Station Eleven: Publish-Apocalyptic Comedy and the Inconceivable Blissful Ending

We’ve watched the world finish dozens of instances. During the last couple a long time, post-apocalyptic tales have completely enraptured us. These tales are, by and enormous, bleak. They’re tragedies. For years The Strolling Useless spun a really unhappy, very gory yarn in regards to the inevitable erosion of individuals and locations as human civilization succumbs to the zombie apocalypse. Cormac McCarthy’s The Street provides an terrible grey world during which the ocean is not blue and every other human inhabitants are assumed to be robbing cannibals except they show themselves to be in any other case. The Final of Us, the online game and present, is one other post-apocalyptic tragedy crammed with loss of life, loss, and human cruelty because the characters trudge via fungus. Publish-apocalyptic tales have lengthy been standard, however just lately these motion pictures, reveals, and books have carved out a good bigger area for themselves within the leisure market. 

Publish-apocalyptic tales are de facto tragedies. The style requires huge quantities of loss of life, loss, and violence in any case. That’s why I used to be caught off guard once I learn Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. The novel’s plot facilities on the tip of the world, however right here’s the factor: it’s hopeful. The guide made me marvel, amid all of the post-apocalyptic tragedies, is there room for post-apocalyptic comedies? 

Tragedy vs. Comedy

A very contagious and deadly illness known as the “Georgia flu” spreads to all corners of the globalized world instantly. Earlier than humanity has time to react, the flu has killed over 99% of people. The 2 years after the illness has run its course are marked by suspicion, touring, and hazard. After this grueling interval, as folks address the truth that civilization has collapsed and the world won’t ever be the identical, the world doesn’t proceed to spiral into chaos however really begins to get higher. Folks start to belief one another once more by settling down into cities and villages collectively. Kirsten Raymonde, who was a baby when the world ended and has lived within the new world for twenty years after the onset of “Georgia flu,” attests to how a lot safer the world has turn into. Over the course of the novel, she displays that, “The world was softening” and that, “It’s a lot much less harmful than it was once.”¹ 

These secure and safer circumstances enable for the existence of (you guessed it) a touring troupe of instrumentalists and thespians. The group is known as The Symphony and is made up of musicians and actors who journey from settlement to settlement performing musical numbers and performs, together with Shakespeare. This characteristic alone reveals that Mandel has created a unique, extra optimistic world than many different post-apocalyptic landscapes. Attempt to shoehorn a troupe of touring Shakespeareans into The Strolling Useless, The Final of Us, or The Street. It simply doesn’t work. They’d be ripped aside earlier than intermission. 

As a substitute of a post-apocalyptic tragedy, Mandel has written what I’m calling a post-apocalyptic comedy. By post-apocalyptic comedy, I don’t essentially imply our trendy sense of comedy as a chunk of leisure that’s merely a vessel for jokes, devoid of any actual stakes. Shaun of the Useless and different related trendy comedies have completed that. I imply one thing extra like a Shakespearean comedy. Shakespeare’s comedies, whereas certainly humorous, typically include loads of drama and actual stakes. Hero’s character is assaulted in a false accusation and her buddies assume she was “Achieved to loss of life by slanderous tongues” in A lot ado About Nothing. Twelfth Evening begins with a twin brother and sister assuming their sibling died in a shipwreck. Measure for Measure consists of dramatic soliloquies and the specter of executions punctuated by syphilis jokes. 

Clearly these comedies aren’t missing in relation to drama or substance. Comedies on this sense often embody a relationship that, “doesn’t run clean, but overcomes all difficulties to finish in a cheerful union.”² Comedies descend into the darkness, messiness, and, sure, the humor of life for 4 acts, but they finish fortunately. As Lord Byron stated, “All tragedies are completed by a loss of life. All comedies are ended by a wedding.”³ There’s a whole lot of reality on this. You may often inform what style a play was by the way it ends. Did a number of characters die on the finish? You most likely simply watched a tragedy. Did two or extra characters get married or was there a celebration within the ultimate act? You most likely simply watched a comedy. 

Two of Shakespeare’s performs play out in Station Eleven: a tragedy and a comedy—King Lear and A Midsummer Evening’s Dream. Lear is acted out two weeks earlier than the world ends. The play, with its motifs of blindness, power-mongering, and trickery, epitomizes Mandel’s world earlier than the apocalypse. Nobody is strictly blissful earlier than the world ends in Station Eleven. Clark, for instance, grows pissed off with “iPhone zombies, folks half his age who wandered in a dream with their eyes fastened on their screens.”⁴ On his approach to a piece project, Clark tries to jostle these folks by obstructing their approach, forcing them to search for from their cellphone for a second. Nonetheless, one scene later Clark needs he might discover these folks and apologize to them as a result of he realizes he’s “as minimally current on this world” as they’re.⁵ Quite than being misplaced in his sensible cellphone, Clark loses himself in his work. He realizes this after a dialog with a girl who calls out the “Excessive-functioning sleepwalkers” of the company world.⁶ For these folks, “Work is meant to be drudgery punctuated by very occasional moments of happiness” however this ‘happiness’ is definitely “distraction.”⁷ 

