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LU XUN, SCIENCE, FICTION

SCIENCE FICTION AND THE CANON

Lu Xun’s preface to A Call to Arms relates his apoplexy upon viewing the image of a Chinese man being executed in Japanese-occupied Manchuria and the apathetic countenances of the surrounding crowd, and how this moment in a lecture hall in Sendai in 1905 led him to abandon the study of medicine and turn toward the “spiritual cure” of literature. This moment is ripe material for scholars of Chinese literature and film in search of a single traumatic rupture to represent the inception of modern Chinese literature.¹ His father’s succumbing to tuberculosis had led Lu Xun to Japan to study medicine, where he was then exposed to what he determined to be China’s spiritual illness. The young man determined that he could do more to save China with the spiritual elixir of the written word than with the curative properties of medicine. Over the course of the twentieth century, he became the emblem of the era, the patron saint of modern Chinese literature. Part of the universe that Lu Xun wanted to bring home was science, and he saw fiction as an apt vehicle for its introduction. Many years before the seminal preface to A Call to Arms, the young Lu Xun’s translation and writing represent a liminal moment in which his commitment to science began to shift to literature. Lu Xun is an instructive figure for understanding attitudes toward science in early twentieth-century China, for examining the form and function of late Qing SF, and for understanding the relationship between the genre and canonical literature.

Many of the themes identifiable in Chinese SF are central to modern Chinese literature as a whole. Lu Xun’s most prominent themes, especially the vision of a sick society and “crisis of figuration” (Huters 2005, 254–279) expressed most forcefully in his short stories “Diary of a Madman” and “Medicine” (“Yao,” 1919, LXQJ, 1:463–472), are emblematic of the pervasiveness of pharmacological metaphor in popular literature at large. Prior to Lu Xun’s adoption of these metaphors, the “sick man of Asia” (dongya bingfu) was already a prominent trope in a number of late Qing works, including SF.² The anxieties and motifs crystallized in Lu Xun’s oeuvre were visible prior to the literary revolution of 1917–1919 and became pervasive in the wake of his lionization as the father of modern Chinese literature.

Lu Xun’s essays on science and SF, and his translations of Jules Verne (1903), serve as a useful point of departure in understanding late Qing approaches to scientific knowledge and the emergent role of SF in the multi-genre fiction of the late Qing.³ Lu Xun’s characteristic ambivalence, visible even in his early essays on science and his translations of SF, would become a defining feature of early Chinese SF at large.

Lu Xun heralded the translation of SF, arguing in the preface to his translation of Verne’s De la terre à la lune that Chinese SF, while “as rare as unicorn horns,” possessed the potential to educate the public in the otherwise tedious subject of science, and he encouraged concerted efforts in translation of science fiction (Wu and Murphy, xiii). In the same year, Bao Tianxiao,⁴ in his preface to Tie Shijie (lit. “Iron world”), the translation of Verne’s Les cinq cents millions de la Bégum, wrote, “Science fiction is the vanguard of the civilized world,” adding that “there are those in the world who don’t like to study, but there are none who don’t appreciate SF, thus it is an adroit mechanism of importing civilized thought, and its seeds quickly bear fruit.”⁵ Haitian Duxiaozi (b. ?) wrote in a similar vein, noting the existence “in our country today, [of] the tide of imported Western knowledge, and books volume upon volume to fill a library to the rafters. To get twice the result with half the effort, what might we choose to make popular throughout the land? I implore you to begin with science fiction.”⁶ Lu Xun and his contemporaries saw in SF the opportunity to disseminate empirical knowledge through the media of popular culture. To this end, Liang Qichao and Xu Nianci produced translations of SF, while the Confucian utopia presented in Kang Youwei’s⁷ Book of the Great Unity (Datong shu, 1901) evinced the clear influence of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (Chen and Xia 1997, 47–48), demonstrating the central role that SF and the utopian imagination played in the formation of modern Chinese literature. This vision of literary purpose would be adopted by May Fourth literati, and its echoes continue to reverberate in the contemporary period. One of these demands was the popularization of scientific knowledge.

