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May. 20th, 2015 11:49 pmI just finished Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven. I was less impressed than the hype had led me to think I would be. It's an accomplished, richly detailed novel that ultimately didn't move me very much. Though in reflecting on it afterward, I started to wonder if part of my problem hadn't been a misreading on my part, attempting to understand the structure as being about the power of performance, when Mandel was trying to tell a story about the power of text.
Station Eleven mostly follows the sojourns of the Travelling Symphony, an arts collective travelling around the northern Midwest in a post-apocalyptic world forged by a flu pandemic that killed most of humanity and rendered most of the technological and social trappings of contemporary society untenable (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ambyr: If you haven't already read this book, you should. As soon as possible.). The book begins and ends with a performance of King Lear, and Shakespeare's themes of generational succession and coming to terms with the meaning of one's life as it comes to a close are resonant ones in Mandel's setting, always contrasted against A Midsummer Night Dream's themes of vanishing into an SF world but being unable to escape the ties of the real world.
So I don't think it's unreasonable to think about performance, and I think it's definitely an important theme of the book. Arthur and Kirsten, the two most central characters, are both actors of some accomplishment, and I think there is the construction of a dynamic where as the novel progresses, Arthur's acting and performance bleeds deeper and deeper into his personal life, whereas for Kirsten her reality bleeds deeper and deeper into her acting. Clark, for example, begins to wonder if Arthur is performing for him at their dinner reunion, a line that Elizabeth later echoes. Meanwhile, starting with Kirsten and Sayid's Slings and Arrows-y lovers quarrel cum Midsummer rehearsal, it becomes harder and harder for Kirsten to just act when they are living out William Shakespeare's 'plague-defined' life. It's a really interesting concept, but I didn't find it an emotionally resonant way into the book for me. In the final chapter, Clark suggests that whereas he was sleepwalking his way through his pre-Georgia Flu life as a corporate consultant, the apocalypse has given him the opportunity to finally really live his life awake. It was of a piece with a lot of Mandel's noodling about the idea of performance: Meaning comes from a Stanislavskian inhabitation of the moment. Life is only worthwhile when you are fully engaged with it. I think there is more to meaning than that, and ultimately I think I failed to connect with Mandel's characters because I couldn't find anything deeper.
But my post-reading contemplation of the idea that it's not performance that is important but text has me wondering if a reread would make me enjoy the characters more. The Symphony has three copies of Midsummer, Kirsten notes at one point, and she has a favorite copy, whose annotations lend her deeper access to the role she is assuming. Kirsten also has a copy of Miranda's Station Eleven comic book, a comic that connects her to Arthur's son more directly than it does her to Arthur. In their final confrontation, we can attempt to read backward a story about the influence of text on two fated lives, as they trade back and forth lines of dialogue that Miranda slaved for years over and then let loose to influence the world and be influenced by it. Both Kirsten and the Prophet have forged meaning out of the text of Station Eleven- vastly different meaning, and their confrontation is not settled by slings and arrows but by Kirsten's reclamation of the text for her side, the side of human kindness and decency.
In Station Eleven's narrative on text, meaning in life isn't a thing we assume or a thing we pretend, it's a thing we negotiate and try to define, in conversation with the past, because the meaning we create will endure after we are gone. Even think about Arthur's final, ill-fated Lear. Mandel doesn't find meaning for it in the memories of the audience, as an ephemeral performance that endured in those Arthur shared it with, even though several members of that audience play significant roles in the novel. Instead, she defines Arthur's performance by newspaper reports of it- the newspaper report Clark reads on his way to the funeral, the newspaper interview Kirsten does in Year 15. Even after the apocalypse, it is text that preserves the things we cared about. Francois describes his work on his frontier newspaper as 'invigorating', and perhaps it is this sort of textual invigoration that produces the lights in the south that are Station Eleven's final notes of optimism.
And it is because of this thought about text that I think I may be able to reconcile myself to one of my other problems with Station Eleven- the way the improbable nested coincidences and intersections that build Mandel's plot consistently pulled me out of the immersion. The repeated intersection of Jeevan and Miranda and Arthur and Clark and Tyler and Kirsten strained credulity and positioned the plot deeply in the lair of fictional artifice, but I wonder if that is not the intention- to suggest that in a world where text gives the meaning of our lives some permanence, there will always be outward ripples from our actions that pull us toward each other, that eventually Tyler and Kirsten were drawn back to each other because they had both been gifted the same legacy by Arthur, the legacy of trying to do a better job of prioritizing what was really important than Arthur managed.
My third problem with the book I don't have as good a reconciliation with, though. As an engineer, it's awfully hard to read this kind of post-apocalyptic book when it doesn't have any engineers in it at all. There's a repeated motif in the book where non-engineers try to explain to post-Flu children how the technological miracles of the 21st century had worked. We get awkward and ridiculous explanations of an airplane's operation, of a laptop, a cellphone. Mandel verges on suggesting that to the non-engineer, these things are magic, but she can't quite get there because her world building doesn't support it. Any encyclopedia can do a better job of explaining an airplane than the former Frequent Flyer manages, and I found myself constantly struggling as I read against the feeling of "I could do it better," of the failure of the world Mandel describes to harness the kinds of low tech technologies that would be the lifeblood of a post-apocalyptic civilization with access to as much of the knowledge and resources of the pre-apocalyptic civilization as this one has.
