Lens vs. Mirror: Chinese Scientific Imagination in the 1900’s

下面这段研究文字，摘自我的一篇英文论文，里面说的“宝玉”是重新想起“补天”使命的贾宝玉，出现在1905年吴趼人《新石头记》里。他游历了上海十里洋场、义和团运动，和完美的乌托邦社会“文明境界”（Civilized Realm）。论文中谈及的另一个人物“老少年” （Old Youth）是类似《镜花缘》里多九公的博学长者，陪伴宝玉在未来中国——文明境界里考察。“老少年”也是吴趼人的笔名之一，不能说没有梁启超“少年中国”的影子。

论文中探讨的所谓“性质测验镜”（Human Nature Inspection Lens）， 是宝玉在“文明境界”里所见识的一种能透视被测人道德“性质”的先进技术。此“镜”被解说为来源于中国古代的灵感，并超越了西方技术的极限，还能以科学测验的方式证明中国人道德的优越。我觉得，在某种意义上，晚清的科幻小说做为一种历史特定的文学类型，就如同这样一面不可多得的“镜”，让我们借此来透视百年前的历史和意识形态。

Dun Wang（王敦）, “The Late Qing's Other Utopias: China's Science-Fictional Imagination, 1900-1910,” in Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies (Taipei, Department of English, National Taiwan Normal University) 34.2 Special Issue “Asia and the Other” (November 2008): 37-62.

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Thus we have the “Human Nature Inspection Lens” as an example of the Civilized Realm’s “more advanced science.” This lens can detect a person’s “nature”—it can see whether he is “civilized” or “barbaric” by looking inside his body. Of course, the real scientific basis for this fantasy was Wilhelm Konrad Röntgen’s discovery and application of the X-ray in medical science in 1895,[1] but in Wu Jianren’s narrative the “lens” is a Chinese invention. The episode of the lens begins when Baoyu first enters the border area, where a “Human Nature Inspection Room”—annexed to the border hostel—is used by a doctor to “inspect” the visitor’s “nature.” While Baoyu and Old Youth are chatting in the hostel, the doctor finishes and reports that this new guest’s nature is “clear and bright” (晶瑩), which suggests that Baoyu is civilized enough to be admitted into the Civilized Realm.[2]

Baoyu then says, “I used to think that ‘human nature’ is an incorporeal thing. If you want to inspect ‘nature,’ it should be investigated through daily reflection. How can it be inspected by using a lens?” (Wu 168) Old Youth replies in a long scientific passage:

“After the inception of science, what thing can not be subject to experimental verification? Take air for example. If you inspect it carefully, you can find myriads of things contained in it. The half-barbaric and half-enlightened people usually call all these things by the appellation ‘air.’ How can this mindset be sufficient? If air is shapeless and cannot be experimentally verified, how come the European and American acousticians can identify sound waves? However, although the acousticians can detect sound waves, the sound wave diagrams they make are only illustrations. The science doctors in our land will let you see the things with your own eyes every time they inspect something. Take the inspection of human nature for instance. This is achieved through a lens which was made by a prestigious medical doctor. The chemically-made glass is processed through several treatments by special liquid compounds. When one inspects the human body through it, his vision will bypass the blood, the muscle, the bones, and the sinews. The inspector can only see the inspectee’s nature. If the inspectee’s nature is civilized, it looks clear and bright like ice and snow. If his nature is barbaric, it is as turbid as smoke. You can evaluate the degree of barbarity by examining the density of the smoke. If it is as pitch-black as ink, it will be impossible to improve that person’s nature.[3] (Wu 168)

This seemingly empirical, analytic science derives from the practice, in traditional Chinese fiction, of telling good persons from bad persons. Old Youth continues:

Most of the ancient novels are loaded with demons and spirits. When those books talk about good and evil, they say that there is a red aura several feet high on top of a good man’s head, and there is dark air surrounding a bad man’s head. It is also said that people have either an air of vigor or an air of decay, and these airs cannot be seen by ordinary eyes but only through supernatural means. But those authors of novels in the old days couldn’t become demons and spirits themselves, so how could they know? It was just their belief. But since there is a belief, it’s possible that it will be proven. As a result, that medical doctor in our country used all of his ability to invent this lens.[4] (Wu 169)

