Celestial Empire. Nathaniel Isaacson

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.