R.F. Kuang LARPs as Dante: a reflection on Katabasis
I feel like writing about anything by R.F. Kuang requires me to preempt things with what I know all the book's haters are going to say. She's a controversial author, so I can't read a novel like Katabasis without paying attention to the discourse that surrounds her.
Is her writing preachy, didactic, lifeless, and heavy-handed? Is she going to ignore issues around class a few too many times? Is she going to be offensive to indigenous Taiwanese people? Is she going to participate in Cantonese erasure? Does she misrepresent real historical figures? Does it feel like she's flexing, talking down, or not trusting her readers to understand subtlety? Does the theorizing slow the pacing, ruin the dialogue, overshadow the actual storytelling, and feel a bit masturbatory? Does the magic system have major plot holes? Do you have to suspend disbelief with the worldbuilding? Are her characters insufferable, frustrating, unsympathetic, and pretentious? Are academic concepts introduced in a juvenile way for such smart characters?
(Why am I so aware of all these critiques of Kuang? Has social media broken my brain?)
If you've read anything by the author before, you already know the answer to these questions. She hasn't changed all that much as a writer over the course of her career. (She's probably been too busy getting her PhD.) In Katabasis, she doesn't, as far as I can tell, portray anything offensive about indigenous communities or about the Cantonese language, but everything else is exactly as you'd expect.
If you're like me, you won't mind. I can acknowledge that in the hands of a different author, the execution here could be better, but I don't want to talk about what Katabasis could have been. I want to talk about what it is, which is a book about the soul-crushing nature of academia, especially for women and minorities.
Following two scholars, Alice and Peter, as they journey to the underworld to retrieve a recently deceased professor, Katabasis primarily serves as a critique of the cognitive dissonance students exhibit in order to process, survive, excuse, and perpetuate the toxicity in academic culture. Expect lots of references to literary and philosophical ideas about death, mathematics, feminism, writing, language, psychology, and -- most importantly -- paradoxes.
The entire magic system is based around paradoxes and how they force people to simultaneously believe in two contradictory statements. For example, Zeno's paradoxes show that an infinite sum of fractional steps can equal a finite distance, implying that motion is impossible if you keep dividing space and time into endlessly smaller pieces. This implication is directly refuted by lived experience. Everyone knows that archers can shoot arrows at a target. Everyone knows that a speedster like Achilles should outpace a tortoise. However, when you first hear Zeno's arguments, they're compelling enough not to dismiss out of hand. It's therefore possible to be convinced -- at least temporarily -- to integrate two diametrically opposed pieces of information (that motion is both possible and impossible) into our worldviews, even if it's irrational and fallacious to think this way. The magic system takes advantage of this irrational thinking by making things like motion truly impossible for a short period of time. Some chalk and diagramming is necessary to make it work, but once a scholar knows what they're doing, they can basically bend reality (within limit).
Though the magic system is interesting in theory, it's introduced pretty terribly. It's unrealistic, for example, that Alice, an expert in this type of magic, hasn't heard of the unexpected hanging paradox, and I'm kind of disappointed that characters felt the need to explain basic ideas to each other, while glossing over anything that was actually interesting, especially with it came to mathematical concepts. Also, if you bother to think through all the implications of the magic system, it doesn't really hold up to scrutiny. (If getting into Hell is as easy as Alice says it is, then a lot more people would have been forced by the powerful, the greedy, and the sadistic to journey to the underworld. According to Alice, it's rare to visit Hell, the purview of a few famous literary figures like Odysseus and Orpheus, and I just don't buy that some Nazi scientists wouldn't have figured out how to send everyone they wanted to genocide to the underworld. Most might not have been able to return, but some probably would. There's no way that Homer and Virgil are among the few rare sources for what it's like to go to Hell, but I digress.)
In true Kuang fashion, the magic system isn't really meant to be scrutinized. It mostly exist to serve a thematic purpose: to explore how paradoxes can fool people into accepting logical fallacies. This idea is very relevant in a book about characters who should be smart enough to think rationally, but fail to do so consistently. The novel mostly focuses on Alice Law, a hypercompetitive graduate student of "Analytic Magick" at Cambridge. She romanticizes and worships academia, craves praise from smart (usually male) authority figures, and prides herself on being able to handle any obstacle in the way of her ambitions. She's tied her sense of identity to academic success, and when she encounters criticisms of academia, it feels like a personal attack. She gets defensive, reframing the belittling, exploitation, harassment, and other major problems with academia as fun intellectual challenges. The cognitive dissonance is textbook: paradoxically integrating two diametrically opposed facts into her worldview as a sort of emotional defense mechanism. The result is that she's willing to overlook abuse. As smart as she is, she misses a lot. She becomes complicit, even when she's the victim, which means predators in positions of power see her as vulnerable, prompting them to deliberately target her, and her descent into Hell doesn't seem any more torturous than the other tasks she's been forced to do for abusive and egomaniacal professors.
