Postapocalyptic Curating: Cultural Crises and the Permanence of Art in Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven

In the first years of the twenty-first century, a number of American authors² have set out to discover (using environmental disasters, pandemics, nuclear wars, massive failures of technology, or fossil fuel scarcity) what would define humanity if societies and civilizations were to collapse in a planetary crisis. While most of these texts focus on the immediate aftermath of civilization's collapse, Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven depicts survivors of a pandemic catastrophe trying, twenty years later, to cope with a new reality. In a world with no borders or countries, the Traveling Symphony, a group of musicians and actors, brings music and plays to scattered settlements in a humanist endeavor. At the same time, in what used to be an airport, a former corporate consultant painstakingly curates the Museum of Civilization, which tries to pass down a sense of shared culture with its collection of donated, useless remnants of technology (credit cards, smartphones, laptops) and assorted objects found in abandoned baggage.

The novel emphasizes the resilience of cultural objects in a brave new world where Shakespeare and obscure science fiction comics apparently coexist in terms of cultural importance. The troupe's motto, "Survival is not enough," stresses the importance of a renewed idea of culture in defining what is human. While in other postapocalyptic texts humanity is defined through individual moral choices—such as those made by the ones "carrying the fire" in Cormac McCarthy's 2006 The Road—Station Eleven suggests that, were humans to survive such an unprecedented crisis, the only hope to escape being feralized lies in a communal, continuous effort to recreate culture. Station Eleven stands out as a rare, hopeful postapocalyptic text, underlining the importance of art and culture for our species and the deeply moral individual and communal choices necessary to recover from crisis by practicing and conserving culture.

Station Eleven was nominated in 2014 for the National Book Award, and it was also a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. While it did not receive either of these awards, it did win the Arthur C. Clarke Award, one of the most prestigious in science fiction. The Arthur C. Clarke Award has been, in recent years, part of the controversy³ about what qualifies as "science fiction" and what the boundaries of the genre are, and the committee justified the election of Mandel's novel by defining the award as a celebration of

new books and new writers, but most of all … [a celebration] alongside all the readers and lovers of stories who are given a unique invitation to encounter something new, something strange and something wonderful whenever a new shortlist is announced. The love of books and the sharing of stories is the true legacy we should aim to create.

(Butler)

One of the reasons underlying the controversy about the boundaries of science-fiction as a genre is the ascription to it of texts which occur in the near future but which do not have that "scientific" approach that some purists in the genre deem necessary. Veronica Hollinger has talked about the "'disappearance' of science fiction as a separate generic enterprise at the present time," precisely because as a genre, science fiction could be considered to be "'irrelevant,' because, as discourse, it has become so significant" (217). Hollinger concludes that "the fin-de-millennium, for science fiction, spells the fin-de-genre": the fin-de millennium, as the Arthur C. Clarke controversy proves, seems to have extended into the early twenty-first century (217). These musings about genre could be seen, indeed, as irrelevant, but the dominance of postapocalyptic narratives⁴ in the space that was occupied before by the wider label of science fiction attests, as James Berger has described, to a "pervasive post-apocalyptic sensibility in recent American culture" (xiii).⁵ The Arthur C. Clarke committee highlighted, when awarding the prize, how Station Eleven is

a novel that straddles the story of a global apocalypse … and its survivors 20 years later. While many post-apocalypse novels focus on the...