Mythorealism and Enchanted Time: Yan Lianke’s Explosion Chronicles

Abstract

In The Explosion Chronicles (Zhalie zhi 炸裂志), Yan Lianke combines ancient and contemporary practices of constructing and destructing, building and burning, in a literary style he calls mythorealism. The fictional chronicles relay a history of development written in the modern language of growth, documenting the development of a community called Explosion, which subsumes a discussion of economic growth within a theme of twisted temporality. This article uses The Explosion Chronicles to interrogate the temporal assumptions inherent in contemporary discourses of economic development in China. At the heart of my analysis of these tropes is a critique of the ideological function of linear time. Time can be arrested in economic growth, becoming an interface that activates intersubjective gazes before narratives mature.