Key Themes: ‘Station Eleven’ by Emily St. John Mandel

THE IMPORTANCE OF ART IN CREATING MEANING

This is most evident in the increased importance of Shakespeare post pandemic, as while “they performed more more modern plays….in the first few years,” “audiences seemed to prefer Shakespeare.” The basic human themes of Shakespeare - guilt, love, tragedy, are enduring, and speak to all audiences, which is noted by Dieter when he states, “people want to see what was best about the world.”

Mandel’s representation of art is that of an attempt to create beauty and hope in a landscape characterised by loss, mournful sadness and bleak desolation. The performance of Shakespeare is a narrative escape – it shows us the sweetness/beauty of life, it “cast[s] a spell” of wonder and hope, providing brief respite from the suffering caused by the pandemic.

August’s poetry provides a similar opportunity for self expression - in the effort to communicate his feelings for Kirsten, he composes a tercet for her: “A fragment for my friend-/If your soul left this earth I would follow and find you/Silent, my starship suspended in night.” Kirsten is “impossibly moved” by August’s words, as here poetry is revealed to be a vehicle for human expression and emotion.

Mandel’s work thus seems to leave her characters oscillating between two states of being. In one state characters are conscious of the intense sweetness of art and life - they compose poetry and act in plays. In another state, characters bear tattoos of “two black knives” on their skin to symbolise the lives they have taken, as they live in a world where death is to always be anticipated. The meaning that art creates for characters reflects this - the beauty created by art is transitory, fleeting and ephemeral – but it is often the only escape that characters can rely upon.

The Symphony’s maxim, “survival is insufficient” is a testament to the need for hope and meaning in the lives of those who perform. We see that members of the Symphony believe that the endurability of Shakespeare is a greater analogy for the endurability of the human spirit in the face of tragedy, sparking hope through performance. This is clear in Kirsten’s reflections on the word “pestilential” as she reflects on the difficulty of performance and theatre in Shakespeare’s era, where “plague closed theatres again and again,” and “death flicker[ed] over the landscape.” Now, Kirsten realises, “the age of electricity [has] come and gone,” but still “Tatiana turns to face her fairy King,” as the human spirit endures despite suffering plague once more, and Shakespeare still makes its way onto stages.

THE POWER OF RELIGION

Throughout the text we see that characters turn to religious systems in order to justify the calamity of the plague and the consequences it has led to. This is clear within Mandel’s representation of the Prophet, who as a child finds comfort in extreme and literalist biblical interpretation, claiming that, “the virus was an angel” and that “everything happens for a reason.” Through sermons he preaches to his followers that the pandemic was a “cleansing of the earth” and that “such a perfect agent of death could only be divine.” The implications of this are that people who did not succumb to the plague were intentionally spared because “[they] are the light.”

While espousing this philosophy gives Tyler’s followers hope that their suffering carries some form of meaning, Tyler’s status as the Prophet of a “doomsday cult” also provides him social capital. He uses this social capital to both reinforce his regime, holding funerals for people who “leave without permission,” but also to act on what he believes are divine commandments “to repopulate the Earth,” demanding the twelve year old Eleanor as a bride.

Mandel’s depiction of religion is critical - particularly when she draws attention to Tyler’s claim that his town, St. Deborah by the Water, “is a place of order,” and that “people with chaos in their hearts cannot abide here.” This claim is then followed by Tyler’s demand that the company “consider leaving Alexandra” as he was “looking for another bride.” It is clear then, that the ‘order’ Tyler mentions in St. Deborah is seeded in authoritarian rule which he justifies through highly dichotomous, biblical language. August notes that followers of the Prophet “call themselves the light” as it evokes a binary opposition depicting all enemies of the Prophet “[as] darkness.” The radical nature of this belief system, coupled with its simplification of human motives as either ‘good’ or ‘evil,’ provides tacit permission to inflict violence on enemies, and justifies barbarism in the name of a greater ideology.

FAITH AND OTHER BELIEF SYSTEMS

While Mandel is critical of the how radical faith may warp ethical standards in times of extreme conflict and difficulty, there are also moments when she provides sympathetic reflection on the need for faith and ritual that some characters possess. Kirsten, for example, “had never entirely let go” of the idea that “if she reached far enough with her thoughts she might find someone waiting.” Her belief is as though if two people thought and felt strongly for each other “at the same moment” then their thoughts “might somehow meet in the middle.” While Kirsten, unlike the Prophet is able to critically evaluate her beliefs as “foolish,” there is something in the act of faith that draws Mandel’s sympathy as Kirsten once again looks at the “still empty” road behind the Symphony, thinking of her missing friend. This sympathy is echoed in August’s prayers as he often “murmured over the dead,” words such as “I hope it was peaceful at the end.” August also believes in “the theory of multiple universes” hoping and believing there was an alternate world out there that had not succumbed to the Georgia Flu. Mandel implies that there is value in the ritual as it provides him a vehicle to communicate the grief he feels in witnessing such tragedy around him.

Even the Prophet’s death is given some measure of sympathy, as Kirsten reflects that “whatever else the prophet had become” he was once “a boy adrift on the road.” This reflection on the extent to which circumstance can lead to the morphing of character as a desperate attempt to find meaning in a world dictated by chaos and cruelty allows Kirsten a measure of closure when considering the consequences of Tyler’s actions.

This depiction of faith as something understandably human and born from intense suffering and grief is reflected in Elizabeth, who claims that humanity survives “catastrophe after catastrophe” as “everything happens for a reason.” This delusion is necessary for Elizabeth who finds it “still inconceivable that civilization might not come back.” Mandel asks an interesting question on what people owe each other in the face of tragedy, as Clark later reflects that he should have done more to pull her “back from the edge.” Perhaps, Mandel seems to ask, there are communal responsibilities of communication, empathy and kindness that we owe each other in the face of disaster, lest we all slip into insanity? It seems that the empathy and generosity characters like Kirsten and Clark are able to afford to people like Elizabeth and Tyler exists due to a shared understanding of suffering, and a shared need for faith in times of turmoil.