Speculative and Grounded Narratives: Theorizing the Rhetoric of Narrative Experientiality with Emily St. John Mandel's Pandemic Novels

Abstract

After the global onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, stories about virus outbreaks have enjoyed newfound popularity. Meanwhile, the lived experience of a pandemic has profoundly altered how pandemic stories are told in post-COVID-19 fiction, as well as assumptions and expectations about what makes such stories tellable. While pandemic narratives written before 2020 usually explore speculative “what if?” scenarios, more recent ones tend to lean toward more grounded reflections, or “what now?” propositions. This essay explores this shift via a comparative case study of Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven (2014) and Sea of Tranquility (2022). The former involves a speculative scenario about an apocalyptic pandemic, whereas the latter appeals heavily to the reader's experience of COVID-19 to make its depiction of a fictional pandemic feel authentic and compelling. Comparison of these two pandemic novels enables a timely amendment to the theory of narrative experientiality, influentially advanced by Marco Caracciolo. This essay introduces a distinction between speculative and grounded narratives, integrating the notion of experientiality with rhetorical narrative theory to reveal how fiction can appeal to both readers’ lived experiences and genuine novelty for its tellability and relevance.