Comparative Drama

In Jorge Luis Borges's short story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," the narrator marvels at Menard's rewriting—his literal word-for-word replication—of Don Quixote. The story works on one level as a lampoon of pretentious literary criticism. On a deeper level, however, Borges seriously considers art as simulacrum, a game with mirrors and parallax views. The narrator insists that the exact same words written by Miguel de Cervantes in seventeenth-century Spain mean something fundamentally different when assimilated and recycled verbatim by Pierre Menard in twentieth-century France. "Pierre Menard did not want to compose another Quixote, which surely is easy enough—he wanted to compose the Quixote," asserts the narrator. "Being, somehow, Cervantes, and arriving thereby at the Quixote—that looked to Menard less challenging (and therefore less interesting) than continuing to be Pierre Menard and coming to the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard."¹ Emily St. John Mandel plays similar games with authorship and perspective in Station Eleven. The novel won acclaim in 2014 as an innovative piece of speculative fiction and a new variation on the post-apocalyptic genre, and since 2020 it has acquired the aura of prophecy for its terrifying vision of a global pandemic. But the most remarkable dimension of this hall of mirrors has gone largely unnoticed. Mandel is a literary descendent in the fabulist tradition, and Station Eleven is metafiction of the highest order. Within the mirrored multiverse of the book, the character Miranda Carroll emerges as Mandel's authorial avatar.² Readers are subtly but persistently led to regard Miranda as the embedded author of Station Eleven. [End Page 139]

Miranda Carroll transmutes her experiences into art through the Dr. Eleven comics, creating an alternate reality she finds preferable to her life. We are told that she dies of the Georgia Flu but that her art survives through copies of Dr. Eleven cherished by the Shakespearean performer Kirsten Raymonde. Miranda's name is apparently taken from Prospero's daughter in The Tempest, but her function within the novel is much more like Prospero himself: a creator, director, and stage manager coordinating the drama of her self-contained fantasies. Indeed, for all the novel's debts to the fabulist tradition of metafiction, Station Eleven draws most emphatically upon Shakespeare's metatheatre. Like Prospero, Miranda Carroll exercises complete creative control over an imaginary realm of her own design. Her artistic autonomy extends beyond her comics to encompass the whole book. Readers are meant to understand Miranda not only as the creator of Dr. Eleven, but also as the creative agency behind all of Station Eleven: the story of her romance and breakup with celebrity actor Arthur Leander; the story of her post-divorce independence as a shipping executive and maturing artist; the story of the deaths of Arthur, Miranda, and 99% of humanity; and the stories of survival and renewal for the Earth's remaining inhabitants after the modern world's collapse. Inside Station Eleven, Miranda Carroll is the Prospero of the entire metafictional cosmos. Her first name derives from The Tempest, but her last name surely comes from Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Miranda guides readers through multiple looking-glasses, first by transforming her world into the cosmic wonderland of Dr. Eleven, then by transmuting it again into a post-apocalyptic mirror world of death and rebirth.