humanistic knowledge will gain value at a time when science, math, and engineering would
be most useful” (4).
17 Yet another staple of the genre is the new economy created by the apocalypse, which
radically destabilizes and redesigns our present economic system (based on the non-tangi-
bility of globally circulating money) to have local economies dominated by the ownership of
tangible objects. Activities such as scavenging and raiding become important and profitable
in these new economies, as do robbing and kidnapping in the absence of a strong universal
moral code. These local economies and societies are thus often completely focused on the
ownership of physical objects, and their desirability is connected to their being useful (and/
or scarce), or their being used to coerce and dominate other people.

129
18 Our current obsession with physical objects as records of our existence often comes up
in surprising places, such as, for example, Werner Herzog’s Lo and Behold. While marketed
as a documentary about the Internet, what Herzog is deeply concerned with in this unusual
film is the impact of technology on humanity and the permanence of records of communi-
cation and objects of Western civilization, especially in part V, “The End of the Net.” In it,
cosmologist Lawrence Krauss (of Arizona State University) laments that “if there’s a solar
flare, if you destroyed the information fabric of the world right now, modern civilization
would collapse.… If the Internet shuts down, people will not remember how they used to
live before that.” Derrida’s “No Apocalypse” also identifies a global nuclear war as an event
that would utterly destroy any human-made kind of archive (be it literary, judiciary …) (“No
Apocalypse” 26–28).
19 In her public lecture at the Total Archive: Dreams of Universal Knowledge from the
Encyclopedia to Big Data conference, Katherine Hayles reflects on the existence of the total
archive as no more than “part of our cultural imaginary,” and emphasizes how the library
in Borges’s “The Aleph” (one of the texts often used to explain Derrida’s theories on the
archive) can be read as a metaphor for the universe, with the question turning from “can
we imagine an end to the library” to “can we imagine an end to the universe.” Hayles is
also extremely interested in the existence of what she calls “apparatus of control” (such
as curators in museums), which mediate and influence the change in any library/archive
from expansion to compression (that is, from the addition of materials to setting limits
on what can be displayed/kept) and from compression to expansion, a movement I find
similar to the unending “anarchiving” tension that Derrida mentions. I would like to thank
the anonymous reviewer and editors for pointing out the existence of a recording of this
lecture, which has helped me immensely in a number of connections in this article and for
future projects.
20 The Picador US edition includes a double spread of the comic book: there is actually
no “access” to the complete comic, and our whole understanding of it is mediated by the
nostalgic memories of those who were fascinated by it as children (Kirsten, the Prophet).
As McDermott notes, precisely because the comic is billed as an extraordinary work of art,
several years in the making, that represents at least to some characters the best that humans
can create (even if it is not part of the canon), the art by Nathan Burton cannot but be disap-
pointing, since it cannot live up to the expectations set by the novel.
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Contributors
132
Audrey Goodman is Professor of English at Georgia State University. Her
research explores the intersections of literature and photography in the
southwestern US, paying particular attention to the region’s vernacular
landscapes and genres. She is the author of Translating Southwestern
Landscapes and Lost Homelands (both published by the University of
Arizona Press). She has also contributed essays to the Cambridge History
of Western American Literature; Women in the Americas; the Blackwell
Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West; Postwestern
Cultures; Left in the West; and the journals Transatlantica, Iperstoria,
Miranda, and Acoma.
Carmen M. Méndez-García teaches American Literature at Universidad
Complutense de Madrid. She was a visiting scholar at Harvard University
in 2001–2002 and a Fulbright participant in the 2010 Study of the US
Institute on Contemporary American Literature at the University of
Louisville. Current interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-century
US literature, counterculture in the US, minority studies (especially
Chicana studies), and spatial studies.
Yael Prizant is a dramaturg, adapter, translator, and scholar. She translates
works by Cuban playwrights and produces plays at LangLab South Bend.
Her book, Cuba Inside Out: Revolution and Contemporary Theatre, investi-
gates the effects of revolution and globalization. In 2018, Prizant was a
Visiting Scholar at Georgia College & State University and has taught at
Johns Hopkins SAIS in Bologna (2015–2017) as well as the University of
Notre Dame (2008–2014). She holds a PhD in Theater from UCLA and
an MFA in Dramaturgy from UMASS Amherst. She currently serves on the
Board of Directors for Ultreia, Inc., a Midwest non-profit arts organization.

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