Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of The Oxford Translators' Revolution

Babel’s reference section includes texts that are supposedly the definitive books on languages aside from English. The Grammaticas symbolize the British Empire’s colonization of languages and cultures. These works are only “definitive” in terms of what can be useful to the empire. Anything not in them is deprecated or not preserved as part of the archive at all, leading to a distorted picture of what a language really is. Robin notes that most of the Chinese Grammatica entries are by Richard Lovell, whose racist attitudes toward China and Chinese people are clear, calling into question how definitive or objective such texts can be. These Grammaticas are part of the translation enterprise that Robin and the revolutionaries destroy when they use the “translation” match-pair. Destroying these Grammaticas is Robin’s effort to decolonize the languages of colonized people. These are not the only reference works on language, however. The Old Library includes books that are translated from one language to another without reference to English, research on endangered languages, and critiques of translations into English. These works symbolize what scholarship might “look like in the age after empire” (509).

Robin hands off Ibrahim’s history of the revolutionaries to Abel Goodfellow and tasks him with publishing the history all over England so that people will not forget them. The subtitle of the novel—An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution—implies that the novel is that history. Ibrahim’s history symbolizes what knowledge and historical narratives will look like with the intervention of colonized people and those who are in the process of liberating themselves. The novel and the fictional history include people of color who are fully fleshed out and who have agency in determining their fates. This history counters the history written by victors like the British Empire, in which the colonized are not human at all or are things to be exploited by the powerful. The history is Arcane in that it is hidden or secret, much like the Hermes Society itself. One of the paradoxes of resistance movements is that they operate in secret to be effective, which makes their role in pushing for change hard to see. Ibrahim’s history is thus an important part of telling a more complete history that includes the actions and people that make liberation possible.

As the members of the cohort prepare for make-or-break exams, they sit for a daguerreotype, a photography technique in which images are developed using a silver-based solution. The daguerreotype is a motif Kuang uses to develop the theme of friendship across racial and cultural lines. For Victoire, Ramy, and Robin, the image is a crude rendering of their identities, one that nevertheless captures how uncomfortable they are in Oxford and their growing unease with Letty’s colorblind racism. Letty sees the image as a true representation of their closeness. The difference in how Letty and the others see the daguerreotype reflects a difference in perspective about the cost of being friends despite their differences.

In contrast to the daguerreotype, Robin imagines their friendship as “a pure and impossible distillation of emotions and sensations. For simple ink on paper was not enough to describe this golden afternoon; the warmth of uncomplicated friendship” (236). Kuang uses “gold” here and throughout to represent pure experience and human connection that transcends the corrupting influence of silver on interpersonal relationships. However, that transcendence often relies on willful blindness to the impact of racial and linguistic differences on people’s experiences.

Griffin gives Robin a gun and shows him how to use it after Robin and his cohort join the older members of the Hermes Society. The gun symbolizes violence as a means of liberation. Robin is at first wary of the gun because it counters his belief that violence is unacceptable, even in self-defense (based on his reaction to killing his father). Robin has a brush with the corrupting influence of violence as power when he discovers that he likes shooting the gun. The gun appears again when Griffin uses it to protect Robin and Victoire from Sterling Jones. Guns kill both Sterling and Griffin, which implies that violence can be powerful but it can also be self-destructive.