Reviews with content warning for Death - Babel: An Arcane History

Babel is not a book I thought I would find myself picking up this year. Initially I had heard of it in comparison to Donna Tarrt's The Secret History. As I found the second book a struggle to read in places, I did not have much hope for Babel but was pleasantly suprised!

Babel is an engaging read encouraging the reader to reflect on the progression of colonisation from the United Kingdom but with a magical element in the form of translation pairs and the power these posess to accomplish great things. From start to end you can see the detail into research into Language, History, Colonisation and Cultures that Kuang has gone to in order to create this informed book. Personally I think the addition of the explanation footnotes was brilliant otherwise there are many times I wouldn't have really understood certain references or situations.

I personally couldn't find fault with this book aside from the pace feeling slow for the first 3/4 and then the ending feeling quite rapid and rushed in comparison. The ending of this book and the meaning around it are what captivated me the most and has stuck with me since I finished reading this book. I certainly prefered Babel to The Secret History.

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owlsantuary's review against another edition

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adventurous dark inspiring mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

you can find this review formatted correctly on my Wordpress (https://owlsantuary.wordpress.com/2023/12/26/babel-or-the-necessity-of-violence/)
“Betrayal, translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?” (153)

Babel, or the Necessity of Violence, an Arcane History, is an anti-colonial response to both the academic world and the romanticisation of academia in literature. It’s a fast paced dark academia thriller that takes you from the stresses of academic life to the very reality of colonial violence and propaganda that rings true with every modern news headline, and uses the power of translation as a vehicle to understand the way that Capitalism homogenises culture. It’s also why I’ve decided R.F Kuang is my current favourite author, because she literally puts something in her writing that leaves me wanting more and more and more. This is both a story and an academic paper and I love her deeply for this. Rebecca, I love you (academically).

Robin Swift, our main character, provides a lens to this very similar version of 1830s England. Adopted by the personification of Orientalism by Edward Saïd, he navigates the harsh realities of moving to a new country and then attending the hallowed halls of Oxford, where he is taught how to strip language and translation bare in order to make use of its power. His ability to speak Mandarin is what makes him unique, and a resource for Babel: the fictional College of Translation he attends, and the only reason he, a non-white, non-English, non-upper-class student, can attend. His colleagues, Ramy, Victoire, and Letty, also fulfil these requirements, with the exception of Letty, who is both English and upper-class, but is not male.

The four form a tight quartet that showcases the way that academia affects marginalised groups. Female students and academics are asked to tamper down their femineity and any reminder of it in order to be taken seriously, and non-white students are asked to accept racism to an absurd degree in their daily lives in order to keep the peace, asking them to either remove any form of non-whiteness from themselves, or to self-orientalise themselves to an absurd degree.

Robin’s half-brother, Griffin, represents the Necessity of Violence. He is the characterisation of Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, and he understands and has seen the casual violence of the Empire first-hand, something that Robin up until this point has not witnessed fully. He saw the death of his mother, and heard of the invasion of Afghanistan, but until he is faced with it in Canton, until he witnesses the casual violence enacted upon himself and his peers and the people of Oxford and London during the raid on the Old Library and the general strike, he does not understand it. Sometimes it takes witnessing violence to understand its depth.

Letty’s role as an antagonist is in that she does not understand intersectionality. While the others have at least two degrees of marginalisation, she enjoys a privilege of belonging to the Empire and even in her marginalised identity as a woman being considered acceptable and “civilised.” If she leaves the college, her privilege in the country and as an English citizen is not rescinded, she can return to a life of luxury. Her betrayal is almost inevitable. Victoire’s apathy at changing her worldview comes from a wish to study and live in peace, the emotional burden of changing her worldview and the antagonism that comes with it being more detrimental to Victoire than Letty, who has not and will not ever experience the same discomfort the rest of them have, being white and upper-class with the correct accent and military father she’s desperate to gain approval of. She's not even named as a perpetrator when the news of Lovell's death is announced (401). In the contemporary, she represents white feminism. She believes it's about personal happiness over the liberation of those her personal happiness requires to suffer (379).

The magic system in Babel is both a metaphor for the homogenisation of culture under white supremacy and of linguistic Imperialism. It’s mentioned when they come across the map of dying languages.

“But that’s the great contradiction of colonialism.” Cathy uttered this like a simple matter of fact. “It’s built to destroy that which it prizes the most.” (384)

Under white supremacy, all white cultures are the same, and the other is inferior, yet it regards a need to stamp out the heathenism within it. Cathy even laments that she’d have grown up speaking Gaelic a generation earlier, the violent efforts to destroy the culture in Scotland now manifest in the language being unheard and considered unimportant. This is manifest in the UK under British culture, disregarding the distinctions between English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish, culture, and even disregarding the local identities such as Kernowyon (Cornish) and Manx (Isle of Man). Efforts to revive languages dead or dying are expensive and difficult in the face of globalisation, and the recognition of the sovereignty of parliaments like the Scottish parliament when they go against the interests of the Westminster parliament (most recently in regard to Trans rights) is disregarded. Robin doesn't even use his native language, Cantonese, to translate. He is asked to work in Mandarin, so that it's more accessible to Lovell.

Translation requires effort and money the Empire is not willing to pool money into, which is why the Empire only ever translated things into English. They saw translation as a betrayal to the original (hence the quote this piece of writing was begun with), not as the speaking of ideas into the world, and an attempt to understand them being made by the rest of it. Maintaining other languages is a drain of Empire resources, it means that in order to get everyone to think the same way, for their propaganda to work, they must all speak English. Allowing other languages to coexist means that people can exist without the linguistic influence of the Empire, nor can the privilege speaking its language obtain. If they translated from English, who would bother to learn it? Who would bother to ally themselves with it?

