110 chapter three
Mythification of Haizi is in evidence from the early 1990s on, in glo-
rification of his death and representation of his suicide as the ultimate
poem and the completion of poethood. Wu Xiaodong and Xie Linglan
write:^26
Haizi’s death is nothing less than a divine sign [干冫] to Chinese intellec-
tual circles, after they have been fast asleep for thousands of years in the
midst of delusion and deception... Suicide is the only active resistance
to the predestined fate of death... Haizi’s death means the ultimate
completion of the image of poethood [䆫Ҏᔶ䈵].Li Chao concludes a review of Works by Haizi and Luo Yihe thus:^27
[Haizi and Luo Yihe’s] death should be given the highest possible ap-
praisal. We cannot do without this indomitable spirit. Such a death is the
poet’s predestined fate, and indeed the poet’s most revered quality.While Wu, Xie and Li focus on the person of the poet, Yu Hong’s
glorification of Haizi’s death can be seen to establish a connection with
his art, in words, language and song:^28
Blood becomes words, language returns to myth: this is Haizi’s offering,
at the end of humankind... Because of Haizi, death has finally become
sacrifice, become birth, become song.Zhu Dake goes further, presenting Haizi as a poeta vates or poet-seer and
prophet, and his suicide as a well-planned work of art. His comparison
of Haizi’s fate to that of Jesus Christ fits religious and cultish features of
Chinese poetic discourse at the time. These features—in Haizi and his
commentators, but also in numerous other poets and critics—qualify
Wolfgang Kubin’s claim that “the idea of the poet as a prophet...
which Guo Moruo may have borrowed from German and English
Romanticism, has survived modernity only in socialist art.”^29 In fact,
socialist orthodoxy has left obvious traces in the avant-garde, captured
to a considerable extent by the notion of romanticism and that of “lit-
erature of euphoria,” which Kubin borrows from Broia Sax.
Remarkably, Zhu Dake not only presents art as religion, but also
turns religion into art, and Jesus into an artist:^30
(^26) Xi Chuan 1991a: 307, 310-312.
(^27) Li Chao 1999: 60-61
(^28) Yu Hong 1999: 120.
(^29) Kubin 1993: 25.
(^30) Zhu Dake 1999: 139-140.