Abstract
The works of experimental fiction of the second half of the 1980s in China are often interpreted as reconstructing the past and wrestling it away from the prevailing teleological narrative of official history. Through this process, a seemingly familiar linearity of time is often transformed into a strange labyrinthine structure, stimulating the reader to find different new ways through it.
This paper uses Ge Fei's short story "Flocks of Brown Birds" (Hese niaoqun) - in which the protagonist retells his uncanny personal history - as an example to examine the techniques of how past can be de-familiarized in literature to the extent that it is possible to perceive it as the future - i.e. something implicitly regarded as yet unknown. Time can hardly be grasped in language otherwise than by using spacial figures, therefore the paper inevitably focuses on how the unfamiliarity of time is represented in the short story by rearrangement of spacial elements.
However, the close examination of this spatio-temporal structure gives rise to the question whether it is really pertinent to speak about familiarity of time in any literary works at all. It will be argued that the opposition between "known" and "unknown" time springs from our "real-world" experience, and if we assume that literature does not primarily refer to anything outside itself, then time in literature may always be unknown and inviting exploration.