Ghosts and their contemporary return: the case of Yu Hua’s The Seventh Day

Abstract

This essay notes the return of ghosts to the contemporary literary landscape and argues that contemporary literary ghosts are primarily historical ghosts, illustrative not of awe for the unknown, or concern over individual morality but of awareness of the problematic of modernity and anxiety over dispossession and moral responsibility. This essay analyzes Yu Hua’s ghost fiction The Seventh Day (2013) and argues that it not only evokes familiar elements of the zhiguai genre, such as issues of rites, boundary and time, but also reworks these elements responding to a new historical context and addressing new concerns. Ghosts in The Seventh Day neither abide to the historical time of development nor enter the cyclical time of reincarnation. Their final place of rest, the land of the unburied, evinces a utopian impulse, which must be understood in connection with the dystopian vision of the mundane world.