1. Introduction

It began – as far as we can tell – with a man, long hair unfettered and a face sorrowful, chanting poetry along the shores of a river.When asked by a fisherman what he was doing walking there, Qu Yuan (BC 340 – 278?) replied that the rest of the world was muddy and he alone pristine; the rest of the world was drunk and he alone sober; for this he was banished.Shortly after explaining his refusal to join the drunk and the dirty and their ilk, this poet with unbridled imagination, in despair over the state of affairs with his country, held onto a rock and drowned himself in the Miluo River along with his unrequited love for his native state Chu.

Qu Yuan’s self-precipitated mortality was met with a kind of narrative immortality, for even over two thousand year later he remains for the Chinese a name synonymous with passionate, unequivocal loyalty and the bohemian bardic ideal.Also born on the shores of the Miluo was a ritual of remembrance now built into the calendar– for each year during the Duanwu Festival every Chinese is given an occasion to compare the reality of his/her life with the mythic ideal created by Qu Yuan.Henceforth the Chinese would have its first suicide legend driven by the search for the sublime, the first recorded instance of someone choosing a value over life.

When writing Qu Yuan’s biography in the Historical Records (Shi Ji), the epic historian Sima Qian (BC 145 – 93) was noticeably wistful.After writing that he shed tears for Qu Yuan near the Miluo, Sima abandons the historian’s reserve and opines: “I blame him for the fact that, with his talent, were he to travel around and advise the feudal lords, which state would not have accommodated him – that he should have come to this?”But in the next breath he seems to have caught himself, since, after reading a tribute to Qu Yuan written by Jia Yi he realizes what it was like to “take life and death as the same, take exile and service as inconsequential” – and felt “a clarity of self-approbation.”[1]Sima Qian was cautious in voicing a small seed of doubt, that, were he to not choose suicide, Qu Yuan might have left us more of his literary genius as rich as his Encountering Sorrow.At the same time, Sima Qian seemed to concur that, from all that we know about Qu Yuan, his suicide was also an inevitable clash between his character and the political circumstances.

With the passage of time, with the story told and retold, the drowning of Qu Yuan has passed from history into mythology and taken on larger-than-life proportions.We as recipients of this heirloom legend extol the seemingly selfless act, but few truly question the validity of Qu Yuan’s choice.Were there other ways to be a living (not self-martyred) loyal subject?If so, did being a poet somehow make this a loaded choice?Are there other reasons why his story endures?

Studies on suicide abound; I wish to examine suicide among poets and writers in Chinese history in particular, to place emphasis on two epithets: “Chinese” and “literary.”The former is worth noting because, at its most complex and enigmatic suicide is value- rather than situation-driven; the Chinese historical and social fabric have uniquely shaped not only the behavior of aforementioned Qu Yuan but also that of others in the 20^th century – in particular, mid-century writer Lao She and the Misty poet Gu Cheng, active in the 1980s.What did these suicides have in common, and how have they changed in the course of time?As part of the chicken-and-egg conundrum of life versus literary art, did suicide exert a special influence on the minds of poets and writers to make them more prone to flirt with death? Finally, how does the literary art’s emphasis on a narrative coherence having a beginning, middle and end make the distinctions between suicide and literature, suicide for literature, and suicide in literature hazy?

2. Value-driven Suicides in Premodern China

Qu Yuan died not as a poet per se but as a statesman.Seeing the land of Chu in imminent defeat and his loyalty ignored, he wanted to die with his moribund country.In the same manner, many value-driven suicides in Chinese history have been forceful announcements of one’s personal and political alignment.Sima Qian’s Historical Records (Shi Ji) recounts numerous such instances where members of the shi class commit suicide in order to demonstrate their loyalty to their respective patrons or kings.Among those include the aged sage Hou Sheng who, since he could not go to battle alongside his patron Prince Wei, smote himself facing the direction of the Prince’s forthcoming conquest when the calculated date of battle arrived.When Hou Sheng had told the Prince of his intentions, there was no indication that the Prince, a reputed lover of the shi class and who had made especially humble efforts to recruit Hou to be his retainer, made any attempt to restrain the old sage from forfeiting his life

Noting that such history and legends have understandably led the modern student to ask whether self-killing in such a “nonchalant” manner reflect to some degree the fact that life in ancient China was relatively cheap, Joseph S.M. Lau explains through the context of the Chinese value system that it is not that life was cheap in ancient China, but that other things were far more valuable.Relating the legend of Gan Jiang and Mo Xie [2] to this phenomenon, Lau comments, “At once familiar and strange, the imagination that sustains the narrative is that of a shared ethos rather than an individualistic consciousness.” [3]