The Language of Science and the Language of Fiction

“Science” (kexue) was part of the problematic glossary of related and conflated terms associated with what Lydia Liu has termed the “translingual practice” of the late Qing. Much like the concept of modernity, which is firmly rooted in a Weberian/Marxist model that privileges the development of European institutions and economic systems as a teleological historical standard and allows little room for alternatives, the term “science” is rarely associated with its original meaning as simple “knowledge” and is instead tied to the European Enlightenment’s scientific method and a limited field of knowledge production. Likewise, the term “civilization” (wenming) was transplanted from Japanese, its meaning often conflated with notions of modernity and Westernization. This is demonstrated trenchantly in Lu Xun’s early essay “On Imbalanced Cultural Development” (“Wenhua pianzhi lun,” 1907), when he asks, “Shall we be instructed to abandon all our past institutions along with the accomplishments of the olden days, and speak only of Western culture as ‘civilization’?” (LXQJ, 1:47). Wang Hui has shown how understandings of science were further clouded by association with classical Chinese terms. This confusion of terminologies produced a specific and highly paradoxical form of knowledge, one that suggested familiarity through adoption of classical Chinese vocabulary but was often understood to be entirely non-Chinese.⁸

Like the hegemonic narrative of Said’s “universalizing historicism,” civilization was also a concept associated with the imagination of a single historical trajectory and a universal valuation of cultural worth. The West was understood to be at the leading edge of evolutionary time: the geographical home of civilization. Logically, if the vanguard of evolution and modernity was in the West, if science was the property of the West, and if civilization was the culmination of Western cultural and scientific achievement on a universal evolutionary scale, then science had to be an indispensable component of civilizational achievement. Theodore Huters and Marsten Anderson have argued that in the literary realm of the late Qing, “modernism” and “realism” were closely associated with one another (Anderson, 27–37; Huters 1993, 147–173). To modernize meant both to cast off the past and the static indigenous tradition that was modernity’s other, and to adopt realist modes of narrative representation in writing. Understood as the most viable alternative to a failing imperial system, material modernization and the adoption of realistic narrative modes to promote modernization were also more or less synonymous with Westernization. Science was thus also closely moored to notions of civilization, modernism, and realism.⁹

During the late Qing, definitions of science began to shift toward a sense of objective understanding of the material world. Although precise dating of the first usage of the term kexue is clouded by Kang Youwei’s penchant for forging memorials, it is clear that use of this term as a translation for “science” did not fully solidify until the early twentieth century, most likely in the year 1911, with the fall of the Qing dynasty (Wang Hui, 15).¹⁰ Not originally a Chinese term, kexue was a Japanese import: a product of Japan’s Meiji Restoration, and another example of translingual practice. It was during this period that the term kexue, and its associations with categorizing knowledge, began to come into widespread usage. Kexue, though more closely associated with notions of “observation and factual experiment” (Wang Hui, 18), continued to be associated with positivism and an overarching cosmic order. While Yan Fu’s 1898 translation of Evolution and Ethics used the term gezhi, by 1902, in his translation of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, he used kexue (Qiu Ruohong, 65).

Proponents of Western fields of knowledge like Yan Fu¹¹ saw sociology as the “science of sciences,” offering the ability to unveil the inherent interrelation between natural and social order (Schwarz, 187). “Science was the expression and result of the spirit of positivism, as well as the manifestation of the universal principle and primary driving force known as tianyan. As the universal principle, tianyan not only revealed the pictures and vistas of the changing world but also determined the criterion of action and direction of value for people” (Wang Hui, 27–28).

As the understanding of science continued to develop, and as its importance continued to ascend in the intellectual hierarchy, science in the Chinese context gradually unmoored itself from its neo-Confucian framework. While the modern scientific lexicon was eventually disambiguated from its neo-Confucian counterpart, the ethical and moral implications of science continued to be foregrounded in intellectual debates and fictional treatment. Science, especially sociology, was seen as a tool for the understanding and reconfiguring of the social order in the interests of nation building. Yan Fu’s view of the importance of sociology continued to emphasize the consonance between the natural and the human order, a notion that has long been a central feature of Chinese philosophical thinking.

Despite an ongoing ambivalence about the relationship between Eastern and Western epistemologies, a key shift in attitudes toward science and technology did take place in the wake of the first Sino-Japanese War. Benjamin Schwarz has noted the fact that in translating Thomas Huxley’s work on social Darwinism, Yan Fu misapprehended the text’s critical stance and, perhaps not surprisingly given China’s semicolonial plight, reconfigured a critique of social Darwinism into a system of moral and social valuation (Schwarz, 45–48). The perception that the law of survival of the fittest applied to societies and nations hung over late Qing intellectual life like a sword of Damocles. Yan Fu’s translation of Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics brought Darwinian thinking to China in a form that had already undergone profound reinterpretations. The translator’s unique understanding of Huxley’s criticism of the social implications of evolution was informed by the apparent reality of social Darwinism under the conditions of colonial rule. What was originally intended to be a criticism of the tenets of social Darwinism was easily understood in East Asia as a matter of historical and empirical fact. At the same time, this tangential offshoot of the main body of evolutionary thinking was identified as its most salient aspect. This is reflected in the writings of late Qing intellectuals like Yan Fu, Liang Qichao, and Kang Youwei, to whom the concept of evolution is most often framed in terms of social Darwinism and racial extinction. Liang Qichao’s writing in Xinmin congbao reflected a pervasive sense that “naked aggression, once thought barbaric, was now presented as a law of civilization supported by European and American science” (Secord, 48). Many Chinese intellectuals shared H. G. Wells’s anxiety that while evolutionary time implied linear motion, the forward progression of time could be reversed, with human intervention playing a key role in the direction a given society was to travel (Pusey 1983, 57–64; Murthy, 79–80).¹²

