Archival is (In)Sufficient: The Dissonant Roles and Instances of Archives in Station Eleven

Completed as a part of a seminar on “The Contemporary Novel,” this project dissects the contradictory roles of the archive in St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. The first half of the project makes the claim that Station Eleven argues for the archive as humankind’s central worldmaking, meaning-making device. The centrality of the archive in Mandel’s novel is, by no means, an original take. Transparently, the first part of this project is a sort of synthesis of many of these arguments made by other academics. The second part of this project, however, examines a peculiarity of the archive’s role in Station Eleven that has not, in my research, yet been explored. Despite the (widely recognized) importance of the archive in the novel, Station Eleven simultaneously demonstrates the abject failure of the archive. My thesis is, in short, that, while Station Eleven postures the archive as central to any meaning-making effort (whether that be of the past, present, or future), it ultimately (knowingly or unknowingly) discredits this very claim, both in its story and (more importantly) in its formal construction.