We resume our previously scheduled programming after a brief hiatus to read a dense and sprawling, transgressive, politically-, emotionally-, and theologically-resonant work about gender-fluidity and swords, and return to the rather tamer world that exists outside of Tamsyn Muir’s The Locked Tomb. I missed you all after the marathon but the break was nice, too, and we come back refreshed and ready to party with the weird, the mythic, the goth, and the scholarly.
Up tonight is R. F. Kuang’s love letter to Oxford, Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution, the title of which gives away the game. It’s rather like the chorus in the prologue of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet telling the audience that the lovers are going to die and their deaths will end the feud between the Capulets and Montagues. As with any tragedy, if the reader/audience knows going in what the endgame will be, they’re relieved of getting caught up in the melodrama; they can relax and appreciate the inevitability of the conclusion in all its emotional power.
So it is here: we know from the first that there will be violence and revolution. Getting there, though, that’s the joy in this immensely readable novel.
I have to think the elevator pitch was something like, “Charles Dickens meets Edward Said meets Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.” All the elements combine in an alternate-history dream of a fantasy British Empire powered by the magic of silver bars that are themselves powered by the enchantment of translation.
In post-Napoleonic Europe, England has risen to the top of the Imperial heap and plans to stay there, a superpower astride the world and gathering all riches to itself. So far, no deviation from history. Where the narrative branch into fantasy comes is the means by which England has achieved its dominance: silver.
London had accumulated the lion’s share of both the world’s silver ore and the world’s languages, and the result was a city that was bigger, heavier, faster, and brighter than nature allowed . . . Silver bars had been used in London — and indeed, throughout the world — for a millennium, but not since the height of the Spanish Empire had any place in the world been so rich in or so reliant on silver’s power.” (pp. 19-20)
Silver doesn’t perform magic, per se, but combined with the power of translation, it makes ships faster, water purer, artillery deadlier, than they would naturally be. It gives an empire the edge it needs to stay on top, to keep expanding — to feed, not the world, but on the world.
Silver is half the equation, and the other half is language. Silver acquires its potency when language experts at the Royal Institute of Translation at Oxford capture the nuances that are lost in translation from one language into another and infuse them in the bars that are to be applied (some sold, some appropriated by the military, some . . . well, let’s just leave that there) for any certain purpose — such as, for instance, healing the sick (who can afford it). But the magic is transient and has to be renewed, and the magic works only when the translator knows both languages. In the healing bar, the pair pair is triacle-treacle, an Old French/English language pair that captures the original meaning from Greek, theriake, meaning “antidote” (as discussed on p. 157).
“You need to be able to think in a language — to live and breathe it, not just recognize it as a smattering of letters on a page . . . It’s partly for this reason that the Classics education at Oxford is so rigorous. Fluency in Latin and Greek are still mandatory for many degrees, though the reformers have been agitating for years for us to drop those requirements. But if we ever did so, half the silver bars in Oxford would stop working.” (p. 159).
Kuang’s style evokes Charles Dickens’, and Babel is something of a play on Great Expectations. Most of the novel’s action is set in the 1830’s, and the nod to Dickens, his clarity of style, his social criticism, and his finely-drawn, complex and layered characters, is masterful. Like Dickens, Babel is not a novel that needs a lot of explication — it’s an easy read, but not a simple one. And there’s one character who is an obvious nod to Dickens: Professor Playfair, who is appealing and fun and horrifically duplicitous.
So. Alternate history, check. Magic silver, check. Dickensian style, check. What’s missing? Ah, yes, Said and Imperialism.
That starts with Robin, who is forced to abandon his birth name along with the body of his mother, taken as a ward by Translation Institute Professor Lovell (his unacknowledged father — didn’t I mention this novel is Dickensian?) and destined to be a translator in service to the English Empire as it undertakes to colonize and subjugate China. To that end, he enrolls in the Translation Institute in Oxford, one of four students. There’s Robin, who is Chinese, Ramy, born in Calcutta, Victoire, from Haiti by way of France, and Letty — a child of the Empire and daughter of a British Admiral, allowed to attend only because her brother died and she is taking his place. Therefore, the protagonists are three outsiders and one insider.
Reminders of British superiority and prejudice are everywhere, writ explicit and subtle, from the railway passengers who assume that Robin doesn’t understand English to iconography. In the University College Chapel, for instance, Ramy and Robin find a bas-relief of a
widely recognized genius who in 1786 published a foundational text identifying Proto-Indo-European as a predecessor language linking Latin, Sanskrit, and Greek. He was now perhaps the single best-known translator on the continent, save for his nephew, the recently graduated Sterling Jones.
‘It’s Sir William Jones.’ Robin found the scene depicted in the frieze somewhat discomfiting. Jones was positioned at a writing desk, one leg crossed pertly over the other, while three figures, clearly meant to be Indians, sat submissively on the floor before him like children receiving a lesson.
