Babel

by R.F. Kuang

He adored it here; he really did. For all the daily slights he suffered, walking through campus delighted him. He simply could not maintain, as Griffin did, an attitude of constant suspicion or rebellion; he could not acquire Griffin’s hatred of this place.

Yet didn’t he have a right to be happy? He had never felt such warmth in his chest until now, had never looked forward to getting up in the morning as he did now.

He was a child starved of affection, which he now had in abundance – and was it so wrong for him to cling to what he had?

And because he himself could not resolve the contradiction of his willingness to thrive at Babel even as it became clearer, day by day, how obviously unjust were the foundations of its fortunes. The only way he could justify his happiness here, to keep dancing on the edges of two worlds, was to continue awaiting Griffin’s correspondence at night – a hidden, silent rebellion whose main purpose was to assuage his guilt over the fact that all this gold and glitter had to come at a cost.

This was what he wanted: a smooth, even path to a future with no surprises. The only obstacle, of course, was his conscience.

And perhaps all that was morally compromised, yes – but was it so wrong to want to survive?

Fluency also entailed a whole host of social rules and unspoken conventions that Robin feared he might never fully grasp.

Still, Robin could not help but envy those boys – those born into this world, who uttered its codes as native speakers. When he saw Elton Pendennis and his crowd strolling and laughing across the green, he couldn’t help but imagine, just for a moment, what it might be like to be a part of that circle. He wanted Pendennis’s life, not so much for its material pleasures – the wine, the cigars, the clothes, the dinners – but for what it represented: the assurance that one would always be welcome in England. If he could only attain Pendennis’s fluency, or at least an imitation of it, then he, too, would blend into the tapestry of this idyllic campus life. And he would no longer be the foreigner, second-guessing his pronunciation at every turn, but a native whose belonging could not possibly be questioned or revoked.

These boys were nothing; he could decimate them with a word if he so desired.

a brat. he'd have slayed all of the tsh & iwwv people

‘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?’

‘So there it is. It’s all quite easy once you’ve grasped the basic principle. We capture what is lost in translation – for there is always something lost in translation – and the bar manifests it into being. Simple enough?’

‘Languages aren’t just made of words. They’re modes of looking at the world. They’re the keys to civilization. And that’s knowledge worth killing for.’

‘Words tell stories.’ This was how Professor Lovell opened their first class that afternoon, held in a spare, windowless room on the tower’s fifth floor. ‘Specifically, the history of those words – how they came into use, and how their meanings morphed into what they mean today – tell us just as much about a people, if not more, than any other kind of historical artefact.

So the history of the word does not describe just a change in language, but a change in an entire social order.’

Phonological calques are often semantic calques as well. Words spread. And you can trace contact points of human history from words that have uncannily similar pronunciations. Languages are only shifting sets of symbols – stable enough to make mutual discourse possible, but fluid enough to reflect changing social dynamics.

‘All you have to do is look at artefacts, documents, and the like. But how do you research the history of words? How do you determine how far they’ve travelled?’ Professor Lovell looked very pleased by this question. ‘Reading,’ he said. ‘There is no other way around it. You compile all the sources you can get your hands on, and then you sit down to solve puzzles. You look for patterns and irregularities. We know, for instance, that the final Latin m was not pronounced in classical times, because inscriptions at Pompeii are misspelled in a way that leaves the m out. This is how we pin down sound changes. Once we do that, we can predict how words should have evolved, and if they don’t match our predictions, then perhaps our hypothesis about linked origins is wrong. Etymology is detective work across centuries, and it’s devilishly hard work, like finding a needle in a haystack. But our particular needles, I’d say, are quite worth the search.’

The curious thing about etymology, they soon learned, was that anything could influence a language, from the consumption habits of the rich and worldly to the so-called vulgar utterances of the poor and wretched. The lowly cants, the supposed secret languages of thieves, vagabonds, and foreigners, had contributed such common words such as bilk, booty, and bauble.

English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular. And Robin found it incredible, how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods.

‘They should teach Sanskrit to China scholars from the beginning. Sanskrit came to China by way of Buddhist texts, and this caused a veritable explosion of linguistic innovation, as Buddhism introduced dozens of concepts that Chinese had no easy word for. Nun, or bhiksunī in Sanskrit, became ni.* Nirvana became nièpán.* Core Chinese concepts like hell, consciousness, and calamity come from Sanskrit. You can’t begin to understand Chinese today without also understanding Buddhism, which means understanding Sanskrit. It’s like trying to understand multiplication before you know how to draw numbers.’

They became what they’d aspired to be since their first year – aloof, brilliant, and fatigued to the bone. They were miserable. They slept and ate too little, read too much, and fell completely out of touch with matters outside Oxford or Babel. They ignored the life of the world; they lived only the life of the mind. They adored it.

For he had never been happier than he was now: stretched thin, too preoccupied with the next thing before him to pay any attention to how it all fitted together.

