Family, Countryside And Memory ——The Forgotten Ancestral Temple

Ancestral temple is the spiritual bond of the family in rural China, it is also the cultural representation of Chinese nation’s worship and traditional ethical morality. Ancestral temple occupies the important position in the social management and people’s daily life. It buries a large root of Chinese nation’s traditional culture in the ancient ancestral temple. Ancestral temple has witnessed the family’s flourish and decay, at the same time it has witnessed the decay of tradition and the occurrence of modernity. China’s new literature pushes the ancient ancestral temple to the dissecting table of the review and self review with aggressive attitude. The family and local novel writers often hold an obvious or hidden refusal attitude toward ancestral temple during this period, they see the ancestral temple as the symbol of traditional culture. They describe ancestral temple as a repressive and negative space, as a result they can make the awakened body with desire suddenly accept discipline and punish, even sacrifice. At the same time, the unruly collocation of space always shows confrontation with the ancestral temple stubbornly. In the collision and symphony of space, the double loss of ancestral temple’s intruder and breakout always provokes an undercurrent in the text, these show body’s coarseness, agitation and wild nature. However, confined to the stereotyped writing of ancestral temple’s ontology significance, as a result, it hinders the ancestral temple into the literature’s breadth, depth and richness to some extent. Facing the new repression that modernity brings in contemporary China, many writers have returned to the embrace of the tradition to review the purpose of the new literature and the lingering nostalgia. The writers have not only favor but also doubt to the ancestral temple, have not only distant but also near ambiguous attitude, it is the projection of contradictory and complex psychological state in the process that modern people reconstruct the moral order and the value of faith. Maybe, we have gone too far. Since we can’t return to the field of history, we may as well pick up these faces which scattered in the field of literature. Back to the origin, we should look for the starting purpose again at that time.