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

Abstract

Archiving the Future:The Uneasy Relationship between Individual Memory and Communal Artifacts in Station Eleven Lourdes Arciniega 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. As Joanne Freed argues in her text on haunting encounters: "if fiction is to inspire new and more ethical relationships across boundaries of difference, it must first allow readers to come into contact with others through the work of the literary imagination" (31). Artifacts then become points of connection that trigger memories that haunt the survivors. These manmade pieces produce "metaphorical hauntings" that tease readers with their elusiveness (Freed 32). Moreover, cultural artifacts that link main characters' storylines occupy the middle of multiple Venn diagrams that shift and sort themselves into different images as Mandel unfolds [End Page 296] her narrative like a kaleidoscope, where the pieces share the same space but can be rearranged to form different representations. Beyond the basic necessities for survival such as water, food, and shelter, Mandel's characters crave and hoard memories of a shared culture. Her novel-a cultural artifact in itself-becomes a defence of art as an essential building block and cornerstone of all civilizations, and never more so in societies in flux, such as her post-pandemic world. In his study of trauma and witnessing, Björn Krondorfer calls attention to the importance of this authorial positioning as a starting point where "acknowledging that our roots are found in a shared historical and geographical space-a space filled with hurt betrayal and losses-we begin to bond to each other" (138). He notes the importance of artifacts in this process as societies transform "the cultural messages we have received from our familial and social networks into material representations [….] We collected, assembled, and arranged scraps of memory in response to discomfiting details of family lore and history" (132). As readers, we journey with Mandel's survivors and are witnesses to their physical and emotional reassembling of their world that arises from their restless scavenging of lost artifacts. From the opening pages of the novel, Mandel signals the importance of recurring encounters between characters and cultural objects. She begins her novel with a dramatization of King Lear and the onstage death of Arthur Leander, who plays Lear. The stage is the Venn diagram, the point of convergence where Jeevan, a paparazzo turned EMT, breaks the fourth wall to assist Arthur, while Kirsten, a child actor playing the ghost of one of Lear's daughters, witnesses the onstage death. Arthur's passing is also a knell that signals the deaths of unnamed and countless others who will disappear with the onset of a pandemic called the Georgian flu. As the flu ravages the world, Mandel calls attention to the slow fading of a society dependent on electricity for survival and communication: "Toronto was falling silent. Every morning the quiet was deeper, the perpetual hum of the...