108 chapter three
curiosity and the desire to identify with a life lived and died to the full,
all the more so in cultish quarters of the poetry scene. As such, the au-
dience of the suicide demands the posthumous construction of a public
identity for someone they largely failed to notice while he was alive.
The right words are easily available. Haizi’s poetry and his explicit
poetics contain a wealth of material that invites projection on his life,
all the more enticing because that life only caught the public eye in its
spectacular finale. His work contains musings on death and burial and
on suicide, including the identification with famous role models like
Van Gogh, addressed as “my thin older brother.” Van Gogh is wildly
popular in Chinese literary and artistic circles, for his biography—or,
of course, his thanatography—as much as for his paintings. He fits
perfectly into what Yeh calls the genealogy of spiritual forebears ap-
propriated by the builders of the poetry cult. The majority are marked
by personal tragedy, often suicide: from Qu Yuan, role model of trag-
ic-heroic poethood in “Chinese” antiquity whose moral-political hues
were aestheticized in the modern era, to (early) modern poets from
across cultural traditions such as Hölderlin, Tsvetayeva, Rimbaud,
Plath, Celan and many others. Haizi’s work also features images of
poetry as fire and the sun, source of creation and destruction, giver
and taker of life, and of the speaker—easily equated with the historical
figure of the poet—as plunging into the fire and consumed by the sun
whose son he wants to be.^23
The process of projection, and more generally of mythification and
the conflation of Haizi’s life and work, is further constituted by voices
that derive authority from their status as Haizi’s fellow poets and crit-
ics. This holds in particular for Luo Yihe’s and Xi Chuan’s early com-
memorative essays. The personal grief they feel as friends and Luo’s
own death on the heels of Haizi’s add to the public tragedy of Haizi’s
poethood. In the introductory words to his first commemorative essay,
Luo Yihe states that Haizi “died for poetry” or “sacrificed himself for
poetry” (⅝䆫, cf expressions like ⅝ ‘die for one’s country’). Luo
presents this as a self-evident truth, without explaining what dying or
sacrificing oneself for poetry means, much like Wang Jiaxin’s remark
that Haizi’s suicide “expressed his love for poetry per se.” Does poetry
need poets to kill themselves in order to safeguard its existence? Do
(^23) Yeh 1996a: 64-68 and 2005: 135. On Qu Yuan, see Schneider 1980. E.g.
Haizi 1997: 4-5, 72, 133-137, 377-378 and 895-897.