King Lear, Mandel’s Station Eleven, and the Shakespearean Apocalypse: Meditations on Pandemic and Posthumanism
James S. Baumlin
Publication: Volume 4 Issue 1
Abstract | From the end of World War II through the late 20th century, the Shakespearean vision of apocalypse—of King Lear as harbinger of the Holocaust—predominated in intellectual culture. Whereas postwar critics could speak of “Shakespeare our contemporary,” the 21st century has carried us beyond the world depicted in his drama. Drawing vocabulary from Marxist literary historian, Raymond Williams, this essay offers an epochal analysis of Shakespeare’s early modernism, drawing contrasts with Emily St. John Mandel’s postmodernism. Shakespeare’s Lear and Mandel’s Station Eleven both depict world-shattering catastrophe, though through different literary-cultural lenses. Writing as an early-modernist, Shakespeare continues to mirror aspects of our current lifeworld. But he could not anticipate the technocultural developments that have reinvented the structures and machinery of capitalism, communication, transportation, information, and energy supply, and how these have reshaped and enhanced the embodied human subject. For late 20th century readers, Shakespeare’s Lear prefigures the terrors of Auschwitz and nuclear Armageddon. But the play fails to envision the biological and technoscientific forces that have transformed us in the 21st century, carrying our species into realms of the posthuman. As cyborg assemblages, our lives are electrified and “plugged in” to a global energy grid. And, as a biological corollary to the cyborg, the human body has been reconceived as an “interspecies” organism, “a transversal entity, fully immersed in and immanent to a network of non-human (animal, vegetable, viral) relations” (Braidotti 193). Hence, King Lear fails to anticipate our current lifeworld in its advanced technologies, bodily enhancements, and emerging crises. A viral pandemic—Mandel’s fictive version as well as our own COVID-19—gives the proof.
Keywords | Apocalyptic Literature, Pandemic, Dystopian Literature, Epochal Analysis, Postmodernism, Posthumanism, Technoculture
James S. Baumlin (jbaumlin@missouristate.edu) is Distinguished Professor of English at Missouri State University, USA, where he teaches coursework in early-modern English literature (Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton), critical theories, and the history of rhetoric, having published extensively in these fields. He has also widely published in rhetorical theory and composition pedagogy. His current research focuses on the history of Western ethos from antiquity to the present day.