Translating Jules Verne

Tracing the complicated trajectory that brought Jules Verne’s De la terre à la lune (From the Earth to the Moon) to China presents the scholar of Chinese literature with an interesting case study in Lydia Liu’s “translingual practice,” as the text was creatively reinterpreted through the process of translation. At the same time, this act of translation demonstrates how a French SF text was incorporated into the Chinese literary field. The novel was translated from the French original into English, made its way to Japan (most likely) via an American translation, where it was then translated into Japanese by Inoue Tsutomu (1850–1928) as Getsukai ryokō, and was then rendered into Chinese by Lu Xun as Yuejie lüxing (1903).¹³ It is unclear which English version Inoue was working with, but it is likely that his translation came from a less-than-accurate version of the original. One glaring inaccuracy is the fact that Lu Xun mistook Jules Verne to be English, an error replicated from Inoue’s translation. It is difficult to say with certainty whether either translator was aware of the satirical nature of the novel. Verne himself harbored serious doubts about the efficacy of science and the promise of the future (Smyth, 118–119), but Meiji and Chinese authors writing in a similar vein often adopted such militaristic discourse with a sense of enjoyment, and adventure.

Reinterpretation, rather than translation, is a more appropriate term for Lu Xun’s efforts in bringing From the Earth to the Moon to a Chinese audience, and Lu Xun himself admitted as much. The specific choices made in reformatting Verne’s work illustrate the transformations that took place when foreign novels were rendered into Chinese, and what methods translators employed when they sought to make their work palatable to a local audience. In a letter to Yang Jiyun about his 1903 translation of Verne’s Voyage au centre de la terre (1864), Di di lüxing, he wrote, “though I referred to it as a translation, it was actually a reinterpretation” (sui shuo yi, qishi nai gaizuo) (LXQJ, 12: 93).¹⁴ In rendering into Chinese Inoue Tsutomu’s translation, which was relatively faithful to the format of the original, Lu Xun reduced it from twenty-eight chapters to fourteen. He also edited out a great deal of the content, especially sections devoted to the descriptions of new inventions and the science behind them. Most visible, however, was his adoption of the traditional “chapter fiction” form of the zhanghui xiaoshuo.¹⁵

Lu Xun’s own introduction to the text further illustrates the vagaries of translating science and SF during the late Qing and the practical difficulties of introducing SF to the Chinese cultural field. “At first I had intended to use only the vernacular language in order to reduce the burden upon my readers, but exclusive use of the vernacular proved to be both troublesome and superfluous. Because of this, I have also made use of classical language in order to save paper (“Lessons,” 22).

The cultural crisis brought about by China’s ignominious defeat in the first Sino-Japanese War catalyzed calls for language reform on the part of reformers dissatisfied with the examination system, but it would take more than two decades until the adoption of a vernacular register was institutionalized. The literary revolution, inaugurated by Hu Shi in 1917 (Hu Shi, 5–16),¹⁶ came only after a long period of grappling with the classical language and its many different registers (Huters 1988; Kaske 2008). Lu Xun and many of his contemporaries remained more comfortable with classical written forms, especially the guwen style,¹⁷ contrary to the post–May Fourth narrative that understands this as “perversely obscurantist,” and indeed “the most significant prose produced after 1900 within the [tongcheng] school was guwen translations of Western works” (Huters 1988, 249, 252). While many late Qing authors envisioned the vernacular language in a position of high symbolic, political, and economic capital, the cultural field they were trying to supplant continued to influence their work.

