The Sweetness of Life on Earth
Time as the Sublime in the World of Station Eleven
Author’s Note:
I’ve never felt myself particularly drawn to post-apocalyptic literature, but St. John Mandel’s novel was a lovely read.
The question of time in a post apocalyptic world has more weight than the mere meaning of clocks or calendars. Characters are shaped by their understanding of time, their acknowledgement of its existence and their recognition of its passing. Time becomes the reason to live and the reason to remember. Time represents death, loss, birth, and growth in the post apocalyptic novel. In Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel Station Eleven, linear time is replaced by a conglomeration of timelines, each happening simultaneously in separate worlds, yet all predetermined by the prior events. The novel is told in multiple threads, illustrating lives both pre and post apocalypse. The cast of characters weave in and out of the text, appearing briefly in the present or the past before disappearing only to turn up once more just when you least expect them. Time is fluid, not adhering to any one rule. Time is what causes apocalypse, as time is something that is always moving onward. Yet time is not always moving in a straight line. In Station Eleven, time functions as the indication of an apocalyptic shift, a shift of time into fragments that instead of moving linearly, drift together and away from one another, creating the obscured timelines found in the novels. In these two novels, time functions as the post apocalyptic “sublime.”
The sublime is categorized as moments at which things are both awe inspiring and frightening at the same time. Characters in Station Eleven frequently encounter time as being something so frightening or inexplicable that it appears beautiful. Time is thought of as being a straight arrow, something that is measurable and definite, but in the case of Station Eleven, this is not the case. St. John Mandel uses multiple plotlines to weave her novel between the present, the past, and perhaps the future. She flips between the life of Arthur pre-pandemic to Jeevan amidst the pandemic, to the traveling symphony in year 20, traversing the post-apocalyptic reality. St. John Mandel writes, “What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty” (57). This quote appears in the time after the apocalypse, and despite the twenty years following the mass extinction of the human race and the drastic changes in lifestyle, the inhabitants who lived through this time period still see beauty in it. The sublime of time allows them to still see beauty despite having lost almost everything and almost everyone, the grand scale of this loss is still marked by a particular beauty.
The post-apocalyptic sublime in these two novels is found within the moments at which linear time is distorted. The distortions range from time literally slowing down to time jumping backwards and forwards with little consequence. In Station Eleven a large part of the sublime is found in how time functions as a predestined influence. This comes with the distortion of linear time and the substitution of a deeper time. St. John Mandel creates a sense of time that is inherently linked, a traceable past that determines the events in the future, even if the events do not happen in a linear order. Time flips forward and backwards, with characters appearing to grasp at the remnants of past memories in which they existed, and sensing memories in which they were mere fragments of the future yet to come. This is found especially in Kirsten’s character, and her connection through the paperweight. The paperweight and the comics are the two objects that connect the past with the present, the objects that form a bridge between the various timelines the novel jumps between. Kirsten observes the paperweight, a symbol of the sublime—a beauty that transcends meaning or time, a representation of the space between the past and the presence. “The paperweight was a smooth lump of glass with storm clouds in it, about the size of a plum. It was of no practical use whatsoever, nothing but dead weight in the bag but she found it beautiful. A woman had given it to her before the collapse, but she couldn’t remember the woman’s name” (66). The paperweight is an example of the sublime for Kirsten. It is a memory and a non-memory. She connects it with the past, yet it has become a constant member of her collection in the present. It bridges the past and the present, and to Kirsten, is unimaginably beautiful. She can not place what it is that she is drawn to as she does not know it’s relevance to the history of the pre and post apocalyptic world, as it is the sublime object that ties her with what once was. The paperweight represents the past continuing yet the present changing to something new.
When Jeevan is remembering his brother, Frank, before facing the outside world, he reflects on time as having a larger role in his brother’s accident. Jeevan remembers making ice cream with Frank and his mother when they were children, reflecting that: “the bullet that would sever his spinal cord still twenty-five years away but already approaching: a woman giving birth to a child who will someday pull the trigger on a gun, a designer sketching the weapon or its precursor, a dictator making a decision that will spark in the fullness of time into a conflagration that Frank will go overseas” (191). Jeevan is thinking of time as the sublime, something larger than the mere number on a clock. Linear time is distorted in his realization that events which took place twenty years earlier put into motion the events which happen in the present. He describes these moments in history which are already in motion as “the pieces of a pattern drifting closer together” (191). In the case of Station Eleven the novel is a continuous drift of time, moments in time which are both individual yet connected through something deeper. Deep time is the sublime, something that the characters can not quite explain yet vaguely recognize.
Shakespeare also functions as a representation of time as the sublime in Station Eleven. When Kirsten performs as Tatiania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, she experiences something inexplicable. St. John Mandel writes, “Lines of a play written in 1594, the year London’s theaters reopened after two seasons of plague. Or written possibly a year later, in 1595 … Some centuries later on a distant continent, Kirsten moves across the stage in a cloud … half in rage, half in love” ( 57). When considering the span of time between when the plays Kirsten and her troupe are performing and the date of this unknown future apocalypse, linear time seems to lose all meaning. The distance between the origin of these lines and Kirsten’s performance is unimaginable—it falls into the category of the sublime, something that is so unbelievably vast or alarmingly inexplicable that it is beautiful. Kirsten seems to recognize this in both her performance and in her decision to join and travel with the symphony. She knows that she and her peers are creating something sublime, creating performances that are somehow so inexplicable that they are beautiful and still relevant in this post pandemic world.
Earlier in the novel it is explained why Shakespeare is the chosen playwright, “They’d performed more modern plays sometimes in the first few years, but what was startling, what no one would have anticipated, was that the audience seemed to prefer Shakespeare to their other theatrical offerings” (38). The sublimity of time taking form in surprise from the inhabitants of the post-apocalyptic world of Station Eleven in their preference of Shakespeare over modern work is an example of how time does not function in a linear fashion in the novel. In this post-apocalyptic world, people long for the past, yet they long for a present and a future as well. Time is something greater than mere history, “‘People want what was best about the world,’ Dieter said. He himself found it difficult to live in the present” (38). In Station Eleven the past is intricately linked with the present, the past is the present and the present is the past. As Mandel writes, Shakespeare wrote these plays to be performed following the reopening of the theaters after the plague in Elizabethan England. The repetition of history is also seen as sublime in this novel, as the traveling symphony is performing these plays following an even worse plague, one that had a 99.99% mortality rate, wiping the majority of the population that would have been familiar with these plays from the face of Earth. Yet they remain relevant even to those born after the pandemic, those who only have the most recent present to base their ideas and beliefs on.
The two timelines can not stand alone without one another. This is how the sublime functions in the novel. As Jeevan recalls how the events which predetermined his brother’s injury were set into motion years prior to their occurrence in Jeevan and Frank’s life, a similar link is made between Shakespeare and the traveling symphony, a troupe of outsiders performing the lines penned by Shakespeare in another lifetime, yet still ring true to the new generation of people living in the post-apocalyptic world in which nearly the entire human population has disappeared from. In these examples time loses all linear meaning. It becomes something abstract and fragmented. In Station Eleven fragments of time drift to and from one another, forming the timelines that work together to tell the story of the numerous characters. Events appear predetermined centuries in advance, characters feel a deep connection to theater written decades prior to their own birth, and the disjointed world of the post pandemic world in year 20 still finds a unique beauty in the sentiments of a world long gone. It is through this disjointed narration style and the beauty of the vast expanse of life’s tempo that establishes time as the sublime in Station Eleven.
Works Cited:
St. John Mandel, Emily. Station Eleven. First Vintage Books. 2014