Though value-driven suicide is found elsewhere in the world,[4] the Chinese tradition is unique in two ways.First, the value system of ancient China has a clearly defined set of missions that each person is obligated to fulfill as a responsible adult.These cardinal virtues, Lau notes, include loyalty to a court or to one’s superiors (“zhong”), filial piety toward one’s parents (“xiao”), righteousness (“yi”) and benevolence (“ren”) toward people in general.“When life is conceived as a series of obligations to be honored, and when one takes upon himself the role of executor of these obligations, one could not possibly think of himself as anything less than a missionary,” Lau notes.“Self-sacrifice, then, denotes a positive gesture affirming the sanctity of human existence.”[5]That these virtues are concrete, obligatory missions to be fulfilled is implicated in the language describing these value-driven suicides: in these writings it is frequently said that by dying, someone has “completed his loyalty (jingzhong)” or “completed his filial piety (jingxiao)” and so on.[6]Nor are these missions and obligations solely for men.For the other half of the population, Lau has pointed out, the Biographies of Virtuous Women (Lienu Zhuan) written in the first century B.C. served as an instruction manual for behavior.When it comes to what values to defend with life, Hsieh and Spence point out that they were “drawn from the political world of males [and] rapidly transposed into the ethical world of female behavior.”[7]Hence, in this parallel world of idealized female behavior, the exhortations of suicide for specific, mission-oriented virtues are no less strong than that in the world of males.Hence women will die for loyalty to her husband, for chastity, and in some more extreme instances, for propriety.

The second way in which the Chinese value-driven suicide can be unique is that in the Chinese tradition, narrative and history are often merged as one, with the latter servinga distinctive prescriptive function.This tradition is partly reinforced by the fact that in ancient China, the literary scholar and statesman is one and the same, and officials in the position to immortalize history and historical figures are also those with well-trained literary imagination.The Shi Ji itself is one example of work that is partly history, partly narrative, partly tribute to virtue.That its description of individuals and their life choices is endowed with an undeniable emotional force owes much to the system of values both idealized and internalized by the author himself.This writer of the superhuman opus had angered the court and was punished with castration and thrown in jail; he chose not to commit suicide despite the humiliation in order to finish Shi Ji – a mission Sima Qian felt needed completion as much as loyalty, filial piety or any other virtue.The literary and historical legacy from premodern China will become modified as we enter the modern era, but never absent.

3. Twentieth-century Suicides

However unreliable they may be as psychological studies, the recorded suicides in premodern China do show us one thing: why someone chooses to take his life has a lot to do with his self-perceived place – and purpose – in the universe.As we fast forward to China in the twentieth century, we find this universe and these purposes vastly changed.Defending certain values with one’s life made sense only through an ancient yardstick of honor and shame developed from repeated narrative reinforcement of what was right and wrong.These notions of loyalty, benevolence, etc., were being redefined by a quickening tempo of social change that began inexorably at the end of the 19^th century.As western colonial influences could no longer be stemmed, as a new generation of literary community reformed language from the classical to the vernacular, and as young students went overseas to study, the set of values that shaped the Chinese consciousness and morality for centuries could no longer be self-contained.Without an unadulterated net of values from early China that bind each person to his/her obligations, direct behavior and exhort honorable deaths, it is no wonder that the modern (and more western) reader will find the self-terminations peppered throughout Shi Ji abrupt, even gratuitous.

Does this mean that the value-driven suicide is dead?The answer is no, although its flavor has changed dramatically since the days of Qu Yuan.

The circumstances leading to Lao She’s suicide in Beijing’s Taiping Lake in August of 1966 were rabid and painful to remember: the 66-year-old Manchu writer, a passionate chronicler of life in his beloved Beijing, had attended a struggle session in the Cultural Revolution only to find himself the target of the newly unleashed sound and fury.At Confucius Temple (Guozijian), where a fire was raging to dispose of all the traditional (now anti-revolutionary) Peking opera costumes, Lao She, along with many other writers and literary professionals, was made to kneel and confess his crimes against the state.One could not help but wonder whether he, who was once baptized as a Christian, did not feel that the very scene of Dante’s Inferno was unfolding right there in fire-ravaged Guozijian.He was severely beaten by Red Guards, dragged away to a police station, only to be beaten by a different group waiting there, and eventually returned home with the help of his wife.He was told to return the next day to “continue with the business.”The next day, allegedly with a copy of Mao’s Quotations in hand, he returned instead to Taiping Lake, where, according to the gatekeeper, he sat silently on a lakeside bench the entire day.No one knows what thoughts coursed through his mind that day, though it is likely that by the time he left his home, shaking his 4-year-old granddaughter’s hand and prompting her to bid him goodbye (more meaningful to the old man than to the toddler), he had already made up his mind to die.It was believed that he drowned himself in the muddy lake at around midnight.

There is no doubt that a society that temporarily lost its sanity drove Lao She to Taiping Lake.However, just as brutal circumstances had pushed him toward death, was there something in death itself that beckoned – pulled – him thither?