Lu Xun and many of his contemporaries understood a broad range of historical developments to be the product of evolutionary processes, and writing was no exception. For example, while Liu Shipei (1884–1919) argued that the next step in the development of literary expression was the adoption of colloquial language, he still understood the maintenance of a classical register to be a key component to preserving a sense of national spirit (Huters 1988, 260). Theodore Huters describes the author’s style in “On the Power of Mara Poetry” (“Moluo shi li shuo”) as “Mimic[king] the elaborate archaisms of Zhang Binglin even as its cosmopolitan polemic points directly at the May Fourth movement that was still ten years away” (Huters 1988, 271). In both language and content, Lu Xun’s early work is rife with the sort of contradictions that characterized the intellectual atmosphere of the late Qing. Andrew Jones has observed that the poignancy of the iron house metaphor is its polysemy, presenting “ethical, philosophical, and political questions in narrative form, materializing in a confined textual space complex and often mutually contradictory ideas, desires and anxieties” (Jones 2011, 34). Many of these contradictions were present in nascent form in Lu Xun’s earliest writings on science and literature.

Lu Xun’s early essays are representative of a late Qing literary trend that favored the use of an archaic grammar and vocabulary blended with the vocabulary of scientific modernity to form a linguistic bricolage. The translingual practice of science translation produced a hybrid discourse composed of an emerging taxonomical vocabulary of biological and physical sciences, with the rhetorical and grammatical range of neo-Confucian guwen explication. The zhanghui xiaoshuo also included classical poetic forms in its linguistic repertoire. The end of chapter 5 of Lu Xun’s adaptation of De la terre à la lune features the following poetic coda, which frames the translation of Verne in terms of Zhuangzian philosophy: “Jiujiu cries the cicada / knowing not spring and autumn; Great men of reason wander freely about the cosmos” (Lu Xun, Yuejie lüxing, 66).¹⁸ The Zhuangzian worldview, with its emphasis on the ineffability of the universe and the limits of human knowledge, was deployed as a heuristic framework in order to suggest the potential to contain science within a broader Chinese epistemological perspective. Lu Xun’s translations and scientific writings at turns place Verne’s work in the cultural field using Ming-Qing fictional forms, while simultaneously deploying the political and symbolic capital of Confucian disputation and Daoist philosophy as heuristic tools.

Borrowing from Stephen Prothero’s work on the creolization of religious practice, John Warne Monroe has suggested that nineteenth-century French efforts to create “sciences of God” could be understood in terms of the creolization of language. In these religious systems, “a ‘grammar’ of deep structures can be separated from a ‘vocabulary’ of specific practices, doctrines, and institutional arrangements” (Monroe, 7–8). A similar practice characterized the Chinese iteration of colonial modernity, as attempts were made to Sinify Western science on both the discursive and philosophical levels. Although Lu Xun is deeply critical of Yangwu-inspired appeals to the inherent Chineseness of foreign science and technology, the new body of foreign knowledge had to be understood in Chinese terms. Notwithstanding the fact that such modes of Sinification were often expedient and occasionally intellectually necessary, they could not fully quell the deep-seated sense of cultural eclipse and decline. This led in part to an approach to cultural appropriation that emphasized selective and conscious adoption of material, intellectual, and spiritual aspects of European culture.

Repeatedly throughout his early essays, Lu Xun argues that the adoption of material culture, no matter how useful, must be accompanied by the adoption of a scientific understanding of nature. The author is deeply critical of what he views as an excessively materialistic and instrumentalist bent in Chinese culture, the same sort identified by Wang Hui in “The Fate of ‘Mr. Science’ in China.”

Consider these achievements: in what way could they have been aiming for concrete benefits? And yet the safety lamp, the steam engine, and improved techniques for mining were all invented. The eyes and ears of society were opened wide with amazement at such things, and daily praises were sung for their immediate rewards, but people continued, as always, to regard men of science with indifference. This is a prime case of taking effects for causes, no different from trying to urge a horse forward by pulling back on its reins; how could they possibly get the desired result? (LXQJ, 1:33; Cheng Min, 11–12; Lu Xun, “Lessons,” 94)

For Lu Xun and many of his contemporaries, the exploratory spirit of science, a commitment to resistance of cultural oppression and to the liberating power of arts and literature, were as important as the material results of science and technology. To this end, many of these early essays evince a Nietzschean turn,¹⁹ emphasizing the importance of idealism and individualism, while voicing deep suspicion of democracy and majority rule. Lu Xun’s histories of science, evolution, and culture all laud the originators of a given idea as much as the idea itself. In this respect, his early work differs markedly from that of his contemporaries, whose fictional prescriptions for China’s technological renewal often focused on the establishment of institutional bodies and systems of knowledge production.²⁰

The preface to Verne’s De la terre à la lune begins with the idea that human beings have asserted dominion over nature and that the world has been made smaller by speedy transportation. Humans used to look upon nature with awe and believe that the seas and mountains could not be traversed.