When she and Peter get to the underworld, it turns out that "Hell is a campus" (a sort of cheeky echo of Sartre's famous quote from No Exit). They pass through university libraries and classrooms, where souls try to achieve salvation by writing papers about how sorry they are for their sins, though they can't figure out what it takes to ensure their words are convincing. Does grammar matter? Should souls use a specific writing technique to emphasize sincerity? Are the divine judges swayed by arguments that rely on Kantian ethics, or are they utilitarians? This version of Hell reflects the worst fears of students like Alice: What if a system she believes is meritocratic turns out to be more arbitrary than she thought? What does it say about her own merit that she's molded her entire identity and personality around succeeding within this problematic system?
Unfortunately, between the bitingly satirical depictions of the academy, Hell is underwhelming. There's a desert. There's the Lethe. There are a bunch of magicians who appear for plot convenience. There's also a cat who appears for plot convenience. It's dull, and some obstacles aren't as challenging as they should be. Alice claims that getting out of Hell is supposed to be difficult, but there's nothing in this story to make me believe she's right. Fortune repeatedly falls into her lap, and it makes parts of the plot kind of boring.
The satirical parts mostly make up for the boring sections, but the humor isn't going to be for everyone. The puns and the wordplay are both great, but everything feels like a snobby inside joke. Some readers may find it pretentious, because while it's fun and playful, Kuang is also clearly name-dropping. She treats the landscape of academic and literary figures as a jungle gym, one where she gives herself the freedom to talk about various writers and scholars without the pressure to be accurate, informative, or even nice. Saul Kripke's surviving friends probably don't want him turned into a silly villain in a work of fiction, and joking about Immanuel Kant's virginity can be interpreted as off-color. For me, there's something hilariously irreverent about it. I think Kuang is self-aware about how overindulgent she's being. I also think that being self-aware doesn't make it less pretentious. Anyone who's spent time with academics knows that calling out your own pretentiousness is itself a pretentious thing to do. It sometimes makes you extra insufferable. Kuang just accepts that she can't help herself, giving herself permission to put the inescapable pretentiousness of academia on full display, exaggerating some of it for readers to roll their eyes alongside her. She's LARPing as Dante Alighieri, and it's on readers to decide whether it's sincere, ironic, or a mix of both. To me, it reads as sharp commentary that's similar in tone to Yellowface (without the meanness), but I get that the humor seems designed to appeal to pseudo-intellectuals, which is an understandable turnoff.
Another similarity that Katabasis shares with Yellowface is its blindness to certain systemic issues. Kuang tackled systems of oppression in Babel, whereas Katabasis is a more personal look at academia and its flaws. In fact, Alice's blind spots are revealed to be the reason why Hell is a campus. According to the book's lore, Hell appears differently to different people. Because Alice and Peter place so much value -- moral or otherwise -- on intelligence, Hell manifests as a campus for them. When the education system fails them, they see it as a personal failing. When it fails someone else, their reaction is to feel superior, and they barely possess enough self-awareness to realize these feelings aren't exactly flattering. People like Alice and Peter can have a difficult time distinguishing between someone who's not academically gifted and someone who's morally inferior. Even if they intellectually know the difference, they subconsciously still equate academic success with a person's quality or worthiness as a human. Additionally, for Alice and Peter, academic excellence is fundamentally entangled with suffering because of how they've both been abused and exploited by professors as they pursue success at the cost of their own well-being. It's therefore framed as perfect Karma that their version of Hell looks like a bunch of souls struggling to climb an academic ladder. However, while academia has undoubtedly abused Alice and Peter, the lack of other forms of torture in Hell still exposes their privilege. They have blind spots about the different types of suffering that exist outside of higher education.
