Archiving the Future: The Uneasy Relationship between Individual Memory and Communal Artifacts in Station Eleven

Abstract

"In Emily St. John Mandel’s dystopian novel Station Eleven (2014), memory is a commodity that is traded, bartered, hoarded, and curated as both an amulet and a shield for survivors of the Georgia flu pandemic. Mandel employs a circular, and often circuitous, narrative arc to tell her story, thus mirroring the haphazard lives led by the protagonists whose control over their destinies unravels in the wake of the pandemic. The survivors’ stories are told through their relationship to artifacts, and in particular to the graphic novel Dr. Eleven, whose first volume, Station Eleven, shares its title with Mandel’s novel, thus creating multiple layers of textual intersection. This collaborative and relational exploration of people and objects offers an opportunity for new readings into the use of trauma, performance, and memory in dystopian fiction.
Survivors in Mandel’s world give value to objects based on individual emotional attachments. Mandel asks her readers to question the worth we attach to found objects in a post-pandemic world not driven by consumerism and currency. She proposes that the desirability of an object lies not in the artifact itself, but in the creative effort and application of knowledge that went into producing it. A play, a photograph, a newspaper, a book, a graphic novel, and a museum collection become vessels through which Mandel’s pandemic survivors redefine themselves and the world around them."