thanatography and the poetic voice 111[Haizi’s fate] means a flying leap from poetic art to performance art.
Through a careful design of sheer genius, in his suicide he completed the
purest articulation of life and the ultimate poem of greatness; in other
words, he completed his ballad of death, his song to end all songs [㒱ଅ]
in death... Haizi’s song to end all songs in death was a modern imita-
tion of the great art of Jesus, the difference being that Haizi completed
the deed alone. As such he had to shoulder the missions of both hero and
traitor by himself.Xiao Ying’s essay “Existence Leading toward Death” (⅏ѵᄬ) is
reminiscent of Xi Chuan’s “Remembrance,” in that it contributes to
the very process of mythification it identifies:^31
In an era that has brought us the failure of poetry, the death of the poet
in itself becomes a possible form of poetry... Haizi’s poems are an
enlightenment of poetry, an enlightenment on the verge of death [㒱
ੑ] written by a poet on the verge of death... In contrast to his name-
less lot while he was alive, poetry circles reacted to the death of the poet
in inevitably drastic fashion—overnight, the poet and his poetry were
made into myth. Thus, the enlightenment given by the death of the poet
to contemporary poetry changes into a conscious, unequivocal sign...
If poetry were still a possibility and a thing of hope, the poet would never
choose death to break off poetry, never put death in poetry’s place. In-
sisting on their desire for poetry, yet having lost the possibility for poetry,
the deaths of [Haizi, Luo Yihe and Ge Mai] become a symbol of the
night of this age in which poetry withers away—the death of the poet
becomes the ultimate poem.As soon as the world learns of Haizi’s suicide and the myth emerges, it
becomes thanatography and extends backward to determine the im-
age of the poet in the preceding years. Writing after the event, several
commentators mobilize references to his poetry to come up with what
we may call post-dictions of his suicide. Thus, in retrospect Haizi’s
textual production already endows him with potentially divine quali-
ties while alive, and makes the particular death he died his logical apo-
theosis, literally so: as not just his finest hour, but in fact his elevation
to divine status.^32
Mythification has accompanied Haizi’s poetry on its way into Eng-
lish in at least two publications. Wang Yuechuan’s “A Perspective on
the Suicides of Chinese Poets in the 1990s” is an exercise in righteous
(^31) Xiao Ying 1999: 231.
(^32) Zhang Qinghua 1999: 182ff, Liaoyuan 2001: 347ff. On Haizi’s apotheosis, cf
Yeh 1996a: 63.