Paul Bady commented: “In spite of subsequent attacks, it is probably that the writer would have survived the Cultural Revolution if he had not had a more personal reason to commit suicide.”[8]Potential personal reasons may be seen from Lao She’s past.During the sino-Japanese war in 1941, when Japanese troops had already entered the province of Guizhou, and was about to lay siege to the city of Chongqing, Lao She, when asked where he would retreat to, responded thusly in a letter: “I can’t see where I can run next, and what’s more it’s no use running anywhere.The good thing is that the Jialing River is both nearby and without a lid.”[9]

After Lao She’s death, his son Shu Yi discovered that days before the brutalities at Guozijian, Lao She was seen by an old friend to be wandering the shores of Lake Shishahai, telling that he had “trouble thinking things through” and that he was “about to go” – both phrases euphemisms for suicide.Shu Yi believed that even before the calamities began for him personally, Lao She had been looking for a body of water in which to drown himself, driven by an impending sense of doom from watching the Cultural Revolution take its course and by the manner of suicide he had created for many of his fictional characters.

“Teahouse,” one of his best-known plays, indirectly showcased the writer’s feelings – if not philosophy – on the taking of one’s own life at the crossroads of history.The play traces the changes experience by a traditional teahouse in old Beijing; we first meet the proprietor Wang Lifa when he was a young man in his twenties.Though the changes in political regimes and many kinds of social turmoil, the teahouse tries to adapt – however awkwardly – to each new situation.In doing so, the proprietor Wang Lifa, in the unmistakable fashion of an urbane city-dweller, has come to understand the workings of all strata of society and the many maneuvers of self-preservation; he tries to offend no one.By the end of the play, the teahouse is threatened with closure and conversion into a clubhouse on the eve of the communist revolution.In the final act Wang Lifa and two old friends converge in a final scene of spiritual dispossession to recount to each other their woes at the twilight of their lives.They sit down to enjoy the simple but much-anticipated pleasure of tea and peanuts, only to realize that they are too old to chew the peanuts.The familiar jollity of old-time Beijing is mixed with the three old men’s sense of futility in their life’s struggles.After he recounts the fruitlessness of his now-defunct vocation, Fourth Master Chang utters a devastating question that no one could answer: “I love my country, but, who loves me?”He subsequently takes out some paper money collected from roadside funeral processions, saying, “Whenever I see funerals, I pick up a few pieces of paper money.No burial clothes, no coffin, so I can only save myself a few pieces of paper money, ha, ha!”[10]The three of them proceeded to perform a collective funeral rite for themselves, scattering the paper money to an imaginary caravan of coffin bearers.

Lao She’s intimate knowledge of Beijing and its ordinary folks render his descriptions so perceptive that it cannot help but be heart wrenching.In the final scene, Wang Lifa, who has complained relative little in the previous scene, hangs himself off-stage, choosing to die with his teahouse, or, more generally, the social and humanistic ecology that has defined him for much of his life – in the same manner that a boat captain goes down with his ship.In the play, after the curtain falls, a comedic figure designed to provide comic relief between acts reappears and chants to the female clerk who was mourning Wang Lifa’s death: “Little girl, don’t you fret, springs of West Mountain flows east.Bitterness out, sweetness in, no one will be a slave no more.”[11]

Of course, this comedic epilogue is not meant to be the last word on the play and is in fact little consolation to anyone.On the other hand, “no one will be a slave no more,” spoken somewhat on behalf of the dead Wang Lifa, has a ring of resigned resolve, even though the down-to-earth protagonist could articulate his emotions less through words than through quiet action.Here Lao She had administered a more expedient ending to a fictional character in the twilight of life, whose entire world was crumbling beneath his feet.Wang Lifa’s death was a study in the breaking point of emotional resilience.At such a breaking point, a man who is too gentle to inflict violence on others could only direct violence toward himself.

“Teahouse” is just one of many of Lao She’s fiction in which the writer modulated into a minor key in the course of a narrative.“Lao She pondered the social and political conditions of suicide throughout his whole career,” David Wang pointed out with many other examples.[12]

Was there a kind of aesthetic of death that the otherwise bon-vivant writer has been immersed in for decades?His death could not be separated from a scrambled-up kind of love that can only be inadequately termed “patriotism (aiguo).”This kind of patriotism was a volatile blend of the large and small, the mundane and sublime, of the Self and Other.In it there was the love – transmitted via literature and learning – for China as a civilizational, historical entity; there was also an ideological enthusiasm for the new Communist regime, as well as a more visceral love for the local way of life in Beijing where language, food, and customs bore the influence of the Manchu – Lao She’s own ethnicity.

