Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven depicts a world that has been destroyed by the devastating flu known as the Georgia Flu. The novel explores possible responses from people living through such traumatizing events by switching between character’s perspectives and showing readers their experiences. Jeevan was trying to survive the pandemic with his disabled brother, but his brother committed suicide so he could not hinder Jeevan anymore. Clark and the others stranded at the airport try to form a community in the image of what the world was like before the pandemic. Clark also decides to create the Museum of Civilization in an effort to remember the world before the fall of civilization.
But perhaps the most interesting response to an apocalyptic scenario I have read so far is that of Kirsten and the people she lives with, called The Traveling Symphony. This group travels around the Great Lakes region performing music and Shakespeare plays. I think that I find this group so fascinating because of their focus on keeping art alive and spreading it to the communities they visit – it is not something I have really seen as the focus in an apocalyptic novel. The more I thought about it, the more I realized the novel explores an aspect of culture in the apocalypse that I had not considered before. When it comes to apocalyptic literature, the main goal of the characters tends to be survival on a more physical level. Art is not traditionally necessary for survival, so it gets left out and forgotten in the face of disastrous scenarios. But what if this line of thinking is too narrow? Sure, people will physically survive without art, but art is such an integral facet of our society that I do not know if we would give it up so easily. As the Symphony quotes Star Trek, “survival is insufficient.” For many people, art is a source of happiness even before the pandemic, and after the collapse, it gave the characters something to believe in and be hopeful for. These feelings are so incredibly important in terrible scenarios because, without them, people would not have anything to live for – any reason to live to see and survive another day. In the novel, we see how art affects characters like Kirsten and how it can give people an escape from their depressing situations, even just temporarily. Station Eleven also makes readers consider how culture will survive the apocalypse. Going beyond the significant impact art has on individual lives, it is also intrinsically intertwined with society and culture as a whole. There are things we know about societies that have died off – their gods, their values, their experiences – because of the art they left behind. In a world as we see in Station Eleven, some children never knew what life was like before the pandemic, so they did not know of the culture before their time. If this happened with all children born after the pandemic, the culture of society before collapse could be forgotten and lost forever. By playing music and performing Shakespeare’s plays (and quoting TV shows like Star Trek), the Symphony is keeping at least a small part of pre-pandemic culture alive so not all is lost to the testament of time. For further interaction on this topic please visit: TCCR Magazine "The Importance of Art" Sydney Writer's Festival "Emily St. John Mandel: Art and Survival"
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AuthorHi, I'm Brooke! In these blog posts, I will be reflecting on content in post-apocalyptic literature. Archives |