|| & ┴ : STATION ELEVEN & HIGH-RISE

I read Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel a couple weeks ago, shortly after finishing High-Rise by J.G. Ballard (which I wrote a bit about here). Station Eleven was a perfectly fine book - not incredible, not terrible, engaging enough plot, some interesting themes, etc. It sticks out in my mind more so because I read it fairly closely to when I read High-Rise. 

If you didn't already know, Station Eleven is a post-apocalyptic novel, in which most of the world's population was wiped out by a disease. The novel jumps back and forth in time, documenting some of the beginning of the outbreak and subsequent weeks after. For the most part, though, the novel takes place twenty years after the initial outbreak, and follows a troupe of actors and musicians, who perform Shakespeare plays. Most of the surviving people have created small self-sustaining communities, since there is no more electricity, plumbing, etc. This passage was of particular interest to me:

On silent afternoons in his brother's apartment, Jeevan found himself thinking about human the city is, how human everything is. We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at al. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt. No one delivers fuel to the gas stations or the airports. Cars are stranded. Airplanes cannot fly. Trucks remain at their points of origin. Food never reaches the cities; grocery stores close. Businesses are locked and then looted. No one comes to work at the power plants or the substations, no one removes fallen trees from electrical lines (178).

This passage presents an interesting contrast to High-Rise, which I read maybe a week or two before this book, so it was still fairly fresh in my mind. In High-Rise, we see ways in which humanity is warped by 'modern' things, the ease and accessibility of resources and services, and when I say 'warped,' I mean it in the most neutral way possible. In the novel, it's not necessarily that people are made worse by modernity, but that modernity reveals humanity in its most grotesque forms, and the ultimate consequences of that are ambiguous.

In the above passage from Station Eleven, the city of Toronto is not really a city anymore now that the people are gone. These modern things of buildings, gas stations, airports, business, power plants - they are nothing without people. They are not modern, only relics. This passage highlights how intertwined humanity and technology are. They are not mutually exclusive. The same thing happens in High-Rise. It is not that the conditions of the high-rise are alien, and making humanity into something it is not, but revealing and recombining what it means to be human. We are androids. Mandel's Station Eleven, in part, highlights the opposite of this equation: the humanity suffused into the technology, into the delicate and precarious modern structures and urban ecologies.
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Note: To clarify, I am playing a bit fast and loose with all of my definitions of 'modernity,' 'city,' 'humanity,' 'people,' modern,' etc. I'm trying to keep this blog casual, while still interrogating texts in a productive, thoughtful way. The differences in meanings are important, but I think for this post in particular, it's okay to fudge it a bit

Note: Those funny little symbols in the title of the post are the symbols for parallel and perpendicular...OHHHH. I will include these symbols in the title for posts where I'm discussing multiple texts in conjunction with each other. So I have this thing where when I envision how the meaning of things work, I envision them as being parallel or perpendicular, or both, creating acute angles or obtuse angles of meaning. It's just how I've always thought of meaning, and so that's the where I got the title for this blog.