Station Eleven: Put up-Apocalyptic Comedy and the Inconceivable Blissful Ending

We’ve watched the world finish dozens of instances. Over the past couple many years, post-apocalyptic tales have completely enraptured us. These tales are, by and huge, bleak. They’re tragedies. For years The Strolling Lifeless spun a really unhappy, very gory yarn concerning the inevitable erosion of individuals and locations as human civilization succumbs to the zombie apocalypse. Cormac McCarthy’s The Highway presents an terrible grey world by which the ocean is now not blue and another 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 full of demise, loss, and human cruelty because the characters trudge by means of fungus. Put up-apocalyptic tales have lengthy been widespread, however lately these motion pictures, exhibits, and books have carved out a fair bigger area for themselves within the leisure market. 

Put up-apocalyptic tales are de facto tragedies. The style requires large quantities of demise, 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 ebook made me surprise, amid all of the post-apocalyptic tragedies, is there room for post-apocalyptic comedies? 

Tragedy vs. Comedy

A really 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 toddler 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 out to be. 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.”¹ 

These secure and safer situations permit for the existence of (you guessed it) a touring troupe of instrumentalists and thespians. The group 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 function alone exhibits that Mandel has created a special, extra optimistic world than many different post-apocalyptic landscapes. Attempt to shoehorn a troupe of touring Shakespeareans into The Strolling Lifeless, The Final of Us, or The Highway. It simply doesn’t work. They’d be ripped aside earlier than intermission. 

As an alternative 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 bit of leisure that’s merely a vessel for jokes, devoid of any actual stakes. Shaun of the Lifeless and different related trendy comedies have achieved that. I imply one thing extra like a Shakespearean comedy. Shakespeare’s comedies, whereas certainly humorous, typically comprise loads of drama and actual stakes. Hero’s character is assaulted in a false accusation and her buddies assume she was “Executed to demise by slanderous tongues” in A lot ado About Nothing. Twelfth Night time begins with a twin brother and sister assuming their sibling died in a shipwreck. Measure for Measure contains 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 easy, 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 mentioned, “All tragedies are completed by a demise. All comedies are ended by a wedding.”³ There’s a variety of fact on this. You’ll be able to often inform what style a play was by the way it ends. Did a number of characters die on the finish? You in all probability simply watched a tragedy. Did two or extra characters get married or was there a celebration within the remaining act? You in all probability simply watched a comedy. 

Two of Shakespeare’s performs play out in Station Eleven: a tragedy and a comedy—King Lear and A Midsummer Night time’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 precisely pleased earlier than the world ends in Station Eleven. Clark, for instance, grows annoyed with “iPhone zombies, folks half his age who wandered in a dream with their eyes mounted on their screens.”⁴ On his method to a piece project, Clark tries to jostle these folks by obstructing their means, forcing them to search for from their cellphone for a second. Nonetheless, one scene later Clark needs he may 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 Slightly than being misplaced in his good cellphone, Clark loses himself in his work. He realizes this after a dialog with a lady 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 likely 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 by means of life depending on their Apple or Android gadget. 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 every day distraction. Doesn’t that make this world tragic? And if the tip of the world additionally entails the tip of those trendy miseries, doesn’t that make the tip of the world a great 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 Night time’s Dream after the tip of the world. Not like different depictions of the apocalypse, Station Eleven wonders if this world is within the remaining acts of a tragedy whereas no matter comes subsequent is the comedy. What warrants the hope present in Station Eleven when nearly 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 lately come to phrases with the truth that nobody is coming to save lots of 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 together with her new husband. Somebody had given the non-religious couple a duplicate of the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, for a marriage present. “Attempting to not dwell on the heavy-handedness” of this present, Mandel started to learn the textual content through the flight.⁹ The secular creator admits she grew tired of the ebook till she began studying Track of Songs. Maybe particularly drawn to this textual content given her latest marriage, she writes that the great thing about the Track of Songs, “pierced [her] atheistic coronary heart.” Her reward for the biblical ebook soars; she describes it as “mysterious; attractive; elegant.” 

When the remainder of the Hebrew Bible bored her, why would she join with Track of Songs so poignantly? There are in all probability a number of causes for this. Track of Songs is certainly distinctive within the biblical canon, the themes of the ebook in all probability resonated with Mandel’s scenario, 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 Track of Songs spoke to Mandel. A marriage is a wonderful factor. It contains a few of the best blessings in life right into a single celebration—household, buddies, meals, music, dancing, romance, and many others. As Jesus mentioned, 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 ebook on the finish of the Bible, Revelation, takes a decidedly comedic flip. Within the closing chapters of John’s Revelation, all the things 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 several 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 sooner or later take pleasure in his wedding ceremony feast along with his lovely bride, and we really will reside fortunately ever after. 

Many of the post-apocalyptic tales we take pleasure in are tragedies. They finish in demise, providing little to no hope. Whereas there’s a spot for these tales, Christians should keep in mind 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. ↩︎