The Magic of Language

Anyone paying attention to the science fiction/fantasy world has likely heard of the controversy surrounding the 2023 Hugo Awards. For those not in the know, the most prestigious sci-fi/fantasy prize has, arguably, a more democratic selection process than, say, the Oscars where a hidden cabal of industry power players make decisions behind closed doors. But the voting and committee procedures still leave plenty of room for shenanigans.

In short, it appears that several authors were eliminated from the finalist list to placate the Chinese government. It’s rather dystopian for a sci-fi award to be swayed by a government: too on the nose; however, one of the individuals shadow-banned from the finals—and the book I would have put money on to win—is the subject of this essay: R.F. Kuang’s Babel, or the Necessity of Violence. Synopsis time.

Babel is set in an alternate history version of early 19th-century England. It largely takes place in Oxford, but it does begin and later return to Canton, modern-day Guangzhou, China. The story follows Robin Swift, a Canton orphan who’s adopted by Oxford professor Richard Lovell. It quickly becomes apparent that Robin is actually Lovell’s illegitimate child, though neither openly admits to the relationship. Instead, the professor acts as an aloof, demanding overlord. Lovell insists Robin study several languages, preparing him to enter Babel, the University of Oxford’s official magic department. He pushes him so hard that once, when Robin is late to tutoring, Lovell beats him senseless and threatens to ship him back to his plague-ridden hovel in China. Fortunately, Robin does well with his studies and is accepted into the prestigious school, thus initiating him into the arcane world. 

Magic is what puts the “alternate” in the alternate history of this novel. The magic as described is simple, elegant, and offers as many permutations as there are words in all the languages spoken on earth. In Kuang’s system, words in two different languages are inscribed on silver bars. The relationship, the tension, or the sympathy between the two words can produce a magical effect. One professor describes it this way: “. . . the power of the bar lies in words. More specifically, the stuff of language that words are incapable of expressing—the stuff that gets lost when we move between one language and another. The silver catches what’s lost and manifests it into being” (p. 82). The professor goes on to inscribe a silver bar with the Proto-Germanic word heimlich, meaning home, and the English word clandestine, implying a secret/secluded abode. After speaking both words aloud, an immense wave of calm and serenity washes over Robin. Upon witnessing this near-miracle, Robin thinks, “The loneliness, the beatings, the long and aching hours of study, the ingesting of languages like bitter tonic so that he could one day do this—it was all worth it” (p. 83). 

We’ll see.

Magic as language? The supernatural born from translation? Beautiful. As someone with a Duolingo streak in the thousands of days, this is so my jam. 

Robin’s life at Babel is complicated. He’s an Asian man in a white, aristocratic space and is bullied in all of the direct and indirect ways you might expect, by students and professors alike. But he does make friends, allies: Ramy from India, Victoire from Haiti, and Letty from England. These four bond over their strangeness within Babel. Robin and Ramy are both Asian, Letty is a woman (though, importantly, also the daughter of a British admiral), and Victoire is Black and a woman. 

You’d rightly surmise that they are not the standard student demographic at Oxford. But their presence is vital in Babel since the magical power derived from European languages is fading, so more “obscure” languages like Chinese or Arabic have grown in importance. One of the graduate students describes it like this: “Those bars [inscribed with Latin, Romance, and Germanic words] are losing their efficacy. As linguistic flow spreads across continents—words like saute and gratin become a standard part of the English lexicon—the semantic warp loses its potency . . . Romance Languages is really the most threatened branch of the faculty, as much as they’d like to pretend they own the building” (p. 163). 

So, these four students (or perhaps three plus Letty) are simultaneously despised and utterly necessary. And the complex relationships between these brilliant, ill-treated individuals fuel the bulk of the book. They are thrown together but, unfortunately, nothing silver can stay: “when everything went sideways and the world broke in half, Robin would think back to this day . . . and wonder why they had been so quick . . . to trust one another . . . the answer was obvious—that they were all four of them drowning in the unfamiliar, and they saw in each other a raft, and clinging to one another was the only way to stay afloat” (p. 88). Beautiful, heartbreaking foreshadowing. 

