Shakespeare is Insufficient: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
When the world changes in an instant, we learn what was timeless, and what will be left behind.
Station Eleven is, yes, a pandemic story. A dystopia from another time, it was published in 2014 to high acclaim, back when “pandemic” was a board game, or a term from a history book. The flu that strikes the world in Station Eleven is swift, and it leaves few survivors. Among those who remain are members of a “traveling symphony,” a band of musicians and actors who have found one another and travel from settlement to settlement in a caravan, bartering their arts for supplies, shelter, and respite.
On the bed of one of the caravan trucks the traveling symphony uses (its tires flat, it is pulled by horses), there is a quote from Star Trek painted in bold white letters: “Survival is insufficient.” It’s the closest thing to a religion for these survivors who seek to bring Bach and Shakespeare to post-apocalyptic humanity. It could be an adage for any kind of life, but here, in modernity’s wasteland, it is bold. Maybe even controversial.
Just as our own 2020 pandemic brings the word “essential” into new relief, fraught with the labor of people whose jobs keep us alive and safe, Emily St. John Mandel’s novel shows us what essential means to those who have lost almost everything. It means ingenuity — but more importantly, it means a band of fellow survivors: a community, a team to carry out the work of maintaining life without modern conveniences. Those with medical knowledge and skill are essential in this story, certainly. Also those with the ability to hunt, to move stealthily through a forest, to build a fire and a shelter and forage for things to eat. Those with the ability to kill when necessary.
But what about music? What about Shakespeare?
For me, who was skeptical of a pandemic novel right now, Station Eleven pleasantly surprised me. It was not the kind of apocalyptic story that required suspension of disbelief. That’s because instead of letting dystopian world-building drive its narrative, it is instead trained on the inner lives of the story’s survivors. We all know the stories of survivors from our real, non-fictional history; we’ve coexisted with all manner of survivors even before the pandemic: survivors of childhood abuse, of sexual violence, of war, of natural disasters. Even our elderly can be seen as survivors: survivors of a long life, with so many gone.
Therefore, unlike other books in its genre, Station Eleven ensures that its apocalypse is not a cynical one — the world is too much with us — but rather is a simulation of humanity doing more than just surviving. It doesn’t need much fantasy to show us this documented side of our human nature, the side that wants and needs more than just breath, food, and shelter.
At one point, two characters debate the education of children born after the pandemic. It’s Year 15 in this chapter. “‘I don’t know,’ their friend was saying now. ‘Does it still make sense to teach kids about the way things were?’... ‘I’m honestly not sure,’ Daria said. ‘I think I’d want my kid to know. All that knowledge, those incredible things we had.’ ‘To what end, though?...You see the way their eyes glaze over when anyone talks to them about antibiotics or engines. It’s science fiction to them, isn’t it? And if it only upsets them--’ ‘Maybe you’re right,’ Daria said. ‘I suppose the question is, does knowing these things make them more or less happy?’” In Year 15, characters are wondering what should endure, and they sense that as survivors of civilization, they are radically different from their children.
The book opens in Year 0, though, on the eve of the outbreak, at a theatre. It’s a performance of King Lear. Lear is a story about a lot of things: old age; the things that haunt us. Inheritances of the next generation. By the end of Station Eleven, two children of the pandemic, both eight years old in Year 0, will face entirely different inheritances from the old world. One will grow up to be our hero, the other our villain. It matters what we take with us into tomorrow; “after” doesn’t erase “before,” but it does define it. It matters how we educate our children, how we tell the truth about tragedies. “I can’t wait till things get back to normal,” one character says, a few too many weeks into the devastation. She will pass this willful optimism on to her son, but in him it will mutate, taking the shape of a prophecy that is only persuasive when coupled with the butt of a loaded rifle.
By the end of Station Eleven, two children of the pandemic, both eight years old in Year 0, will face entirely different inheritances from the old world. One will grow up to be our hero, the other our villain. It matters what we take with us into tomorrow; “after” doesn’t erase “before,” but it does define it.
As such, this novel also need not look to fantasy to imagine the kind of evil that arises in the vacuum left by society. Like in our present pandemic landscape, false prophets abound in Station Eleven. In fact, our own pandemic has taught us that gunpoint isn’t needed for genocidal prophecies to take hold, as long as the right kind of political figure can make freedom sound antithetical to justice. But both stories of pandemic reveal the ways in which a crisis gives way to Hannah Arendt’s idea of the banality of evil, which she outlines in her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem.
For Arendt, “evil comes from a failure to think.” What made Adolf Eichmann, and other Nazi officers like him, banal in his evil was how “thoughtless” he was: that he amassed influence through systematic lying in favor of the version of reality that served his power, and by promising that same power to others. “The net effect of this language system was not to keep these people ignorant of what they were doing, but to prevent them from equating it with their old, ‘normal’ knowledge of murder and lies,” Arendt explains.
“Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth,” she goes on to argue, “and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III 'to prove a villain.' Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all.”
“I can’t wait till things get back to normal,” one character says, a few too many weeks into the devastation.
With “extraordinary diligence in looking out for personal advancement,” the American band of false prophets in Washington clinch their fight against accessible health care and other social welfare programs in this public health crisis. They need not the persuasive machinations of Iago, nor even the suggestive witches of Macbeth; the assurance of their reelection is enough to make them fan the flames of conspiracies about inflated death counts, lab-engineered viruses, Bill Gates, and the Book of Revelation.
In Station Eleven, the traveling symphony performs Shakespeare plays, but one member of the troupe, “the clarinet” as she is called, wants to write her own plays. When she’s asked if she thinks she can top Shakespeare, she says no — it’s not about that. “She wanted to write something modern, something that addressed this age in which they’d somehow landed.” Yes, the clarinet knows that Shakespeare’s life and world were marked, too, by plague. “The difference,” though, “was that they’d seen electricity, they’d seen everything, they’d watched a civilization collapse, and Shakespeare hadn’t. In Shakespeare’s time the wonders of technology were still ahead, not behind them, and far less had been lost.”
The clarinet wants to write a play for her age because she knows that “survival might be insufficient...but on the other hand, so was Shakespeare.” Arendt has the same point. Our great pre-pandemic human dramas of good and evil feel essential as talismans connecting us to our past. But we will also need new stories to usher us into the future. Station Eleven may be one that survives our pre-pandemic canon as a dystopian story that knew how evil would emerge, and how goodness would survive. In conjuring the interiorities not of an imagined age, but of every age — those well-acquainted with death, like Lear — the author not only convinces; she counsels.
