Babel: An Arcane History
R. F. Kuang’s Babel: An Arcane History (2022) is a fantasy-inspired, alternate history of 1820 and 30s Britain and its relationship with the world beyond. As one might expect from the time period, Babel centers on themes of empire and colonialism. Oxford is the hub in Babel and not just for the academic study ongoing there. In the fantasy-like world building of Babel, Oxford houses the Tower, the center of colonial Britain’s translators’ world. In Kuang’s clever and moving novel, language and translation claim a power that creeps towards magic and provides the writer an eloquent metaphor through which to deconstruct the colonial project.
From the start, something feels a bit unnerving, even macabre, in Babel. And it should. At the heart of Babel’s world is an odious human trafficking. Unlike other forms of slavery, though, the Royal Institute of Translation centered at the Tower manipulates its vassals into loving the terms of their enslavement. Kuang’s novel opens with a scene set in nineteenth-century Canton as a family dies of fever. A boy lays beside his dead mother’s body prepared to die himself when a mysterious British man appears wielding a silver bar with words written in both English and Cantonese. The man asks the boy to read them. This boy, it seems, in unique in 1820s Canton for he can read and speak both his native Chinese and also the English of his British tutor. This silver-bar brandish gentleman, you see, is not the first mysterious Brit to have come to this boy; his tutor, a young British woman, simply appeared one day, paid by an unknown British patron. When the child reads the words on the bar, his fever breaks and the man conveys him to the care of a lovable British cook and housekeeper. Within days the child boards a ship to Britain with a new self-given English name—Robin Swift—and a new puzzling guardian who, turns out, is a Babel professor. Robin’s life in Canton fades into memory and his days overflow with classical language instruction from a string of tutors. The child is a natural linguist and soon he is well-versed in several more languages; his ultimate aspiration, his guardian tells him, to attend the Tower of Babel in Oxford.
Kuang’s novel provides a startling metaphor for the extractive nature of colonialism. As the reader follows young Robin on his own journey through a country nearly as different from his native land as Gulliver’s travels—the author of which inspired the young man’s choice of surname—he meets a diverse cast of characters. Robin’s life interweaves with a cadre of other young people, all language specialists, who hail from around the colonial world: India, West Indies, and the UK. Together they come of age in the bubble of rigorous academic study. And yet the troubles of the world beyond their scholarship intervene with increasing regularity. As the characters grapple with the disturbing realities of the system of which they are being trained to be an integral part, Babel forces the reader to reflect upon the upsetting and ongoing nature of colonialism.
I found Babel’s concept and message to be profound, even if the narrative may have gone on a bit too long for my taste. (The novel exceeds 500 pages and the final several hundred pages felt a bit tedious, although they included writing that was at times very rich and moving.) Even as a few of Kuang’s authorial decisions disappointed me somewhat, I enthusiastically applaud her project and encourage everyone to give this book a go. While Babel provides fantasy-infused, alternative history of nineteenth-century British Empire, all of its concepts are of continuing concern in today’s twentieth century. Babel is a brilliant treatment of the deplorable nature of the colonial project; Kuang’s novel reveals the colonialism’s endurance as it illuminates the economy of language, tradition, and world view. Questions of cultural appropriation loom large in a novel about an empire that relies on the power of colonized languages and native speakers. While Babel may fall short in some of its craft, in my opinion, it is, nonetheless, a wildly powerful read. It is a novel that will haunt its reader long after reading its final sentences. It also provides a compelling, if also troubling, way out of such a system; one that I continue to grapple with weeks after finishing the novel. Works like this demonstrate the power of story, even fantastical tales like this one, to guide individual readers through a necessary and meaningful reflection of their own culture and time.
Bibliography:
Kuang, R. F., Babel: An Arcane History. Harper: 2022.
A Few Great Passages:
“A lie was not a lie if it was never uttered; questions that were never asked did not need answers. They would both remain perfectly content to linger in the liminal, endless space between truth and denial” (30).
“’Translation, from time immemorial, has been the facilitator of peace. Translation makes possible communication, which in turn makes possible the kind of diplomacy, trade, and cooperation between foreign people that brings wealth and prosperity to all’” (81).
“’The point of it all is to keep amassing silver. We possess all this silver because we cajole, manipulate, and threaten other countries into trade deals that keep the cash flowing homeward. And we enforce those trade deals with the very same silver bars, now inscribed with Babel’s work, that make our ships faster, our soldiers hardier, and our guns more dealing. It’s a vicious circle of profit, and unless some outside force breaks the cycle, sooner or later Britain will possess all the wealth in the world’” (100).
“Translation involves a special dimension—a literal transportation of texts across conquered territory, words delivered like spices from an alien land. Words mean something quite different when they journey from the palaces of Rome to the tearooms of today’s Britain” (106).
“’What was lost at Babel was not merely human unity, but the original language—something primordial and innate, perfectly understandable and lacking nothing in form or content. Biblical scholars call it the Adamic language. Some think it is Hebrew. Some think it is a real but ancient language that has been lost to time. Some think it is a new, artificial language that we ought to invent. Something think French fulfills this role; some think English, once it’s finished robbing and morphing, it might’” (107).
“We can, through perfecting the art of translation, achieve what humanity lost at Babel” (108).
“But I do think there is a pure realm of meaning – a language in between, where all concepts are perfectly expressed, which we have not been able to approximate. There is a sense a feeling of when we have got it right’” (115).
“We take their languages, their ways of seeing and describing the world. We ought to give them something in return” (117).
“Languages are only shifting sets of symbols – stable enough to make mutual discourse possible, but fluid enough to reflect changing social dynamics. When we invoke words in silver, we call to mind that changing history” (166).
“’There are no kind masters [. . . ] It doesn’t matter how lenient, how gracious, how invested in your education they make out to be. Masters are masters in the end’” (380).
“The thing about violence, see, is that the Empire has a lot more to lose than we do. Violence disrupts the extractive economy., You wreak havoc on one supply line, and there’s a dip in prices across the Atlantic. Their entire system of trade is high-strung and vulnerable to shocks because they’ve made it thus, because the rapacious greed of capitalism is punishing. It’s why slave revolts succeed. They can’t fire on their own source of labour—it’d be like killing their own golden (397).
“Empire needed extraction. Violence shocked the system, because the system could not cannibalize itself and survive. The hands of the Empire were tied, because it could not raze that from which it profited. And like those sugar fields, like those markers, like those bodies of unwilling labour, Babel was an asset. Britain needed Chinese, needed Arabic and Sanskrit and all the languages of colonized territories to function. Britain could not hurt Babel without hurting itself. And so Babel alone, an asset denied, could grind the Empire to a halt” (456).
“There was no innate, perfectly comprehensible language; there was no candidate, not English, not French, that could bully and absorb enough to become one. Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving, through the world. No; a thousand worlds within one. And translation—a necessary endeavour, however futile, to move between them” (535).
