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The apocalypse occupies a special place in our cultural production. Tales of catastrophe give particular emphasis to the environment and the object world, reaching beyond the confines of the immediate narrative to engage the audience on an affective level. This emphasis achieves its effect by linking the plot to the prehistory of the characters and the pre-apocalyptic world through the remnants that survive. The existence of objects and the network of relationships they engender are often built on the tensions between functionality and dysfunctionality, between forgetting and remembering. They may become triggers and sites of nostalgia, and also function to anchor the characters within the stories to their lost pasts.
The present study explores objecthood after the apocalypse, in particular the manifold use of objects, their relationship to memory and the peculiarities of thingness in Emily St John Mandel's Station Eleven (2014). Set in a postapocalyptic, near-future North America, where 99.9% of humanity has died as a result of a virus called the Georgia Flu, the novel oscillates between various events of the past and the narrative present, nineteen years after the outbreak of the pandemic. We follow the fates of a number of people connected through the focal point of Arthur Leander, a Canadian actor, whose death during a production of King Lear on the eve of the pandemic opens the novel. Some characters die before or during the Georgia Flu outbreak - Arthur and his first wife Miranda Carroll, creator of the Dr Eleven comics - and others survive - Kirsten Raymonde, one of the child actors in the Lear production; Clark Thompson, Arthur's best friend; and Jeevan Chaudhary, whose life has intersected Arthur's career at various points, in his capacity as a paparazzo, and later as an aspiring medic trying to save Arthur's life after his fatal heart attack.
Their individual stories unfold in fragments, alternating between past and present, as the narrative 'encircles the moment of humanity's fall and imagines the apocalypse as a catalyst for regression' (Smith 2016: 291). The postapocalyptic reality transpires through the journey of Kirsten with the Travelling Symphony, a theatre troupe cum symphony orchestra that traverses what used to be Northern Michigan and performs Shakespeare and classical music in the post-catastrophe settlements. Their motto - 'Survival...