Fantastic Time as Para-History: Spectrality and Historical Justice in Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out

摘要

ABSTRACTThe Nobel Laureate Mo Yan has long been hailed by Chinese scholars as leading the literary trend of “new historical fiction,” yet in this article I argue that Mo Yan’s fantasy novel Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out exemplifies a historical consciousness that is essentially postmodern. In this novel, through the fictional construction of a multidimensional fantastic time that encompasses both a lineal passage of time and its cyclical repetition, a postmodernist deconstruction of authoritative historical narrative and a reconstruction of historical justice are realized. Specifically, the repetition of cyclical time creates a spectrality effect, permanently opening up the present to the past, therefore offering historical justice to those injured in the past. The novel belongs to what Linda Hutcheon terms “historiographic metafiction,” yet its poignant social critique offers a conscientious intervention in fictional history construction.摘要中国诺贝尔文学奖得主莫言通常被中国学者认为是“新历史主义文学”的代表者。本文认为，莫言的《生死疲劳》展现了一种本质上属于后现代的历史意识。小说构建了一种多层次的奇幻时间，它即包含线性层面上的时间，又包含循环往复的时间；通过这种多层次的奇幻时间，小说实现了对权威历史叙事的后现代解构以及对历史正义的重构。具体来说，循环时间的重复性造成了一种幽灵效果，使得现在打开了一个通向过去的缺口，从而为历史上的被伤害者带来一种历史正义。本文认为该小说可归于琳达·哈钦所提出的“历史元小说”，但它所具有的强烈社会批判意识使得它参与了一种文学层面的历史重构。