Obviously Kuang is making fun of academia here, comparing it to the violence of religious institutions that arbitrarily decide who deserves reward and advancement, but this version of Hell also reveals something universal about suffering. Hell is not just torment. It's tailored torment. It targets a single individual based on their personal flaws in a way that separates them from other types of people who may have gone to a different version of Hell. It leaves souls cut off from the rest of humanity in the same way that the ivory tower is a bubble. Hell, like academia, is torturous because of how isolating it is.
Of course, academia doesn't have to be isolating or torturous, but it is for someone like Alice. Blinded by ambition, she constantly ignores bodily concerns, hardly ever eating or sleeping, caring only about expanding and cultivating her mind. Her willingness to go to Hell very much reflects her disregard for her own life and limbs. Her motivation is ostensibly to obtain her dead professor's recommendation letter, which may seem like a flimsy reason to go to Hell, and it is, but Alice is simply following her own twisted logic to its natural conclusion. Her pursuit of success has lead her down plenty of hellish rabbit holes in university, so she believes she's more than capable of visiting literal Hell. If she's afraid for her life, she pushes the fear aside. Her physical body is something she's trained herself to ignore.
By extension, Alice ignores the broader concerns of the world that her body navigates, which leaves her isolated and vulnerable to abuse. She often fails to see the systems of oppression at work against her and others. She distances herself from feminists, barely thinks about class disparities, and mentions race even less. Part of the problem is that she's a product of the eighties, but Kuang is satirizing an approach to scholarship that has always been common. Academia, for all the wonderful functions it can and does serve in society, is sometimes structured to incentivize a selfish and temporary kind of success. Alice is not the only one who falls into the trap. Peter is the same way, and his journey parallels Alice's.
You cannot have a stable Euclidean surface without the parallel postulate; you cannot survive without believing you are invulnerable. So your only option is the reconstruction of the lie -- I am not embodied, this cannot matter, and so it does not matter
R.F. Kuang, Katabasis
The idea of parallel journeys is a motif throughout the novel. Based on her research, Alice knows that a line straight through Hell exists. If she can find that path, she should be able to get in and out alive. She might not know if she can follow it exactly, but she hopes to at least find a parallel path. Because the underworld turns out to be a hyperbolic space, Peter can travel a wholly different parallel path through Hell that still intersects with Alice's journey. (In euclidean geometry, if Alice and Peter traveled distinct paths that were both parallel to the same line, they couldn't intersect. All three paths would be parallel to each other. Hyperbolic geometry works differently, allowing Alice and Peter to travel along distinct paths that do intersect.) In Katabasis's lore, T. S. Eliot once followed yet another distinct path through Hell, and "The Waste Land" is framed as a record of his journey. The same goes for Dante, Orpheus and any other literary figure said to have visited the afterlife. Katabasis, whose title means journey to the underworld in Greek, is explicitly positioning itself within a long tradition of descent narratives that each reckon with death and suffering in their own unique ways. All these stories still share a commonality: a point of intersection, where characters meet Satan, Hades, or whatever you want to call him, and bargain for a way out.
Katabasis's unique reckoning with suffering involves an academic with her head in the clouds, but at her journey's point of intersection with all past descent narratives, Alice encounters Lord Yama, and she returns to earth -- both literally and figuratively: because to plea for an escape to the real world, she has to want to be there. She has to finally care about her life and well-being. She has to start thinking about earthly concerns like falling in love, taking care of her health, and grounding her theories in material realities.
On a related note, when Zeno introduced his paradoxes about the impossibility of motion, Diogenes the Cynic is reported to have responded by saying "solvitur ambulando:" it is solved by walking. He stood up, took a step, and demonstrated that motion exists. Technically Diogenes didn't solve the paradox; calculus did centuries later. A true logician might be unimpressed by Diogenes's rebuttal or lack thereof, but most humans are not purely rational agents. We're ambulatory animals in possession of just enough consciousness to be aware of our own ambulation. Diogenes might not have directly uncovered the mathematical fallacies that Zeno employed, but he was rhetorically persuasive enough to reveal that Zeno's logic was fallacious somehow.
The phrase "solvitur ambulando" is later alluded to in a story by Lewis Carroll (whose work clearly inspired Alice's name) called "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles", which is about infinite regression, one of many paradoxes mentioned in Katabasis. Infinite regression, in Carroll's formulation of it, claims that every step in a formal proof or argument demands an additional line to rigorously justify using it. That new line becomes an argument that also needs additional justification. A rational agent should therefore be trapped in an eternal chain of premises without ever reaching the conclusion. Carol reveals that logic alone can't bring Achilles to a conclusion. At some point, he just has to jump (or walk) to it. It is solved by walking. (Incidentally, in the lore of Katabasis, Carroll is said to be yet another literary figure who descended to the underworld.)