In a newspaper article written in 1941 titled “The Poet,” Lao She tried to define a poet as someone who reacts with superhuman intensity to the world: “To be a poet one must be spellbound.One must lose one’s head, sacrifice one’s life, and one must seek the revelations of truth and benevolence, the enlightenment of beauty and happiness – only then is one a poet.”[13]Elsewhere in the article Lao She also mentions poets who “walk and chant along the shore,” and who, when society is in danger, will “jump into the water and make a martyr of himself.”Statements like these show that the traditional ideal of the poet as mythical martyr – a tradition that began with Qu Yuan – was still exerting its influence on Lao She’s imagination.Yet, to be a martyr means dying for something clearly defined; Lao She’s death came at a time when this primordial-soup-like “patriotism” could no longer be internally reconciled.As the Peking opera costumes burned in Guozijian, the ideological state of China he had embraced was turning violently against the cultural China in which he had been immersed all his life.He had spent many of his productive years writing for the ideological state; the state has now betrayed his other love – the culture of Beijing, his own spiritual nursery.

If, back in 1941, Lao She could have died unambiguously a patriot martyr’s death in front of the Japanese, in 1966 his death could no longer be so simple.Wang Lifa in “Teahouse” has spent his life avoiding confrontations with the injustice around him, but finally could not stomach seeing the part of life he held most dear violated – and resisted the only way he knew how.Across the thin looking glass in real life, Lao She, too, was suddenly indignant.He died not because he absolutely had to, but because making further compromises seemed too revolting.

What strikes us about Lao She’s death is that while it was largely driven by external circumstance, it was partly driven by his own values – ones that were long-standing and discernible in his fiction.It is in these values that the line between the nature of suicide as self-destruction becomes blurred with suicide’s tendency to be a kind of self-construction.

4.The Aesthetics of Endings

In most traditional value-driven suicides, the chosen values, as previously categorized by Joseph Lau under several motifs, are well-recognized and widely shared by society through narrative reinforcement.We have already seen, in the case of Lao She, as the fabric of society changes, both self-perception and reception of the public vis-à-vis suicide can change as well and become ambiguous; we can no longer say, for example, that either of them died for “zhong,” or for “ren,” etc.

In the same vein, is it possible that the value for which one dies can become so intensely personal that it is almost unrecognizably idiosyncratic?The result of a “privatization” of canonized virtues is a value that is instead a personal aesthetic of life.For the extreme value-driven suicide, we must venture (again across the thin looking-glass) into a theoretical construct in the realm of fiction.

In the last scene of the film directed by Chen Kaige, Farewell My Concubine, set eleven years after the Cultural Revolution, we see two long-time stage brothers, long separated by personal and historical turmoil, are reunited in an empty theatre and are again performing the Peking Opera act that had once made them famous.In this act, as it has always been performed, Dieyi, who plays the concubine, begs the King of Chu (Xiaolou) to give her his sword so that she can die with him and his vanquished troops.The concubine is to then commit suicide in front of the King, faithful to him in the end.But in this performance, something different happens.Instead of play-acting the concubine’s suicide, Dieyi the actor actually plunges the sword into himself and dies in front of his stage brother.The movie had recounted a very difficult and painful childhood for Xiaolou, as well as an even more painful period in the Cultural Revolution when the two brothers were forced to betray each other.It would have been less unusual if Dieyi had committed suicide at either of these times than at the time of this scene, eleven years after the most devastating losses had taken place for both of them.

What could have motivated his suicide at this time?A clue to this question lies in the final scene.When the two brothers are finally reunited, singing their parts in costume for the first time in over twenty years, there was a moment, when, catching their breaths, they retreat from the operatic world back to their now middle-aged life.It was during this moment when Xiaolou, smiling, recalls their childhood with that loaded, fateful line which Dieyi had once insisted on wrongly reciting, "I was born a boy, not a girl," reminding Dieyi – now with tacit approval – of his erstwhile steadfastness and stubbornly strong sense of self.This simple act is significant in that it signaled to Dieyi that Xiaolou has now forgiven him for the injuries he once dealt him, and has, when all is said and done, given him his tacit admiration.In other words, it was at that moment when he finds his life narrative of personal loyalty intact after all.It is at this point that death becomes irresistible, because it would have been the perfect ending to a life spent more in yearning than in enjoyment.Again in the glow of the life narrative he held dear, he knows that life after this perfect, elusive moment would again require compromises in the face of a modern incredulity vis-à-vis the simple but steadfast narrative of loyalty in the style of the faithful concubine.This was his cue to capture this moment as the ending for a life aspiring to mirror a narrative; this was his cue to, as the troupe master once instructed them, “take responsibility for his own fate.”As the Concubine asks the King for his sword one last time, the camera turns to Dieyi’s face, where a glimmer of a smile appears, hinting that a new idea – and impromptu determination – has taken hold.By no coincidence, it is right after this short pause that Dieyi takes his life.It was this serendipitous decision that was reflected in his barely discernible smile when he reaches for the sword.

