Considering Temporality in Telling the Story of Covid

Is there a particular way the story of Covid should be told? How can we begin to tell a story that hasn’t yet ended? These are the questions narratologist Frederick Kaufman presents in a recent op-ed published in the New York Times. His concern is primarily with the absence of a predominating “plot” to the story of COVID-19, which he argues makes the pandemic difficult to historicize or commemorate: he describes fractured narratives which cast Covid as a backdrop for other fictional stories, as a “plague narrative,” or as a “gothic fantasy.” There’s also precedent for pandemics disappearing from popular culture altogether: as the Spanish Flu is noticeably missing from much of the media produced at the time.

As variants, lockdowns, and mask mandates appear, disappear, and reappear all over the world, it is apparent that the story of Covid, much like that of climate change, is very much still being written. In their article “Climate change as an event,” sociologists Iddo Tavory and Robin Wagner-Pacifici deliberate on whether climate change can be considered an “event,” defining  “eventfulness” as a moment in which a rupture in normative expectations occurs, leading to a recalibration of normalcy. They argue that defining “event” status is important because it helps us understand how people will respond and react to events—particularly ones that have meaningful societal consequences, such as climate change and Covid-19.

Wagner-Pacifici and Tavory also argue that varying frames of climate change’s “eventhood” exist, leading to differing levels of urgency to address the climate crisis. These frames include “scientific eventfulness,” “radical eventfulness,” and “sensible eventfulness.” Each frame implies a different timeline of the event's rupture and normative recalibration, which in turn creates differing levels of urgency in reacting to the event. The differing meanings of the event in each frame illustrate why considerations timing should be factored into discussions of eventfulness. 

While expounding on temporal meaning-making, Wagner-Pacifici and Tavory contrast climate change with Covid: climate change lacked a definitive starting point, whereas Covid had one, thus making Covid a more urgent event than climate change. However, despite a clear starting point, the ongoing nature of Covid has failed to create a unified narrative about its cultural impact. My goal is to expand upon Tavory and Wagner-Pacifici’s ideas by using their framework of eventhood to speculate about how Covid will be remembered. 

It is obvious that we are in the event of Covid, but it is also clear that there is no narrative device that has unified the “story” of Covid. I think that Tavory and Wagner-Pacifici’s article lends insight into why this lack of unified narrative might be the case. They discuss how problems of temporality confuse the meaning-making process of an event. For example, framing climate change as in the past, versus the present, versus the eventual future. I posit that this fracturing of temporal framing makes unified messaging on the experience of Covid particularly difficult to construct as well. It’s easy to see Covid as an event with a definitive beginning in the past (many of my peers mark Friday, March 13 of 2020 as the day it became truly “real”); however, it undoubtedly still colors our present and future as we make decisions about masking in the grocery store, visiting elderly family members, and weighing remote versus in-person job opportunities. We can’t tell stories or take lessons from an event that is behind us, with us, and ahead of us all at once. 

Thinking about their discussion of temporality in “eventfulness,” I wonder how our historicization of Covid can discuss its origins and impact on our recent past while also acknowledging the ways in which the story of Covid is still very much in progress. The questions abound: How will Covid fit into textbooks about American history? Will there ever be a classic novel about it? How will its stories affect the children of my generation? Until we can address Covid’s complicated temporal role in history construction, there will not be one “story of Covid.” Although there will never be one defining narrative, making sense of its simultaneous status as a past event, a current urgent event, and an inevitable shaper of the future may assist cultural interpretations of its meaning.