“That's just what translation is, I think. That's all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they're trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.” (535)

When Victoire tries to submit a match-pair in Haitian Creole, she is laughed at, as it is “useless,” but only to the Empire. The match-pair she devises would have been useful to the people of Haiti, but because of its perceived uselessness, it is disregarded. This is again, the great contradiction. In protecting the sanctity of the British Empire, it destroys those within it, only regarding what it can use to destroy and consume more and more of the rest of the world with. One of the ways that the British crippled the Indian economy was to destroy the Indian industrial commerce – which India was famed for having prior to British rule. It was relegated to being solely for primary resources, and remove its manufacturing power and ability to self-sustain meant that India was flooded with cheap quality goods make in the UK over their own industry, and getting a hold of well-made goods is a luxury only few could afford now that mass manufacture had become so commonplace. It destroys the wealth of knowledge (cultural and academic) and industry in order to make money.

I see this myself personally today. Well-made clothes have become harder and harder to come by, and now even the quality of raw fabric has declined significantly. Even a plain cotton that would be opaque and set you back about £6 a metre ten or twenty years ago costs £10 a metre and is translucent and rips far more easily despite being from the same company, same label. It’s gotten to a point I’ve considered weaving fabric myself, but who has the time? I can’t build a loom, I’m a student that moves house once a year, sometimes across continents, and I think my landlord would evict me if I started keeping silkworms on the balcony. Even if you’re not someone who makes their own clothes, the availability of well-made clothing that won’t end up in landfill in 3 years is scarce.

Collective action is another theme brought up in this book. The translators put on a general strike, and effectively cripples the British Empire. One way of comparing the silver match-pair system to reality in the UK today is the fact that nobody carries cash anymore. Everything is contactless. If you lose your phone, if the signal shorts out, you’re screwed. You could quite easily cripple the UK by switching off the internet, because nobody could pay for anything anymore. And also the fact that everything is imported. Supply lines are fragile things, made so evident by the Evergreen incident, which blocked 12% of world trade by blocking the Suez Canal. That same 12% is now blocked by Yemeni ships, which in response to the Israeli attacks on Palestine and Lebanon have begun to take over ships they think are associated with the settler state and force many shipping companies to divert their shipping lines around the entire continent of Africa. In the book this is manifested as the felling of Westminster Bridge. The port of London is instrumental to the running of the British Empire and the City of London, but to make a point, they do not relent their violence, destroying London, the heart itself to spite the Translators and their strike, as to fall to foreign workers, foreign languages would be their greatest downfall, as it would admit that they had crippled them after exploiting them for so very long.

Kuang’s writing style is addictive and distinctive. I have never felt like I do not misunderstand a character’s intentions unless she wishes me to. Oxford is barely described, but I believe this is on purpose. The four students barely divert from their rooms, the library, and the tower. Many students can attest to the fact that university life shrinks your physical existence to the few places you frequent. One complaint that I have of the pacing of the book is about the strike. I felt it was too fast, and that the turmoil of the strike and monotony was not translated as well as it could have been to the page.

I am rating this book 9.9/10 because of the pacing thing because it was tiny.

Then again, all stories lose parts when they are translated to page. I weep for the death of performance of oral history, static in words. Still and unmoving, not alive as language should be.

I wish to recommend further readings for the topics brought up in this book.

Grosfoguel explains well and in detail the way that capitalism and colonisation came to be, and how the disregard of humanity came to be justified.

Grosfoguel, R. (2013) The Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities Epistemic Racism/Sexism and the Four Genocides/Epistemicides of the Long 16th Century. Human architecture: Journal of tHe Sociology of Self-Knowledge XI, Issue 1, Fall, 73-90. https://www.niwrc.org/sites/default/files/images/resource/2%20The%20Structure%20of%20Knowledge%20in%20Westernized%20Universities_%20Epistemic.pdf

In The Anarchy by William Dalrymple, he gives a an account of the takeover of India by the English East India Company in a way that explains what happened and the absolute chaos created by this transition of power.

I also found this article which specifically talks about the exploitation of India:

Thakur, K. K. (2013). BRITISH COLONIAL EXPLOITATION OF INDIA AND GLOBALIZATION. Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 74, 405–415. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44158840

Mentioned as a heading in Chapter 26 is Frantz Fanon’s the Wretched of the Earth. It was originally written in French, but has been translated into English for those unable to read the original. It deals with the necessary violence of the process of decolonisation.

To discuss translation and power, there is Focault, but I read these two articles in order to try and better understand the theory surrounding translation and power.

Tymoczko, M. (2006). Translation: Ethics, Ideology, Action. The Massachusetts Review, 47(3), 442–461. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25091110

Philp, M. (1983). Foucault on Power: A Problem in Radical Translation? Political Theory, 11(1), 29–52. http://www.jstor.org/stable/191008

I also read an interesting paper on the connection between early modern caffeine dependencies, Empire, and commodification.

Jamieson, R. W. (2001). The Essence of Commodification: Caffeine Dependencies in the Early Modern World. Journal of Social History, 35(2), 269–294. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3790189

Read this article about Globalisation and Imperialism

Chilcote, R. H. (2002). Globalization or Imperialism? Latin American Perspectives, 29(6), 80–84. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3184999

On the subject of oral history, I read this (specifically the introduction).

Russell, T.C. (2013). The Mythology and Oral Literature of Taiwan ’ s Indigenous Peoples.

Also APA is the superior citation style fight with me in the comments about it.

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