thanatography and the poetic voice 93ᴔП䇰, 2005). And third: yes, there are those who attempt to rescue
Haizi’s poetry from the popular, near-complete identification with his
suicide, but they fight an uphill battle.^1
A study of Haizi as a literary phenomenon, then, highlights the is-
sue of what we may call creative suicide. Is his suicide a poem, or the
poem to end all poems, even if he didn’t literally write it, or publicly
orchestrate it like Mishima? More generally, is Haizi’s life part of his
work, and should we view his life and work as one? Elisabeth Bron-
fen observes that one of the thrilling things about artistic representa-
tions of death is that they allow the survivors to experience death by
proxy. One can see how this holds all the more for artists who not only
produce representations of death but actually “live it” by committing
suicide, especially if the suicide is visibly premeditated. Depending on
the circumstances, a view of the artist’s life and work as one can make
it possible for life to mean the artist’s death, or more precisely: their
death, with the preceding life as a process predestined to lead up to
this death and no other. Then, often triggering a deceptive mechanism
we may call post hoc inevitability, biography becomes thanatography.
That is, the rewriting of a life as first and foremost the build-up to a
death.^2
As a reader, I don’t try to retrieve authorial intent or verify the
historical authenticity of experiences that the poem evokes. What does
the author mean? or Should we identify the speaker in this poetry
with the historical figure of the author? are but two of the many ques-
tions one may choose to ask once someone releases their poetry into
the public domain. Moreover, in Haizi’s case, if we let ourselves be
swept along by the trend of conflating his life and work, the historically
authentic experience we claim to explore is that of an individual’s sui-
(^1) Avant-garde authors included in Tong & Chen 2004, an anthology of must-
reads in poetry from all over the world, are Shu Ting, Gu Cheng, Bei Dao and
Haizi. Alvarez 1971, Brouwers 1984. Wang (David Der-wei) 2004: ch 7; Yeh 1994 /
1995, 1996a. Yeh 1994 and 1995 are the same essay in Chinese and English, but
because the former appears to have been censored, I will hereafter only refer to Yeh
- Mao Jian 2005. 2
Bronfen 1992: x. Bronfen calls the field that informs her study that of thanato-
poetics, focusing on the conjunction of femininity and death or, in an alternative
formula, on the triangulation of femininity, death and textuality (403). Simon Patton,
reviewing poetry by Yang Lian that he finds “monotonous in its morbidity,” uses
thanatography to mean ‘a prolonged investigation of death and decay, a literary mortu-
ary’ (1995b). In its occasional medical usage, thanatography means ‘description of a
death.’