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Chapter 3
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
When Robin gets back to his room, he can’t sleep. He can’t believe that he’s just helped people steal silver bars from Oxford and envisions Professor Lovell finding out and telling him to leave in disgrace. Robin wakes up the next morning to Ramy shaking him. Ramy says he overslept, and they only have 20 minutes to get to their first day at the Translation Institute. Ramy and Robin make it on time but barely. When they arrive, they meet the two other students in their cohort at the Translation Institute, who are both girls. That surprises Ramy and Robin, as women are not admitted to Oxford. They say their names are Victoire and Letty. Victoire is Black while Letty is White.
Robin envisioning Professor Lovell telling him to leave Oxford in disgrace brings to mind when Professor Lovell beat Robin with a fireplace poker. Through that act of violence, Lovell has imposed himself in Robin’s mind as the figure of authority who will castigate Robin if he makes a mistake. That shows the kind of trauma that Robin has endured at Lovell’s hands. The novel has also already established that Oxford can be a hostile atmosphere to women, and it will continue to show how that hostile atmosphere impacts Victoire and Letty.
Themes
Robin, Ramy, Victoire, and Letty then meet Anthony, who is a postgraduate. Anthony gives the first-year students a tour of the Translation Institute building, which is referred to as Babel. Anthony points out the live translation and literary translation wings. He says that the travel involved with live translation becomes exhausting. He also looks down on the work of the literary translators. He says the academic work can be fascinating, but it’s self-indulgent. Anthony says that the really important work is done with silver on the eighth floor, the highest floor of the building. That’s where Anthony works. He says that silver-work is housed on the highest floor in case the work starts a fire. That way, everyone will be able to get out of the building before the fire spreads. A fire would destroy decades of invaluable research in the building.
Anthony’s tour makes it clear that Babel is directly involved in the construction of silver bars, which ties the university to the resources that England uses to power its still-growing Empire. Anthony’s tour also suggests that there is a hierarchy, at least among Babel students, that determines which kind of work is the most rewarding and worthwhile. Silver-work—or working to construct and maintain silver bars—occupies the highest part of that hierarchy. That is, the power that fuels the British Empire is considered more important than speaking directly with others or translating literature—two things that help and enlighten people.
Themes
The group then goes to the eighth floor, which looks more like a workshop than a library. There, they meet Professor Jerome Playfair. Professor Playfair says that Babel is the only part of Oxford that admits students who are “not of European origin.” He also begins to explain to them how silver works. He says that the power of the silver bars comes from the aspects of language that words cannot express. He says that when you translate a word from one language to another, something is lost in translation. The silver catches what is lost and “manifests it into being.”
This passage elucidates, on some level, how the silver bars function. Namely, silver bars capture what is lost in translation when a word is translated from one language to another. That puts intercultural exchange at the heart of what makes the silver bars work. Playfair’s comment about Babel admitting students who are not of European origin signals that the institute, like the silver bars (and like the exploitative British Empire), seems to need people of different cultures who speak languages other than English in order to function.
Themes
For an example, Professor Playfair writes the German word Heimlich on a silver bar and says the word means “secret” or “clandestine” and comes from a Proto-Germanic word that means “home.” He then writes “clandestine” in English on the bar. When he does, Robin feels the world shift. He feels bound together with Ramy, Victoire, and Letty. It is as if they know something that none of the other scholars on the floor do. And Robin feels like they are safe together there in the tower, as if the tower is a kind of sanctuary for them.
Playfair’s explanation demonstrates how the silver bars work. When he uses a silver bar by translating the German word Heimlich to the English word “clandestine,” the bar produces in the students the effect of feeling like they have a shared secret. The demonstration also shows what Ramy, Robin, Letty, and Victoire all hope Babel will be: a kind of sanctuary where they can study together in peace and safety.
Themes
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After that demonstration, Robin thinks that everything he’s gone through has been worth it to be able to take part in this kind of magic. Professor Playfair then says he needs to take some of their blood. They use that blood, he says, so that the wards of the tower can distinguish students from potential thieves. There are more attempted robberies of Babel, he says, than of all the banks in England. After their blood is drawn, Professor Playfair puts the vials into a drawer. He says now they’re part of the tower, and the tower will know who they are and will let them through the doors.
Playfair’s comments about the robberies of Babel bring to mind when Robin helped thieves steal silver bars from the tower. Playfair’s statement implicitly raises the question of why there are so many attempted robberies of the tower. Is it just that silver bars are valuable, or is there something else about Babel that motivates people to try and steal from it?
Themes
After the tour, Robin, Ramy, Victoire, and Letty eat lunch together. Over lunch, they trade stories about instances of discrimination they have faced since arriving at Oxford. The four of them feel like the only people in the world who understand what they’re experiencing. The girls are not allowed to live on campus. They describe where they live and say that it’s near a pub called the Twisted Root. After lunch, Robin tells Ramy he needs to go meet Professor Lovell. Robin feels bad lying to Ramy but isn’t sure what else to do. Robin then walks in the direction of the Twisted Root. When he is close, he runs into his doppelgänger in the street, who says he’s been waiting for Robin all day.
The fact that Victoire and Letty cannot live on the Oxford campus shows the kind of sexist discrimination they face while at Oxford. The novel introduces those ideas among the different characters to point to the role that intersectionality—or how the various aspects of one’s identity lead to unique experiences of privilege and oppression—plays in the characters’ lives. Namely, the novel points out that Ramy, Robin, Victoire, and Letty’s experiences of discrimination vary based on their identities. However, because they have all experienced discrimination in one form or another, they are also able to exchange stories and find common ground.
Themes
