This one is pissing me off because there’s cheese in it. I’m not sure there’s a period of Chinese dynastic history wherein the type of dudes likely to be having rap battles would also have been familiar with hard cheese. There’d be political fucking implications to that. Fermented dairy products were often seen as uncivilized foods, and were associated in particular with northern “barbarian” cuisine (see: <lactose intolerance in Eurasia>), whereas competitive poetry was viewed as a civilized and scholarly pastime appropriate to civil servants and courtiers. Mentioning cheese in a verse which also references the heavens could be seen as an effort to legitimize the presence of these dangerous foreign elements within Chinese society, and, thus, as seditious. If dairy were to become a common theme in rap battles, it might be viewed as a dangerous sign of poor morale and defeatist thinking among the literati. “Emperor, we have got to move the capital to the south. The scholars are rapping about cheese. It’s all falling apart.”
Back to the original topic, 相鼠 "Consider the Rat" from the 詩經 Shijing is an absolutely lethal diss track:
相鼠有皮、人而無儀。
人而無儀、不死何為？
Even a rat has skin and fur --
and yet some people have no decency.
To be a person with no decency --
Why not just die?
相鼠有齒、人而無止。
人而無止、不死何俟？
Even a rat has teeth in its gob --
and yet some people have no shame.
To be a person with no shame --
What's keeping you from dying?
相鼠有體、人而無禮。
人而無禮、胡不遄死？
Even a rat has a body --
and yet some people have no manners.
To be a person with no manners --
Why won't you hurry up and die?
I guess one good thing about Twitter collapsing is that at least now there's no danger of anybody finding anything you write. I finished R.F. Kuang's Babel yesterday, and would love to talk about it with other people who have read it. Tumblr is a lot less susceptible to context collapse and also nobody's here, so there's probably less risk of pile-ons and unnecessary bad feelings.
I wrote up some initial impressions of Babel as a sort of hypertrophied tweet thread -- initially posted on my alt, then edited a bit when my mom e-mailed to ask about Babel after seeing it mentioned somewhere, then edited a bit more. Throwing these out as discussion points, in case there's anyone still using Tumblr, rather than as conclusions: I may be wrong, am probably missing things, and have been in a generally fucked-up headspace lately so I could be getting all of this completely backwards. The tl;dr is that there's a lot to like in Babel, but the author is capable of doing a lot more, and there are places where it feels as if she was butting up hard against the limits of what can be done with YA.
1) I enjoyed Babel and also feel like there’s no way of critiquing the book without coming off as being all #NotAllWhiteSinologists about it.
2) I love the conceit at the center of the book, and really love the way Kuang stealthily drops a good overview of issues in translation theory on her unsuspecting readers. Ditto for the disguised intro to center/periphery and its subsequent payoff. These are things that should be common knowledge, and this is a really cool way of getting us to that point. Language nerds will love this book and translators will find themselves seen and depicted by someone who gets it. This part is so good, you guys. I'd recommend the book for this alone.
3) But it feels like the worldbuilding falls short of its own standards: the world of Babel operates according to extremely different rules, and has for centuries, but somehow ended up geopolitically and socially in sync with our own as of the mid-19th c. Obviously this is necessary for Kuang to tell the story she wants to tell, but it feels less than fully satisfying. This is even more the case, in ways that I think are worth unpacking, for all the anachronisms of fact, speech, and thought: Babel's footnotes and general attention to contemporary events and pop culture recall Susanna Clarke, but Clarke's characters had 19th century brains in 19th century bodies and it is impossible for me to imagine them using the word "feminist" in any sense, let alone a positive one.
4) There were real people in the 19th century who accurately perceived and courageously fought the injustices of their day, and for Babel to have its characters speaking and thinking in the ways they do feels very much to me like 21st-century Twitter Discourse colonizing 19th-century justice movements. The problem is not that the characters are always saying things like "non-zero chance" or that they're opposed to the exploitation and degradation of their homelands by the British Empire; it's that in their speech, actions, and thoughts they flatter the contemporary reader instead of honoring people who actually existed. In a less ambitious or more carelessly written book, this probably wouldn't have been as noticeable, but Babel does itself the disservice of being otherwise thoughtful.
5) Would it replicate colonizing dynamics of knowledge production to note that by the book’s own logic Robin should have been speaking Nanking Mandarin as the prestige dialect, that even in Beijing those velars hadn’t fully palatalized before high front vowels yet, and that the Hanyu Pinyin romanization system used here wasn’t invented for more than a century and reflects pronunciations that didn't become the official standard until the early 1950s?
(Obviously the above is all nerd shit. But Babel is thoughtful and well-researched, so things like this jump out much more than they would in a book whose author had not invested the same quality of thought and care.)
I actually do mean this as a live question. When a person who looks like me makes comments that look like this about work by a person who looks like Kuang, it is ~~uncomfortable~~ for very good reasons. Reading Babel as a white sinologue is discomfiting, and the book does a good and (to my mind) convincing job of explaining why that should be.
But I worry that in doing so, it will encourage at least some readers to adopt the sort of weird zero-sum views that disguise truculence and intellectual laziness as social justice and anticolonialism. I'm pretty sure that's not what Kuang was out to accomplish with the book -- but it's a clearly identifiable tendency, especially among the kind of people who post about YA fiction online. I love Twitter and am already grieving it, but there's a reason I didn't post this there.
The word "problematic" is, as a noun, an invitation to examine and think through complex issues. As an adjective, it is mostly deployed as a verdict: "problematic (adj.)" registers discomfort and prevents further discussion. Babel does a good job of describing a problematic (n.), but it does so for an audience mostly inclined toward the adjectival use of the word, and if I were to phrase my concern in terms of the book's devices, I guess I'd say I'm worried that in translating complex and discomfiting issues into the idiom of YA, Kuang creates a "problematique / problematic" match-pair that risks backfiring.
6) A lot of my criticisms basically are over things I would’ve liked to have read, rather than the things that Kuang was actually trying to write. In an earlier version of these thoughts, I wrote that Kuang succeeded admirably at the task she set for herself, but on further consideration I'm not actually sure what that task was. Babel's plot and characterization mark it as YA, and judged by that standard, it is a remarkably well done and thoughtful book. (Full disclosure: I believe that YA is actively bad for people and should absolutely be eliminated as a commercial and conceptual category, so I enjoy and admire the way Kuang makes it clear here and in her earlier work that being a YA protagonist is incredibly bad praxis.) But taking Babel seriously means judging the book by (what I take to be) its own standards, and I don't know if it clears that bar.
I enjoyed Babel and found a lot to like in it -- but Kuang is obviously capable of doing a lot more if she ever wants to, and I hope she will.
Not going to lie, I’ve had a panicky feeling for a while now of being back where I was circa 2012 -- trying to keep body and soul joined together with freelance translation, failing, and having no other ideas for anything else -- except ten years older, sadder, and poorer. Finding myself back on Tumblr ahead of the impending Twitter collapse isn’t doing much to change that.
It’s nice here, mind; Tumblr was always the best of the things that were neither strictly social nor strictly bloggy. But who knows -- if the rest of the world keeps failing to thrive as much as I have been, we could all be migrating to Livejournal clones by this time next year.
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