Resisting Progress: The Fragmented History of Station Eleven
By: Claire Stratton
Tags: Emily St John Mandel, Progress, Pandemic, History, Station Eleven

Station Eleven presents a poignant and compassionate understanding of the troubles of modern life through the imagination of its destruction. It looks back on the present from a post-pandemic future, noticing the beauty, the superficiality, the technology, and the absurdity of its existence. The storyline oscillates back and forth in time, weaving between characters in the past and present, between places familiar and imagined. It jumps from a dinner party in Los Angeles to a beach in Malaysia to the fantasy world of Miranda’s Station Eleven, connecting Arthur, his ex-wives, his friends, and his co-workers to the people in the airport terminal and the Traveling Symphony. Through these disjunctions, Station Eleven constructs its own narrative of history by deconstructing both time and place. More specifically, it resists the idea that history progresses linearly– mirroring ideas found in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment– through its fluid conceptualization of time, its critique of modernity, and its appreciation of the surprising beauty that flourishes in the ruins of modernity.

In the same way Horkheimer and Adorno understand that “the curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression” (28), Station Eleven too is conscious of the pitfalls of the modern world and the mythical illusion of progress. Despite the advanced technological moment that the pre-collapse world is set in, its characters are plagued by unhappiness. When Miranda sits down with Arthur in his dressing room to talk, she wonders to herself, “did this happen to all actors, this blurring of borders between performance and life?”. “The man playing the part of the aging actor sipped his tea, and in that moment, acting or not, it seemed to her that he was deeply unhappy” (Mandel, 211). Arthur’s fame and career force him to continually perform, to retreat further and further away from his authentic self. His identity is so inauthentic and performative that he cannot sustain his relationships; when asked “which one?” upon mention of his ex-wife, he realizes “this was a sign of having gone seriously astray, wasn’t it? Having more than one ex-wife?” (Mandel, 320). Arthur is not the only one who feels he has lost himself and what is important. During the 360 report, a young woman named Dahlia articulates a profound, shared depression characteristic of the modern world. She notices the expected drudgery inherent in life, commenting to Clark that “adulthood’s full of ghosts… high functioning sleepwalkers, essentially” (Mandel, 163). When she says this, Clark realizes, “when was the last time he’d been truly moved by anything? When was the last time he felt awe or inspiration?” (Mandel, 164). As he recognizes his own numbness and the despicability of his life’s work, progress and modernity are again critiqued as being mere illusion. In contrast, when he enters the new world, Clark shaves the left side of head and “after all these years of corporate responsibility, the haircut made him feel like himself again” (Mandel, 249). Authenticity is just one of the many things that struggles to survive in the seemingly progressive modern world.

Station Eleven reshapes the conventional understanding of linear progress not just by critiquing the modern world, but by showing the beauty in its destruction. As the people in the Severn City Airport notice, “time had been reset by the catastrophe” (Mandel, 231), turning “progress” on its head and imagining a world that seems to go back in time. Interestingly, this regression is characterized not necessarily by pain and struggle, but by feelings of awe, inspiration, and appreciation that failed to exist in the old, seemingly modern world. When we are first introduced to the post-pandemic world, we are told, “what was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty” (57). The new world is thus bookmarked as something valuable in itself; it is not an inherent tragedy to go “backwards”. Throughout the novel, as the new world is lived and experienced, it is similarly described by small moments of appreciation. When Jeevan first steps outside of Frank’s apartment into the streets of his city, he finds “a stark and unexpected beauty, silent metropolis, no movement” (Mandel, 182). Decades into the collapse, this feeling still permeates its characters observations: “in the morning light there was beauty in the decrepitude, sunlight catching in the flowers that had spring up through the gravel of long overgrown driveways, mossy front porches turned brilliant green, a white blossoming bush alive with butterflies. This dazzling world” (Mandel, 296). Unlike in the pre-collapse modern world in which objects like the paperweight get haphazardly moved around and forgotten about, objects regain meaning in the new world. The Museum of Civilization is created because “Clark had always been fond of beautiful objects, and in his present state of mind, all objects were beautiful. He stood by the case and found himself moved by every object he saw there, by the human enterprise each object had required” (255). The contrast between the characters’ ability to enjoy life in the new world and their unhappiness in the old world pointedly disrupts conventional thinking of the linear progress of history. By fracturing time and showing the beauty in modernity’s destruction, Mandel creates her own history that understands progress as myth.

The political message is not immediately clear in Station Eleven, but Mandel’s willingness to shatter time, to critique the banality of the modern world, and to appreciate the beauty in modernity’s destruction undeniably reveal the politically powerful way the novel uncouples progress and linear time. As she guides the reader through her fragmented narrative, she asks us to reconsider the way that the past, present, and future are commonly conceptualized, to learn to map history unconventionally, and to create new modes of understanding.