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Chapter 8
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
After the first year, in the summer, Ramy goes to Spain to study, Letty goes to Germany, Victoire goes to France, and Robin goes to Malaysia. When they come back, they’re all excited to see one another. In their first class session of the year, Professor Playfair gives an introductory lecture delving into the ins and outs of silver-work. They cannot make their own engravings until their fourth year, but they start learning the basics of silver-work during their second year.
Robin, Victoire, Ramy, and Letty continue their studies at Babel and begin to take on silver-work. As Griffin has previously argued, Babel’s involvement in the silver trade makes them complicit in the British Empire’s violent and racist colonization of other countries. With that in mind, as Robin and his cohort become more directly involved in silver-work, they also become more directly complicit in the moral wrongs of the British Empire.
Themes
In the lecture, Professor Playfair reiterates that the foundational principle of silver-work is untranslatability. When one translates a word to another language, the silver bar harnesses the power of what is lost in translation. For example, the word kárabos can be translated to the English word “caravel,” which is a type of ship. Kárabos, though, can also be translated as “crab.” When one affixes a silver bar with the engravings of kárabos and caravel to a fishing ship, the bar is infused with the power of what is lost in translation—the word crab. That leads fishing boats affixed with those bars to have higher fishing yields. Playfair says that one must never engrave a bar with the word “translation.” If one does that, it creates a paradox, and the silver bar will self-destruct. If that silver bar touches other bars, then those bars will become contaminated and unusable.
Playfair explains in more detail how the silver bars work. Language families are groups of languages that can be traced back to a common root. For example, English and Spanish belong to the Indo-European language family, while Mandarin and Burmese belong to the Sino-Tibetan language family. Playfair’s explanation about how the silver bars work shows why languages that belong to different language families could provide especially fertile ground for the silver bars because translating between those languages provides an opportunity for less direct translations, which will lead to more possibilities for the silver bars to harness.
Themes
After Professor Playfair’s lecture, Robin and his cohort go to lunch. They’re joined by Anthony, the postgraduate student who gave them a tour of Babel during their first year. Anthony says that he has been working to find match-pairs of words for silver-work. He says that in England there are only 1,200 such pairs at this point. Robin and his cohort are surprised. Anthony explains that Romance languages have become too similar to one another, so the match-pairs between those languages are beginning to lose their power. The valuable words, Anthony says, now come from countries like China and India.
Anthony’s explanation about the relatively small number of functioning match-pairs underlines the reason why people who speak languages other than Romance languages are especially valuable to Babel. It also highlights the idea that while the British Empire needs people from countries like China and India, it doesn’t respond to that need by treating those people with consideration or respect. Instead, the Empire exploits people from those countries for its own gain.
Themes
That year, Robin, Ramy, Letty, and Victoire also take a class on Etymology with Professor Lovell. The class turns out to be less awkward for Robin than he thought it would be. Professor Lovell isn’t a natural lecturer, but everything he says is fascinating. In that class, they use English to study how languages transform over time. The cohort also begins learning another language, not to acquire fluency necessarily, but to deepen their knowledge of the languages they are already fluent in. Robin studies Sanskrit. As the year progresses, Oxford feels more and more like home to Robin, and he and his cohort become closer and closer. Robin also takes up rowing.
Robin’s interest in his classes coupled with the sense that Oxford is becoming his home underlines the difficulty of the conflict that Robin finds himself in. While he knows that he is complicit in the wrongs of Babel, Oxford, and the British Empire, he also enjoys his life. Furthermore, he cannot see directly the wrongs that Babel and the Empire are committing. With that in mind, the novel frames Robin’s conflict as a question of whether Robin’s personal enjoyment of his life will prevent him from acknowledging the true extent of his complicity.
Themes
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At one point, a chemist named Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre comes to Babel, looking for help with a camera obscura he has been working on. He can’t figure out exactly how to get it to work. Ultimately, it becomes a competition between those who do silver-work to see who can figure out how to make the contraption work. Anthony ends up winning the competition and therefore gets a cut of the profits from the invention, which is the first daguerreotype. Robin and his friends have their picture taken with the device. Robin, Ramy, and Victoire find the resulting image unsettling, but Letty likes the picture of them together.
This passage underlines how important friendship is for Letty. While Robin, Ramy, and Victoire find the picture of them unsettling, Letty is pleased by it because she likes having an image that she can look at whenever she wants to remind her of how close she is with her friends. The passage also underlines the idea that Babel is at the vanguard of new technology, as Daguerre seeks out the students at Babel to help with a cutting-edge invention (the daguerreotype was the first invented photography method, which uses silver to create images).
Themes
