“Survival is insufficient.” Station Eleven, Emily St. Mandel’s 2014 dystopian novel, followed by the HBO series released in 2021, is a case study on how people change, perpetuate, and internalize the art they love. Based in a post-apocalyptic world after the “Georgian Flu” pandemic, a fictitious strain of the swine flu that wiped out 99% of the population, survivors form sparse and distrusting societies across the Great Lakes region of North America, formerly the US. Mandel’s novel follows an eerily familiar timeline orbiting life pre and post-pandemic, in which “Year 0” marks ground zero of the outbreak and observing twenty years after. Society undergoes a “new normal” as Mandel’s end-time novel fills your head with ‘what ifs’ violently adjacent to our COVID-19 reality to underscore what is integral to carrying on from the perspective of the ones left behind.
Mandel’s style reads like a cautionary tale as her omniscient narration dutifully witnesses the initial panic to contain the flu to a dwindled society after the flu ravishes and the dust begins to settle. Pre-pandemic, the protagonist, eight-year-old Kirsten Raymonde, is acting in her first production of King Lear. Post-pandemic, we find her again as she continues to put on Shakespearean plays as a rugged actor belonging to the Traveling Symphony, a performing troupe that travels between towns. In a post-world, pandemic survivors crave art in all forms, even internalizing the message, the escapism of a narrative, as salvation. Traveling Symphony bears the Star Trek slogan “Survival is insufficient,” in which Mandel equates the arts with the air we live and breathe, even more as a vehicle of cultural immortality.
A society stripped of systems of modern life holds reverence for Beethoven, scavenging for weapons alongside materials to repair classical string instruments, as a member of the Symphony believes that “People want what was best about the world.” Kirsten’s childhood is shaped by the Symphony’s influence until she becomes a Shakespearean actor who relies on knife tattoos on her forearm to remember each of her kills. The art that saved Kirsten from the chaos of the outbreak jeopardizes the nomadic troupe as the novel’s name is called back to a prophetic comic called “Station Eleven,” which ignites an occult following. The Prophet, the antagonist Tyler Leander, challenges Kirsten’s lifeline in The Symphony as he leads a child army to hunt down The Symphony and all remnants of the past under the guise of the outbreak’s divine revelation. Art intertwines protagonist to antagonist as Kirsten preserves the expression of grief for a lost world through the relics of a pre-pandemic comic and theater. For Kirsten, the comic’s lines echo throughout the plot; “I remember damage,” “I don’t want to live the wrong life and then die,” as she holds art as a talisman to find a new future.
In a social landscape flattened by the chaos of the flu, Mandel asks us what prevails and what is truly necessary for people to live and not just survive. The focus surrounding the arts is the heartbeat of the novel and offers a philosophical statement on the immortality of art. Mandel commits a post-apocalyptic death of an author as a means to bind communication and expression of the arts directly to human intimacy in a society searching for obsolescence.
