“She learned,
in fact, that revolution is always unimaginable. It shatters the world you
know. The future is unwritten, brimming with potential”
R F Kuang’s-Babel
“The
historical significance and the moral grandeur of the proletarian revolution
consists in the fact that it is laying the foundations of a culture that is
above classes and which will be the first culture that is truly human.”
Leon Trotsky
'What is
art? First of all, art is the cognition of life. Art is not the free play of
fantasy, feelings and moods; art is not the expression of merely the subjective
sensations and experiences of the poet; art is not assigned the goal of
primarily awakening in the reader 'good feelings.' Like science, art cognises
life. Both art and science have the same subject: life, reality. However,
science analyses, art synthesises; science is abstract, art is concrete;
science turns to the mind of man, art to his sensual nature. Science cognises
life with the help of concepts, art with the aid of images in the form of
living, sensual contemplation.'
Aleksandr
Konstantinovich Voronsky,
R.F. Kuang’s Babel through a Marxist lens
It takes a brave
and gifted writer to play fast and loose with British history and get away with
it. However, the writer Rebecca F Kuang, who has a master's and two PHD’s,
manages to pull this off with an erudition that belies her tender years.
R. F.
Kuang’s “speculative fiction” is an attack on capitalism, or to be precise,
British imperialism. In Babel, she quotes Frantz Fanon: “Colonialism is not a
machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence
and only gives in when confronted with greater violence”.
Of course,
Kuang is free to quote whom she pleases, but Fanon is not the most healthy of
anti-imperialist writers. Fanon (1925–1961) was a Martinique-born psychiatrist,
anti-colonial theorist and participant in Algeria’s war of independence. His
major works, most notably The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White
Masks, combined clinical experience, existential-philosophical reflection and
militant polemic to expose the psychic and violent dimensions of colonial
domination.
Fanon
remains indispensable for understanding the brutality of imperialism, the
profound psychological injuries inflicted on colonised peoples, and the
legitimating role of national liberation as a political response to colonial
oppression. However, his work tends to express an overemphasis on the peasantry
and the “national” element. Fanon’s analyses sometimes valorise “the people”
and guerrilla insurgency in ways that underplay the historically decisive role
of the industrial working class as an emancipatory force.
Kuang was born
in China but grew up in the United States. Aged 29, she has already written
five books, has a list of impressive book awards and survived graduate work at
both Oxford and Cambridge. Kuang’s first three books comprised a trilogy:
The Poppy War (2018), The Dragon Republic (2019), and The
Burning God (2020). Yellowface was published in 2023, and her
latest Katabasis has just been published.[1]
Poppy Trilogy
In the
novel, local merchants, industrialists tied to foreign capital, and landowning
elites who broker deals with imperial powers function as a comprador class—they
defend property, seek stability for capital accumulation, and will sell
national sovereignty to protect their interests. The novel’s bureaucratic and
military apparatus—police, generals, intelligence organs—is an embodiment of
the state as an instrument of class rule. They administer repression, manage
economic concessions and mediate between imperial interests and local elites.
To her
credit, she warns against relying on nationalist elites or petty-bourgeois
adventurism to carry out democratic or social reforms. In semi-colonial
settings, the proletariat must assert independent leadership—organise urban
workers, factory committees, soldiers’ committees, and alliances with the poor
peasantry, rather than subordinating itself to comprador regimes.
Despite her
tender age, Kuang possesses a verbal brilliance and erudition probably
unsurpassed by any novelist of her generation. She has mocked many sacred cows.
In Yellowface, she attacks the right-wing MeToo# movement. She hates contemporary
identity politics, which typically originates in petty‑bourgeois layers with ambitions inside the cultural and
professional hierarchy of capitalism. Kuang came under heavy attack for writing
Yellowface. The public dispute over the book's accusers that an author has
appropriated or misrepresented Asian experience cannot be reduced to questions
of individual taste or moral purity. It is rooted in the concrete class
relations and economic imperatives of the publishing industry.
At the
surface level, the row frames itself as an ethical debate about representation.
However, its intensity and public amplification are products of a crisis in
cultural markets. Publishing has become an arena of intensified competition for
scarce positions — advances, awards, media visibility — driven by
conglomeration and profit-maximising behaviour. Large publishers, retailers and
tech platforms compress cultural diversity into marketable identity niches,
while promotional narratives and outrage cycles are monetised. The
HarperCollins one‑day strike and workers’ testimonies show how publishing
workers face low pay, expanded workloads, and corporate cost‑cutting even as firms seek cultural “brands” to sell; this creates an environment
in which status and visibility are disproportionately valuable to authors and
gatekeepers alike.
As the dispute
over Yellowface shows, a writer does not write under conditions of his/her
choosing, and artistic greatness is not something merely willed. Some periods
are more favourable to genius than others. I am not saying Kuang is a genius,
but the limitations of American intellectual life during the recent epoch will have
shaped her. With a fascist gangster in the White House, it will be interesting to
see how much she curses and kicks against the confines.
