Newsmaker: R. F. Kuang

For Rebecca F. Kuang, academia is more than a fictional setting. After writing The Poppy War in 2018 as an undergraduate at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., Kuang went on to study at two of the world’s most famous universities, Cambridge and Oxford in the UK. Her fourth book, the historical dark-academia fantasy Babel: An Arcane History, was followed by Yellowface, a lacerating critique of racism in modern publishing.

Currently a PhD candidate in East Asian languages and literatures at Yale, Kuang returns to both fantasy and higher education in Katabasis (August, HarperCollins), a tale of two students in Cambridge’s Department of Analytical Magick who journey to hell in search of their famed, feared, and abruptly deceased advisor, Professor Grimes. American Libraries spoke with Kuang about academia, the afterlife, and the beauty of libraries.

What inspired you to create a katabasis, a story of a hero’s journey to the underworld?

I’ve always loved underworld stories. I adore the original Orpheus and Eurydice myth [about a musician who travels to the underworld to bring back his deceased wife]. And I like extremes. The most extreme way you could test a personal relationship, it seems, is to see what happens when mortality is at stake—or the immortality of the soul. The first time I thought about death and what happens afterward was when I saw a film in which the main character dies. I stayed awake all night fretting and freaking out. I finally ran down to my parents’ room. They said, “Are you upset because the character died?” And I said, “No, I’m upset because what if heaven is boring? What if I don’t like it there? What if an eternal existence would be terrible?”

The protagonists of Katabasis, Alice and Peter, find that hell resembles Cambridge. But instead of dissertations, it’s sins that are published and defended. What inspired your vision of the underworld and its eight courts of judgment?

I was playing around with the idea that the punishments of hell or the ethical lessons you take from it only make sense if they mirror the moral universe you are already acquainted with. This is a very syncretic book. It takes inspiration from all sorts of mythologies and religions across time periods and across continents. As I was thinking through what the gradation of sins would be, from the lightest to the heaviest, I was working a lot with the Buddhist traditions and Dante’s Inferno, of course. But I’m mostly inspired by Plato’s The Republic and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.

Alice is pleased to find that the first court in the underworld is a library. What role have libraries played in your life and work?

There’s nowhere I feel happier than a library. I’m so grateful for librarians. When I was growing up in suburban Dallas, I begged my parents to take me to the public library. For me, it was better than the mall, better than the movie theater. I spent many hours of my adolescence in the young adult section and the manga section, dreaming and entering different worlds. When I went to college, I developed an adoration for the university library. It still feels like a miracle, all the knowledge ever produced in your field at your fingertips. And there’s something about grand libraries in particular, like the Bodleian at Oxford, that do something to your thought process. You feel the weight of the tradition and the elegance of the thought and want to become the kind of thinker who’s worthy of that library. Libraries are also the last defenders of freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and curiosity and intellectual inquiry. I got married in a library!

What prompted you to return to fantasy and academia after your modern satire Yellowface?

Fantasy is the genre in which I learned how to tell stories, so Yellowface wasn’t so much a good-bye as it was testing out some different voices. I always knew I wanted to go back to fantasy, and Katabasis and Babel, in my mind, form a sort of duology. Babel is about large, broad sociohistorical forces. Katabasis is my opportunity to tunnel into a very granular picture of interpersonal relationships and personal psychology. While the cast of Babel is very big and the plot spans continents and years, Katabasis takes place over a couple of days, and it’s principally about this triangle of Alice, Peter, and Professor Grimes. These novels are like counterweights for me. They’re both examinations of what goes on in the university from very different angles.

How do you balance your extensive research with giving free rein to your imagination?

It’s all the same process for me. Inquiry itself is a lot of fun. I love jumping down rabbit holes. I’m married to a philosopher, and there are a lot of logicians in his department. The magic system for the book hinges on the rules of classical logic and the very precise definitions of what makes for logical paradox. So we threw a paradox party. We have a whiteboard in our living room, and all these philosophers came over, and the only rule was you had to prepare a paradox and present it to the group, and it was great. It was one of the best nights of my life. One after another, people drew their paradoxes on the whiteboard, and we would all appreciate them and tinker with them and wonder, is this a paradox? Can we resolve it? That’s my idea of fun. And from that night, a lot of the spells and the crucial scenes in Katabasis were born.

