Now You See Him, Now You Don’t: Looking for Karel Capek

by Peter Swirski 30 April 2003 With the Nobel Prize politicized beyond redemption, many of its recipients are controversial (to say the least). Pearl Buck, for example, was honored as the best of the best in 1938, the year of Karel Capek’s death, while Graham Greene and Jorge Luis Borges went to their graves empty-handed. Still, when Capek’s War With the Newts was brought to the attention of the Swedish Academy in 1936, it was only the last in a steady chain of the author’s international triumphs, which included previous nominations for the prize.

War With the Newts is like Gulliver’s Travels: simple enough to delight a dilettante, deep enough to drown a philosopher, playful and ironic enough to reward even the most discriminating and cultivated reader. Call it nobrow, call it crossover collage, call it something-for-everyone. After all, in the words of the Czech critic F. Burianek, its witty parodies can be enjoyed especially by a cultivated and literature-sensitive reader. The roller-coaster plot opens with the discovery of a sapient amphibian species in the South Seas who, in the hands of an old sea dog, Captain van Toch, soon become efficient pearl divers. The operation expands, the newts are shipped around the world, and in no time the captain is having an audience with G. H. Bondy of Prague, captain of world industry. The breakthrough powwow brings about the Salamander Syndicate, paving the way for the industrial, mass-scale use of this intelligent and by now articulate species. As their exploitation intensifies according to the iron logic of 20th-century slash-and-burn capitalism, the newts become an essential grease for the machinery of global trade and progress. Hunted, killed, enslaved, exhibited in circuses, bred in captivity, tortured, abused, preyed upon, and trained for war, they re-enact Capek’s condensed version of an everyday in the life of our civilization.

WHERE'S KAREL?

Nothing could make a more topical and hard-hitting emblem for every decade of the 20th century, including the hypocritical wars-for-oil of the 21st. And yet, after two interwar decades of fame and acclaim, rave reviews and theatrical attendance records, literary and critical tributes from the literati of Wells’, Chesterton’s, Shaw’s, or Galsworthy’s stature, the Czech writer recedes from the canons of world or even European literature. Writing for The Nation in 1990, John Clute tellingly speaks of the long death that had befallen Capek, who, following World War II, was to remain virtually unpublished in his own country for half a century. A year later Bohuslava Bradbrook felt compelled to begin her review with a fervent hope for the Czech author’s return from oblivion. Cecil Parrott completed the picture in 1995 by observing that, despite a publishing mini-revival in the early ’90s, Capek continues to be insufficiently recognized outside his own country.

It is difficult to account for this state of affairs. While Mann, Musil, Moravia, Kafka, Lorca, and a dozen others were rapidly attaining the status of perennial 20th-century classics, Capek had to wait until 1962 for his first English-language biography. Adding insult to injury, it was his first critical biography, period; compounding the insult, for 40 years it remained the only one in the English language, until Ivan Klima’s Karel Capek: Life and Work. Largely ignored by critics, Capek commanded the highest praise from writers as diverse as Arthur Miller, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, Milan Kundera, and Stanislaw Lem, some listing him as a major influence. Yet, as if an iron curtain insulated him from postwar sensibilities, the author whose plays and novels took Europe, America, and Japan by storm on more than one occasion ends up oddly forgotten, as if he belonged only to his own era, with no appeal or pertinence to the second half of the 20th century and beyond.

The veil of silence extends even into the writer’s homeland. In 1990, in an effort to revive interest in his writings, Catbird Press put out a Capek reader entitled Toward the Radical Center. Taking stock of the writer’s current fortunes in his critical introduction, Peter Kussi did not mince words: Capek had vanished not only from the world, but even from Czech literature. Contemporary accounts of 20th-century Czech fiction spotlight two writers who weathered the turbulent postwar decades. They are Jaroslav Hasek, the one-book wonder of Good Soldier Schweik, and Franz Kafka, who wrote almost entirely in German. “But a generation or two ago,” prompts Kussi, “the Czech author with the most solid reputation abroad, especially in the English-speaking world, was Karel Capek.”

WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON?

Inevitably, it all begs one question. Is Capek’s masterpiece, released into a Europe choking in the hands of fascist regimes and nationalistic dictatorships, merely a hollow echo from the distant past? Is this why postwar history has been mindless of its ultra-modern author who, in addition to being a nonstop entertainer, is one of the most polyphonic writers of our era? A look at the principles behind his writing might help us account for his lapse from our postwar collective memory.

