94 chapter three
cide. I would venture that the state of mind directly preceding the act
of suicide—not so much in time as in experience—remains incommu-
nicable in language, beyond a superficial level of essentially meaning-
less verbalization. As such, discussing actual suicide, always someone
else’s, is the domestication in words of something unspeakable. Liter-
ally so, as it is undergone by human beings of their own initiative but
impossible for them to speak of once it takes place.
One of the factors explaining suicide’s popularity as a topic for re-
flection among those who live on is the absoluteness of self-determi-
nation by self-destruction. While suicide can be plausibly imagined as
such, a vision of killing oneself as an assertion of subjectivity shouldn’t
block out another, perhaps less thrilling but equally convincing. At the
risk of stating the obvious, I mean the possibility of an individual life
simply becoming unbearable, for reasons ranging from the grand to
the pedestrian: from war guilt to continual shortness of breath. Sui-
cide, in other words, not as an act of strategy but as the embodiment,
and the disembodiment, of despair.^3
The above reservations don’t mean that we should limit ourselves
to studying the strictly textual dimensions of Haizi’s poetry. A work
of art can make people curious about its maker and what they learn
about the maker can influence their appreciation of the work. In this
sense, fascination with the suicides of poets and artists rather than with
their daytime jobs as insurance agents, to cite a useful cliché, makes
total sense. Especially if the suicide is young and violent, creation and
(self-)destruction present a powerful mix. It is hard to maintain that the
music of Joy Division didn’t change when Ian Curtis hanged himself,
or that Haizi’s poetry didn’t change when Haizi had himself cut in two
by a freight train. The retroactive nature of mechanisms such as these
is something to marvel at rather than deny, as does Alvarez when he
writes that “the suicide adds nothing at all to the poetry,” a contestable
claim made in an otherwise convincing study of the power that sui-
cide has exerted over the creative imagination.^4 Central to reflection
on these things, especially in professional commentary, is the question
where one draws the boundaries of the text and how much space one
gives the author, if the author is inside them to begin with. Any answer
(^3) On the essentially private and desperate nature of many suicides, see Alvarez
1971: 44, 85-90, 144, 206 et passim.
(^4) Alvarez 1971: 33, 124.