Old Youth’s reference to the apparently supernatural phenomena presented in traditional fiction in fact points to the ancient Confucian belief that people have a moral nature or quality that is spiritual, that is, beyond the reach of sense perception, and furthermore that this moral nature can somehow be seen or known by non-physical means. Therefore Confucius exclaimed: “Look to how it is. Observe from what it comes. Examine where it is that he feels at ease. How can he remain hidden? How can he remain hidden?”[5] This nature-inspection lens is an extension of the Confucian moral eye. The scientific discourse about its optical “mechanism” validates rather than dismisses “observation” of moral qualities that can be visualized as bright or turbid gases. The lens thus serves as the trope of a scientific investigation that transforms intuition into rational verification.

This “fathoming” power of this lens also has a variety of medical applications in the Civilized Realm’s hospitals, which themselves have many lens-equipped devices that look like cameras with tripods. The late Qing Chinese were familiar with photography in their cities, especially in the treaty port of Shanghai. Western photography had become a symbol of Western science since the 1840s through the activities of entrepreneurs, diplomats and missionaries. Following the lead of foreign photographic studios, Chinese photographic studios began to emerge.[6] The Chinese public’s interest in this novel science as well as art was reflected in various publications, for example the Shanghai Dianshizhai Pictorial (點石齋畫報).[7] Therefore, it was only natural that Wu Jianren would imagine the Civilized Realm’s Human Nature Inspection device as a kind of super-camera. It was for him also an imaginative extension of the newly-invented X-ray machine, which was after all an enhancement of the camera which let it see beneath the body’s surface and into the inner body. Of course, the actual (Western) X-ray could only see the physical (not the moral or spiritual) inner body, whereas Wu’s X-ray-like lens could see the inner essence. Indeed Wu’s Human Nature Inspection Lens was accompanied by a “Bone Inspection Lens” through which Baoyu could see the human body become a “snow-white skeleton,” and a “Marrow Inspection Lens” which could see through the bones themselves to the marrow inside, which is after all (figuratively or allegorically speaking) our true inner essence. Other lenses in the doctor’s Human Nature Inspection Room could detect blood circulation, tendons, and internal organs.

In his reading of Thomas Mann’s 1920’s novel Magic Mountain, Peter Brooks notes that “moment of great significance” (Brooks 263) when Hans Castorp visits the X-ray room for the first time. Castorp views Joachim’s body through a “lighted window” that displays the “empty skeleton,” and is amazed to see that Joachim’s “honor-loving heart” looks something like a “swimming jelly-fish.” Here Brooks wonders “if this is the first moment in literature that the heart is viewed in an X-ray” (Brooks 263). He aptly points out that at this point, Mann “uses the relatively new technology to rewrite an age-old trope of the heart as the seat of emotions and character” (Brooks 264). As the juxtaposition of “swimming jelly-fish” and “honor-loving” makes plain, this human heart is being viewed simultaneously as “a piece of anatomy” and “a moral concept.” Like Mann, Wu Jianren combines “physiology and poetry” to illuminate the unseen by analogically projecting from a pattern of symbols on the level of the visible. (Brooks, 264)In both cases the optics is also a poetics, one which is instrumental in allowing a particular culture to see what it intends to see.

In fact, optical objects have long been employed metaphorically in traditional Chinese fiction, and not only in the context of Confucianism. The most important figure is no doubt the mirror, which was associated with that self-reflective quality by which one might see the unseen truth, the truth that evades the naked eye. In the evolution of Neo-Confucianism, proper observation of one’s own moral nature as with a self-inspecting lens was fused with the Buddhist image of the ideal empty (void) mind that reflects the whole world like an empty mirror. In the Dream of the Red Chamber—the original Story of the Stone—there is a mysterious “Mirror for the Romantic” (風月寶鑒 Fengyue Baojian) with two sides in “the Hall of Emptiness in the Land of Illusion” (太虛幻境 Taixu Huanjing). Its front side or face makes clearly visible one’s erotic desires, while its back side or face presents a skull to serve (as in European Renaissance painting) as moral admonition.

