Station Eleven and the purpose of art
With the world as they knew it gone, the characters remake the world from the resources they carry inside them.
I love Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 apocalyptic novel Station Eleven, and I waited eagerly for the recent HBO limited-series adaptation. Mandel’s meditation on the meaning of art in a society ripped apart by loss is ripe for our cultural moment. Although the show rewrites key character arcs and plotlines, it achieves its own beauty and coherence, embodying Mandel’s point about the importance of art adapting to the circumstances of the moment.
The story is set 20 years after a global flu pandemic kills 99 percent of the world’s population. A band of actors and musicians called the Traveling Symphony walk around Lake Michigan in a yearly circuit, performing Shakespeare and giving concerts to the small communities that have reconstituted themselves in the post-pandemic world. They live by the motto “Because survival is insufficient.” With the world as they knew it gone, they make art from the resources they carry inside them: plays and music they’ve committed to memory, a slogan repurposed from a Star Trek episode. Out of these glowing coals they build fires—both heat and light—around which new forms of human community can be imagined beyond the tasks of biological continuity.
The central work of art in the show is a graphic novel, also called Station Eleven, about an astronaut lost in space. Kirsten Raymonde (Mackenzie Davis), an actor in the Traveling Symphony, has carried the book with her since the pandemic began. Its language and images, which we hear and see only in snatches, structure her inner life profoundly. Her copy is one of few in existence, a private gift from a dear friend from the before times, so it seems both improbable and eerie when she meets a mysterious young man who calls himself the Prophet (Daniel Zovatto) and seems to know Station Eleven.
