"I heard a traveller from an antique land….”
(Percy Shelley, “Ozymandias” (quoted in Kuang 147)
“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, 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 healthiest 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 overemphasise 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, was published recently.[1]
Poppy Trilogy
Kuang’s The Poppy War trilogy is not a moral fable but works
as a social document. In Kuang’s world, the countryside supplies labour, food
and recruits. Peasants are dispossessed by landowners, corvée, and military
levies; they are often the immediate constituency of insurgent movements. Urban
workers, miners, artisans, and the conscripted soldier class appear as
concentrated sites of industrial labour, political organisation, and military
potency.
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—embodies 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 faced heavy criticism for writing Yellowface.
The public dispute over the book's accusations 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 publishing industry's concrete class
relations and economic imperatives.
On the surface, the row frames itself as an ethical debate
about representation. However, its intensity and public amplification stem from
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 monetising promotional narratives and outrage cycles. 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 their 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 can 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 Oxford University in the 1830s. Although it
is labelled a historical novel, Kuang insists 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 splendour, 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. The book also lacks working-class characters.
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,
which imperial institutions appropriate 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 interesting to review her work in, say, five years to see
how much 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/
