120 chapter three
he felt there was someone speaking into his ear all the time, which made
him unable to write. And to Haizi, being unable to write meant thor-
oughly losing his life.Here, Xi Chuan’s words recall those of Han Dong, an author whose
poetry and poetics could hardly be more different from his own, but
who shares his belief that Haizi was someone who would rather die
than live with the concrete, physical inability to write. Recognizing
that toward the end of his life Haizi showed signs of terrible confusion,
Xi Chuan still questions his official medical diagnosis as “schizophren-
ic.” In the sixth section of “Afterword,” he suggests that the trigger of
Haizi’s suicide—as opposed to its deeper causes—may have been the
guilt he felt about having said disrespectful things about a former girl-
friend in a bout of drunkenness, although Haizi’s companions at the
time insisted that he had not. In the seventh section Xi Chuan points
out that “Haizi was fully dedicated to writing. There was no distance
whatsoever between living and writing.” This formula makes Haizi’s
life and work seamlessly contiguous if not indistinguishable. Xi Chuan
concludes, however, by saying that Haizi could have written more and
better poetry if he had handled his talent differently.
Having noted the impact of “Afterword,” we see how a voice that
launched the myth of Haizi in 1990 retains its authority a mere four
years later, when it takes others to task over their contributions to that
myth. The explanation lies, again, in the speaker’s status as a personal
friend of Haizi and in his own rapid rise as an acclaimed poet. For the
present analysis it is important that Xi Chuan’s claim that Haizi had
somehow mishandled his talent invalidates the notion of his suicide as
the poem to end all poems.
Reading the PoetIn light of the overwhelming conflation of Haizi’s life and work in
critical discourse, it stands to reason that thanatography extends from
the poet to his poetry. Haizi’s death, in other words, is projected back-
ward to determine not just his life but also his writings. For biogra-
pher Liaoyuan the one-on-one relationship of life and work goes both
ways. He takes Haizi’s poetry as biographical documentation but also
reads evidence from other spheres into the poetry. Textual analysis by
other commentators, too, displays a vision shaped by Haizi’s extra-
textual death. We find a telling example in the first edition of Chen