Dieyi's suicide is a kind of aesthetic suicide, in that the perpetrator is not so much interested in ending suffering as he is interested in immortalizing an aesthetic ideal.If life is to be lived like a narrative, then it must have a proper beginning, middle and end.Real life, however, is cruelly indifferent to our personal aesthetic, and would ordinarily end at the mercy of random circumstance.To make life follow a narrative one holds dear, therefore, requires some active intervention.

If Dieyi’s suicide were to take place in real life, most people would have been puzzled as to his reasons, for he would have had no time to leave an explanatory note, and it would not have been obvious from his actions, or the police report at the scene, etc.Yet the film gives us the luxury of a coherent and prescient world in which to evaluate the meanings of his actions, as well as a glimpse into the most personal and most subtle of value-driven suicides.[14]The fact that this suicide takes place in a fictional world rather than a real one does not have to weaken the point it makes.In so much that it is an idealized conception, it represents what is emotionally conceivable.

Could it not be possible that inconclusively-motivated suicides such as that of Wang Guowei has a component of Dieyi’s aesthetic suicide?Or might not Lao She’s convoluted loyalty touch on the same pathos?And isn’t the casual phrase “I’m so happy I could die” a casual – if not perverse – testament of the polarity of life and death, that the things we live for are sometimes the things we voluntarily die because of?

Anne Foerst of MIT, who uses breakthroughs in artificial intelligence to answer philosophical questions such as what distinguishes a person from a non-person, proposes that one defining characteristic of personhood is one’s possession of a self-construct as well as a social construct.With robots now able to do much thinking and planning we once thought were the trademark of humans, the our species name, Homo sapiens, seems out of date.Foerst proposes that since the human self-construct consists of a series of stories that create a kind of personal genealogy that ultimately creates psychological coherence, it would be better to call ourselves instead Homo narrans – the story-tellers.Better yet, she proposes, since at times others take over the telling of our stories for us, it would be more appropriate to call ourselves Homo narrandus – the person whose story has to be told.[15]

The tendencies of Homo narrandus should not be underestimated.Umberto Eco, in a lecture series on narrative fiction, recounted an anecdote in which, once, during a visit to a science museum, the museum curator gave him a surprise gift – a personal planetarium show that recreated the sky over Eco's birthplace on the first night of his life.Deeply struck, Eco recalls:

“ [During] those fifteen minutes I had the impression that I was the only man, since the dawn of time, who had ever had the privilege of being reunited with his own beginning.I was so happy, that I had the feeling – almost the desire – that I could, that I should, die at that very moment, and that any other moment would have been untimely.I would cheerfully have died then, because I had lived through the most beautiful story I had ever read in my entire life…I was, for a moment, the model reader of the Book of Books.”[16]

Though this is a more light-hearted example (Eco concludes the lecture by saying mischievously, “But since life is cruel – for you and for me – here I am.”), what Eco demonstrated was that, the thought of death – however transient – can be due not to any negative emotions, but due to a deep human desire for a sense of closure of our choosing – to write our own ending to the narrative of our lives, when the most opportune moment arrives.What could have been more seductive than that, to a literary mind?

5. Suicide and the Pursuit of a Life Narrative

“An act like this is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art.”

– Albert Camus

The fact remains that most suicides are aware of the effect of their action on others.At the very least this is true for those who leave behind a suicide note.Some of these notes have explicit directions on posthumous matters, some of them try to preemptively console loved ones.The fact also remains that suicide can be a powerful statement – a statement to seek revenge, statement of protest or resignation, or a profession of love and loyalty.This statement is one of the most powerful a person can make, since the dead will always have the last word.In fact, the potential for misinterpretation of this statement – i.e., that it be taken as a confession of guilt or failure – has sometimes made a potential suicide reconsider.

What distinguishes the value-driven suicide from other kinds of suicide is its (rather counter-intuitive) hope to construct something out of death.It may seek to create a kind of memory, image, or to maintain an ideal.In the modern world where we are perpetually suspicious of pure ideals and ideologies, sometimes the goal may be simply to construct a personal narrative.

For this reason, the value-driven suicide often requires (however unconsciously) a posthumous audience, people who will remember the ideal constructed through death.In one way we can call this audience posthumous “readers,” to note its position relative to a “pre-humous” writer, however conscious he or she may be of this privileged position.

The complicit relationship between the pre-humous writer and the posthumous reader, however, can have its unpalatable costs and its ugly side.

On Waiheke Island in New Zealand in 1993, the murder-suicide of Gu Cheng shocked the Chinese literary community across the world.According to police reports, the famed Misty poet struck his wife fatally with an axe and then hung himself from a tree.Police records showed signs of trouble in his marriage, but the incident had a conspicuous touch of mental instability, and it is probably safe to conclude Gu had struggled with demons of other kinds.After his death, his mother wondered in grief and disbelief: he once fell on his head as a child – could he have had a neurological disease after all?