The infinite regression paradox exposes a possible limit of logical reasoning. By the time Alice finishes her journey, she seems to have finally internalized these limitations of purely logical, theoretical, and academic thinking. She's been over-romanticizing the life of the mind, but at the end of the novel, she seems to understand that it's hurting her and others. Her problems are literally solved by walking -- by trudging through Hell, until she finally confronts her earthly needs, learning that Diogenes might have been right about how embodied action can sometimes be superior to pure abstraction.
However, despite all she's learned, Alice's arc is incomplete. Compared to other Kuang books, Katabasis's ending is downright euphoric, but there are still loose ends, especially when it comes to Alice's relationship with Peter. Peter, Alice's companion in Hell, is an emotionally unavailable moody and broody golden boy who Alice is obsessed with, probably because she has a masochistic tendency to try impressing and pleasing geniuses who mistreat her. It helps that he's hot. All Byronic Heroes have a tortured past to explain their actions, and Peter is no different. Alice just doesn't discover his excuse until late in the book. She's in love with him on page one, but the novel never unpacks why she's drawn to a man who makes her insecure. Peter is, much like her superiors in university, a massive jerk. Even though her arc is about unlearning the abuse she's internalized, she never changes how she feels about Peter. Her undying love undermines much of her progress.
Arguably Alice's love does die (only to get rekindled after she learns Peter has an excuse for mistreating her). Arguably she just has a humiliation kink (which can be explored under safer conditions). Whatever the justification is for the romance, it's all just theorizing. We can't know for sure, because Peter and Alice don't talk about it. They don't have any of the tough conversations needed to move forward, so they have a whole lot of work to do before their relationship can approach anything resembling healthy. Alice does say she's excited to have more conversations with Peter and to learn more about him in the future, so their romance isn't doomed. It's just open-ended, which is okay. It's fair that Alice still has more to learn. Her pursuit of knowledge doesn't end just because of negative experiences in university. There's no sign she even plans to change her career path. Her mindset is what has changed. Hopefully she and Peter can have a long talk, and I'm optimistic about their future, but I also find it frustrating that the book glosses over some of the obstacles that they need to overcome. It feels too convenient that Peter happens to have a thin excuse for his behavior. It allows Alice to let her feelings for him sit unquestioned when what she needs to do some serious soul-searching in order to figure out why she lets people get away with making her feel like she constantly has to prove herself.
(Peter should probably also interrogate how he's allowed Alice to treat him, because she hasn't exactly been a saint either, but that conversation is also conveniently rushed. He's a little too quick to forgive.)
I guess the summation of my criticisms here is that things get convenient. The plot, the character work, and the worldbuilding all feel too neat, and they don't hold up to scrutiny. Good storytelling is sacrificed on the altar of extending central metaphors as far as they can possibly go. I also have all the usual criticisms of Kuang's didactic style, but if you've read anything else by her, then you know what you're in for. I personally can tolerate all the flexing and expository theorizing, so I liked this book. It's great conversation fodder. It should definitely appeal the pseudo-intellectual crowd that has made dark academia so popular, and I also think there are more critically-minded readers who might find a lot of ideas to chew on. It might not be Kuang's best book, but it's also not terrible.
What's sad is that Katabasis should have been her best work. Her biggest strength as a writer is her ability to unflinchingly depict the worst of humanity. She's good a describing the grotesque. She's good at describing gore, torture, and suffering. She's good at telling tragedies and messy love stories. She's good at making literary, historical, and philosophical allusions that prove her points about how awful people are. She's good at crafting an unsympathetic trainwreck of a protagonist who deserves eternal torment. Here is a book about all the things that should highlight Kuang's strengths. My expectations were high, and they weren't met. I was not prepared for her villains to be lackluster. I was not prepared for Hell to showcase so few grotesque horrors. I was not prepared for a poorly constructed romance. I was not prepared for a rushed redemption arc. This book could have been so much more.
I already said I wanted to talk about what this book is, not what it isn't or what it could have been, so I guess I've broken that rule. In a vacuum, Katabasis is an average book for me, maybe slightly better, but we all know that art, just like academic scholarship, can't be divorced from context, and apparently, neither can my enjoyment of it. It has quality, but not as much as it should.