Early on Robin learns of another, older version of himself, a former Lovell protégé, and ends up joining a secret society risking everything to dismantle Britain's colonial rule, a nearly insurmountable task due to the supremacy afforded them by the command of silver magic. There’s intrigue, deadly rivalries, magical fights, struggles for the hearts of the people. Epic, tragic, and so much fun.

I won’t give too much away. Yet. I started reading Babel and it initially felt like a dark academy novel: Harry Potter with angst. But I don’t mind saying I was completely wrong. It gets real dark, grimdark even. The characters, the politics, the magic, the language, all just incredible. It deserved the Hugo, though I must admit as a former Chinese major with ties to both the American and Asian academies, there were moments when this book felt like it was written just for me. But it is deserving of attention and I hope that the Hugo Awards debacle has only garnered it a wider audience.

As I was reading, I couldn’t help but constantly return to a collection of essays I’ve been working through: Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. Gramsci was an Italian Marxist philosopher who was born in the late 1800s and died after more than a decade of mistreatment in—of all the places you might guess—prison during Mussolini’s fascist reign. Prison Notebooks is a vast collection of writings whose language, regardless of the translator, is often necessarily opaque as Gramsci was, again, under arrest. I’m always amazed that any of his work managed to see the light of day.

The two areas that Gramsci touched on that feel particularly pertinent to Babel are the concept of hegemony and the social role of the intellectual. To begin, hegemony has its own Marxist etymology but Gramsci further elaborated the idea. He was writing in a time, the early 1900s, when many were confused about the direction or the efficacy of Marxist thought. Marx and Engels had predicted that capitalism would grow so cruel, that the worker would be so immiserated, that people would be so completely incapable of reproducing themselves, that the proletariat couldn’t help but rise up and smash the oppressive machine. But that hadn’t happened (still waiting). Capitalism only further entrenched itself; Gramsci offers compelling reasons for the ways in which capitalism evolved to avoid its death knell. 

Hegemony, he argued, was not merely the ability of the elites to control the masses through violent coercion (i.e., the military, the police), but a form of ideological control. The ruling class, then as now, is able to make its interests appear like the best—sometimes the only—option for stability and/or progress. You can see this today every time a middle-class person voices support for a millionaire who’d gladly gut every social program for a tax break, or how blue-collar workers refuse to support a union despite the fact that a union is the only entity that might shield them from wrongful termination, pension raiding, or offer any kind of path toward an increased wage or improved working conditions. It’s the seductive illusion offered by Regan’s trickle-down economics. Hegemony is how the rich convince the poor that the rich deserve all the wealth and power. The interests of the ruling class become common sense, another one of Gramsci’s terms that I won’t dwell on here.

And hegemony is how Babel works. Now, I will say that Babel does actually create and use magic, i.e., coercive force. It does directly contribute to Britain's military strength on top of being a massive money maker. But ideology, aesthetics, and performance also play a key role; Robin and the others (and, I’ll admit, me too) are wonderstruck by Oxford’s magical luster: “Robin paused, too dazzled to follow . . . a tower out of time, a vision from a dream. Those stained-glass windows, that high imposing dome; it all seemed to have been pulled from [a] painting . . .” (p. 72). “Reverently, Robin reached out and pulled the first volume of the Chinese Grammatica towards him. The tome felt inordinately heavy, each page weighted down by ink . . . He put the volume down, struck with the unsettling realization that Professor Lovell—a foreigner—knew more about his mother tongue than he did'' (p. 78). Oxford’s knowledge, its power, is awe-inspiring. 

Importantly, however, hegemony is an ideology meaning it can, with enough counter-evidence and thought, be overcome. For Robin, it begins with those closest to him, particularly as he considers his lost life in Canton: “He felt a crush of guilt for loving [his friends], and Oxford, as much as he did” (p. 130). Without going into too much detail, Babel’s luster fades as Robin peeks behind the curtain. He understands where silver comes from. He sees how he and his colleagues are being exploited, and how little they matter to this magical, colonial leviathan. The spell of hegemony is, eventually, broken. 

