Pandemic Mythologies in Covid (Short) Fiction

The present article examines the escapist themes and narrative techniques in The Decameron Project (2020), a multi-authored short story collection inspired by the desire to relate the globalised experience of the covid pandemic. Previous research on the collection has commended its representation of temporal stasis (Mussgnug 2021; Howell 2022), but consideration of its escapist endeavours has been minimal, when not wilfully overlooked (Pittel 2023). This paper typifies the collection’s escapist ambitions in a twofold manner: on the one hand, some of the stories commit to an unbridled belief in humanity and its ability to come together in the face of hardship, a theme that is argued to constitute an escapist, pandemic metanarrative within the bounds of the collection; on the other, the article examines stories that escape the reality of the pandemic by introducing impersonal or alien focalisers, dehumanising the experience of living through the spread of the coronavirus by means of deploying narrative technique to consciously remove affect and suffering from diegesis. These two approaches to escape considered, the article maintains that the collection’s marriage of opposite compromises with what ‘covid reality’ entails reflects the surrealism, atemporality and disruption of normality that were located at the discursive centre of the covid pandemic. Thus, and despite their seeming incongruence, the confluence of these two escapist dispositions is maintained to succeed at both representing, and allowing readers a sense of escape from, the pandemic experience.