thanatography and the poetic voice 91CHAPTER THREETHANATOGRAPHY AND THE POETIC VOICE:
HAIZIAsk any Chinese about the poet Haizi, and the first thing they will say
is that he killed himself.
Really? First, not all Chinese people know of Haizi. Second, one
doesn’t have to be Chinese to remember Haizi’s suicide at the mention
of his name. That public discourse has had more time for his death
than for his writings is not just true in China. Many who haven’t read
his poetry do know that he was a poet and killed himself, and there is
probably no one that has read his poetry and doesn’t know that he killed
himself. Third, there are some Chinese readers, mostly fellow poets
and critics, who resist the domination of Haizi’s poetry by the memory
of his suicide.
On the other hand: first, Haizi is in fact one of the best-known con-
temporary Chinese poets, among younger readers even better known
than Bei Dao, Shu Ting and Gu Cheng. The latter three are among
the Obscure poets who, in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, were
more visible in Chinese society at large than any generation or indi-
vidual poet has been ever since. As noted, what I have called their rock
stardom at the time was really an anomaly, occasioned by particular
historical circumstances. Gu Cheng’s fame further increased because
like Haizi, he killed himself. He did so after killing Xie Ye, and publicity
surrounding the murder-suicide spread far beyond the literary world.
Second, to be sure, the suicides of artists and writers fascinate readers
everywhere. This includes those who only “read” the suicide, not what
the self-killer wrote, painted and so on, as well as professional critics
like Alfred Alvarez and Jeroen Brouwers, whose analysis encompass-
es both authors and works. Still, as Michelle Yeh has shown, literary
suicides particularly enthrall Chinese poets and their audiences—and
the number of modern Chinese writers that have killed themselves is
remarkable. I have seen Yeh’s findings confirmed in many instances
of formal and informal critical discourse, a recent example being Mao
Jian’s The Last Myth: The Riddle of the Poet’s Suicide (᳔ৢⱘ干䆱: 䆫Ҏ㞾