Katabasis, R.F. Kuang’s latest novel, portrays modern class society primarily through the lens of academic elitism and the commodification of knowledge. The new book marks a departure for Kuang, as her previous work, such as Babel, focused on class and colonialism.
Kuang’s previous work should be approached with both caution and admiration. Her earlier novels, the Poppy War trilogy and Babel, drew considerable attention for their engagement with imperialism, colonialism, and historical violence. Babel examines British colonialism and the exploitation of non-Western knowledge through a fantasy lens. These are legitimate and important subjects.
However, a limitation of this kind of literary-political fiction is that it frames oppression primarily through the lens of race and national identity rather than class. The enemy in Babel is, broadly, “the British empire” understood in racial and civilizational terms, rather than capitalism as a world-historical system that generates imperialism regardless of which nation or ethnic group sits at the top.
Katabasis critiques present-day class society, showing the “ivory tower” as a modern class structure that gatekeeps social mobility behind walls of wealth and power. The core of the novel presents the reader with many arguments regarding class in contemporary society. The first one sees academia as a modern class hierarchy. Kuang frames the university system as an “infernal structure” that mirrors a pyramid scheme rather than a meritocracy. Secondly, Characters like Alice and Peter are depicted as “cannon fodder” in a departmental war, spending their best years doing grunt work to further the prestige of senior academics, barriers to Entry.
The novel also critiques how prestigious universities gatekeep their institutions, making success nearly impossible for those without significant “financial privilege”. The protagonists are so indoctrinated into this class system that they believe their lives are literally “not worth living” without validation from an elite institution.
If the Katabasis theme seems familiar, it is because it invokes the classical literary descent into the underworld (as in Dante, Virgil, and Homer). The novel continues Kuang’s interest in dark, morally complex fantasy. It raises many questions, including whether the narrative’s moral framework reduces social evil to individual wickedness or to ethnic or national conflict, or whether it points towards systemic, class-based contradictions. From a literary and political standpoint, does Kuang’s “descent” have any genuine social content, or is it primarily psychological and individual? Great literature, even in fantasy, illuminates the real social forces that shape human suffering the test for the reader is whether Katabasis reaches that depth.
Dante’s Inferno is perhaps the most elaborate katabasis in Western literature, and it is saturated with class content. The organisation of hell explicitly reflects the social and political contradictions of late medieval Italy popes, usurers, and political enemies are placed in their circles with meticulous class logic. The great usurers of Florence sit in the seventh circle; Dante was writing at a moment when merchant capital was beginning to corrode feudal social relations, and his moral geography encodes that anxiety. The sin of usury (lending for profit) damns early capitalists; the sin of betrayal damns political traitors to the feudal order.
Kuang’s book is not just a history book; her katabasis metaphor, used in modern terms, takes on a different path. The world of the labouring poor, the mines, the factories, the slums, was consistently figured in the 19th and 20th centuries as an underworld into which bourgeois observers “descended.” Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England is, in a sense, a social katabasis, a descent into the cellars and rookeries of Manchester to bring back testimony from a world the bourgeoisie preferred not to see. Émile Zola’s Germinal centres on a literal descent into the coal mines; the underground is the space of proletarian labour and, ultimately, of proletarian rebellion.
This is where the class dimension becomes most politically charged. The bourgeoisie imagines itself above ground, in the light of civilisation and culture; the working class is relegated to the depths. But the katabasis trope, when deployed honestly, always carries the seed of a reversal; the hero who goes down returns transformed, with knowledge the surface world lacks. The revolutionary implications are not hard to see: it is precisely from the “underworld” of capitalist production from the mines, the foundries, the assembly lines — that the force capable of overthrowing the existing order emerges.
As Beejay Silcox observes, “Katabasis is far from perfect. There’s a pair of blood-drunk villains who feel like a gory distraction, and a nonsense MacGuffin. Bone creatures clatter through plot holes. Grand mythologies collide and compete. Chunks of the novel read like a Rowan Atkinson sketch. And the 1980s faculty politics look deceptively – or perhaps wearily – like our own (a fascinating companion read would be Helen Garner’s 1995 landmark provocation The First Stone). But none of that really matters – especially if you have a score to settle.”[1]
Katabasis is a complex and contradictory work. Kuang is not a Marxist, yet her work enables a Marxist to explain their approach to mythology. Marxists insist that artistic and mythological forms are not autonomous —they arise from and reflect material and social conditions, even as they develop internally. The katabasis is not merely a timeless archetype (as Jung or Joseph Campbell would have it) within a deeply ahistorical, idealist framework. It is a form that takes on different social content in different epochs, justifying imperial class rule in Virgil, mapping the contradictions of feudal society in Dante, and encoding working-class experience in the naturalist novel.
[1] www.theguardian.com/books/2025/aug/14/katabasis-by-rf-kuang-review-a-descent-into-the-hellscape-of-academia
A Trumpet of Sedition 