History isn’t a premade tapestry that we’ve got to suffer, a closed world with no exit. We can form it. Make it. We just have to choose to make it.’

He didn’t want to dwell on all the things they represented – the fact that for all of his professed allegiance to revolution, for his commitment to equality and to helping those who were without, he had no experience of true poverty at all. He’d seen hard times in Canton, but he had never not known where his next meal might come from or where he would sleep at night. He had never looked at his family and wondered what it might take to keep them alive. For all his identification with the poor orphan Oliver Twist, for all his bitter self-pity, the fact remained that since the day he had set foot in England, he had not once gone to sleep hungry.

Acting from generosity, or perhaps sadism, the Babel faculty made available a set of silver bars for examinees to use as study aids. These bars were engraved with a match-pair using the English word meticulous and its Latin forerunner metus, meaning ‘fear, dread’. The modern usage of meticulous had arisen just a few decades before in France, with the connotation of being fearful of making a mistake. The effect of the bars was to induce a chilling anxiety whenever the user erred in their work.

pretty useless for me since i've done this without the bars :)

He was somehow both exhausted all the time and unable to sleep from a surplus of nervous energy.

But fear, was, of course, not rational. His imagination ran wild with the thousand and one things that could go wrong.

Everything was okay; the world could keep moving; nothing else mattered, because they’d done it.

If only one could engrave entire memories in silver, thought Robin, to be manifested again and again for years to come – not the cruel distortion of the daguerreotype, but 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, 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.

It felt now as if they had all the time in the world to do nothing but be happy, if they could just remember how.

But the future, vague as it was frightening, was easily ignored for now; it paled so against the brilliance of the present.

Reality was, after all, just so malleable – facts could be forgotten, truths suppressed, lives seen from only one angle like a trick prism, if only one resolved never to look too closely.

He was parroting what Griffin had told him, truths he had come to internalize. Yet in the face of Professor Lovell’s stony silence, it all seemed so silly. His voice sounded frail and tinny, desperately unsure of itself.

And that was the heart of it all, wasn’t it? Robin had always been willing, in theory, to give up only some things for a revolution he halfway believed in. He was fine with resistance as long as it didn’t hurt him. And the contradiction was fine, as long as he didn’t think too hard about it, or look too closely. But spelled out like this, in such bleak terms, it seemed inarguable that far from being a revolutionary, Robin, in fact, had no convictions whatsoever.

Why was it so difficult to find the words? There was something wrong with this argument, but once again, he could not figure out what.

Only he hadn’t the faintest clue whether he’d done the right thing, what right and wrong meant at all, or how the pieces might now fall.

Inside, he felt like a fraud, a traitor.

It sounded so abstract – just categories of use, exchange, and value – until it wasn’t; until you realized the web you lived in and the exploitations your lifestyle demanded, until you saw looming above it all the spectre of colonial labour and colonial pain.

Free trade. This was always the British line of argument – free trade, free competition, an equal playing field for all. Only it never ended up that way, did it? What ‘free trade’ really meant was British imperial dominance, for what was free about a trade that relied on a massive build-up of naval power to secure maritime access? When mere trading companies could wage war, assess taxes, and administer civil and criminal justice?

These trade networks were carved in stone. Nothing was pushing this arrangement off its course; there were too many private interests, too much money at stake. They could see where it was going, but the people who had the power to do anything about it had been placed in positions where they would profit, and the people who suffered most had no power at all.

His thoughts were so jumbled; he had no idea how to convey what he meant, and all he could grasp at were memories, passing references.

He sensed something momentous had just occurred, but he wasn’t sure of what, nor his role in it.

He had danced for years on the razor’s edge of these truths, had remained there as a means of survival, a way to cope, unable to accept either side fully because an unflinching examination of the truth was so frightening that the contradictions threatened to break him.

But he could not go on like this. He could not exist a split man, his psyche constantly erasing and re-erasing the truth. He felt a great pressure in the back of his mind. He felt like he would quite literally burst, unless he stopped being double. Unless he chose.

They were speaking not in terms of ethics, but of logistics, and this made Robin feel as if they’d stepped into an upside-down world where nothing made sense, and no one had a single problem with it but him.

Robin couldn’t tell if he was prying or just being friendly.

The days were terribly long. Time crawled when every second contained a horrible contingency, the question will we get away? Robin was constantly sick. His nausea was wholly different from the roiling unease of seasickness; it was a vicious mass of guilt gnawing at his stomach and clawing at his throat, a poisonous weight that made it hard to breathe. Trying to relax or to distract himself was no help; it was when he slipped up and lost his guard that the sickness redoubled.

Behaving like a person demanded tremendous focus. Sometimes the most he could do was to remember to breathe, hard and even.

He was scared of his subconscious; of letting it wander. He could dwell on nothing.

He wanted all thoughts to stop. He wanted to disappear.

They had no skills; they had not the strength nor the temperament for manual labour, and they did not have the connections to find employment. Most importantly, they didn’t know how to live.