Enthymema XXXVI 2024 Rethinking Collective Story: Olga Tokarczuk’s Tender Narrator and Spatiotemporal Entangle- ment 1 Piotr F. Piekutowski University of Silesia in Katowice Abstract – This article introduces the characterisation of the ‘tender narrator’ elaborat- ed by the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk. The new narrative instance proposed in the No- bel Prize lecture (2019) turns out to be not just a we-narrator model but a post- anthropocentric one. In order to analyse it, the paper proposes to distinguish three key elements of Tokarczuk’s project: the connection of diegetic forms with the environmen- tal crisis of the Anthropocene; the changing, ‘fragmented’ collective and individual per- spectives; and the titular narrative tenderness as a form of sensitivity linking humankind to more-than-human voices, highlighting their networks and relations. This idea seems correlated to the repertoire of econarratological research and, more broadly, non- anthropocentric narrative theories. This article aims to problematise spatiotemporal ex- periences in Tokarczuk’s novel The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story (2024) in or- der to detail the manifestations of the fourth-person narrator, namely ‘tender narrator’. In analysing how representations of time and space are mediated in the tender story, aspects such as interdependencies, despatialisation and fragmentation of perspectives are brought to the fore. Keywords – Olga Tokarczuk; Tender Narrator; The Empusium; Econarratology; Anthro- pocene. Piekutowski, Piotr F. “Rethinking Collective Story: Olga Tokarczuk’s Tender Narrator and Spatio- temporal Entanglement”. Enthymema, n. XXXVI, 2024, pp. 293-305. https://doi.org/10.54103/2037-2426/24925 https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/enthymema Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License ISSN 2037-2426 1 This article is a part of the research project entitled Poetics of Entanglement. The Nonhuman Side of Polish Literature in Econarratological Approach (grant no. 2023/49/N/HS2/03010) supported by the National Science Centre (Poland).