But like with the Romance languages, the power is also fading, hegemony or no. The UK needs to import colonial subjects to maintain control over those very same colonies. Indeed, we learn later in the book (minor spoilers for a real-world historical event) that Robin’s father, Professor Lovell, is assisting in initiating a war with China in order to seize silver from the Chinese government, a near exact replication of the real First Opium War. The British Empire is attempting to sell opium to China to counter a trade imbalance. And when China refused their advances, the British started a war. Being the world’s biggest drug dealer is not, in the long run, going to work out. It’s obviously a morally bankrupt position but, on top of that, it’s hardly good politics. 

I feel like I go back to Fanon a lot in these essays, but colonialism specifically and oppression generally work not merely through force of arms, but because oppressive regimes are able to convince enough people that their supremacy is absolute and their victory is inevitable, or what we might understand here as hegemony. And, in our magical Oxford, it’s clear that supremacy is hardly a birthright and victory is always contingent on circumstances. Our four main characters spend a lot of time around other students and faculty and find many of them wanting, often intellectually and certainly morally. But their presence alone, the need for literal and figurative foreign tongues, is also a clear demonstration of an empire’s utter inability to sustain itself. It’s a house of cards. A pretty one. A frightening one. But it will, inevitably, come crashing down. Empires always do.

And it is toward Babel’s hegemony, its ideological force, that Robin finally tilts (though I’ll admit there’s some magical destruction that plays an important role, too). 

Returning to Gramsci, the philosopher noted that any (successful) liberatory movement would require not just a physical presence, i.e., something that may fight the military/police forces arrayed against it, but also a group of people offering their own version of ideology/common sense, something that agitates against the ruling class’ hegemonic ideology. And that is where intellectuals enter the picture.

Gramsci notes that intellectuals, as we’d generally understand the term, are traditionally culled from the upper class of society. It’s not necessarily the ruling class (e.g., the aristocracy) that produces intellectuals—as they often already wield their own form of power and are deeply invested in maintaining it—but from the bourgeoisie, usually as a means of climbing the social ladder. And this form of intellectualism is, whether consciously or not, deeply invested in maintaining the status quo through hegemony, proselytizing on behalf of the ruling class to convince the masses that the rich deserve it all and everyone else can fight for the crumbs. It is, after all, the goal of the intellectual to join the high and mighty, not topple them. And, on a baser level, who signs the intellectuals' paychecks? The ruling class. University presidents and professors are—today, 2024—losing their jobs because donors with deep pockets don’t like what they say or what they teach. The fact that money has captured education, like politics, shouldn’t come as a revelation to anyone.

But what Gramsci pointed out is that all people in all classes exercise some degree of intellectual thought; we are thinking creatures after all and we all possess the capacity to be intellectuals. Indeed, every class has its own homegrown organic intellectual class. They’re just not often understood as such; they are not assigned the social role of “intellectual”; they’re not rubber-stamped with Oxford’s seal of approval.

Take a factory for example. Sure, there are distant engineers or architects or inventors who created the systems and processes the workers manipulate to produce a product. These may be intellectuals of one kind or another. But those factory workers are far from automatons (much to the dismay of the owners); they think and feel and act and make decisions even within the confines of the factory. Moreover, among the workers themselves are those who, whether through conscious exercise or unconscious curiosity, have examined the system with a critical eye. They become thought leaders (i.e., organic intellectuals); their opinions matter to their colleagues; their opinions steer the conversation. Now, whether those opinions lead to liberation or not is another matter. But people think. We can’t help but think. And we share these ideas with our friends and colleagues. We are social creatures, after all.

And so it should come as no surprise that much of modern society is designed—by capitalism or despotism—to prevent us from thinking. We’re tired, disconnected, drugged, and binging Netflix—bread and circuses and chill—but that’s another essay.

Gramsci felt that it is the duty of the (leftist) intellectual to offer a counter-hegemony, an alternative form of common sense, that allows everyone to understand their oppressed role within our current economic system and offer well-thought-out, reasoned alternatives that have been tested through praxis. No, the billionaires don’t deserve all the money. No, they’re not smarter than you or me. No, they’re not harder working than the custodian who sweeps the factory floor. The goal of the intellectual should be to take a moment to look around, to think, and to offer recommendations on the project of making this world a better, more equitable place.