Billings looked proud. ‘That’s right. Here he is translating a digest on the Hindu laws, and there are some Brahmins on the floor to assist him. We are, I believe, the only college whose walls are graced with Indians. But then Univ has always had a special link to the colonies. And those tigers’ heads, as you know, are emblematic of Bengal.’
‘Why’s he the only one with a table?’ Ramy asked. ‘Why are the Brahmins on the floor?’
‘Well, I suppose Hindus preferred it that way,’ said Billings. ‘They like sitting cross-legged, you see, for they find it more comfortable.’
‘Very illuminating,’ said Ramy. ‘I never knew.’ (p. 61).
I picked this rather long passage for a reason: it’s a perfect encapsulation of the condescension and exploitation inherent in Imperialism, depicting an Englishman as teaching Brahmins, experts in Hindu law, lessons in their own culture. Ramy’s dry response is also important — he, and Robin, and Victoire, are dependent on the English system for their education and living, even as they feel the daily stings of prejudice from faculty, students, and townies, as well as awareness of the larger organized injustices that keep the English wealthy and coddled.
Lovell makes this point early in the novel when he tells the child who will become Robin,
‘Your mother and grandparents are dead, your father unknown, and you have no extended family. Stay here, and you won’t have a penny to your name. All you will ever know is poverty, disease, and starvation. You’ll find work on the docks if you’re lucky, but you’re still small yet, so you’ll spend a few years begging or stealing. Assuming you reach adulthood, the best you can hope for is backbreaking labour on the ships.’ (p. 10)
All the foreign students in Robin’s cohort, in the Institute itself, exist on those same margins — deeply indebted to the Empire that fosters them, subject to its endless reminders that they will never never be British or indeed ever be the social equal of even the poorest and meanest white Englishman, allowed to do what they love only by perpetuating the injustice the Empire visits on its colonies. Now the Empire has set its sights on China, the largest repository of silver in the world, and Robin is the instrument that the Institute will use to give England its edge in conquest, just as Ramy is the instrument meant to keep India docile, and Victoire the instrument meant to keep the tea and sugar flowing from the Caribbean. While Oxford might be tranquil, book-heavy, replete with scones and luxuries, it’s sustained by blood and poverty and misery.
That is, after all, the price of Empire.
While the subtext is grim, Babel is also the story of the love of scholarship, the sheer intoxication of learning. Oxford is the setting for a thousand Bildingsromans, and Kuang’s joins a distinguished lineage, a love letter to academia in all its seductive duplicity, its peculiar dynamics, its savage rivalries and petty competitions, its pretensions and class distinctions, its fine and glorious messiness. A writer who lives between cultures, Kuang — who was born in Guangzhou (once called Canton), raised in Dallas, educated at Oxford — perfectly captures the nuances of a marginalized existence, whether that be cultural or linguistic. Like Robin, she knows what it is to be at home in a foreign land.
And then there is, of course, the meat of the book: translation. We’ve discussed the difficulties of translation before, whether it be Old Irish poetry or Beowulf, and how subtle and challenging it is to translate from one language to another. Kuang’s treatment of translation is nothing short of sublime — it’s a subject she returns to repeatedly, one that the entire novel hangs upons, in definitions that capture its multifaceted nature, its scholarly requirements and artistic demands. Robin tells a self-satisfied poet,
‘The translator needs to be a translator, literary critic, and poet all at once — he must read the original well enough to understand all the machinery at play, to convey its meaning with as much accuracy as possible, then rearrange the translated meaning into an aesthetically pleasing structure in the target language that, by his judgment, matches the original. The poet runs untrammelled across the meadow. The translator dances in shackles.’ (pp. 147-148)
For Robin, translation is beauty, “A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No; a thousand worlds within one” (p. 535). And the world is too grand, too varied, to come under one boot heel, or one language, or one tower. The children of the colonized, ripped from their native worlds and brought to Oxford to serve as the instruments of their own peoples’ subjugation, can only accommodate so much cognitive dissonance before the illusion breaks and the choice lies between living as hypocritical pawns and resistance. Resistance becomes rebellion, and the seeds of an empire’s destruction are contained in its own foundations. Part alternate history, part fantasy, part social critique, tribute to scholarship, portrait of a beloved iconic school, academic satire, meditation on history and inevitability, and Dickens revisited, Babel’s got it all going on.
The original Tower of Babel was struck down by God, it’s grandiose builders fractured into a thousand different peoples and languages. I won’t give away the plot, but parallels — yes, there are a few. The central question remains, though — although the novel’s title includes “the Necessity of Violence,” the level, quality, and agent of that violence is very much open. Is open rebellion any more violent than what England visits upon its colonies every day? Is violence in service of a larger cause ever justified?
I have to confess that, while reading Babel, in the back of my mind I revisited an Ursula Le Guin short story that I also have to confess I never liked very much — “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” I still don’t like it — it trades her signature subtlety for didacticism. But it does get the job done, posing the question that haunts us today in our consumer-driven world: in the midst of plenty and luxury, how much suffering can we turn away from and still manage to look at ourselves in the mirror?
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