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Chapter 12
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Babel, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Colonization and Racism
Language, Translation, and Power
Race, Gender, and Intersectionality
Violence and Nonviolence
Complicity
Summary
Analysis
Griffin doesn’t contact Robin again. For a while, Robin keeps looking for Griffin’s notes, but they never come. Meanwhile, as the end of Robin, Victoire, Ramy, and Letty’s third year approaches, they prepare for exams. If they fail any of their language or theory exams, they won’t be able to continue at Babel. If they fail their silver-work exam, they won’t be able to work on the eighth floor.
The novel has previously established the high stakes of exams at Babel. If Robin, Ramy, Victoire, or Letty fail those exams, there’s a chance that they’ll be expelled from the university. Those stakes are especially high for someone like Robin and Ramy, who have been brought to England solely to study at Oxford.
Themes
In a footnote, the narrator explains that when Griffin was a student, he failed his silver-work exam. Having internalized Professor Lovell’s expectations and biases, at the time, Griffin considered silver-work to be the only really meaningful work done at Babel.
Griffin’s lack of academic success at Babel provides more information about who he is as a character. Namely, Griffin seems to have disappointed himself and Professor Lovell. In the wake of that disappointment, though, Griffin began working with the Hermes Society, doing work that opposes everything that Lovell supports and stands for.
Themes
As Robin, Victoire, Ramy, and Letty’s exams approach, their anxiety becomes increasingly overwhelming. One day, Robin goes to a bookstore in search of a book he’ll use for his exams. He thinks he sees Anthony, the student who went missing on a research trip to Barbados. He calls out Anthony’s name, but the person quickly runs away down the street. Robin isn’t sure what to think. Ultimately, he decides his anxiety about exams has gotten so bad that it’s causing him to hallucinate.
Robin’s potential sighting of Anthony again points to the mysteries that surround his disappearance, including the idea that both Victoire and Griffin may know something about that disappearance that Robin doesn’t. Robin’s willingness to believe he’s hallucinating because of anxiety points again to the high stakes and overwhelming nature of the exams at Babel.
Themes
The test Robin and his cohort fear the most is the silver-work exam. As Robin and his cohort study, they find that Professor Lovell has discovered many of the most brilliant match-pairs (translated words that can be used to release the magic of silver bars). Another person who discovered several match-pairs is named Evie Brooke. Robin and his cohort determine that she would have graduated in the same year as Anthony. They all find it strange that they haven’t heard anything more about her or what happened to her, considering how brilliant she clearly was.
Professor Lovell’s intellectual brilliance serves as a tacit critique of the value that Babel places on academic achievement. That is, while Professor Lovell is academically talented, he is also racist, classist, abusive, and exploitative. The novel shows how those qualities fuel not just his behavior toward others but his willingness to support policies that harm others, including developing the match-pair he found that put countless people out of work. The novel suggests that while Lovell may have received the best education that “one can afford” (as he previously described Oxford to Robin), he was in dire need of (and did not receive) an education that stressed moral principles in addition to academic excellence.
Themes
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When it comes time for exams, Robin does well enough on his language and theory exams. When it comes time for the silver-work exam, Robin is as nervous as he’s ever been. During the exam, he trips over his words as he explains to Professor Chakravarti his theory for his match-pair. When he etches the words onto the silver bar and says them out loud, the silver bar produces a wondrous effect. It seems that Robin has done well, and the same is true for Letty and Ramy.
This passage shows how Robin, Letty, and Ramy’s months of intensive study pay off, as they succeed in their exams, including in the difficult silver-work exam. The novel again points to the way that the entire structure of Babel has been set up to reward students for engaging in work that is, ultimately, used to enrich the British Empire and oppress others.
Themes
When Victoire leaves her exam, though, she’s upset. She explains to the cohort that she used a Kreyòl word for part of her original match-pair. It worked brilliantly, but her advisor said she couldn’t use it. It wouldn’t be useful, her advisor said, because no one speaks Kreyòl. Victoire said it would be useful in Haiti, and her advisor laughed. Victoire then used a match-pair in French and English. She says that she asked her advisor afterward, and found out that she, Ramy, Robin, and Letty all passed the exam.
The professor’s racism toward Letty makes Babel’s priorities clear once more. The institution is concerned with making silver bars that will enrich and benefit the British Empire and the wealthy people within that Empire—not Kreyòl-speaking people in Haiti who, Victoire insists, objectively need help too.
Themes
