What kind of salvage it envisions can be better appreciated by reading the novel through Williams’ notion of ‘salvagepunk’ ( 2011: 20), in which salvage is the work of uncovering apocalyptic revelations hidden in the rubble of catastrophe in order to make a new world. Station Eleven implies that civilization can be salvaged. Miranda’s amusement works along the lines Hogle describes, addressing the economic collapse of 2007–8 only to disguise it by minimizing its effect in relation to a much larger collapse. It says: You wanted a collapse? This is a collapse. The comparison implicit in Miranda’s reflection, which takes place when she knows she is dying from the Flu, is wry and ironic. In gothic fiction, suggests Hogle, contemporary ‘desires, quandaries, and sources of anxiety’ are simultaneously ‘address and disguise’ ( Hogle, 2002: 4) by transforming those fears into ‘extreme’ ( Hogle, 2002: 14) forms. ![]() In this respect, Station Eleven - while not a gothic novel - borrows an operation of the gothic described by Jerrold E. The pandemic’s seemingly apocalyptic scale and effect legitimize a desire to recuperate and redeem the pre-Flu world lacking the revelation critics Andrew Tate, Evan Calder Williams, and Teresa Heffernan associate with the arrival of apocalypse, the novel rejects a critique of 21st-century capitalism, even as it alludes to its long history and its deleterious effects. This article will argue that this scene, in which Mandel places Miranda’s reflection on the word ‘collapse’ immediately after a description of the world-ending pandemic, exemplifies a key characteristic of Station Eleven. ![]() In this new reality, Miranda muses on ‘how casually everyone had once thrown the word collapse around’ after the ‘economic collapse’ of 2007–8, something which makes her both ‘troubled’ and ‘amused’ ( Mandel, 2014: 217). In Malaysia, ‘he three nearest airports had closed in the previous ninety minutes’, and in the ‘coffin chill’ ( 2014: 217) of the ‘oddly empty’ ( 2014: 225) hotel Miranda is staying at, the ‘staff had fled’ ( 2014: 227) and the ‘concierge w a surgical mask’ and looks at her with ‘unmistakable fear’ ( 2014: 225). ‘n a beach on the coast of Malaysia’ ( Mandel, 2014: 217), the Georgia Flu is closing in ultimately the pandemic will have a ‘mortality rate’ of ‘99 percent’ ( Mandel, 2014: 253) and cause what one character calls ‘the end of the world’ ( Mandel, 2014: 176). Hogle’s description of the gothic to show how Station Eleven simultaneously addresses and disguises what Williams calls ‘capitalist apocalypse’, and in the process comes tantalizingly close to – but ultimately refuses – revelation. Reading the novel through Evan Calder Williams’ concept of ‘salvagepunk’, it borrows Jerrold E. The second section continues this focus on the novel’s engagement with capitalism. The first argues that the novel’s use of Shakespeare helps Mandel register the way the Georgia Flu brings the end of the Anthropocene, an era she also defines as the era of globalized trade. ![]() The article is arranged into two sections. Organized around a close reading of a scene in which a character named Miranda explicitly links the economic collapses of 2007–8 and the collapse occasioned by the Flu, this article argues that the novel and its characters come close to acknowledging – as critics Frederick Buell and Evan Calder Williams do – that the pre-Flu world was already apocalyptic, but in failing to fully do so they seek to redeem and recuperate this world rather than build a newer, better one. This article argues that in Station Eleven, the apocalypse brought by the Georgia Flu does not lead to revelation.
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