The postwar years were Cold War years, and artists who couldn’t be enlisted in the them-or-us tug of war were of suspect virtue. Which side was Capek on? Vexingly enough, neither. A humanist, a pacifist, a free thinker, he was an opponent of progress or victory at all costs who didn’t hide his contempt for militarist propaganda. “A war machine. A vast machine, a huge one. The swiftest, most effective crusher of lives” is what he called it in The Insect Play. If the enemies of our enemies were our Cold War friends, Capek had the rare honor of appearing unsound to both the capitalist Scylla and the Warsaw Pact Charybdis. To the Allies, drunk on World War victory and rampant consumerism, his calls for social reform, redistribution of wealth, and pacifist independence sounded simply too red, especially coming from a state now buried deep in Stalin’s embrace. For the Soviets he was no less reactionary, if only because he could not be conscripted in the propaganda war against the West. He was, after all, the author of “Why I Am Not a Communist” (1924) who declined Moscow’s invitation to attend the 1938 May Day parade. Even more to the point, he was a critic of the revolution who held that after reforms people were just as selfish, greedy, and cruel as before. As if on cue, communist censors struck from the 1954 Czech edition of War With the Newts the passage which, in a hysterical spoof of a Party manifesto, exhorts the newts to unite.

In a time of extremes, defined by dogmatic political stances, staunch propaganda wars, flag-waving oaths of loyalty, and Nixon- and McCarthy-stoked witch-hunts, Capek was a voice of neutrality and moderation. Equally critical of either system, at times he must have seemed a pinko reformist, if not full-blown socialist. Didn’t his newts declare expansionist war on the world a day prior to the anniversary of the American Revolution? With writers and artists testifying before the Senate left and even right, who had much use for a guy so deadly in his satire of the First World? And as for loyalty oaths, Capek swore them only to his irrepressible wit, profound understanding of history, and defiant humanism.

With the world and its problems getting more complex, with automation, weapons of mass destruction, genocides, geopolitics, and hemispheres of influence, a champion of the small and individual must come to seem an anachronism. Unfortunately, that would seem to be Capek’s fate. In the century that unvaryingly confused bigger with better, he was wont to caution all would-be architects of global progress. “Empires do not endure due to the wisdom of state dignitaries, but as a result of the needs of many millions of people who work at crafts of all kinds in order that they might live. … It is these private details that make up what we call the greatness of nations.”

Despite the ferocity with which he tore into the complacencies of our time, Capek was never preachy or grandiloquent. Puckish and irreverent, like Ghost Dog, the black samurai from Jim Jarmusch’s film of the same name, he often paid respect to little things, sparing Big Notions but a fleeting glance. He could be as side-splitting as Woody Allen in the latter’s mock-Dostoevskian Love and Death and as poignant as Allen in his Dostoevskian Crimes and Misdemeanors. Resorting to laughter, fantasy, and grotesque instead of throwing his philosophical weight around, may, however, have cost him critical laurels. It is a dismal fact that a genius of comedy hardly ever enjoys highest acclaim, just because his art seems to lack the luster of a voluminous and self-important grand opus. And yet Capek’s greatness can be measured by the aphorism from his first collection (co-written with brother Josef), The Garden of Krakonos: “Humor is the salt of the earth, and whoever is well salted will long retain his freshness.”

Capek’s doctoral thesis, “The Objective Method in Esthetics With a View to Creative Art,” was a passionate defense of the objective and representational role of literature. Even then he distanced himself from the cult of art for art’s sake, and from highbrow esthetics as esoteric symbol-weaving or Freudian id-expression. Literature was about the drama of the masses, not intellectual navel-gazing. A storyteller in the popular tradition, he was--paradoxically--a relentless experimentalist who--no less paradoxically-- found Joyce and his antics disturbing and vulgar. For the postmodern crowd, awash in epistemological and narrative angst, his genre-coated pill of enlightenment would sound out of tune and out of time.

Finally, Capek’s art fell prey to the emerging opposition between highbrow and lowbrow. How could you take seriously a wordsmith who looked for inspiration “in pulp literature, not in the realm of exclusive creations”? In his lifetime he was venerated as a modernist par excellence: intellectual, philosophical, political, and avant-garde. But he was always a little too comical, too enamored of lowbrow genres, and just too damn readable to suit custodians of intellectual mystique. Few reviewers fail to remark on how entertaining War With the Newts is, implicitly diminishing it in the eyes of those who, with Clement Greenberg, equate major art with readers’ prolonged resistance to it. How could a novel published serially in a daily paper, written in the idiom of popular press--or even worse, of Tinseltown B-movies--be Art?

GENRE-FREE ZONE

One of the casualties of high-culture elitism is science fiction. It’s just not fit for literary history books, at least on the western side of the Atlantic. If you’re a talented artist who writes about science in a speculative vein, you must slough off the stigma of a literary lightweight before you get reeled in by the establishment. This is not so much the case in Europe, where the genre boasts the illustrious tradition of Plato’s utopian republicanism, Aesop’s satirical fables, and Voltaire’s philosophical contes. Sandwiched between Wells and Stapledon, Capek effortlessly grafts literature onto philosophy--or is it the other way round? Or does Capek’s close encounter with the Nobel Prize in 1936 mean that War With the Newts is not science fiction? Seeing that the Czech author’s exit from the world stage paralleled his ascent as sci-fi’s interwar precursor as the author of R.U.R., Krakatit, The Absolute at Large, and other fantastic tales, some of his themes that have come to be identified with the genre might be worth another look.