As the brilliant
Marxist writer Leon Trotsky once wrote:” If environment expressed itself in
novels, European science would not be breaking its head over the question of
where the stories of A Thousand and One Nights were made, whether in Egypt,
India, or Persia.” To say that man’s environment, including the artist’s, that
is, the conditions of his education and life, finds expression in his art also,
does not mean to say that such expression has a precise geographic,
ethnographic and statistical character. It is not at all surprising that it is
difficult to decide whether certain novels were made in Egypt, India or Persia,
because the social conditions of these countries have much in common. However,
the very fact that European science is “breaking its head” trying to solve this
question, as these novels themselves show, indicates that these novels reflect
an environment, even if unevenly.
No one can
jump beyond himself. Even the ravings of an insane person contain nothing that
the sick man had not received before from the outside world. However, it would
be an insanity of another order to regard his ravings as the accurate
reflection of an external world. Only an experienced and thoughtful
psychiatrist who knows the patient's past will be able to find the reflected
and distorted bits of reality in the ravings' contents. Artistic creation, of
course, is not a raving, though it is also a deflection, a changing and a
transformation of reality, in accordance with the peculiar laws of art. However
fantastic art may be, it cannot have at its disposal any other material except
that which is given to it by the world of three dimensions and by the narrower
world of class society. Even when the artist creates heaven and hell, he merely
transforms the experience of his own life into his phantasmagorias, almost to
the point of his landlady’s unpaid bill”.[2]
Babel-Or the Necessity
of Violence
Babel is set
at 1830s Oxford University. Despite being labelled a historical novel, Kuang is
adamant that it has lessons for today’s readers. In an interview, Kuang called
her book “ a dark text of academia, saying, “ I love campus novels, dark
academia novels. Moreover, I knew that when I finished the Poppy War trilogy, I
was going to move on and do something in that genre. That is the setting in
which I am most comfortable and familiar. Those are the interpersonal dynamics
that I observe and most enjoy writing about—between students and rival
students, students and teachers, etc.[3]
Roger
Marheine writes “ Kuang pulls no punches in her scathing critique of Oxford
professors who are either overt imperial agents of war (e.g. Robin’s father,
Professor Lovell), willing dupes of imperial platitudes especially as they
practice their daily craft within the very privileged confines of Oxfordian
splendor, or specialists blissfully unaware of empire’s greater crimes as they
live in academic cocoons and grasp only their own silo of knowledge. One of
Oxford’s professors, Jerome Playfair, represents Kuang’s satirical comment on
the British gentleman’s code of conduct, as they ruthlessly assert their global
dominance.”[4]
Marheine is
a pseudo-leftist and, like many on the radical left, echoes the Socialist
Worker Party's sentiment that Kuang’s book is a "goldmine of revolutionary
politics." While I am loath to downplay Kuang’s radical stance, she is not
a Marxist, and this is not a socialist work of historical fiction. Some have argued
that the book lacked nuance in its treatment of how characters from different
marginalised backgrounds intersected with the imperial centre. There is a
distinct lack of characters of a working-class background.
However,
Rebecca F. Kuang’s fiction (notably The Poppy War trilogy and Babel) offers
rich material for Marxist study: imperialism, ethnic division, bureaucracy,
mass mobilisation, culture, and the politics of memory recur throughout her
work.
Kuang’s critique
of knowledge as imperial plunder in Babel does deserve a Marxist class analysis.
Kuang’s Babel dramatises how the production, translation and curation of
knowledge are woven into imperial accumulation. Her book shows that texts,
languages and librarianship become commodities and instruments of state power.
The novel makes visible several features of that process that are vital for
organising library, academic and translation workers.
The main
thread running through the book is that knowledge labour is expropriated and
monetised. Kuang has clearly studied this barbaric practice because her book
shows how scholarship and translation produce useful intellectual commodities, annotated
corpora, glossaries, and archival order are appropriated by imperial
institutions for political and economic advantage. The unpaid or underpaid
labour of native speakers, archivists and junior scholars supplies content and
expertise that enriches metropolitan libraries and universities, while the
material rewards (funding, prestige, job security) flow to imperial centres.
This mirrors the contemporary university’s transformation into a
profit-generating arm of capital, in which millions of dollars in tuition and
research funding are extracted. At the same time, adjuncts, librarians and
translators remain precarious and low-paid.
Kuang is not
overtly a Marxist; she does not mention Marx by name, but she does strive to
present a materialist analysis of capitalism and empire. It would be very
interesting to review her work in, say, five years to discover the extent to
which it reflects the growth of fascist tendencies within world capitalism and
how a growing radical working class can tackle this. Adopting a Marxist approach
would give her already stunning work an even sharper edge, along with a much
wider readership than this great writer has achieved so far.
[1]
keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2023/07/review-yellowface-by-rebecca-f-kuang.html
[2]
The Formalist School of Poetry and Marxism-Literature and Revolution Leon
Trotsky www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/lit_revo/ch05.htm
[3]
www.goodreads.com/interviews/show/1570.R_F_Kuang
[4]
Book Review: Babel by R. F. Kuang-mltoday.com/book-review-babel-by-r-f-kuang/
