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• The Prospero of Wonderland; or, Miranda Carroll, Author of Station Eleven
• Graley Herren (bio)

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.

From Shakespeare's Metatheatre to Miranda's Metafiction

The concept of theatrum mundi, famously translated by Jaques as "All the world's a stage / And all the men and women merely players," is as old as drama itself.³ Yet there is something distinctly modern about Shakespeare's relentlessly self-conscious employment of this conceit. Lionel Abel coined the term "metatheatre" to describe the reflexive tendency of plays, particularly from Shakespeare onward, to draw attention to themselves as plays—and in so doing, to draw attention to the performative nature [End Page 140] of life off stage as well. Abel examined plays "about life seen as already theatricalized." Metatheatrical works draw attention to the artifice of their...

中文翻译：

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仙境的普洛斯彼罗；或者，米兰达·卡罗尔，《第十一站》的作者

以下是内容的简短摘录，以代替摘要：

• 仙境的普洛斯彼罗；或者，米兰达·卡罗尔，《第十一站》的作者
• 格雷利·赫伦（简介）

在豪尔赫·路易斯·博尔赫斯的短篇小说《皮埃尔·梅纳尔，《堂吉诃德》的作者》中，叙述者对梅纳尔对《堂吉诃德》的重写——他逐字逐句地复制——感到惊叹。这个故事在某种程度上是对自命不凡的文学批评的讽刺。然而，在更深层次上，博尔赫斯认真地将艺术视为拟像，一种带有镜子和视差视图的游戏。叙述者坚持认为，米格尔·德·塞万提斯在 17 世纪的西班牙所写的完全相同的文字，在被皮埃尔·梅纳德在 20 世纪的法国逐字吸收和重复使用时，其含义根本不同。“皮埃尔·梅纳德不想再创作一部《堂吉诃德》，这当然很容易——他想创作吉诃德，”叙述者断言。“不知何故，成为塞万提斯，并由此到达吉诃德——在梅纳尔看来，这比继续成为皮埃尔·梅纳尔并通过皮埃尔·梅纳尔的经历来到达吉诃德更具挑战性（因此也更不有趣）。” ¹艾米丽·圣约翰·曼德尔在《第十一站》中也玩起了类似的作者权和视角游戏。这部小说在 2014 年作为一部创新的推理小说和后世界末日类型的新变种赢得了赞誉，自 2020 年以来，它获得了因其对全球流行病的可怕愿景而具有预言的光环。但这座镜厅最引人注目的维度基本上被忽视了。曼德尔是寓言传统的文学后裔，《第十一站》是最高级别的元小说。在这本书的镜像多元宇宙中，米兰达·卡罗尔这个角色作为曼德尔的作者化身出现。²读者被巧妙而持久地引导，将米兰达视为《第十一站》的嵌入式作者。[完第139页]

米兰达·卡罗尔通过《十一博士》漫画将她的经历转化为艺术，创造了一个她认为比她的生活更好的替代现实。我们得知她死于佐治亚流感，但她的艺术作品通过莎士比亚表演者克尔斯滕·雷蒙德所珍藏的《十一博士》的副本得以保存。米兰达的名字显然取自《暴风雨》中普洛斯彼罗的女儿，但她在小说中的角色更像普洛斯彼罗本人：一位创作者、导演和舞台监督，协调她自成一体的幻想戏剧。事实上，尽管这部小说得益于元小说的寓言传统，《第十一站》主要借鉴了莎士比亚的元戏剧。和普洛斯彼罗一样，米兰达·卡罗尔对自己设计的想象领域进行了完全的创造性控制。她的艺​​术自主性超出了她的漫画范围，涵盖了整本书。读者应该理解米兰达不仅是《十一博士》的创造者，也是《十一号车站》背后的创意机构：她与明星演员亚瑟·利安德的浪漫和分手的故事；离婚后她作为航运高管和成熟艺术家的独立故事；亚瑟、米兰达和 99% 的人类死亡的故事；以及现代世界崩溃后地球上剩余居民的生存和复兴的故事。十一站内，米兰达·卡罗尔是整个元小说宇宙的普洛斯彼罗。她的名字源自《暴风雨》，但她的姓氏肯定来自《爱丽丝梦游仙境》和《爱丽丝镜中奇遇记》的作者刘易斯·卡罗尔。米兰达引导读者通过多重镜子，首先将她的世界转变为十一博士的宇宙仙境，然后再次将其转变为死亡与重生的后世界末日镜像世界。

从莎士比亚的元剧院到米兰达的元小说

世界剧场的概念，被雅克翻译为“世界是一个舞台/所有的男人和女人都只是演员”，这个概念与戏剧本身一样古老。³然而，莎士比亚对这一想法的不懈自觉运用却具有明显的现代性。莱昂内尔·阿贝尔（Lionel Abel）创造了“元戏剧”一词来描述戏剧的反射倾向，特别是从莎士比亚开始，将人们的注意力吸引到戏剧本身，并以此吸引人们对舞台外生活的表演性质的关注[结束第140页]以及。阿贝尔审视了“关于已经被戏剧化的生活的戏剧”。元戏剧作品引起人们对其技巧的关注...