Ghost Marriage in Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature: Between the Past and the Future

Abstract

This article examines the adoption of ghost marriage (冥婚) as a literary theme in twentieth-century Chinese literature, arguing that this theme reflects a set of changes in perceptions of temporality from the premodern to the modern period. As a traditional ritual of holding marriage for the dead, ghost marriage embodies premodern views of time and space wherein the living and the dead are perceived as coexisting in parallel spaces, and the boundary of life and death is seen as transcendable through the extension of kinship. In this way, the dead are kept within the family, maintaining the warmth of familial relationships that transcend being and non-being. Modern authors, promoting a linear view of time, have taken up ghost marriage as an anchoring point of nostalgia for an unrecoverable ethics-based society. For instance, Yan Lianke’s 阎连科1994 novella Searching for the Land (寻找土地) announces the utter corruption—and therefore the death—of ethics-based society, suggesting that the only alternative is to confront the future as a road to hope rather than indulge in an illusion of the past. Through an analysis of Yan’s novella, this essay discusses how the theme of ghost marriage fits into the broader literary context of the early 1990s while also anticipating some of the distinctive elements of Yan Lianke’s subsequent novels.

Key words： Yan Lianke; Searching for the Land; ghost marriage; kinship