In any case, Zeus had been wrong to chain Prometheus to a rock. That only made a martyr of him. Marx himself had said so, thus spreading confusion among the world proletariat.
If he had been Zeus, Mao wouldn’t have put Prometheus in chains or hurled down thunderbolts upon him. He would have sent him to the rice-fields, amid the mire and the people.
The ancient Greeks knew plenty of things but they didn’t know the power of the paddy-field. The paddy-field, with its mud and its night soil…Nothing like it for destroying a man and making him disappear without trace.
Mao had a file, perhaps the one he cherished most, labelled “Letters from the Rice-fields”. In the last few years he’d received letters of every kind from all sorts of people: from prisoners on the eve of execution, from widows, from fallen ministers begging him for clemency, from unemployed embalmers, and so on. But those from the rice-fields were the only ones he enjoyed looking through again from time to time. They were from writers deported for a period of re-education in the provinces or in out-of-the-way villages. “Thousands of us here in the water and the mud thank you, O God, for delivering us from the demon of writing …”
Mao liked to get out the file and compare recent letters with earlier ones. He noticed that they grew more and more scrappy, their sentences thinner and thinner, akin to the dullness of the earth. Lord, he thought one day, soon they’ll only be seeding me senseless ramblings like the blatherings of someone with apoplexy. And after that I shouldn’t be surprised if one of them just dispatches a piece of paper smeared with mud, a few scattered characters like grains of rice miraculously left behind after a flood.
He smiled at the thought of it. Then he could be said to have got the better of the writers! He’d always felt a deep aversion for them, but after he married Jiang Qing, and especially after she began to get old, his dislike had become almost unbearable. He knew, as the foreign press had recently reminded him, that she was influenced by her past as a third-rate film actress, and the jealousies, failures and permanent humiliations she’d undergone, though she probably hadn’t told even him about the worst of them. He knew or could imagine the real reasons why this belated settling of old scores had become an obsession with her, but as it chimed with his own ideas he didn’t disagree with it. One day he went so far as to tell her so.
“You’re an out and out egoist, and it’s a personal matter with you. I’m a poet myself, but I don’t hate other poets out of jealousy or spite. It’s because they do harm that I can’t stand them, not out of any personal animosity. And when I’ve got rid of them all I’ll even feel a certain regret, as one might after having to pull up a beautiful but noxious weed. You, on the other hand… But you’re a woman, so I suppose one mustn’t be too hard on you…”
He well recalled that unforgettable July night in Shaoshan when they’d sat up till dawn talking about the future of the world.
It was an oppressive, damp night, stifling the end of every sentence into groans. They’d both been excited at the thought of the world of the future, purified of art and literature. “How marvellous it will be to purge the world of such delusions and unhealthy emotions!” she had cried, though she cracked her knuckles with a certain amount of apprehension. She knew it was a difficult task, and kept asking him, as if for reassurance, about the chances of success. He duly reassured her, and she replied, almost as if she were actually drunk: “And music too — on another night such as this well rid the world of that too, so that the whole planet is as deaf as a post!” The theatre, the novel, poetry — they were all to be dealt with in the same fashion. The only subject left for the imagination to work on — she didn’t say this explicitly, but he could guess what she meant — would be their own two lives. Or rather hers. And was it such a wild idea, after all? What other woman since Creation had had the leader of a billion men for a husband?
All these things could be brought about somehow or other. Autos-da-fé had been common throughout the history of mankind, and it was quite feasible to close theatres, smash pianos, drag thousands of writers through the mud, and even return the human brain to a less complex state and make the imagination wither away. These things were all interconnected: the elimination of one brought about the destruction of another, jest as the fall of one beam can lead to the collapse of a whole roof. But there was still one thing more difficult to dispose of than all the rest. Twice, almost trembling, she had asked him: “What about life itself? What are we going to do about what people call the good life, with its after-dinner conversations, and love …?” More out of fear than anything else she’d had to make two attempts at explaining what she meant by love. After much beating about the bush she’d finally brought it out: she was talking about love in the usual sense of the word — the relationship between men and women. Mao had listened to her in silence, then, with the same deliberation as before, he explained that all the aspects of life she had referred to, not excepting love itself, would eventually fade away. After-dinner conversations would disappear, if they hadn’t died out already, for the simple reason that there wouldn’t be any more dinners (you couldn’t describe a mere bowl of rice as a dinner!). As for love, that was only a question of time…
Except that his ideas were untinged by any personal ambition, their views had recently tended to grow more and more alike. True, Mao had been very much in love with his first wife: when he dedicated one of his most moving poems to her, Jiang Qing had responded with hysterical tears. But in the course of the last few years his opinions about love, as about a number of other things, had changed.
Jiang Qing, glad to see love relegated at last to a place among the other undesirables, began to talk more passionately, more fanatically even, than before, for hours and hours which he would always remember as her night. She whispered in his ear that love was their personal enemy (she no longer bothered to call it the enemy of China or of the Revolution), as ruthless as the rest and in many ways more unrelenting than they because more insatiable. She maintained that this wretched relationship between the sexes used up a large part of the world’s total resources of love, thus depriving him and her of their own due share: it hijacked the love that should rightly come to them, she went on tearfully. Again he interrupted her calmly. “Don’t worry, Jiang Qing,” he said, “love will be abolished too.” And he explained that love wasn’t as powerful as it might seem: it hadn’t even existed until comparatively recently., In the ages of barbarism it took the form of mere sexuality, and even in classical times its affective content was limited. It was the European Renaissance that had fostered the disease and turned it into the most widespread epidemic in the world. Bet the winged monster would eventually die as rapidly as it had been bore, after having already said goodbye to the things that had nurtured it — the arts, literature and all the other nonsense. He described the various stages of the war to be waged against it: the first thing to do was reduce love to what it had been before the Renaissance. The second phase would deliver it a fatal blow by reducing it to sexual relations pure and simple. Thus the danger would be to ail intents and purposes eliminated. “But how long will it take, for God’s sake? How long will it take to finish it off?” she asked impatiently, almost in anguish. He had given her some sort of limit, he couldn’t recall exactly what, but he did remember her sighing because she didn’t think they’d live to see it. Soon afterwards, when he first heard of lovers in Cambodia being summarily executed after being found talking about love instead of politics, he’d reminded her of her sceptical sigh that hot damp night.