Karel Čapek - War with the Newts

Best remembered for coining the word ‘robot’, Karel Čapek became one of Czechoslovakia’s most prominent intellectuals after the nation’s ascension from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in October 1918. Establishing himself with R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), co-written with brother Josef in 1920, Čapek filled the void left by Good Soldier Švejk writer Jaroslav Hašek’s untimely demise in 1923 – and, less appreciated then, Franz Kafka’s premature death a year later – with a series of works combining science fiction with sharp satire.

War with the Newts, published in 1936 and first issued in English the next year, was one of Čapek’s most imaginative and ambitious texts. Čapek posits the eponymous conflict, which begins only in the last four of its 26 chapters, as the product of colonialism, Enlightenment rationality and intellectual pseudo-science, racism and nationalism, and the ineffectiveness of self-regarding international diplomacy.

Formally, War with the Newts is restlessly inventive. The core of the book, a long chapter called ‘Along the Steps of Civilisation’ which charts the newts’ rise from submarine life to an intelligent species, constructs its narrative through skilful parodies of newspaper articles, minutes from meetings and scientific reports, using appropriate typography to lend realism to Čapek’s deft pseudo-historiography.

There is no clear protagonist, with the increasingly homogenous mass of newts constituting a key character, but all the people who unwittingly facilitate their rise to global domination are Czech. In an opening that recalls Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Captain van Toch – Čapek’s finest comic character – discovers the newts near Sumatra. Convinced that they will respect his moral code, he persuades industrialist G. H. Bondy to use them in pearl farming. This leads to the formation of the Salamander Syndicate to regulate newt trade, then to their rebellion: something for which porter Mr Povondra repeatedly credits and then blames himself, simply because he let van Toch into Bondy’s office.

The narration is detached throughout, with Hašek’s influence seen in the way Čapek uses humour to keep readers onside when the story seems slow or rambling. One highlight of Švejk is a chapter in which Hašek’s soldier mistakenly marches in a giant circle, seventy of the funniest pages in modern literature: two scenes here in which ditzy Hollywood actress Li outlines her idea for a film with the newts, including a whole page of her friend Mr Abe’s successive thoughts in parenthesis, feel close to Hašek in spirit, their exuberant comedy of retaining trust in the author as he deviates from the crucial socio-economic developments.

The most memorable aside is ‘Of the Sexual Life of the Newts’, the Appendix to Book One. Anticipating the trivial yet inevitable question of how the newts reproduce, Čapek references Utopian writers, naming H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley amongst the ‘relevant literature’ on the subject. Structurally, War with the Newts resembles Huxley’s dystopian Brave New World as Čapek calmly explicates the social changes in mock-scientific terms before the underlying terror explodes in its final third.

The novel contains numerous stabs at the media, whose desperation for stories lubricates the disastrous newt integration into human labour, before their conviction that the public is bored with the lizards leads journalists to ignore them just as they turn from curiosity to threat. When the press does address their ascent, it focuses on the wrong things, using the Newt Communist Manifesto to spread fear despite the newts themselves utterly disregarding it.

There are plenty of barbs at inter-war culture too: ‘Along the Steps of Civilisation’ presents a number of quotes from famous figures about the newts’ spiritual life. Čapek’s mock George Bernard Shaw is amongst his more brutal strikes: ‘They certainly haven’t got a soul. In this they agree with man.’

Čapek does not just mock intellectuals, but Mae West’s flippant ‘They have no sex-appeal. And therefore they have no soul’ feels far warmer than his parodies of prominent thinkers. In ‘Wolf Meynert Writes His Masterpiece’, detailing a philosopher’s joy in the collapse of modern civilisation, Čapek shows no mercy for writers such as Oswald Spengler who delighted in The Decline of the West. Avant-garde artists who proclaim the salamanders as the future and the anonymous reactionary whose pamphlet urges humanity to arm itself against them are placed side-by-side as the conflict deepens: by now, all Western culture appears irredeemably absurd.

Čapek satirises the onset of the First World War as much as the Second: the incidents that foreshadow the atrocities recall the Agadir crisis of 1911 as much as the rise of Nazism. As old values become ever more impotent to address the new political reality, Čapek pictures a world that has refused to learn from its mistakes and faces a terrible future. Through Mr Povondra’s complacent reflections, Čapek saves his final attack for the Czech people, specifically their belief that Czechoslovakia’s neutrality will save them from any war.

Finally, the narrator talks to himself, refusing to spare humanity the consequences of underestimating the newt threat. The novel ends on a deeply uncertain tone – more poignant with the knowledge that Čapek died in December 1938, just after the Munich Agreement allowed Hitler to annex the Sudetenland. His brother Josef survived him, arrested as the Germans completed their conquest of Czechoslovakia and dying in the Bergen-Belsen camp in April 1945.

A fascinating and often furiously funny historical document, the novel feels strangely prescient in the light of 9/11, as Čapek notes that the newts’ lack of a state or recognised government makes it difficult for international diplomacy to attack them. The Chief Salamander’s chilling despatches that outline his demands only emphasise this resonance. Sadly, we can only speculate about what Karel Čapek might have seen in post-war Czechoslovakia, but War with the Newts remains a vibrant example of the range of his vision.