Speculative fiction, narration and (its) epidemics: (on) illness in the novel On Such A Full Sea by Chang-Rae Lee

On Such a Full Sea is a fifth novel by the Korean American author Chang-rae Lee. In the context of this article the questions of speculative realism and speculative fiction are examined, as well as the idea of dystopian novel. In the introductory part, the questions of genre and its examples in various literary corpuses is placed in a comparative context. Then the focus shifts on how Lee’s novel both follows the pattern of the genre and also resists it in two ways: by employing plural position of narration (we instead of I) and by focusing on anthropological rather than scientific aspect of “speculative fabulation”. In the first part of the analysis Lee is located within the corpus of American and Korean literatures, as well as in the body of speculative fiction that is driven by ethical issues embedded in contemporary “world problems” concerning refugees, environmental issues and class structure of western societies and the rest of the world. In the central part of the article a question of C-illness, the fictional epidemic, is presented by way of close reading of issues that Lee discusses on ethical and structural level. In conclusion the question of dystopia is problematized in other types of novels, rather than only in SF. The examples are so called “emigrant prose” and novels concerned with identity crises in contemporary postmodern (and perhaps post-humanist) society. Lee’s novels are read in the context of works by Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Haruki Murakami and others. There is also a brief comparison with modern and contemporary Croatian dystopian prose, with a sole purpose to provide an appropriate context for possible translation. The conclusion is provided by a short discussion about the way the epidemic is reflected in a wider society