His poetry began at age 12, and his flirtation with death was equally precocious: he had attempted suicide many times, beginning at age 17 and as recently as a few months before his death, in Berlin.[17]In his last phone interview with the press Gu spoke frankly about his suicidal impulses, and added: “I have always been confused: why did I become a male? I wondered why the heavens sprinkled fire on my being.I’m forever conflicted.When I see two girls living in harmony together, I’m extremely happy.”[18]

The “two girls” he referred to are in fact his wife Xie Ye and his lover Li Ying (Ying’er).Living on the island with these two women was the basis for his posthumously published novel Ying’er.Completed just a few months before his murder-suicide, it showed the height to which he took his obsession of designing his own death.The novel Ying’er is for most part a first-person narrative of the life of the protagonist Gu Cheng, who has a tortured love affair with the novel’s namesake while both Li and his wife are living on an island in New Zealand, where he hoped that the two women who “loved him can also admire each other.”Gu in fact has made no attempt to veil the novel as fiction, as in the prologue he uses a third-person perspective to describe the protagonist Gu Cheng, and the description is an exact match with himself.In an interview he called the novel “an autobiographical novel…with the purpose of reflecting some things that can be explained but that are at the same time impossible to explain.” He adds, “When I first began writing, I was going mad.”[19]In the novel the protagonist Gu Cheng repeatedly talks about his resolve to “self-terminate.”Although no other overt references to homicide is found, in a section titled “Gifts: about dreams and stories,” a line reads (ominously only with hindsight), “An axe is used to chop wood.It is also used to chop young women.”[20]

In retrospect, Gu Cheng seemed to have almost lived deliberately for this posthumous audience/reader.He was the screenwriter, actor, cinematographer, director, and PR agent of the entire grim enterprise.Friends who knew him described the poet known for his “fairytale” poetry as a child who refused to grow up, a rather self-absorbed idiot-savant who depended on his sensible wife to get through the day.Gu Cheng himself, in conversation and in his much-recited poetry, unapologetically agreed with this assessment.Ying’er’s preternatural power, ironically, comes from the same unapologetic desires in Gu Cheng that refuses to compromise with a world outside of his own.

The novel contains letters the protagonist wrote to either his wife or lover (sometimes both). Portions of it are descriptions of life with Ying’er; a smaller portion of it describes life with his wife Lei (Lei Mi was the pen name of Xie Ye).Accounts of his life with Ying’er reads like a sensual and otherworldly journey.After Ying’er disappears from his life, the protagonist’s despair, suicidal obsessions and almost nonsensical soliloquys are equally otherworldly.

In other words, the novel showcases all the unrestrained imagination that made Gu Cheng a famed poet, all the persistent flirtation with boundaries of death and possession that made him interesting, and at the same time, the frighteningly complicit relationship between the fictional self and the “real life” self of Gu Cheng that may have precipitated the actual act.

Alvarez says of Sylvia Plath, for whom suicide also figured prominently in her writing and ultimately in ending her life: “The authority of her poetry was in part due to her brave persistence in following the thread of her inspiration right down to the Minotaur’s lair.”[21]For Gu Cheng, this persistence even transgressed both civil law and humanistic instincts.

Even if the dead is not always right, or even when the dead is morally reprehensible, those who commit suicide are hard to argue with.Alvarez points out: “behind [horrible suicides] is a certain residue of primitive magic: it is as though the suicide believes…that he will finally have his posthumous way, provided his death is sufficiently terrible.”[22]

Looking at the death of Gu Cheng, a glib postmodern cultural critic might be tempted to say, “These days, suicide just isn’t what it used to be in the days of Qu Yuan.”While the suicides of Wang Guowei and Lao She still had inklings of aspiring to something ideal, Gu Cheng, in an age (post-Tiananmen) when dying for a collective cause becomes increasingly rare, had in the end neither the energy nor will to steer his suicide away from the ignoble and from the solipsistic.For Gu’s death it is more appropriate to apply Karl Menninger’s idea, that in every suicide there exist (simultaneous but separately) the wish to kill, the wish to be killed, and the wish to die.Alvarez adds: “So however convincing the immediate causes, imaginary rewards and blind provocations of their final suicide, the act, successful or not, is fundamentally an attempt at exorcism.”[23]

At the same time, the extent to which a literary artist fantasizes about “writing” his or her own life’s coda with the indelible ink of action differs quantitatively but not qualitatively.The poet Han Dong says (with a touch of cynicism) of the suicide of poet Haizi in 1989: “In order to distinguish [poetry] from ordinary life, actionists always search for extraordinary action.They drink, fight, fool around with women, drift about, cultivate eccentricities, to prove they are poets.In the end they realize that they have not transcended the mundane and their situation is worse.Now only death has not been tried.”[24]

6. Survivors and Readers – Uneasy Conclusions

When all is said and done, it is we – the living – who are left to ponder the act of suicide.The death of Qu Yuan moves us because it is the stuff of legend – sprinkled with the stardust of antiquity and the comforting glow of human faith.Gu Cheng’s death moves us because of his youth, his unworldly genius, a brutal reminder of what is possible in the recess of an isolated (though brilliant) mind, and the powerful force of what Michelle Yeh has come to call “the cult of poetry” that has emerged in modern China.Lao She’s suicide continues to generate discussion today because it is inextricably bound to an era that seemed to have brought out the worst and darkest in many.