Contact with alien intelligence, although on this occasion of terrestrial origin: Capek’s sentient and articulate newts are more than a mere vehicle for his dystopian adventure. In his customary fashion, they are carefully described in biological and ecological terms as the author develops multiple evolutionary, morphological, and anthropological appendixes that flesh out the new race. Nor is this type of speculation an arid artifice of fiction. Only a few years before the novel, the world was abuzz over Douglas Burden’s find of a giant lizard species on the island of Komodo, not so far from the region picked in the novel as the cradle of the humanlike salamanders. The Komodo dragon, okapi, mountain gorilla, and other big vertebrates (the most recent found as late as 1994) are only the tip of the iceberg of amphibian, marine, and insect species still awaiting discovery today.

Ecology and the perils of monkeying with nature: Decades before the birth of eco-movements, Capek delineates the global, not to say holistic, effects of ill-bred environmental programs. He tracks with particular care the disastrous effects of the get-rich-quick policy of introducing newts to habitats unprepared for their fertility and rate of expansion. Just as in reality, where nonendemic species often trigger a near-collapse of the local flora and fauna--as when the rabbit nearly overran the Australian ecosystem--disregard for the long-term effects of environmental policies can bring about results mapped with deadly, if hilarious accuracy in War With the Newts. Raising global eco-consciousness is one of the novel’s prescient feats.

Intelligence and thought in other beings: Research with primates, other mammals, birds, and even invertebrates indicates that cognitive processing is certainly not a human monopoly. Similarly, ever since Alan Turing’s epochal article, “Can Machines Think” (1950), much debate and controversy has centered around the possibility of a thinking computer. Drawing attention to the problem, Capek has few illusions. Faced with a bevy of behavioral evidence--language, science, engineering--that the giant newts are a thinking species, his learned professors would rather claim mimicry than allow that these creatures may be as sapient as Ronald Reagan or Lynda Lovelace.

Construction of a good and just society, whether through a blueprint for a utopia or a critique of negative tendencies: References by the industrialist Bondy and his cronies to the making of a new Atlantis, with freedom and justice for all, are a rank parody of this theme. Their road to the future is paved with the blood, sweat, and toil of the enslaved newts, bred in circumstances that cannot but evoke the genetic management of Huxley’s Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. In the end, Bondy’s Newtopia is a totalitarian regime marching to the hymn of progress derided by the Little Tramp in Modern Times.

Futurological prognoses: Unlike a Delphi oracle, Capek is remarkably exact in his vision of what in 1936 was only a shadow of a world war. For us, bookkeepers of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, it cannot but trigger the memory of occupation and concentration-camp slaughter. Territorial gluttony, government-run weapons trade, cynical violations of neutrality, ethnic cleansing, outright exterminations, mass transport of civilians in boxed railcars, special fenced-in camps … what in 1936 was only a feat of modernist imagination is a lesson in modern history for our millennium.

The legacy of H. G. Wells: The literary conversation with Wells stretches from Capek’s early stories down to the Newts. The war of the worlds between humans and submarine newts, coupled with the catastrophic results of their breeding in captivity a la The Island of Dr. Moreau, have an unmistakably Wellsian ring about them. With the Englishman cited as an authority on utopias/dystopias, with heat rays bewailed in a hysterical English headline, with familiar scenes of invasion-spawned anarchy in War With the Newts, The War of the Worlds is never far from mind. In fact the congruence between the two works was obvious enough for a 1937 anonymous Time review to disparage Capek’s book as a lackluster Wellsian fantasy.

The entire history of speculative fiction about society and its increasingly technological means of governance: Works on the utopian axis, from Plato’s Atlantis to Wells’ Modern Utopia and the anti-utopias of Zamyatin and Huxley, are the natural paradigms for the problem of the (in)human use of human beings. Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, a science adventure in which a renegade human wields submarine technology against people, is another. A more immediate model for the narrative vehicle--a new/old species of intelligent and talking animals--may be Pierre Mac Orlan’s “La Bete conquerante” (1920). In this little-known story, a farmer, trying to slaughter a pig, creates lesions on its brain in such a way that allows it to acquire speech. In no time talking animals are everywhere, and while humans lose themselves in indolence, the beasts, pressed into the yoke of slavery and industrial labor, rebel and take over the world. Another template is the animal fable, from the didactic strain of Aesop to Anatole France’s ironic Penguin Island and The Revolt of the Angels. Finally, anyone familiar with Jack London’s ***Iron Heel*** and Thea von Harbou’s screenplay for Metropolis may sense them standing behind Newts’ scenes of mayhem as the workers revolt.

The answer to the question of whether Capek is a populist entertainer or a highbrow litterateur is, ultimately: Who cares? Certainly not the Czech author, convinced that the division between popular and highbrow was just another invention of the latter. After all, the serious classics of today were perforce the comedy entertainers of yesterday. Or, in his own words: “Folk humor will always enter into literature and will abide there by right of perpetuity; but in this case it will bear the name of Aristophanes, Rabelais, or Cervantes.”