Postapocalyptic Curating: Cultural Crises and the Permanence of Art in Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven

Abstract

In the first years of the twenty-first century, a number of American authors2 have set out to discover (using environmental disasters, pandemics, 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 technology (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 postapocalyptic text, underlining the importance of art and culture for our species 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