In Chinese, the character “jing” (鏡) stands for both the mirror, an optical surface that reflects images into the human eye, and the lens, a transparent optical surface that mediates between the human eye and the object focused on by refracting the light reflected from the surface of the object. Since both things have the same name in Chinese, the more modern connotations of the lens—that scientific instrument and optical novelty newly-imported from the West—are still congruent with the classical symbolism of the mirror. Thus the conflated jing-trope unites these two senses of ancient Chinese mirror and modern Western lens; jing integrates China’s traditional past and (at the turn of the 20^th century starting-to-be-predicted) scientific future into a unified optical epistemology, applied by Old Youth to justify the traditional discourse, in Chinese fiction, of the “red aura” (紅光) or “dark air” (黑氣) on top of a good or bad man’s head.

That is, Old Youth’s pre-scientific (“supernatural”) imagining of the red aura and dark air which express a moral meaning can in a sense be validated by a creative scientific discourse; or, to take it the other way, the modern scientific discourse helps to validate a moral discourse that might otherwise seem purely metaphysical, supernatural or even magical. The utopian-philosophical, utopian-scientific and utopian-fantastic narrative gives a validity to the imaginative space of the ancient Chinese world, for it sees this world as being indispensable in and to the new (Western) scientific discourse. Conversely, the scientific discourse is assimilated as an organic component of the ancient ethical-metaphysical discourse about morality and human nature....

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[1] In 1896, only one year after Röntgen’s discovery, Liang Qichao (梁啟超) had introduced the X-ray to the Chinese. In the same year Tan Sitong (譚嗣同) also described X-ray photos in his writing.

[2] Of course, one might see a danger in this sort of inner-self inspection by external “authorities,” a praxis which may seem an extension of the Foucauldian panopticon—and/or of the Althusserian “hailing” and “subjecting” ideological state apparatus—into the inner body or “inner subject.” Such a view would indeed reinforce a typically Western (to some degree distorted) perspective on Chinese society and culture. This view may be kept in mind throughout the following discussion, though the author’s point will be that a truly moral-spiritual view is also a true view on a level above that of merely scientific-material truth.

[3] “科學發明以來，何事何物不可測驗！即如空氣之中，細細測驗起來，中藏萬有。野蠻半開通之流，動輒以空氣二字，一總包括在內，如何使得？倘謂無形，不能測驗，何以歐美聲學家，尚能測出聲浪來？不過聲學雖然測出聲浪，但所繪聲浪圖，都是以意為之。敝境科學博士，每測驗一物，必設法使眼能看見。即以測驗性質而論， 系用一鏡經高等醫學博士，用化學制成玻璃，再用藥水幾番制煉，隔著此鏡窺測人身，則血肉筋骨一切不見，獨見其性質。性質是文明的，便晶瑩為冰雪；是野蠻的，便混濁如煙霧。視其煙霧之濃淡，以別其野蠻之深淺。其有濃黑如墨的，便是不能改良的了。” All the English translations of passages from this novel are my own.

[4] “古人小說多半是載神鬼之類，每每談及善惡，謂善人頂上有紅光數尺，惡人頂上有黑氣圍繞。又說人有旺氣，有衰氣，人不能見，惟鬼神可見。當日著書之人，又不曾親身做過鬼神，如何知道？不過是個理想而已。既有此理想，便能見諸實行。所以敝境醫學博士，瘁盡心力，製成此鏡。”

[5] Analects 2:10 (視其所以。觀其所由。察其所安。人焉廋哉。人焉廋哉。) My own translation. For the “Confucian moral eye,” also see note 18.

[6] See Hu and Ma.

[7] The Dianshizhai Pictorial depicted a scene of photo-taking in one of its pages in 1884. See Chen, The Pictorial Late Qing (圖像晚清).