Most post-apocalyptic tales are inclined to idealize the world earlier than its collapse, as if the tip of the world have been interrupting some excellent prelapsarian Eden. However Mandel is fast to level out the world’s flaws. Many individuals do drift via life depending on their Apple or Android machine. Others neglect their households, social lives, and bodily well being to pursue profession developments. Whether or not our fixation is our smartphone’s pixels or company promotions, many people quiet our persistent distress by day by day distraction. Doesn’t that make this world tragic? And if the tip of the world additionally includes the tip of those trendy miseries, doesn’t that make the tip of the world a superb factor? 

A depressing man accountable for two failed marriages performs the tragedy King Lear earlier than the world ends, whereas Kirsten and her troupe carry out the comedy A Midsummer Evening’s Dream after the tip of the world. Not like different depictions of the apocalypse, Station Eleven wonders if this world is within the ultimate acts of a tragedy whereas no matter comes subsequent is the comedy. What warrants the hope present in Station Eleven when virtually each different piece of leisure in its style is bleak and tragic?

Blissful Endings 

At one level throughout Station Eleven, a bunch of persons are stranded at an airport after illness has decimated the world round them. The huddled mass of shell-shocked survivors have solely just lately come to phrases with the truth that nobody is coming to avoid wasting them. This grim realization prompts a few pilots to commandeer a airplane. It’s the first time this group of individuals have seen a airplane take off in a very long time. For one character, watching the airplane barrel down the runway and launch into the sky is an emotional expertise. He asks himself, “Why, in his lifetime of frequent journey, had he by no means acknowledged the great thing about flight? The improbability of it.”⁸

Emily St. John Mandel additionally had a memorable flight expertise the day after her wedding ceremony. She was 26, flying to her honeymoon along with her new husband. Somebody had given the non-religious couple a replica of the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, for a marriage present. “Making an attempt to not dwell on the heavy-handedness” of this present, Mandel started to learn the textual content throughout the flight.⁹ The secular writer admits she grew tired of the guide till she began studying Music of Songs. Maybe particularly drawn to this textual content given her current marriage, she writes that the great thing about the Music of Songs, “pierced [her] atheistic coronary heart.” Her reward for the biblical guide soars; she describes it as “mysterious; attractive; elegant.” 

When the remainder of the Hebrew Bible bored her, why would she join with Music of Songs so poignantly? There are most likely a number of causes for this. Music of Songs is certainly distinctive within the biblical canon, the themes of the guide most likely resonated with Mandel’s state of affairs, and the lyrical fantastic thing about the poetry absolutely appealed to her writerly sensibilities. However deeper than all these causes, I believe the great thing about the marriage celebration featured in Music of Songs spoke to Mandel. A marriage is a lovely factor. It consists of among the biggest blessings in life right into a single celebration—household, buddies, meals, music, dancing, romance, and so forth. As Jesus stated, weddings are events for feasting and celebrating, not fasting and mourning (Matt. 9:15). 

The Bible, like several good comedy, ends in a wedding celebration. After the horror of beasts, illnesses, and cosmic ruptures, the apocalyptic guide on the finish of the Bible, Revelation, takes a decidedly comedic flip. Within the closing chapters of John’s Revelation, all the pieces has been made proper, and John hears multitudes shouting in pleasure. The multitude exclaims in a voice like thunder peals and floods that the marriage feast of the lamb has come (Rev. 19:6-9). The lamb, Jesus, is lastly celebrating his marriage to the bride, the church. Like all good comedy, Christ and his bride have been the final folks you’d’ve paired collectively. Christ was the consummate devoted hero who selected to pursue a bride who was terrible and untrue to him. However his love will prevail over all difficulties and he’ll at some point take pleasure in his wedding ceremony feast together with his stunning bride, and we really will dwell fortunately ever after. 

Many of the post-apocalyptic tales we take pleasure in are tragedies. They finish in loss of life, providing little to no hope. Whereas there’s a spot for these tales, Christians should do not forget that the Bible doesn’t have a tragic ending however a comedic one.

1.  Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven (New York: Classic Books, 2015), 132, 114. ↩︎
2.  M. H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, A Gloss of Literary Phrases. (Wadsworth Cengage Studying, tenth ed, 2012) 54. ↩︎
3.  Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto 3. ↩︎
4.  Mandel, Station Eleven, 160. ↩︎
5.  Ibid., 164. ↩︎
6.  Ibid., 163. ↩︎
7.  Ibid., 163. ↩︎
8.  Ibid., 247. ↩︎
9.  Emily St. John Mandel, A Closed World: On By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, The Tens of millions, March 7, 2014. ↩︎