In a series of recent interviews discussing Lao She’s death, a group of people – young, old, erstwhile victims, witnesses and participants of the Cultural Revolution – showed an astounding range of emotion.Some felt genuine sorrow at his tragic end; some who survived a similar ordeal could not resist comparisons between Lao She’s choice to die with their own resolve to ride out the storm, while others showed a mixture of cynicism and callousness toward that era as a whole.[25]

In fact, what we say and believe about suicide says as much about us as it does about the dead.Suicides haunt us because they pose a threat to our existential strategies: there is something about an act of suicide that makes us vulnerable regardless how distantly it relates to us.Despite the deeds and words of those who take their lives, when a suicide happens, because the dead cannot always explain their motives to our satisfaction, we need our own suicide narrative.Like Sima Qian, who needed to convince himself why Qu Yuan was not better off as a traveling advisor to other feudal lords, we, too, need to explain for ourselves, for example, why people like Lao She drowned themselves, or why historical warriors in Shi Ji took their lives so unflinchingly, or why the concubine sheds real blood on stage.We need these posthumous narratives for our own living to make sense, for without them to pick up where the pre-humous authors left off, we could not properly reconcile the same miseries, same longings and conflicts we the living share with the dead.

To the possibility of suicide for himself and the actuality of suicide in other people, Albert Camus responded with his collection of essays, The Myth of Sisyphus.In it, the existential philosopher asserts that life in this universe is ultimately absurd, but nonetheless worth living:

“If I convince myself that this life has no other aspect than that of the absurd, if I feel that its whole equilibrium depends on that perpetual opposition between my conscious revolt and the darkness in which it struggles, if I admit that my freedom has no meaning except in relation to its limited fate, then I must say that what counts is not the best living but the most living.”[26]

Referring to the tragic hero in Greek mythology who is condemned to forever roll a rock up a hill until gravity undoes his work, Camus concludes: “This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile…the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”[27]

For those who chose death instead of rolling the rock of existence up a hill – Qu Yuan, Lao She and Gu Cheng – can we also imagine them happy?I cannot answer this question.But while we the living may have wished them to have lived past their own constructed end, we cannot deny that both in the narratives by the dead and about the dead, the idea of suicide lingers as either a Siren to be reached or a Hydra to be slain.It looms large because it ultimately touches the ponderous question – how am I to live, or, perhaps more importantly, how am I to have others say I have lived?

To attempt to classify suicides is to accept making simplifications to a whole range of human behavior that may lead to it.Although it is not in my power to “deal with” the problem of suicide, what I can point out in this limited and admittedly esoteric study, is this: at the largest scale, suicide can be thought of along three simplified and mutually overlapping axes: at the internal, and certainly most clinical and positivistic level, suicide is related to various kinds of emotional disorder or illness.Psychiatrists have shown that causes of suicide can include bipolar disorder, child abuse, depression, hallucinations, panic disorder, schizophrenia, and personality disorders.[28]At a more external level, suicides can be situation-driven, where the suicide may feel that dying is the only way out of traumatic situations such as humiliation, physical pain, financial hardship, political persecution, imminent punishment, or a sudden emotional loss.Yet, to only focus on mental instability and situational factors is to ignore the existential, value-laden, symbolic and narrative forces that shape human behavior.Thus, what interests me most is the third dimension of suicide, where death by one’s own hand serves to uphold or actualize some (or a combination of) chosen value or aesthetic.These values, when judged out of their cultural context, may seem absurd; the aesthetics may seem irrelevant, or worse, condemnable, inhumane and tinged with utter madness.But they will continue to beckon the literary (and maybe not-so-literary) imagination for time to come.

I would have personally given a lot to weave a net of sanity and safety around Lao She in August 1966 so that he might have lived to a ripe old age, so that he might have continued chugging wine from jugs with rickshaw drivers while brainstorming his next play.I also wish someone somewhere might have sought remedy for Gu Cheng’s neurotic behavior – away from Gu’s fantasy world and away from his wife’s loving indulgences.But at the end of the day, after we account for the circumstantial inducements and psychiatric penchant for self-destruction, there is still something about these literary suicides that is more than social malaise, beyond the reach of Prozac and elusive to otherwise social, clinical, or even humanitarian analyses.It comes from a stubborn insistence on our part to seize control over the one part of our lives we are most likely to control, driven by a desire as old as human history to write, for ourselves, the last chapter to our own (to borrow Eco’s words) Book of Books.

