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

One of the reasons success at Babel requires complicity in oppression is that silversmithing and translation are necessary for Britain’s imperial ambitions of Britain. The major conflicts in the novel are between the agents of empire and the empire’s colonized subjects. Four ideological stances towards imperialism and translation are present in the novel and serve as key motivations for the choices the characters make. Those stances include full-throated imperialism, the pragmatic embrace of imperialism, anticolonialism supported by nonviolent protest, and anticolonialism advanced through violence.

Jerome Playfair, Sterling Jones, and Richard Lovell are committed to the project of empire. Playfair assumes as a matter of course that translators serve “at the pleasure of the Crown”(108) because he sees language as a tool that brings colonial subjects under Great Britain’s benevolent control. This is imperialism as a civilizing mission to give the gift of good governance to colonial subjects. Sterling Jones and Richard Lovell dispense with this idealized, paternalistic notion of the relationship between colonizer and colonized. Robin describes men like them as “blades of empire….Slave traders and soldiers. Ready killers, all of them” (415). For imperialists, colonial subjects are “[l]owly, uncivilized stock” (112), “[a]nimals” (420), or even “chattel” (354) when silver is used to restrain them. This dehumanizing language shows how racism and Eurocentrism underwrite imperialism. Lovell beats six-year-old Robin with a poker, and Sterling Jones tortures Robin because of this attitude.

Letty is a pragmatic imperialist. Her relationship with the empire is complicated by her gender. As a white, British woman, Letty has some access to privilege: she had enough wealth that she could steal an education not typically available to women. She has an admiral for a father and believes she can call on him to intervene when in trouble. Letty recognizes that some aspects of imperialism are rooted in violence and inequality. Unlike the other members of her cohort, though, she “thought the Empire inevitable. The future immutable. And resistance pointless” (438). Where the empire is explicitly violent, she believes it can be made more palatable by working within the existing power structure. She sees a postcolonial world as a fantasy. Her concern is with accruing enough power that she can live a comfortable life in the status quo.

The anticolonialist stances in the novel are complicated as well. Robin and Professor Anand Chakravarti are initially on the same page. They agree that protests, the destruction of property instead of people, the Hermes Society’s lobbying efforts to convince Parliament to avoid war with China, and self-sacrifice are the stuff of revolution. Chakravarti is willing to go along with the revolutionaries in the tower so long as they believe that “violence is applied as the last resort” (498). Robin’s belief in the effectiveness of nonviolence wanes when nonviolent means fail to change the way the government treats its colonial subjects and when the government kills his loved ones. Robin becomes like Griffin, who sees imperialism as violence that has to be met with violence. His embrace of violence means he is willing to die to destroy the power of the British Empire.

During the translators’ uprising, Victoire identifies the fundamental flaw of nonviolent resistance to colonialism, which is that the colonized “have to die” to be worthy of the colonizers’ pity and to be seen as noble (525). Unlike Robin, Victoire isn’t content with an end that requires her death. Her approach to fighting against colonialism is by turns pragmatic and idealistic, focused on joy and sacrifice. Her version of anticolonialism first involves the decolonization of her mind. She achieves “true liberation” (539) and claims her identity as Haitian when she works with the Hermes Society. She is more future-focused than Robin and Griffin. Decolonization is just the beginning, a moment when the future “is unwritten, brimming with potential” (540). Kuang gives Victoire the last chapter and words in the novel, which implies that choosing to live and fight another day is as important as a willingness to be a martyr in anticolonialist struggles.

Although Robin Swift is the novel’s protagonist, friendships take center stage in driving the plot and conflicts. While the friendships at times sustain the characters, friendship isn’t enough to overcome differences rooted in the identities of each character.

The friendship between Robin and Ramy begins by chance and deepens as Robin realizes he can learn something from Ramy’s approach to being an other. Friendship with Ramy forces Robin to be more assertive, as when he intervenes to stop a group of students from beating up Ramy because of his skin color. When Robin befriends Victoire and Letty, he grows even braver on their behalf, as on the night he defuses the anger of the students who sexually harass Victoire and Letty.

The friendships peak after the group survives the rigors of third-year exams together. In their relief, the friends have a “golden afternoon [with] the warmth of uncomplicated friendship, all fights forgotten, all sins forgiven; the sunlight melting away the memory of the classroom chill; the sticky taste of lemon on their tongues and their startled, delighted relief”(236). Because of these tight friendships, the cohort is able to survive frequent reminders that they are outsiders who are only begrudgingly accepted by other students. That sense of support and common experience lasts for several years until conflicts over identity and politics disrupt the group.

Secrets and poor allyship end this golden period. Robin chooses commitment to his half-brother Griffin and the Hermes Society over loyalty to his friends; when Ramy, Victoire, and Letty discover he is a member of Hermes, each feels this secret keeping is a betrayal of trust. Robin betrays their trust again when he leaks the location of a Hermes safehouse to regain Professor Lovell’s trust. Robin’s relationship with the other three is never the same again, and his despair after Ramy’s death fuels his insistence on the necessity of violence. In the end, his friendship with Victoire moderates some of his violent impulses and gives him enough clarity to use the “translation” match-pair to destroy silver power in England. The final conversation between Robin and Victoire shows that friendships can exist despite deep conflicts over what is right. Victoire is only able to choose life over martyrdom after Robin helps her reframe that choice as bravery.

Letty’s inability to be both a friend and an ally to the other three also dissolves the cohort’s friendships. She minimizes their experiences of racism, feels comfortable telling them how they should and should not address racism, and consistently centers her own pain. Her sense that she should be at the center of the story crystallizes for Robin on the night of the harassment at the faculty ball. Letty makes the “bizarre line of argument” (246) that the assault was solely about gender rather than race as well since both she and Victoire were victims. Her perspective shows a willful blindness to the way that race shapes their experiences of gender differently. The breach in the two young women’s friendship is just the first in a series of steps that leads to Letty’s betrayal during the Oxford Translators’ Revolution.

The unraveling of the cohort’s deep friendships calls into question the possibility of true friendship between white people and people of color in oppressive institutions. Ultimately, Kuang’s message about friendship is that enduring friendships are the result of empathy and a willingness to forgive. Friendships unfold in the real world, meaning that identities, politics, and status also play a role in whether friendships can last.