Apocalypse Without Revelation?: Shakespeare, Salvagepunk and Station Eleven

Abstract

This article argues that in Station Eleven, the apocalypse brought by the Georgia Flu does not lead to revelation. Organized around a close reading of a scene in which a character named Miranda explicitly links the economic collapses of 2007–8 and the collapse occasioned by the Flu, this article argues that the novel and its characters come close to acknowledging – as critics Frederick Buell and Evan Calder Williams do – that the pre-Flu world was already apocalyptic, but in failing to fully do so they seek to redeem and recuperate this world rather than build a newer, better one. The article is arranged into two sections. The first argues that the novel’s use of Shakespeare helps Mandel register the way the Georgia Flu brings the end of the Anthropocene, an era she also defines as the era of globalized trade. The second section continues this focus on the novel’s engagement with capitalism. Reading the novel through Evan Calder Williams’ concept of ‘salvagepunk’, it borrows Jerrold E. Hogle’s description of the gothic to show how Station Eleven simultaneously addresses and disguises what Williams calls ‘capitalist apocalypse’, and in the process comes tantalizingly close to – but ultimately refuses – revelation.