Works Cited

Alvarez, A. The Savage God: A Study of Suicide. New York: Random House, 1972.

Bady, Paul. "Death and the Novel: On Lao She's "Suicide"." Two Writers and the Cultural Revolution: Lao She and Chen Jo-Hsi. Ed. George Gao. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1974.

Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. New York: Vintage Books, 1955.

Eco, Umberto. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. Harvard University Press, 1993.

Fu, Guangming. Lao She Zhisi Caifang Shilu (Interviews on the Death of Lao She). Beijing: China Broadcast & Television Press, 1999.

Gu, Cheng, and Lei Mi. Ying'er. Beijing: Zuojia Chubanshe, 1993.

Huang, Lifang, ed. Menglung Shiren Gu Cheng Zisi (the Death of Misty Poet Gu Cheng). Guangzhou: Huacheng Chubanshe, 1994.

Lao_She. Chaguan and Longqugou. Beijing: Renming wenxue chubanshe, 1994.

Lau, Joseph S. M. "The Courage to Be: Suicide as Self-Fulfillment in Chinese History and Literature." Asian Culture Quarterly 16.3 (1988): 33-48.

Wang, David Der-Wei. Fictional Realism in 20th Century China: Mao Dun, Lao She, and Shen Congwen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.

Wu, Chucai et al. Guwen Guanzhi. Liaoning Guji Chubanshe, 1994.

Yeh, Michelle. "Death of the Poet: Poetry and Society in Contemporary China and Taiwan." Chinese Literature in the Second Half of a Modern Century: A Critical Survey. Eds. Pang-yuan Chi and David Der-Wei Wang. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000. 216-38.

Zhu, Xiaoping, and Na Jiang. Menglong De Siwang (a Misty Death). Beijing: Huayi Chubanshe, 1993.

[1] Chucai et al Wu, Guwen Guanzhi (Liaoning Guji Chubanshe, 1994)., pg. 184, translation my own.

[2] In this story a sword maker’s son, to avenge his father’s death, presented his own head to a stranger who promised to do this for him, using his head as bait.

[3] Joseph S. M. Lau, "The Courage to Be: Suicide as Self-Fulfillment in Chinese History and Literature," Asian Culture Quarterly 16.3 (1988). pg. 33-6.

[4] In fact, the modern (and inevitably western) basic belief that life, liberty and the pursuit of individual happiness is of paramount value has not always been the case, even outside of ancient China: the ancient Greek suicides all had some elements of honor, avoidance of dishonor, or expression of grief; the Stoics, represented by Seneca, calmly exhorted suicide; the Vikings, some African tribes and the Aztecs promoted violent deaths as glorious; the ancient Scythians felt it was the duty of the old and infirm to dispose of themselves (in what Durkheim classified as “altruistic suicide”).In Japan, writer Mishima has also made a posthumous name for himself with the concerted dual act of committing ritual suicide after finishing his tetralogy.

[6] The word “jing” can be translated not only as “to complete,” but also “to exhaust, to deplete,” all of which connotes the presence of a finite quantity.

[8] Paul Bady, "Death and the Novel: On Lao She's "Suicide"," Two Writers and the Cultural Revolution: Lao She and Chen Jo-Hsi, ed. George Gao (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1974).

[9] Guangming Fu, Lao She Zhisi Caifang Shilu (Interviews on the Death of Lao She) (Beijing: China Broadcast & Television Press, 1999). pg. 42.

[10] Lao_She, Chaguan and Longqugou (Beijing: Renming wenxue chubanshe, 1994). pg. 64.

[12] See for example the chapter “I Love My Country; Does My Country Love Me?” in David Der-Wei Wang, Fictional Realism in 20th Century China: Mao Dun, Lao She, and Shen Congwen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

[13] Fu, Lao She Zhisi Caifang Shilu (Interviews on the Death of Lao She). pg. 397.

[14] Xiaolou, for one, understood why.After crying out his brother’s stage name “Dieyi” in horror, in a brief moment his expression changed from the initial shock into a serene resolution, and he quietly muttered Dieyi’s childhood name as the last scene faded.Calling out his childhood name at this moment represented Xiaolou’s complicity in completing this life narrative by restoring the memory of Dieyi to where it properly began.Thus, it only took a moment for Xiaolou to realize that Dieyi has taken his life not in pain, but in the inexorable completion toward an ideal.

[15] From her lecture, “Are Robots the Image of God? – Musings on Personhood,” given at Columbia University, April 26, 2000.

[16] Umberto Eco, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (Harvard University Press, 1993). pg. 140.

[17] Xiaoping Zhu and Na Jiang, Menglong De Siwang (a Misty Death) (Beijing: Huayi Chubanshe, 1993). pg 105.