As intellectually grounded and as dramatic as Katabasis is, it has many funny moments. Did you look to any models that combine sophisticated philosophical inquiries with humor?

Some models for very learned writing that is nevertheless hilarious, I would say, include Umberto Eco. I read The Name of the Rose while I was deep in revisions for Katabasis. I think his confidence in rambling for pages about a random backstory or bits of theology and the kind of sheer indulgence he takes in exploring ideas is an attitude I brought into my revision. I’m also very tickled by the humor of novelists like Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges. They’re so erudite, and they take the reader on all these intellectual journeys and deep into philosophical and logical paradoxes, but they always maintain a light, goofy touch. And then there’s Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi. It’s so heartfelt, it’s so humanist, but it’s also hilarious. And the hilarity comes from the disconnect between a clean, philosophical thought and the context in which it’s uttered. So, other than just reading a lot and being in that mood, I don’t take a more deliberate approach to my humor. I think I’m just a kind of goofy person, and it shows in my writing.

As the result of a spell, Alice’s state of mind is chaotic. She’s inundated by a constant torrent of input and overloaded with memories of everything she reads and experiences.

As a scholar, you would think you would want to have endless memory capacity. I was very upset when I got to grad school and started noticing gaps in my memory. I would realize that I didn’t even know the names of professors I had [had] just a few years ago, and I was like, ‘Oh no, memory is not endless.’ But I’m also interested in the role that forgetting plays in being a person and maintaining a healthy psychology. In many of the religious traditions about hell, forgetting is crucial to reincarnation. The soul has to be cleansed of all its memories of a past life in order to enter the world again. In the Greek tradition, the river Lethe in the underworld famously strips your memories, your soul is washed in the waters, and then you’re ready to pass on.

So I was thinking about the links between memory and death and rebirth, and this brought me to some literature about memory and trauma. It turns out that being able to forget is crucial to healing from traumatic experiences. It’s actually really, really bad for you to remember every single detail, every bit of information you’re fed. In order to constitute ourselves as subjects, in order to maintain a coherent perception of who we are and our narratives about ourselves, we have to forget, and we’re not always in control of this process. With Alice’s character, I’m exploring what happens if that goes wrong—how, if you can’t forget, you can’t heal.

The catalyst for Katabasis is Professor Grimes’s toxic arrogance, cruelty, and atrocious abuse of authority. Why did you choose to dramatize this dark side of academia?

I’m really interested in student-teacher relationships and the nature of that bond. Some of it comes from having been a student for so long myself and having wonderful relationships with mentors. As I shift from undergraduate to graduate student to PhD candidate, I don’t take classes anymore—now I teach—so I find myself on the other side of that role. I think a lot about what we owe to one another, how that relationship can be something beautiful and special, how you can foster somebody’s intellectual journey, and, also, what happens when there’s an abuse of trust or an abuse of that power difference. There’s so much good stuff written on the psychoanalysis of the student-teacher relationship. I was inspired by an essay by philosopher Amia Srinivasan in her collection The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century and by a recent essay by Merve Emre about transference in the classroom and the kind of projections that students put on their teachers and what happens when teachers don’t realize that this is a projection, when they think, “Oh, my student is actually in love with me,” rather than in love with the material. What are all the ways in which it can go wrong? The novel is an exploration of what happens when that bond is violated, and what happens when professors abuse that trust and that adoration.

How do you manage to pursue advanced degrees and write such complex and dramatic novels? What are your days like?

They’re pretty boring. I’m a morning person. I can focus best in the hours between when I wake up and noon. The first thing I do most days is run, because I think running is the hardest thing, and if you can start off your day by doing the hardest thing, then everything feels easier after that. I run to meditate and wake myself up and get grounded, and then I come back, and I write for hours. I always do my creative work first because everything else feels a bit more passive, especially academic work. You’re reading more, you’re engaging with somebody else’s thought. You’re not trying to create worlds out of thin air. I leave all my correspondences, emails, and logistics stuff until the very end of the day, when my brain is on the fritz, because I can deal with emails at 10% brain capacity, but I can only write with 100% brain capacity.