Station Eleven mostly follows the sojourns of the Travelling Symphony, an arts collective travelling around the northern Midwest in a post-apocalyptic world forged by a flu pandemic that killed most of humanity and rendered most of the technological and social trappings of contemporary society untenable (
ambyr: If you haven't already read this book, you should. As soon as possible.). The book begins and ends with a performance of King Lear, and Shakespeare's themes of generational succession and coming to terms with the meaning of one's life as it comes to a close are resonant ones in Mandel's setting, always contrasted against A Midsummer Night Dream's themes of vanishing into an SF world but being unable to escape the ties of the real world. So I don't think it's unreasonable to think about performance, and I think it's definitely an important theme of the book. Arthur and Kirsten, the two most central characters, are both actors of some accomplishment, and I think there is the construction of a dynamic where as the novel progresses, Arthur's acting and performance bleeds deeper and deeper into his personal life, whereas for Kirsten her reality bleeds deeper and deeper into her acting. Clark, for example, begins to wonder if Arthur is performing for him at their dinner reunion, a line that Elizabeth later echoes. Meanwhile, starting with Kirsten and Sayid's Slings and Arrows-y lovers quarrel cum Midsummer rehearsal, it becomes harder and harder for Kirsten to just act when they are living out William Shakespeare's 'plague-defined' life. It's a really interesting concept, but I didn't find it an emotionally resonant way into the book for me. In the final chapter, Clark suggests that whereas he was sleepwalking his way through his pre-Georgia Flu life as a corporate consultant, the apocalypse has given him the opportunity to finally really live his life awake. It was of a piece with a lot of Mandel's noodling about the idea of performance: Meaning comes from a Stanislavskian inhabitation of the moment. Life is only worthwhile when you are fully engaged with it. I think there is more to meaning than that, and ultimately I think I failed to connect with Mandel's characters because I couldn't find anything deeper.
But my post-reading contemplation of the idea that it's not performance that is important but text has me wondering if a reread would make me enjoy the characters more. The Symphony has three copies of Midsummer, Kirsten notes at one point, and she has a favorite copy, whose annotations lend her deeper access to the role she is assuming. Kirsten also has a copy of Miranda's Station Eleven comic book, a comic that connects her to Arthur's son more directly than it does her to Arthur. In their final confrontation, we can attempt to read backward a story about the influence of text on two fated lives, as they trade back and forth lines of dialogue that Miranda slaved for years over and then let loose to influence the world and be influenced by it. Both Kirsten and the Prophet have forged meaning out of the text of Station Eleven- vastly different meaning, and their confrontation is not settled by slings and arrows but by Kirsten's reclamation of the text for her side, the side of human kindness and decency.
In Station Eleven's narrative on text, meaning in life isn't a thing we assume or a thing we pretend, it's a thing we negotiate and try to define, in conversation with the past, because the meaning we create will endure after we are gone. Even think about Arthur's final, ill-fated Lear. Mandel doesn't find meaning for it in the memories of the audience, as an ephemeral performance that endured in those Arthur shared it with, even though several members of that audience play significant roles in the novel. Instead, she defines Arthur's performance by newspaper reports of it- the newspaper report Clark reads on his way to the funeral, the newspaper interview Kirsten does in Year 15. Even after the apocalypse, it is text that preserves the things we cared about. Francois describes his work on his frontier newspaper as 'invigorating', and perhaps it is this sort of textual invigoration that produces the lights in the south that are Station Eleven's final notes of optimism.
And it is because of this thought about text that I think I may be able to reconcile myself to one of my other problems with Station Eleven- the way the improbable nested coincidences and intersections that build Mandel's plot consistently pulled me out of the immersion. The repeated intersection of Jeevan and Miranda and Arthur and Clark and Tyler and Kirsten strained credulity and positioned the plot deeply in the lair of fictional artifice, but I wonder if that is not the intention- to suggest that in a world where text gives the meaning of our lives some permanence, there will always be outward ripples from our actions that pull us toward each other, that eventually Tyler and Kirsten were drawn back to each other because they had both been gifted the same legacy by Arthur, the legacy of trying to do a better job of prioritizing what was really important than Arthur managed.
My third problem with the book I don't have as good a reconciliation with, though. As an engineer, it's awfully hard to read this kind of post-apocalyptic book when it doesn't have any engineers in it at all. There's a repeated motif in the book where non-engineers try to explain to post-Flu children how the technological miracles of the 21st century had worked. We get awkward and ridiculous explanations of an airplane's operation, of a laptop, a cellphone. Mandel verges on suggesting that to the non-engineer, these things are magic, but she can't quite get there because her world building doesn't support it. Any encyclopedia can do a better job of explaining an airplane than the former Frequent Flyer manages, and I found myself constantly struggling as I read against the feeling of "I could do it better," of the failure of the world Mandel describes to harness the kinds of low tech technologies that would be the lifeblood of a post-apocalyptic civilization with access to as much of the knowledge and resources of the pre-apocalyptic civilization as this one has.