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

Abstract

The 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.