Silver Bars Symbol Analysis

He’d never figured out precisely what [the silver bars] were, and no one in his household could explain. His grandmother called them rich men’s magic spells, metal amulets carrying blessings from the gods. His mother thought they contained trapped demons who could be summoned to accomplish their masters’ orders. Even Miss Betty, who made loud her disdain for indigenous Chinese superstition and constantly criticized his mother’s heeding of hungry ghosts, found them unnerving. ‘They’re witchcraft,’ she’d said when he asked. ‘They’re devil’s work is what they are.’

He discovered that in Parliament, in town halls, and on the streets, reformers of every stripe were fighting for the soul of London, while a conservative, landed ruling class fought back against attempts at change at every turn.

He did not understand these political struggles, not then. He only sensed that London, and England at large, was very divided about what it was and what it wanted to be. And he understood that silver lay behind it all. For when the Radicals wrote about the perils of industrialization, and when the Conservatives refuted this with proof of the booming economy; when any of the political parties spoke about slums, housing, roads, transportation, agriculture, and manufacturing; when anyone spoke about Britain and the Empire’s future at all, the word was always there in papers, pamphlets, magazines, and even prayer books: silver, silver, silver.

‘But how does this happen?’ he continued. ‘How does all the power from foreign languages just somehow accrue to England? This is no accident; this is a deliberate exploitation of foreign culture and foreign resources. The professors like to pretend that the tower is a refuge for pure knowledge, that it sits above the mundane concerns of business and commerce, but it does not. It’s intricately tied to the business of colonialism. It is the business of colonialism […] Everything Babel does is in the service of expanding the Empire.’

‘We funnel silver away to people, communities, and movements that deserve it. We aid slave revolts. Resistance movements. We melt down silver bars made for cleaning doilies and use them to cure disease instead.’ Griffin slowed down; turned to look Robin in the eyes. ‘That’s what this is all for.’

This was, Robin had to admit, a very compelling theory of the world. Only it seemed to implicate nearly everything he held dear.

‘Britain is the only place where I’ve ever seen silver bars in wide use,’ said Robin. ‘They’re not nearly so popular in Canton, or, I’ve heard, in Calcutta. And it strikes me – I don’t know, it seems a bit strange that the British are the only ones who get to use them when the Chinese and Indians are contributing the crucial components of their functioning.’

‘But that’s simple economics,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘It takes a great deal of cash to purchase what we create. The British happen to be able to afford it. We have deals with Chinese and Indian merchants too, but they’re often less able to pay the export fees.’

‘I gave them a Kreyòl-French match-pair,’ Victoire said. ‘And it worked, worked like a charm, only Professor Leblanc said they couldn’t put it in the Current Ledger because he didn’t see how a Kreyòl match-pair would be useful to anyone who doesn’t speak Kreyòl. And then I said it’d be of great use to people in Haiti, and then he laughed.’

‘Oh, dear.’ Letty rubbed her shoulder. ‘Did they let you try a different one?’

She’d asked the wrong question. Robin saw a flash of irritation in Victoire’s eyes, but it was gone in an instant. She sighed and nodded.

How had Jardine, Matheson, and Lovell known negotiations in Canton would break out in hostilities more than two years ago?

But that was obvious. They’d known because this was their intent all along. They wanted hostilities because they wanted silver, and without some miraculous change in the Qing Emperor’s mind, the only way to get that was to turn their guns on China. They’d planned on war before they had even set sail.

We’re trying to track the number of languages still spoken around the world, and where they’re dying out. And there are a good deal of languages which are dying […] I think it’s not inconceivable that one day, most of the world will speak only English.’ She sighed, looking up at the map. ‘I was born a generation too late. It’s not so long ago that I might have grown up around Gaelic.’

‘But that would destroy silver-working,’ said Robin. ‘Wouldn’t it? It’d collapse the linguistic landscape. There would be nothing to translate. No differences to distort.’

‘But that’s the great contradiction of colonialism.’ Cathy uttered this like a simple matter of fact. ‘It’s built to destroy that which it prizes most.’

We, the students of the Royal Institute of Translation, demand Britain cease consideration of an unlawful war against China. Given this government’s determination to initiate hostilities and its brutal suppression of those working to expose its motives, we have no other option to make our voices heard than to cease all translation and silver-working services by the Institute, until such time as our demands are met. We henceforth declare our strike.

But what struck him most just then was the beauty. The bars were singing, shaking; trying, he thought, to express some unutterable truth about themselves, which was that translation was impossible, that the realm of pure meaning they captured and manifested would and could not ever be known, that the enterprise of this tower had been impossible from inception.

For how could there ever be an Adamic language? The thought now made him laugh. There was no innate, perfectly comprehensible language; there was no candidate, not English, not French, that could bully and absorb enough to become one. Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No; a thousand worlds within one. And translation – a necessary endeavour, however futile, to move between them.

‘That’s just what translation is, I think. That’s all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they’re trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.’