This dynamic is what the back half of Babel explores. Again, I don’t want to go into too much detail because there are a lot of fun twists. But there’s a secret society that possesses an Oxford education and uses it not to further colonial ends but to attempt, albeit near hopelessly, to dismantle the British empire’s stranglehold over the world. 

I think a more interesting and immediate example of this intellectual-proletariat relationship is contained in more mundane interactions. Early on, while Robin and the others are still enamored of Oxford’s charms, they encounter a protest initiated by recently fired mill workers. Some new Babel-produced silver magic cost them their jobs. One of the protesters even lashes out at Victoire. Later in the novel, this same worker reappears and joins Robin in his Quixotic quest:

“You threw an egg at me,” Victoire said . . .

“Yes, but it was only an egg,” Abel said. “Nothing personal” (p. 480).

Again, without specifics, in this moment, the goals of the workers and the intellectuals aligned. Or rather now that the intellectuals have stepped away from Babel and the money and prestige it offers—the golden path up the social ladder—their goals can finally align. The intellectuals and the workers are able to help each other not because the intellectuals produced a plan and expected the “rabble” to follow it. No, the “rabble” thinks. The “rabble” understands. As Robin and others agitate, the “rabble” fights with them, protects them, feeds them. Each member does what they can, fights for their shared cause with whatever skills they have. It is this horizontal relationship that needs to be fostered, not the trickle-down intellectual thought that many on the right would prefer. 

Babel provides expert lessons in the way hegemony works, particularly the hegemony of the academy and its production of the intellectual class. And it offers a clear vision of how academy-trained intellectuals could step away from their own, for lack of a better phrase, ivory tower bullshit and join with the people to create a better world. So many in education entered the field for just that reason: to help people, to improve the world, to help create a brighter future. There are ways to fulfill those promises. We just need to consider the role we all play in systems of oppression and think. Think long. Think hard. Even at the end of a rough day, thinking, acting, and eventually, collectivizing is perhaps the only thing that may save us.

To close, I’d like to throw one final book into the mix: Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline. The subtitle of Babel is The Necessity of Violence. I know what Fanon would say regarding militant anticolonial movements as a way to develop a national psyche, but Malm’s work offers a slightly different perspective. The book is a meditation on the ethics of direct, violent action against industrial targets, and the downstream impact that would have on individuals, their ability to reproduce themselves, and society at large. 

I don’t want to speak for Malm and say that he wholeheartedly endorses violence. In fact, I’d say that’s not at all the point of this work. But he does note that a—perhaps ill-informed—militant climate movement would, “wage war against civilization and indeed humanity as such,” but we might consider another kind of movement that would, “fight for the possibility of civilization in the sense of organized social life for Homo sapiens” (p. 157). 

There is an important difference between waging war against something and for something. One fights to destroy; the other fights to build. The defeat of the enemy is not the hardest fight to win, not that victory is ever inevitable. It is, from my perspective, shifting gears from war to governance without governance looking like endless war that presents one of the greatest challenges the world would face if any kind of liberatory revolution ever took off.

Robin’s life, despite fleeting moments of friendship, is one riven by trauma. Considering the most emotional moments he experiences throughout the book, it is not the ideal for a better world that drives him exactly. It is love. It is a desire to be recognized as human. It is an attempt to recover—however impossibly—all those things that colonialism, oppression, and abuse stole from him and those like him. Building a coalition does not require we all get along all the time. The path to liberation can be personal, it can be self-interested. Because a better world for me requires that you, too, have a better world. My betterment cannot come at the cost of another's misery, as is often the case within our zero sum economic and political structures. Our desires must be universalized; we all must be allowed to be the best humans we can be.

Let us all be intellectuals. Let us all think. Let us all put into practice our best ideas and learn from one another, from our successes and mistakes. Let us all use the magic of language and thought, and those spaces between words, to build a better tomorrow.